The Secret Developer’s Productivity Hack: The Infinite Power of ‘Tomorrow’
Photo by Paul Esch-Laurent on Unsplash
I’ve taken inspiration from my colleagues for this one. The employees of my current company are also known as The Tomorrow People for good reason as they’ve embraced this one neat trick which has at a stroke solved stress and troubles within the workplace.
It’s The Infinite Power of ‘Tomorrow’
Why do today what can be done tomorrow
I know what you’re thinking. The Secret Developer is writing a classic piece exploring the classic procrastination habit sarcastically praising the excuse of ‘tomorrow’ as a productivity hack.
That’s not what this is.
Here I’m talking about an organization that works as a collection of people to stop work from being completed.
Do it tomorrow.
The Hacks
What I’ve done is collect a series of behaviors and sayings that are embedded in our culture.
If it isn’t broken don’t fix it
We’ve unwritten policies that stop anyone from improving anything. I created a refactoring ticket for some code in the most important part of our app.
It needed doing since we had an if-else pyramid at least 10 statements deep. Worse, the code is not covered by unit tests.
No problem I thought (when new to the company). I’ll solve the problem and ship a better solution.
Not here you won’t.
It turns out another team is responsible for that code. No, they won’t test the refactoring that’s your issue. My team won’t test the code as they don’t know the functionality. The owning team apparently also doesn’t know the functionality.
They’ve got code in production, and nobody knows the functionality.
Nobody wants to understand the functionality.
Ultimately if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.
Kick sand in the gears
If you’ve something that can help the team to work better there is one response that will stop them trying to help again. Stop them trying to change things. Stop them.
One developer can’t just change something. It has to be done in the proper way.
Although in a sense the guy who said that is correct, in another sense you should be able to change things as and when it doesn’t affect others. I remember my suggestion to add A2B testing in my own work wouldn’t have changed anything for any other developer in the organization. The other reason it couldn’t be done?
If we just do things, we might have to do the work again.
Which whilst true might mean we’d get things done. It’s been almost a year and we haven’t been able to implement A2B testing in our codebase. It’s something the business wants. It’s easier to kick sand into the gears and slow things down rather than get them done.
It means less work. So, everyone is happy (apart from customers).
Mouse jiggler to keep up appearances
I suspect this is just me as my colleagues have no problem setting their mobile phones to be BYOD (so the company can remote-wipe your personal phone). I typically sit at my desk and wait for the *ping* of a message while I write blog articles about my amazing working life.
Rather than constantly touching up my trackpad I’ve found that I can use a mouse jiggler in order to keep my machine from showing me as inactive.
It doesn’t much matter if I do anything or not but appearances matter.
Cameras off. What was the question?
We have a policy of cameras on in the company. It’s quite amazing that we frequently have meetings where nobody turns their camera on at all during a meeting.
This leads to a constant refrain of:
What was the question?
as people do not seem to listen to each other or talk about the work issues of the day.
Personally, I’m using this time to:
Finish tickets (infrequently)
Write blog posts (of varying quality)
Look for a new job (more frequently as time passes)
It’s hard to say what my colleagues are doing during this time, but I suspect Hotstar (although another of my colleagues almost definitely has another job).
The Alternative
Facebook used to have the saying “move fast and break things” and although I don’t think they meant the Oculus login process I do think they had a point. Overall, this would mean as a company they want to get things done because the obvious limitation to not working is that the competition moves ahead and overtakes.
Imagine a company where the default mode of being is to get things done and enable work.
Does anyone know if there are openings at such a company?
Conclusion
I guess we just all need to find companies that align with our working values. If we can do this, we can move through our work (and our code) making a difference.
At least that’s what I want.
If you’ve a different view I guess, you’ll be too busy to write anything in the comments. So…