The Secret Developer’s Productivity Mantra

Photo by Alex Gruber on Unsplash

The Secret Developer has had a rough time recently. They’re working a job where it is difficult to get a work machine set up to complete any dev. Their situation has led them to think that working isn’t important in their current position and that there is no value in actually doing anything to make their situation better.

Their current job has led to today’s article. The Secret Developer’s Productivity Mantra.

“My current company doesn’t seem to care about our quality of work. Therefore, I’m taking inspiration from the inactivity of my colleagues today and want to embrace their work ethic.

This style of working is empowering when it’s termed ‘The infinite power of tomorrow.’”

Why do it today what can be done tomorrow?

“You heard (read) what I just said (wrote). My colleagues don’t seem to care about our product and do pretty much nothing most days. 

It’s like they’ve made a habit out of NOT working hard. I’m going to join them, and I think this works out as a set productivity hack. If you want to join with me sing the chant. 

Do it tomorrow.”

The Hacks

What I’ve done is collect a series of behaviors and sayings that are embedded in our working culture at *. 

“Let me list them and see if you want to join in with these ‘productivity hacks’. I hope the sarcasm is clear to you at this point.”

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 project.

It needed doing since we had an if-else pyramid at least 10 statements deep. Worse, the code is not covered by unit tests.

So, I felt it was my responsibility to solve the problem and ship a great solution. My work met a simple response.

NO

It turns out another team is responsible for that code. 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 also doesn’t know the functionality.

The code is in production, and nobody knows the functionality.

Nobody wants to understand the functionality.

Even if we wanted to fix it, we wouldn’t be able to test it.

The message from the team is that if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.”

Kick sand in the gears

“It’s been made clear to me that my company doesn’t want one developer to make things better. They don’t want us to work hard.

I got told one day:

‘One developer can’t just change something. It has to be done in the proper way.’

Which is fine…to a point. I can’t see anyone trying to improve the product though. Perhaps they have been prevented from improving the software we make. It’s just not right even though wanting to do things properly is actually admirable.

Anyway, my suggestion for other improvements got binned for spurious reasons and I won’t make such suggestions again. The sand got kicked into the gears and new ideas were not introduced to make our work better.

It means less work. So, everyone is happy (apart from customers). Nevermind. ”

What was the question? Who cares, as our cameras are off

“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.

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 Corporate 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…”