Innovation in Software

About two years ago, job adverts started appearing in the industry that had interesting phrases in them: Ruby on Rails Rockstar; Ajax Master; Software Architect Ninja.

Eyebrows were raised. Was this just another example of the industry’s machismo playing out? Were we witnessing the next generation of kids coming up through the industry and rejecting the corporate ties of traditional job titles? Did HR really expect their latest technology recruit to play to stadiums, or attack enemies silently in the middle of the night?

What these companies were actually trying to say was “we need somebody self-motivated, dedicated to their craft, and who can take a lead in front of our audience (composed of customers, investors and employees)”.

Alas, the whole meme was misunderstood, those recruited into such roles were ridiculed, and adverts stopped trying to feel like they were recruiting heroes from Manga comics or NME.

However, we still need that mindset all over this industry. I’d go as far as to say it needs to become the default. We just need to cut out the hyperness and stop drenching the industry in irrelevant masculinity.

Let me explain what I mean by “that mindset” in more detail. Most of you will be familiar, but I think it’s worth recapping:

• Self-motived

  Anybody can learn how to write code, or fix a server. The difference between the majority of people in the industry today and the ones we want to see more of is how they learn, not what they learn. Some years ago I was working in a public sector gig where I had a couple of different people working under me. The difference between how they thought about their work was considerable. If I asked the first person to do something, the response might be “I’ve never done that before, so I’m going to need a few minutes to work it out, Google around, work out what I’m doing, spot the drawbacks, OK?”. Brilliant. The other guy would simply stop at “I’ve not been trained to do that. You need to send me on a training course”.

  There is no room in this industry for people with the second mindset any more. Rockstars don’t normally go to music school. Yes, training courses can be valuable, but unless you’re the kind of person who teaches themselves constantly, you’re not suited to this industry.

• Dedicated to their craft

  A craft you say? Better believe it. Most of us are taking a blank piece of framework and sculpting it into a finished product. “Rockstars” care about aesthetics, tools, even to some extent materials (or at least in the Ruby world we do). Software people should have ideals of craftsmanship, even when they’re pretending to be engineers.

  However, not everybody is dedicated to their craft. Many will not go to a conference unless somebody else is paying. Most do not re-factor their code to make it better in every way possible. 98% will never attempt to help other developers improve their code without an assumption of compensation. The really great people in this sector have the mannerisms and dedication of the minority, mannerisms we need to see become the norm.

  I’m not suggesting hair-shirts or years of religious solitude here, just an interest in the industry that seeps a little bit from time to time out of normal work hours and uses up some of their spare time and cash because the interest is genuine.

• Taking a lead

  I’ve met and worked with many “back-room mindset” developers. I once worked in a “pit” of developers and engineers at a household-name firm where team members were told to go home, have a bath, and come back tomorrow with clean clothes without any holes in them. To the uninitiated, this sounds disgusting (and to be fair, the pit did have a ‘funkiness’ about it), but in years gone by this was what small development teams were like. Guys who were in the back room, never asked for an opinion, never brought into management meetings, and who liked it that way. An invitation to a meeting was often met with a sneer by many of the people I worked with back in the late 1990s.

  Those attitudes are now (thankfully) disappearing. If you are the kind of developer who never wants to talk to the customer or management, you are useless in this industry. You’re dead wood. Sorry, but you need to realise that 80% of development is about communication, and good developers are the ones who lead that communication. Taking the lead is what we do. We are sculpting the future of organisations and job roles, we don’t get to sit in the cupboard and meekly accept specification documents handed down to us by non-developers any more.

There are more traits out there that we need to collectively foster, each of us at a personal level. This is just a starting point, this is what I thought of when people mentioned “Rockstar” developers. We just need a new name for it, something that doesn’t have all the connotations of “rockstar”, “ninja” or “master”. “Crafter” could work, but is too folksy for most people.

If the industry doesn’t start seeing these traits more in the kids coming up out of college, we’re going to struggle. The massive teams of old are dead. Small, focused development teams filled with people who think about their work the right way are the future. How do we foster these people?