Letting Developers Do What They Do Best

Filed in archive Management on April 19, 2006

Once again Joel Spolsky has written an article that I feel compelled to comment on here. In his article entitled The Development Abstraction Layer he talks about the need for management to provide an environment in which developers can focus on writing code. I don't agree with many of the things that Joel writes about in his blog but on this occasion I do agree with him.

There have been a number of occasions when I've worked at a company and thought to myself "what the hell am I doing this for now." On those occasions I would be attending some meeting for a corporate compliance checklist of some sort, acting as a team leader and managing some task a manager above me thought was beneath him or her, or in general doing something way outside the scope of what a "developer" is really suppose to be doing. What a developer is suppose to be doing is write code against some business requirement and delivering software applications that either save or make money for a company.

This of course way over simplifies the realities that exist in the world around us. However, I think Joel is right that managers of programmers should aspire to provide an environment where writing code is the primary focus of the programmers working for them. I don't know about everyone else out there but I've spent a lot of time and energy learning what it is I do for a living. It takes me effort to get "into the zone" where I can create that save or make money for a company. Management should do all they can to let people do what they do best.