Does this look like you? Are you surrounded by like minded individuals, sharing a community experience at work with your fellow geeks? Perhaps you have even gone further than that and made a lasting friend or two out of your fellow developers. That certainly describes the kind of environment that I flourish in and in my more senior years, have worked hard to foster. It’s my experience that software developed in this environment is more cohesive and easier to maintain over the long haul. With he right personality types, social activity at work for geeks often means talking shop and this leads to a win – win situation for everyone. More ideas begat better ideas, common work patterns begin to evolve; other than that it’s just plain more enjoyable.
However I have struck the odd workplace that is the antithesis of what I have just described. Personality bereft work silos, with dead silence abounding throughout the organisation, lack of willingness to work together, fostering a cycle of suspicion and loss of preparedness to work as a team. I have seen enough of this type of work place to know that I can never work in one again.
Of course it’s possible that I have just described your workplace and perhaps even worse than that, it’s the way it is because you designed it to be that way? What kind of work environment do you have? Do the developers at your office communicate with one another vibrantly, rich in tone and timbre, taking coffee breaks together, occasionally going out for lunch and generally taking any office bound social opportunity to debate and discuss geeky things? Do you have a mate at work?
I would really be interested to hear the arguments (if there are any) that make a case for this almost Brechtian bleakness and minimalism in surroundings.
I was reminded today of the value of debate, strongly held opinions and having the courage to let go of weakly held opinions. I like to think of the latter of these three as the ability to liberally contradict oneself when it becomes clear that a position held no longer seems able to be supported and the only logical course is accepting another point of view which has stood up to the rigours or test of the debate.
The best experiences I have had always seem to take root in groups (even as small as two) where debate of ideas were frequent and encouraged. Further to that, protagonists exhibit an ability to come to the debate without ego and a willingness to leave a position previously held when the debates logical outcome cannot support their position. I have in the past witnessed what I call the ‘developers mother Teresa effect‘ where a developer will hold on to their position when all else seems lost, purely out of a need to save it’s soul.
What was fantastic about today’s debate was that it started out around a single issue and flowed into a much broader discussion that lead to a great number of issues and solutions that had not yet been considered much less understood. So what started as a debate over a single topic ended with an array of solutions to a number of issues that were previously hidden - a very positive outcome all in all. Along the way we argued (debated) our viewpoints strongly but never was their hint of dying for a cause borne out of it’s ownership. In some small way it reminded me of TDD, in the sense that as a group we were able navigate an outcome from testing our opinions and ideas, in the same vein as one discovers the design of code through testing.
Ok, so it happened to me again, another unsettled night of sleep punctuated with moments of awakening that included the same piece of code running through my head. What was the code you ask? The code was nothing special by any stretch of the imagination – just the same two interfaces over and over again, first at 1am then 2am, 3.15am and on it went at hourly intervals.
This is not the first time this has happened to me, in fact I have dreamt code a dozen or so times before and it’s always during unsettled nights where I would awake several times with the same code reverberating in my head. I have asked colleagues about this a few times and have found that one or two of them have also experienced this phenomenon and a bit of research seems to indicate that I am not alone (which I expected). What about you – do you dream code?
