An Experiment in Scotch

I ran across this inter­view with Joel Spol­sky today and while it’s all good, I found one part of it to be really eye-opening as it relates to my cur­rent job. That insight is that if, as a soft­ware devel­oper, you work for a com­pany that isn’t a soft­ware shop (I work for a com­pany that does third party bill pay­ment), your inter­ests as a soft­ware devel­oper are going to be seri­ously dif­fer­ent from CEO. And that is a big prob­lem if you want to be happy as a soft­ware developer.

The peo­ple who are happy in a com­pany like that are the CEO, the sales guys and maybe mar­ket­ing because what the CEO thinks about all day long is how to get more peo­ple to do X and those thoughts align per­fectly with sales guys. The CEO could care less if they are happy after they’ve done X, just as long as they’ve done it. That means that he could care less about whether you, as a soft­ware devel­oper, have the best tools or a quiet work­space or two mon­i­tors. None of that helps him get more peo­ple to do X, at least not in his very focused view. By under­stand­ing this, you, as that poor maligned soft­ware devel­oper, can real­ize that it makes no sense to rage against the machine as it were because the peo­ple who have the power to change things don’t have any inter­ests in com­mon with you. It’s almost impos­si­ble for peo­ple who don’t share your inter­ests to under­stand or care about whether you can do your job well. Because your job doesn’t directly make the CEO more money, it’s point­less to be upset because every­thing you do in your daily job seems to be set up in the most ineffiecient way possible.

At my job, this is true for the CEO, the CTO and prob­a­bly for the VP of IT (who I shall men­tion has been on the job for 2 weeks now and has not both­ered to intro­duce him­self to any of the devel­op­ers, which is in and of itself, prob­a­bly a huge sign that the hier­ar­chy of the sys­tem has run its course and we, the peo­ple who write the soft­ware this par­tic­u­lar com­pany runs upon, have in fact become the untouch­able caste — how­ever that is a sub­ject for another blog post). When the peo­ple who make the deci­sions regard­ing your abil­ity to do your job well don’t hap­pen to care whether or not you are happy, you won’t be happy, at least not directly happy because of your job. You can give up on “my job makes me happy” and either search for another job if you are suf­fi­ciently moti­vated or give up and accept a life of mean­ing­less security.

If you do the lat­ter, I’m not sure you can actu­ally con­sider your­self a soft­ware devel­oper. If you do, you’re going to be an awfully cyn­i­cal one.

I’m tired of being cynical.