An Experiment in Scotch

Or for my non-sports-enlightened read­ers, if Tom Cruise was in your movie, would you make him direc­tor? Now, don’t get me wrong, Kobe might be a great coach and Tom Cruise might make a great direc­tor, but it’s not what they cur­rently do best. Mak­ing the great­est cur­rent bas­ket­ball player into a coach would be an awfully strange move if you really wanted your team to have suc­cess. So why is it then that so many com­pa­nies make man­agers out of their best devel­op­ers?

The best devel­op­ers have pride in their work as well as that innate desire to cre­ate men­tioned in the link above. They don’t work at com­pa­nies where “coders seem to be con­sid­ered com­modi­ties and low level crafts­man”. I really don’t under­stand how com­pa­nies run by smart peo­ple can think that pro­mot­ing the very best employ­ees into a job they aren’t specif­i­cally suited for would be a great idea but it seems to hap­pen quite a bit, includ­ing where I cur­rently work.

Joel recently wrote about why he started his own com­pany, specif­i­cally so he could have fun at work. I don’t remem­ber the last time I had a sin­gle day where I could actu­ally say I had fun at work, though last Fri­day I had a pretty darn good 4 hours in the after­noon. I’m lean­ing more and more towards doing some­thing almost all my cowork­ers and acquain­tances would find dumb­found­ing but I’m hav­ing zero luck find­ing jobs in Dal­las where the guys and gals who write the soft­ware are on the same stand­ing as the suits that sell it. It’s ridicu­lous going through life being proud of some­thing every­one else looks down on.