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JUXT: Blog: Just a techie? ☰ Services HomeWordageTraining Compliance Resources Blog Why JUXT? Why Clojure? Clojure In Tech Radar Library Tech crux whet tick yadaWell-nighAbout Us Clients Team Careers Community Contact By Jon Pither Just a techie? – Techies, Devs, Boffins and Geeks. As soon as I hear the word 'techie', I finger an emotion-cocktail of frustration and despair, with a sprinkling of betrayal. Subdued through repetition this negative response may be, it’s nevertheless a undeniability to action. A undeniability to protect the techies (myself included), and a requirement to be vigilant well-nigh the state of the project. I recall decades ago reading a 'red-top' newspaper in the UK tabbed "The Sun", and whenever it talked well-nigh a scientific matter (rarely), it would refer to the scientists as 'boffins'. It was a mechanism to dehumanise this matriculation of people, so that the fact that they are clever and coming up with ideas, doesn’t matter on a personal level. They’re not like you and me and we’re not junior to them - in need of stuff challenged on our life-choices - as these people are simply just boffins! So it goes with techies. This is a tuft of people who just love to geek out and play with computers. Just make sure you’ve got adults in the room to shepherd them and to talk to them on your behalf. There’s a knack to it. It’s not simply the insidious dehumanisation and the patronising that bothers me - which to be fair, is a human condition - rather it’s the attempted commoditisation of what is a highly specialised trade. When you trivialise a trade, you make the trades-people interchangeable. This isn’t a them-vs-us thing, considering inside of our joint profession, we regularly do it to ourselves. There’s a treasonous pattern inside of Agile software minutiae of squashing individualism. Devs can’t be trusted to work solo, so pair them up. Devs can’t be trusted to think holistically well-nigh the problem at hand, so each 'story' needs to be written child-like. We demand TDD, a convoluted code-review and workshop process, and antipatterns such as 'the big wittiness of mud' terrify us, so we must insist on nano-sized microservices to promote lawmaking shared ownership and polyglot diversity, so that each service can be rewritten at any time in any language, and no single developer can possibly overly wilt a bottleneck. This is at the grass-roots level. The problem gets worse when the 'scrum masters' are landed, promoting slogans such as 'my job is to make myself redundant' and 'I want to create self-organising teams', and then they do the word-for-word opposite. I’m not sure who coined the term 'story drones', but it neatly portrays what is so worldwide on large projects with all the trimmings of project managers, merchantry analysts, iteration managers, architects, and then finally the developers. In the morning a soul-crushed developer will be paired up with flipside - perhaps using 'pair stairs' - then will be given a story of 2-3 velocity points worth, will have a 'story huddle' with all the senior project cast, will have a coffee to take a breath, will unshut the JIRA ticket and read the visa criteria, will have flipside huddle to correct the assumptions made in the first huddle, will correct the JIRA ticket, will go to lunch, will get flipside coffee, will glance at the build monitors, then will finally start engaging in 'ping pong' TDD, where one person writes the unit-test, and the other makes the test pass. Later, a solo developer will refactor most of it. What’s the solution? We could start by giving up on the dream of developers all stuff equal in ability, who can then be traded as commodities. Developers have variegated strengths - some are fantastic systems thinkers, some are drawn towards architecture, and others possess a laser focus on delivery. Some are largest at communicating, whilst some just want to think tightly well-nigh the problem and to ponder every whet case. If developers are recognised as individuals and emboldened with trust and freedom, then they will play to their strengths to requite an overall multiplying effect. We can embrace individualism rather than chasing it away, by triumphal and raising up the role of the software developer. I want my boffins and techies to be seen as surgeons. They know what they’re doing and you’re in unscratched hands. We’ve got junior doctors in there moreover to learn, but the junior doesn’t wilt the senior overnight. When we’ve got top surgeons the results will speak for themselves, and the good news is that the top surgeons aren’t required in such large quantities. This can make everyone happy. Published: 2018-11-09 Sign up to the JUXT newsletter Submit Privacy policy Selling Clojure to theMerchantryOur experiences of selling Clojure by Jon Pither Published: 2015-03-30 The point of software consultancies Software is a difficult merchantry by Jon Pither Published: 2018-07-25 2017 in review Looking when on 2017 and towards 2018 by Jon Pither Published: 2018-01-02 Copyright © JUXT LTD 2012-2018 Technology House, 151 Silbury Blvd., Milton Keynes MK9 1LH United Kingdom Company registration: 08457399 Home Software Clojure In Clojure RadarUnshutSource Software Services TrainingWell-nighUs Team Careers Community Contact In London Library Blog GitHub @juxtpro Login