Friday, September 8, 2006

Treating your developers right...

This is uhmmm... for the benefit of "someone" who I know tends to read this blog.  I also know, many of you already know all of this and have experienced it first hand, so please bear with me for a moment.  For the record, we developers here at the Developer Tools Group at Borland, do have a lot of private offices.  The reasons seem to be very clear from this "Joel on Software" article.
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8 comments:

  1. Ralf MimounSeptember 8, 2006 at 4:29 AM

    That's old, ooold news. It's well known since the pleistocene, when DeMarco wrote Peopleware. It's a standard. Funny enough, many managers never ever read it.

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  2. Allen BauerSeptember 8, 2006 at 4:42 AM

    Of course this is "old news" ;-)... Which is why this posting is for "someone" out there that may benefit from this reference. All of us who are living this everyday, can see this clearly.

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  3. Ralf MimounSeptember 8, 2006 at 7:17 AM

    Yes, it's a strange world. You pay someboy to use all his/her (I am not that good in pc) bain matter to solve problems. And then you do all to make it almost impossible.


    The best offices I ever saw were at a company in Oslo, Norway. A huge free space in the middle of the building, with desks, seats, coffee machines and soft drinks (everything for free, of course). Everybody has an office on his own. Not large, but quiet. A glass wall to the free space, so you are not that cut off from the rest, but perfect to work. And if you close the door everybody knows that you don't want to be disturbed. And they were all really nice, I even thought of moving to Norway :-)

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  4. C JohnsonSeptember 8, 2006 at 8:26 AM

    Careful, Borland has been known for blowing money on worthless things (like caring for a fish pond that had been "destocked" years earlier by racoons...) rather than focus on important things like R&D. If they figure out that things like seperate offices are actually important, that could ruin it for everyone.

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  5. J DollSeptember 8, 2006 at 9:18 AM

    This needs to be applied to alot of computer jobs, not just developers.

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  6. Jeremy McGeeSeptember 8, 2006 at 4:11 PM

    I suspect one reason why "manager" types need to be told about this is that they frequently themselves come from a sales / marketing background, not development.


    In sales, interaction with colleagues is essential, and much of that is face-to-face.

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  7. kent MorwathSeptember 9, 2006 at 7:32 AM

    C Johnson: "Careful, Borland has been known for blowing money on worthless things"

    Oh yes, feel free to tell the same about Google, for example, <G>. And anyway, when Khan was "blowing money" Borland was stronger than ever - the only one able to treat MS on its own field - something even the "mighty" Google didn't yet.

    Then they turned to blow money like every other company - golf clubs, huge exec bonuses, VPs, etc. - and all we see where they got...

    And if you don't understand how much is important for a developer to work in the right environment, well, it makes me doubt about you being a real developer...

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  8. Roberto NogueiraSeptember 9, 2006 at 5:03 PM

    ...meanwhile

    "Sun Brings JRuby In-House"

    Sun hires the lead developers on the JRuby project to focus on delivering an implementation of Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine.

    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2013651,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594



    "Tim Bray (Sun) declares -- JRuby Love, Sun is responding to the Hype".

    http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/07/JRuby-guys

    ReplyDelete

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