Optimizing for developer happiness. Manager 2.0: The Role of the Manager in Scrum. When an organization starts to explore Scrum, there’s often an uncomfortable moment early on when someone points out that the role of “manager” seems to be missing entirely. “Well I guess we’ll have to just get rid of ‘em all!” Wisecracks one of the developers, and all the managers in the room shift uncomfortably in their seats. Scrum defines just three roles – Product Owner, Team, and ScrumMaster – and the basic direction given to others in the organization is to “support them, or get out of their way”. This is not very detailed advice, especially if you’re a manager expected by senior management to ensure everything goes well. The traditional role of the manager in the corporate world is based on a model known as “command and control”. In complex, dynamic environments such as software development, this approach tends to break down.
Scrum is based on a different approach: The Self-Organizing Team. Team Tango had just completed their first Sprint Planning Meeting, for a two-week Sprint. Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small. Coding Horror: Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas. How much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much: It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed.
They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.To make a business, you need to multiply the two. I was reminded of Mr. I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. The disconnect between idea and execution here is so vast it's hard to understand why the author himself can't see it. I wouldn't call ideas worthless, per se, but it's clear that ideas alone are a hollow sort of currency. The criticism that all you need is "super-connected people" to be successful was also leveled at Stack Overflow.
I very much enjoyed the Hacker News conversation about cloning the site in a weekend. I don't care how internet famous you are; nobody gets a pass on execution. Execution isn't merely a multiplier. Master Craftsman Teams. In the early ‘70s F. T. Baker, and Fred Brooks wrote about the notion of Chief Programmer teams. The idea was that a highly skilled chief programer would be assisted by a team of helpers.
The chief would write most of the code, delegating simpler tasks to the helpers. Though the idea was tried at IBM and shown to work well, the idea has never really caught on. One reason may be that the economics don’t appear to be all that good. A team of four juniors making $50K supporting a senior making $100K costs $300K. But in light of the movement towards software craftsmanship, perhaps it’s time to dust off this old idea and look at it from a different perspective. We are in the throes of a recession that is challenging us to think differently about things.
Why should a young aspiring software professional spend four years and $200K+ to attend an institution that will teach them less about their chosen profession than 3 months of working on a real project with talented mentors? Coding Horror: Egoless Programming: You Are Not Your Job.