Developer Productivity – 5 Ways To Kill It
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Design
In keeping with the sarcastic tone of my How To Be The Worst Developer Ever post I’m going to explore several ways for managers to systematically destroy productivity among their developers. Unfortunately I am writing some of these from experience, then again, I’m sure we have all experienced some of these at one time or another.
1. Make Them Feel Unvalued By Ignoring Their Advice
Warranted or not, who cares what developers have to say, never mind years or experience and savvy, or blatant evidence that they are right. You’re the manager. You get paid the big bucks to make the big decisions.
2. Keep Them On Their Toes By Changing The Project Requirements
After looking at the prototype they submitted for review, have them implement the dozen “minor” changes that just popped into your head. Don’t worry about running those “bright ideas” through a stupidity test, if it goes south you can blame the developers anyway. Be sure to remind them that it is still due next Friday.
For maximum effectiveness, be sure to “review” their progress weekly.
3. Keep Them On Their Toes By Changing Deadlines
After dropping number 2 on them, they have the nerve to inform you that your changes don’t make sense and will require major reworking of the entire project. Also, there is no way they can have it ready for Monday. Hmmm. You must quell this little revolution. Inform them that you have scheduled a demonstration with the CEO and are moving the deadline up to Thursday. That should do it. They’ll have to pull an all nighter. They’ll be too tired to question your managerial skills again.
4. Assign Extra Unrelated Work
You get back from a long weekend at a managers conference at the golf club. The project seems to be running smoothly and the developers look a little happy. They must have been slacking off while you were gone. Have someone review the pile of emails in your inbox and respond to the random product surveys vendors send you.
Remind them the project is still due Wednesday. Thursday? No. I told you it was due Wednesday. If you can’t keep simple details straight how can I put my confidence in you to get the project completed on time? *alternate execution of number 3*
5. Refuse To Get The Tools They Request
You already provided the team with Visual Studio and something called Subversion, what more do they need? What the heck is Resharper or NHibernate any way? Where do these new ideas keep coming from? Why can’t they just be happy with their adhoc SQL and DataSets? Code completion? Are you kidding me? They want tools that will write the code for them? This is getting out of hand. Perhaps shuffling various team members around will get things back on track.
