A lot of management and sales types get awfully confused over the word "design", when I tell people that I "design" software they often think this simply means deciding "what it's going to look like, colours and fonts etc.". It's a bit like thinking that all there is to making a car is sketching out the body-shape and deciding what shade of red it's going to be painted. When you confuse the engineering team with the marketing team or don't really understand what the difference is, you end up thinking that the same things motivate them, a fatal error and the ruination of many a promising project.
Over the years I've witnessed many an engineering offices housing dusty ping-pong tables and pristine unused games consoles whilst their network and server infrastructure are severely crippled because of lack of investment. When asked why their office is littered with such pointless and distracting trinkets, the response is often a shoulder shrug and the comment that no one talked to them about it. As any qualified technical person knows, it's easier to retain a good engineer by simply buying her a bigger monitor rather than a dart-board or indoor putting-green! The nature of software engineering (as opposed to jobs like marketing or relationship based endeavours like sales) is one where constant interruption and noise ruin the levels of concentration needed to achieve anything meaningful, sales people need inbound calls and lots of short (random) conversations to build opportunities and find new ones, engineers don't.
The only thing that really needs to be understood is that people are all different and different things motivate them, many managers delude themselves into thinking that what motivates them motivates all. In my experience, when it comes to many technical challenges, one size fits all isn't a good strategy for building a productive team.
Over the years I've witnessed many an engineering offices housing dusty ping-pong tables and pristine unused games consoles whilst their network and server infrastructure are severely crippled because of lack of investment. When asked why their office is littered with such pointless and distracting trinkets, the response is often a shoulder shrug and the comment that no one talked to them about it. As any qualified technical person knows, it's easier to retain a good engineer by simply buying her a bigger monitor rather than a dart-board or indoor putting-green! The nature of software engineering (as opposed to jobs like marketing or relationship based endeavours like sales) is one where constant interruption and noise ruin the levels of concentration needed to achieve anything meaningful, sales people need inbound calls and lots of short (random) conversations to build opportunities and find new ones, engineers don't.
The only thing that really needs to be understood is that people are all different and different things motivate them, many managers delude themselves into thinking that what motivates them motivates all. In my experience, when it comes to many technical challenges, one size fits all isn't a good strategy for building a productive team.
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