Shifting Perspective

Software development is an ever changing environment. Projects come and projects go, but one thing that will stay in place, hacking away at the hot keyboard is the poor developer.

This creature is destined to have blurry vision, carpel tunnel syndrome, and a very high caffeine to blood ratio. This mere mortal is expected to do the impossible in the shortest possible time, without thought to feelings or exhaustion levels.

Does this wonder of modern society care? No! He thrives on the unknown challenges that are thrown in his direction.

There is one thing that will always make me cringe.

The software development manager.

Nine times out of ten, the software manager comes from a development background himself. He spent hour after hour slapping away at his keyboard, churning out line after line of code, only to have a bug report longer than his arm thrown in his face the day after submitting his code.
Does he remember the pain, the anguish? Again, No!

The software development manager, will have challenges of his own. Delivering on time is his primary focus, and if he has a new task that needs to be done “now”, then he will seldom think about the state of the poor developer’s mind while he is churning his code out.

He will arrive at the side of the developer seemingly out of this air, and demand a shift of focus. This requires the poor long suffering developer, to perform super human feats of the mind in order to focus on this new task that is going to interrupt his thought process.

Some of the tasks that will have to be performed are:



1. Re-route his brains neural pathways to be able to focus on his manager’s face instead of his screen and keyboard.


2. Actually physically have to restrain him self from ripping the said manager’s face off for interrupting him.


3. Listen and reply when needed to any thing the manager requests.


4. Ask questions about the new task.



These go on and on, but the bottom line is that he basically, now has to start thinking about something else that is supposedly more important than his interrupted task. This requires a lot of locating his thinking part of his brain, which was shut down in the process of listening to his manager.
Once he locates it, he can then start to think about what is needed to start his new task.
He has to be able to visualize what is needed, so that he can even begin to write any code. The code itself isn’t all that difficult once you get to know it.

It is the calculations, flows, designs of the GUI, the duplicative code that needs to be centralized, etc.

There a million and one small little seemingly (on their own) stupid bits of code that together for an application that does wonderful things.

Interrupt a developer at work at your own peril and cost!