One of the organizational stereotypes is having a big room full of cubicles filled with employees. Even if programmers can work in such settings, improperly designed environments restrict to a certain degree the creativity and productivity, making more difficult employees' collaboration and socialization. Despite having dedicated meeting rooms, an important part of the communication occurs ad-hoc. In open spaces each transient interruption can easily lead inadvertently to loss of concentration, which leads to wasted time, as one needs retaking thoughts’ thread and reviewing the last written code, and occasionally to bugs.
Programming is expected to be a 9 to 5 job with the effective working time
of 8 hours. Subtracting the interruptions, the pauses one needs to take, the
effective working time decreases to about 6 hours. In other words, to reach
8 hours of effective productivity one needs to work about 10 hours or so.
Therefore, unless adequately planned, each project starts with a 20% of
overtime. Moreover, even if a task is planned to take 8 hours, given the
need of information the allocated time is split over multiple days. The
higher the need for further clarifications the higher the chances for effort
to expand. In extremis, the effort can double itself.
Spending extensive time in front of the computer can have adverse effects
on programmers’ physical and psychical health. Same effect has the time
pressure and some of the negative behavior that occurs in working
environments. Also, the communication skills can suffer when they are not
properly addressed. Unfortunately, few organizations give importance to
these aspects, few offer a work free time balance, even if a programmer’s
job best fits and requires such approach. What’s even more unfortunate is
when organizations ignore the overtime, taking it as part of job’s
description. It’s also one of the main reasons why programmers leave, why
competent workforce is lost. In the end everyone’s replaceable, however
what’s the price one must pay for it?
Trainings are offered typically within running projects as they can be
easily billed. Besides the fact that this behavior takes time unnecessarily
from a project’s schedule, it can easily make trainings ineffective when the
programmers can’t immediately use the new knowledge. Moreover, considering
resources that come and go, the unwillingness to invest in programmers can
have incalculable effects on an organization performance, respectively on
their personal development.
Organizations typically look for self-motivated resources, this request
often encompassing organization’s whole motivational strategy. Long projects
feel like a marathon in which is difficult to sustain the same rhythm for
the whole duration of the project. Managers and team leaders need to work on
programmers’ motivation if they need sustained performance. They must act as
mentors and leaders altogether, not only to control tasks’ status and rave
and storm each time deviations occur. It’s easy to complain about the status
quo without doing anything to address the existing issues
(challenges).
Especially in dysfunctional teams, programmers believe that management can’t contribute much to project’s technical aspects, while management sees little or no benefit in making developers integrant part of project's decisional process. Moreover, the lack of transparence and communication lead to a wide range of frictions between the various parties.
Especially in dysfunctional teams, programmers believe that management can’t contribute much to project’s technical aspects, while management sees little or no benefit in making developers integrant part of project's decisional process. Moreover, the lack of transparence and communication lead to a wide range of frictions between the various parties.
Probably the most difficult to understand is people’s stubbornness in
expecting different behavior by following the same methods and of ignoring
the common sense. It’s bewildering the easiness with which people ignore
technological and Project Management principles and best practices. It
resides in human nature the stubbornness of learning on the hard way despite
the warnings of the experienced, however, despite the negative effects
there’s often minimal learning in the process...
To be eventually continued…
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