Issue #8 - Getting Software Developers To Do Something Difficult
When you’re leading smart people; ask, don’t tell.
Welcome!
Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.
This week we have:
Tip of the week: Getting Software Developer To Do Something Difficult
Book of the week: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Finds of the week: Become a More Collaborative Leader, Telling truths that might hurt, Why rewrites fail.
Tip of The Week: Getting Software Developer To Do Something Difficult
When it comes to asking a team of software engineers to do something difficult there are two ways you can approach it.
Tell them what must be done: “At the moment it takes 24 hours for our software to provide customer recommendations. They need the recommendations to be provided in half the time they currently take, and the sales team have committed to delivering that in 4 weeks’ time”.
That’ll usually result in a lot of frustration from the team and a long list of very reasonable reasons why the request is some combination of impossible or improbable.
Present it as an open challenge: “Our customers really need our software to provide recommendations faster. What can we do to vastly improve performance over the next four weeks?”
The second approach focuses your team on addressing the problem that is important – improving the performance, rather than focusing on the reasons why the request is unreasonable or impossible.
It also opens up the solution space.
Instead of trying to make it twice as fast, which may constrain the possible solutions the team offers, you’ve asked for vastly improved performance. That leaves open all possible solutions including some that might make it 10 times faster that wouldn’t be considered if the goal was specifically twice as fast.
When you’re leading smart people; ask, don’t tell.
Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?
I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.
The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.
Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.
You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.
You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.
Book of The Week: So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Ask most people for advice and you’ll be told to follow your dreams and do something you’re passionate about. The problem is, for many people our passions don’t overlap with many career options. For example powerlifting, mountain biking or reading are all great passions of mine - but there’s not many careers that they lead to.
Cal Newport disagrees with this conventional wisdom suggesting that it should be your talent and skill - and not necessarily your passion - that determines you career path. Trying to find what drives us, instead of focusing on what we are good at, is harmful and frustrating.
The title is a direct quote from comedian Steve Martin, who, when once asked why he was successful in his career, immediately replied, 'Be so good they can't ignore you'.
So how do we do that?
Don’t do what you love. Learn to love what you do – by acquiring mastery, autonomy and relatedness.
Adopt the mind-set: “What value can I bring”? Then practice hard and get out of your comfort zone to master the delivery of that value.
To succeed in your career (or venture) acquiring rare and valuable skills (career capital).
Acquire career capital to maintain control and autonomy in your work.
Find a motivating mission that's a unifying goal for your work life.
Success on your mission requires making bold bets and standing out from the crowd.