Posted by
Pete McBreen
16 Nov 2012 at 20:29
The Atlantic has an article called When the nerds go marching in that tells a story about the comparative approaches of the Obama and Romney teams and how they built and tested their systems in the run up to the 2012 US presidential election.
Obama team had an interesting approach to the planning - Making it a game
Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. “You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you’re doing,” he said, “but you’re calm because you know you can handle your shit.”
Posted by
Pete McBreen
13 Nov 2012 at 20:44
As usual, The Codist is slightly controversial and bluntly states that What Programmers Want is Less Stupid and More Programming.
So no matter what you do the best programmers will motivate themselves if you give them challenging code to write or problems to solve, and keep the stupid as far away as you can. Give them a work environment that makes this possible and consistent. Manage them with this understanding. Rewards are nice but the ultimate motivator is still opportunity.
In the end Andrew comes down to the Free Game theory of programmer motivation that was first popularized in Tracy Kidder’s book The Soul of a New Machine, but that does not detract from the overall thrust that you have to keep the stupid away from your developers.
Posted by
Pete McBreen
12 Nov 2012 at 14:53
A political piece from last week’s election - We Need a Programmer for President.
It has an interesting take on the need for more emphasis on teaching programming in schools at an early age, rather than the more normal Computer Literacy which focuses on how to use the standard suite of applications.
