"It’s only natural, then, that your programmer is reduced to doing only what brings him success: coding."
Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...
I spent most of my day coding. Except for some fresh air breaks and occasional discussions on how to collaborate I actually spend every second doing it. And I love it. The article suggests in its whole premise that this is wrong. For me and for the business. Yet it lacks any evidence on why I should want to do more than that - in fact I would even call it blindly dogmatic in that regard.
But at least in my work context I think that my boss's job is to keep me from customers and design decisions as much as possible - since that is what I love and what yields the most productive use of my time. I wonder why my joiner friends aren't told that spending all day in their workshop creating beautiful wooden art is wrong and that they should instead derive more pleasure from interactions with their customers...
Maybe in an ideal world someone who cries over every line of code since she/he would much rather make design decisions but is left out of the creativity loop just isn't a natural coder. Just like someone who hates working with wood maybe shouldn't.
I am well aware that this is a position of extremes and blocks out the gray areas that are reality. But my work reality is just not what this "Hacker, Problem Solver, Calvinist, Geek" regards as the very premise of his manager lesson.
Let me know where I can find a company like this! It’s obvious to me that engineering quality is precisely what engineers should be worried about — the “how” as opposed to the “what” or the “why”. Like chefs should be focused on the food.
When you take the responsibility for building the right thing for the market, etc and smear it across all the engineers, some will step up and become informal managers, organically acquiring power in response to the responsibility put on them, while
others who are too busy programming or not interested in taking on other jobs will realize they have responsibility that is out of line with their power.
> We could all just sit at home and write code all day. but without users there is no point.
Depends on how you are motivated. Speaking for myself, my motivation always comes from myself, never from what others think of my work. The users/paying customers aren't the point, at best they are an enabler, allowing me to spend more time coding that I would otherwise have to waste by having a non-coding job.
I do totally understand that motivation, coding is enjoyable. I have lots of code on github that I wrote that no-one has ever run since the time I checked it in once it worked.
But the PHP code I wrote that was getting 1m pageviews a month gave more of a sense of achievement than my clever raytracer.
Replacing "success" by "pleasure" quickly reveals why there's not a single sentence in that article I can agree with. I for one am quite happy not being included in matters that sound like a different job title to me...