Bad Programmers

There was an article in the CACM recently that caught my attention entitled, “In Praise of Bad Programmers”

Still here?

Apparently the provocative  title really sets off some fire alarms for people. I shared the article, which I personally thought was great, with a team and we discussed it together. I thought the whole conversation went really well and I thought it felt very productive. Afterward, I discovered that everyone in the room had apparently been thinking one thing: “He thinks I’m a bad programmer”. I’m not sure they recalled any of the conversation after reading the article. In fact, I’m quite sure they didn’t.

That reaction probably says a few things about us:

1. We don’t feel safe talking about our skills with each other
2. The team felt some sort of judgement was being made by me
3. How you frame the conversation really does make a difference

Having done this sort of thing for a while, none of the above particularly shocks or surprises me. It’s just a reminder that some conversations with teams are harder than others. You don’t avoid them, but you need to be prepared to set the stage well before the conversation, make sure the team feels safe enough to deal with the conversation, and have a way to check in with them afterward to make sure your read on the conversation isn’t incorrect.

Oh, and if they’re still angry after all that, then it’s really their problem. I’m a coach not a therapist.

First Class Impediments

About a year ago I put together a terrific tutorial on finding and managing impediments. It was something that I felt strangely passionate about. But I must confess that focusing on impediments felt a little weird. I’d refer to it as my “silly impediments presentation”. You don’t see many talks at major Agile conferences that discuss impediments. After all who really takes impediments seriously anyway?

Apparently, really good project leaders do.

In fact, it’s arguably the most important thing that good leaders do. Go ask your team what a good scrum master does. Dollars to donuts, I bet you get “remove impediments” for an answer every time. So I guess impediments are pretty important, perhaps equally important to some of the more glamorous subjects in the agile books (you know: planning, retrospectives, etc.). So it’s time that we made impediments a first class member of the project management conversation. After all, planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives won’t do much for you if you neglect impediments. You just end up stuck and reflecting on that fact.