Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

Sh*t People Say to Front-end Developers

Posted on: by mejarc 3 Comments
  1. We really don’t need a designer.
  2. What’s an information architect?
  3. Nobody will be looking at this page with a mobile device.
  4. This style guide from 2002 is still good.
  5. We really don’t need localization.
  6. This Excel spreadsheet is our issue tracker. Works great!
  7. Using Flash would make this so much easier!
  8. HTML5 is too risky and experimental.
  9. What’s a validator?
  10. Browser support? All of them, of course.
  11. We really don’t need a copywriter.
  12. Of course our users will sit through this thirty-second auto-play splash video.
  13. We really don’t need JavaScript testing.
  14. The database guy already did the HTML and CSS, so you just have to add a few tweaks.
  15. Of course our users will submit this twenty-question form before seeing our content.
  16. This will be a short project.

Stop arranging developers like the typing pool

A couple weeks into the project, and despite my access to the issue tracking system, the project wiki, and the code repository, I still felt uneasy–there was something I was missing, but since I didn’t know what that was, I couldn’t ask for it. Coffee? Water? Multiple monitors? Appealing snacks? Had all those. I stood above my workspace, and then figured it out:

We were seated all wrong.

All of us on the development team were placed into cubicles arranged into a herringbone pattern pointing to one side of the room. Our faces turned about 25° towards one other person. I became familiar with the backs of many of my co-workers’ heads, since that’s much of what I saw of them all day. It was a bizarre arrangement for the kind of work we expected to do, since it discouraged interaction: you didn’t want to walk up behind someone and tap him or her on the shoulder for just any old thing.

Of course, interruptions are ruinous to developer productivity, but so is
isolation. There was a lot of context missing for me on this project, because it wasn’t available through the commit comments, and asking for it on chat would’ve required my knowing who to ask for what. I was slower to contribute because I couldn’t overhear relevant chitchat and couldn’t catch the eye of the project lead when I had a question, the most urgent one being: why were our workspaces arranged so stupidly?

I envisioned some workmen arriving one morning with a bare sketch of a floor plan in hand, and a general work order: “Build X number of cubicles from this pile of parts.” They weren’t told who’d work in the cubes, nor what was important to us. They acted from assumptions that seemed reasonable, but were still flat-out wrong.

One was that we all needed to have visual contact with one certain thing at one end of the room. Most of us have experience with this kind of arrangement, since it’s how we sat when we attended school. It’s also how clerical workers’ desks were often placed in early open plan offices. Management enjoyed this arrangement, since it permitted easy surveillance of those notorious insubordinates, schoolchildren and women. Placed side-by-side, we have less interaction with our peers, and more with the authority figure at the end of the room. But here in a twenty-first-century cube farm, there was no teacher on a dais to please. Why were we all facing the same way?

To watch a movie? Or perhaps a more sinister activity?

We have always been at war with SVN

The project never required the Two Minutes Hate–well, as far I could tell. Who would’ve tapped me on the shoulder to let me know?

What not to buy in 2011

This is the time of year when the Interwebs are flooded with “what to buy…” consumer guides. In contrast, the things I discuss below are much cheaper, saving you both time and money, because in the end you won’t be shopping for them at all.

(An aside to Web services freelancers: you know, if we stop offering these things, people will stop thinking they can obtain them. Give it a thought.)

What not to buy in 2011

  • Support for IE 6. Freelancers–put a clause in your contracts that requires a $10,000 deposit before you even start up IETester or the like.
  • Meetings requiring developer attendance.

    "Sunday," © Peter Paul Jacques

    Described variously as “toxic,” “a disaster,” and “the biggest productivity killers for programmers,” meetings are relics from the twentieth century which have as much relevance to your technology projects as do carbon paper and stenography.
  • The cost of a stern “butts-in-chairs” policy. Savvy, experienced developers know what conditions make them productive, and these are various. Nobody lists compulsory enclosure in a cube farm among those conditions.
  • Huge office spaces. Since you’re not having meetings, and you’re letting your team co-work or telecommute, you don’t need all that much space anymore.
  • Fake work.
    Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder than Ever but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem

    This should be obvious, but somebody had to write a whole book about it to expose the problem.

  • Expensive conference fees. As Rebecca Murphey noted, the most useful conferences for Web technology seem to be ones organized by and for practitioners, who aren’t always bankrolled by deep-pocketed corporations.
  • Tag soup, nouvelle cuisine style. Regrettably, HTML5 provides just as many opportunities for lousy markup (“<div>-itis,” overuse of class and ID attributes) to the novice and/or the unconcerned, as  did earlier HTML standards.

What’s dropped off your 2011 shopping list?

Productivity System Smackdown: FlyLady vs. GTD

Many of us, it seems, meet day’s end with disappointment, not satisfaction. We started ambitiously, worked steadily–at something. But what is there to show for that? A barely diminished to-do list, and a burden for tomorrow.

I confess that my favorite way to procrastinate is to read productivity blogs. It’s by way of this habit (bad or good? Let me know) that I’ve learned about the following productivity systems. Readers familiar with both might be astonished that I’m comparing these, since they’re oriented towards such different audiences and spheres of activity–but having used and experienced both, I think they’re ultimately about the same subject, which is reaching that thrilling moment when your to-do list is blank.

GTD

Contender #1: Getting Things Done, a.k.a. GTD

Who:
David Allen
How:
the book (Getting Things Done ), the seminars, the applications, the fans.
What:
GTD© is the productivity system outlined by David Allen in his 2001 bestseller. Allen proposes that a profound gain in one’s productivity follows from writing things down, rather than keeping them in one’s memory. Much of GTD centers on organizing that written data into recognizable prompts for action.
Ritual object:
Many items hold great importance in the GTD system, such as daily calendars, notebooks, and PDAs, but when I read GTD, nothing seemed more crucial for the system’s implementation than the File Folder.
Pros:
  • As you can see from the options above, there are many sources of information about this system. Any practitioner seems ready to pounce on your least little question about how to use the system.
  • Held in great esteem in the US corporate workplace. Casually mentioning your reliance on GTD practices in a job interview will probably score you points.
  • Several of the principles are quick to implement and easy to remember (I expect Allen would prefer we make notes about them down instead).
Cons:
  • Though Allen does include non-workplace examples, his is not a system to apply in all situations. I can’t imagine how blue-collar or domestic workers would use some of the GTD principles.
  • Generates more physical artifacts than I find comfortable. For instance, Allen suggests making file folders to organize even unique documents. Having joyously reduced my own files to just one letter-size box, I’m reluctant to add to their bulk again.
  • Has no apparent built-in protections against tipping into obsession. Taken to its limits, GTD could easily absorb all that time one used to spend in leisure or paying work.
FlyLady

Contender #2: FlyLady

Who:
Marla Cilley, the “FlyLady” (the moniker comes from her love of fly fishing)
How:
the Website, the online discussions, the publications, the occasional workshops
What:
The FlyLady’s system treats domestic concerns almost exclusively. Practitioners receive daily emails from the FlyLady reminding them to undertake various household chores in small (5- or 15-minute) chunks of time. The emails include testimonials from grateful participants, and homespun pep talks from the FlyLady.
Ritual Object:
The Shiny Sink, maintained nightly by faithful practitioners, though the Timer, the Calendar, and the Control Journal assume almost as much importance
Pros:
  • Very easy to implement and follow. Much of the system establishes routines. One can begin them at any time.
  • Corny as they are, the FlyLady’s pep talks do address self-defeating behaviors such as perfectionism and procrastinating.
  • Many of the FlyLady principles can apply to other than domestic work.
Cons:
  • The very feminine and very folksy tone of FlyLady messaging is likely to irritate most men and not a few women
  • Nearly all FlyLady emails will contain exhortations to buy one or more of the housecleaning tools for sale through the FlyLady Website
  • Since it is a system used by one of the most despised, “uncool” sectors of the population (middle-aged, middle-class, nonurban women), you probably won’t garner job interview points for mentioning it.

The Winner

The FlyLady.

Yes, really. Why? Because her system is simpler, doesn’t leave a lot of stuff behind (among her frequent themes is reducing clutter), and really addresses why we don’t Get Things Done: it’s because 1) we think we have to do them perfectly; and 2) we think they will take more time to accomplish than they really will. Though Allen does have the rule about working immediately on any task which will take fewer than two minutes, FlyLady combats procrastination by not even requiring one to assess which tasks those are.

As other systems are discovering, one’s best tool for productivity is a timer. Set the timer for an easy-to-accommodate sliver of your day, and work on one task, whether it’s decluttering your sock drawer, making cold calls, or even writing blog posts. The timer rings; you stop–and there’s one less thing to do.