Ask Slashdot: What Defines Good Developer Culture?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm part of a team of six people developing applications for mobile devices (Android & iOS). In our company, which consists of many teams responsible for 'classic' software development, business intelligence, virtualization, hardware, etc., we are kind of a small startup because we were the first to use agile methods like Scrum and we are open to new technologies and methods. Also, our team is pretty young — I'm the oldest at 30 years of age. We would like to further raise productivity and motivation, so we're currently collecting ideas about what makes a good developer/hacker culture, and how it can be improved in our team/company. These can be things we do ourselves, or suggestions we pass on to management. I would like to know: what, in your opinion, defines good, modern developer culture? What does developer culture consists of? For example, is it: clearly defined career opportunities? A geeky office? Benefits like trips to extraordinary conferences? Please let me know what you think."

culture?

[masternerdguy]

Soon we'll be using rasberry pis bought with bitcoins in the year of the linux desktop.

Re:culture?

[Anonymous Coward]

... reading about it all on SlashBI and SlashCloud.

a few tips

[Anonymous Coward]

make sure bug reports have a "who's fault is this" section so you know who to blame. make sure everyone has to fill out a time sheet with their daily activities down to a 15 minute intervals. start every day with a meeting that's a half hour to an hour long so that everyone start work with maximum productivity in mind. make sure everyones personal phone is in a public list so you can call them up at any time and ask questions. oh yeah and a mandatory softball game every other friday after work, people love that, builds unity.

Re:No micro manages or quotes with NO TPS reports

[seepho]

The solution is obvious: have a meeting to discuss the usefulness of meetings.

Nerf

[ThogScully]

readily available supply of Nerf weapons

Re:Intellectual honesty

[period3]

Agree with most of this - but I would also add variable width fonts to the list.

Re:Good Development Culture

[alphatel]

An emphasis on keeping high-quality & intelligent developers. Don't ever let intellectually lazy developers onto your team.

We have a solution for lazy developers. Well, a solution for the whole team. Keeps things simple:

We're adding a little something to this month's developer salaries. First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize?
Second prize is a set of steak knives.
Third prize is you're fired.

Re:No micro manages or quotes with NO TPS reports

[Troyusrex]

The solution is obvious: have a meeting to discuss the usefulness of meetings.

Yes but you can't rush right into a meeting like that. Often it takes four or five pre-meeting meetings before going into a meeting like that.

Re:No micro manages or quotes with NO TPS reports

[w_dragon]

That describes pretty much every scrum retrospective I've been a part of.

Re:No micro manages or quotes with NO TPS reports

[Anonymous Coward]

• Most meetings should involve two people. Sometimes three. Rarely more.
• Any meeting that involves more than three people should be done standing up.
• Anyone should feel free to excuse themselves from a meeting when they feel their presence is no longer useful.
• Meetings should have a written agenda and a clear purpose
• Meetings should have a clearly stated start time and a clearly stated end time. Never wait for late people.
• Meetings should have a designated note taker, and any decisions should be documented and disseminated.
• Most regularly scheduled "status" meetings are a waste of time

Oh man! Hahaha! Whoosh on me! I laughed pretty hard when I finally realized that everyone was actually talking about sex.

Re:culture?

[Gripp]

meh... prior to my current job i would have agreed with you 100%. But I've actually stumbled into working somewhere that actually does have a culture. Everyone here is willing to put in as much time as it takes to make our clients happy; including staying up until 4am for a load test one night and then waking at 3am for a meeting with an overseas client the next. We've had people hop on and help troubleshoot while at the hospital and vacation, and drive hardware to other states over their weekend. More importantly, there is never a boss forcing or even asking it to be done, we just do what we know is needed. Co workers are open to receiving and dishing out honest opinions - no matter how harsh - and build stronger relationships with other on the count of it.

It may sound gruesome, but that is where the company embracing culture and its employees comes in. While we are semi expected to be in the office between 10am and 6pm, there is no one watching or caring what time you leave or come in - so long as you're getting your job done. Hell, we don't even track time! Any given night there is at least a few of us out having drinks, and even working from the bar. And more importantly, we are all very accepting. Anyone busting their asses is welcome, with open arms. Our office has a full service coffee bar with a barrista (free), free soda, free snacks, ping pong tables, several arcade machines, a theater and buys lunch for everyone every friday. We have no internet filters or people watching our activity. it's not all that uncommon to see people on facebook or reddit or even playing a video game. It's not uncommon for nerf gun fights to break out, or coworkers facebook bombing each other. Again, all that matters is performance. We all recognize that some weeks are 80 hours of chasing fires, and others are spent dicking around. Working from home is accepted, so long as it isn't abused. And even then they deal with it on an individual basis rather the typical all-encompassing "new company rules" approach. There are no "designated smoke breaks" and no one bitching about the smokers (myself being one have been previously unaccustomed to not constantly hearing that crap). Internal meetings are full of cursing - with our CEO being the biggest potty mouth. In fact, we make it a point to drop as many 4 letter words as we can during interviews to make sure the candidate isn't uptight about that kind of thing.

This may sound like an impossible environment to work/be productive in... but our flagship product has over 30 million lines of code, we have a hosted environment with 5 datacenters globally + EC2 overflow + PCI walled gardens, and hundreds of premise clients as well - all of which we support 24/7 without discrimination or cost to the client. And since our product is the backbone of many solutions, we have to deal with nearly every type of language and tech out there. python, ruby, groovy, java, C, php, opa, ccxml, vxml, html, groovy, js/jquery, etc. Even better, the purpose of our product is to parse/render many of those languages, it requirs a fairly deep understanding of them, and constant learning... we have to work with ALL db's, OS's, web service types, packet analysis, working with various carriers and telco's and hardwares, etc. . All done with around 100 employees, total - which only about 60 are technical.

TL;DR - free/happy employees make the best employees. Just make sure you focus on hiring/keeping the aces.