People Management

Unless you work entirely alone, alignment is a big deal. When you are well aligned with your company’s goals you are a more valuable employee. When you are well aligned with your manager they can keep you on the right track and be an ally against obstacles. When you are well aligned with your peers you can keep each other focused on the most important work.

On the other hand, when you have poor alignment you can see all sorts of problems. When teams are misaligned they can undermine each other’s efforts. When you are misaligned with your manager you can find yourself being over managed or left out to dry when things get rough. When you are not aligned with the goals of your organization you miss opportunities to demonstrate your skills and advance your career.

Developing software is an excellent career. Software has touched almost every aspect of our world, and its impact is always expanding. Many new things have become possible because of software, things that couldn’t have been dreamed of even ten years ago. The industry is continuing to expand. Tools are getting better. New opportunities are appearing everywhere… So why haven’t you gotten a promotion in ten years?

In the early days of my career, I got new responsibilities, promotions, and raises fairly regularly. It took a bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and a few years (but not very many years), to work my way up to a senior developer position. Senior means different things at different places, but eventually I got to a place where there was no easy next step, and I had a good number of peers in exactly the same position.

We did one of our monthly releases at work this week. Releases can be stressful and frustrating, and take a lot of methodical preparation to get right. It can be thankless work too; the only time a user notices a release is when it goes badly. We do our releases early on a week day to minimize impact, so if anything does go wrong, there’s not many bodies around to help out. It’s not much fun, but it’s important work that needs to be done.

My company runs a 24/7 site with a substantial number of users and connections to partner systems all over the world. We do what we can to make the system fault tolerant, but problems can still appear at any time of day or night. Ideally we would have a technical support team that’s staffed around the clock, but that not in the cards for now.

We used to have a system where anyone that could fix a problem would get a text message, and whoever was closest to a computer would respond. It worked most of the time, but there were some issues. The team creating the tickets would often be unsure of which component was broken, so the issues would hit lots of people who would be unable to help, and it also exposes a quirk of human behaviour that makes us less likely to help when more people are available.