Originally published on ProAgile’s blog
That was the question I posed on Twitter yesterday. I got a huge pile of answers, some of them surprised me! This article is my way of thanking everyone for sharing their ideas.
You can see the whole picture in this pdf which you are free to download.
Of course I asked this question mostly because I was curious whether anyone else would say the same things as me. I primed the discussion with my personal list, asked people to ”like” any responses they agreed with and reply with their own additions.
I was really pleased with how many people took the trouble to write something. Some of the things I hadn’t thought of at all.
I went through all the replies and summarized the main ideas on postit notes. (I didn’t try to transcribe every one). Then I grouped them by area and added some colours and headlines. The picture above is what I came up with in the end. Eight areas that emerged:
- Human needs
- Teamwork
- Learning and professional development
- Making progress and achieving a Flow state
- Meaningful relationship with end users and customers
- Building something important
- Good code and coding environment
- Shared coding rules and architecture
Some ideas would fit in more than one area of course, in which case I tried to put them near the boundary.
The main point that surprised me was the number of people who wanted peace and quiet – long stretches of uninterrupted time. I interpret that as a desire to reach the ’flow’ state that you get when you become so absorbed in what you’re doing that you are no longer conscious of time passing. It’s a wonderfully rewarding state to be in. I guess I never found silence to be a prerequisite for that, I get it in a pair or ensemble too.
The most popular kinds of ideas, that got the most likes, were mostly around the ’human needs’ category. We’re all people, including software developers 🙂
I’m interested in this question not only from idle curiosity. I regularly give talks at conferences and company events attended by lots of software developers. I want to understand the kinds of challenges developers have in their daily work and connect that to the things I can help them with. I don’t want to just cause additional boring meetings taking people away from fun coding!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion on Twitter. I think I learnt something from it, I hope you like my summary.
