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Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic,
by lukasb 5y ago
Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way.
A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen."
Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way."
YMMW on the practicality of his advice, but it was super inspiring.
- crabmusket 5y agoThat sounds a lot like the ideas in this talk, where he was asked to give a keynote at a software convention. http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee.html http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee.html > This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world—and above all the built structure of the world—alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure. I realize that you may be surprised by my conclusion. This is not what I am, technically, supposed to have been talking about to you. Or you may say, Well, great idea, but we're not interested. I hope that is not your reaction. I hope that all of you, as members of a great profession of the future, will decide to help me, and to help yourselves, by taking part in this enormous world-wide effort. I do think you are capable of it. And I do not think any other professional body has quite the ability, or the natural opportunity for influence, to do this job as it must be done.
- citizenpaul 5y ago>"Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way." Interesting quote. It really makes me think about the great resignation and WFH movement. I think lots of people truly were asleep to how bad their job and consequently life had become due to working with all the negative corporate aspects of America. This is a succinct way to describe the trend. I wonder if we will see drops in pharmaceutical and alcohol sales in the coming years.
- sloan 5y agoThanks for the anecdote, I love it. What’s SWE in this context?
- actually_a_dog 5y agoI wouldn't call it love per se, but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
- skeeter2020 5y agoI have several junior developers on my team who came from the customer success / support side of the business who grew themselves into developer roles. They typically have not only the strongest desire to learn & improve, but also the most empathy and understanding of our impact on customers & their livelihood.
- kbelder 5y agoYes! If you can get somebody on your team that has worked their way up from, for example, a customer service contact center, they'll be immensely valuable. Just their insight on what customers love and hate about your product is probably worth their hire.
- wonder_er 5y agoThis was my path into software development! It's served me so well, now I want to figure out how to "recruit" future engineers from customer service teams. The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their teams.
- alexott 5y agoVery often they go into product management roles
- wonder_er 5y agoSeveral? That feels like _many_. I rarely cross paths with teams that can handle more than one at a time. Do you have a particularly large team? Or a particularly good process for 'onboarding' new/less-experienced engineers? Sounds like a lot of things are going right at your company for your team to have picked up several developers this way.
- wolverine876 5y agoWithout knowing Alexander's concept in detail, once I learned to work (and live) that way, doing otherwise has seemed like a waste of time, almost pointless. The only point is that, unfortunately, many people don't understand - and scoff at - working 'with love', but in those cases I often feel like I'm mostly building a road to nowhere.
- specialist 5y agoI once had a high trust (love) team. We kicked ass. Together. I miss it every day. Everything since has tasted like ash. I've been trying to get back to that happy place ever since. Sadly, I eventually stopped talking about trust (in the workplace) IRL; people don't much like crazy talk or zealots.
- pjmorris 5y agoI've been on a number of teams like that, and miss them. There's a phrase 'the song of friends at work' that I can't find the source of, but it serves as a kind of navigation point for me as I try to steer my career and efforts.
- blenderdt 5y agoThis is the reason I changed how I approached software projects. Alexander made me rethink how software should be built: with love for the user, but also with love for other developers.
- hinkley 5y agoAdjust your own mask before helping others with theirs. It always appalls me when developers reason that a software development system that barely functions for themselves will somehow result in an application that the users will enjoy paying to use. Software that doesn’t work for the developers will eventually stop working for everyone else too.