Part II of Hegel, Coding and Managers: Your boss and Hegel think it’s life or death but it’s not

DISCLAIMER: This article in no way is based on previous or current employers, and/or clients past or present.

I have great admiration for Joel Spoelsky who runs Fog Creek Software, because frankly, his advice has helped me in my career when I’ve run into tough situations. He has helped me thrive. In his, “Fire and Motion” article, he made it really clear to me what productivity means as a developer.

He’s been seduced by a certain Hegelism that most managers feel deep down to the core, and he expresses it really clearly when he talks about finding great developers.

In the last piece, I talked about how coders work under the false notion that coding will somehow make them better managers. Hegel expressed this in the Phenomenology of Spirit where the slave somehow through her work becomes free. Marx would later exploit this romantic delusion of Hegel’s and we are still cleaning up the mess from this lost cause. Mind you, I am in favor of returning Che Guevara’s stolen rolex to Cuba.

In this piece, there’s a specific prejudice that managers have that you can see in Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic. The one who becomes the master does so because she risked all:

[I]t is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won… The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. (s. 187)

Having risked all, the master is entitled to the enjoyment of the products of the slave and is the measure of the slave’s worth.

This sort of scrutiny and prejudice towards the slave can seen in the coder’s interview process.

Basically, you want a coder who can:
1) Do Smart Things
2) Do those Smart Things to Completion, i.e. Get Stuff Done

I’m not disagreeing with that at all, but let’s take the straw man of an example where Joel tells us not to hire the smart guy who can’t get things done:

‘People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say, “Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language,” and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant whitepaper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful. The other way to identify these people is that they have a tendency to show up at your office, coffee mug in hand, and try to start a long conversation about the relative merits of Java introspection vs. COM type libraries, on the day you are trying to ship a beta.’

There are two criticisms here against the manager:
1) The manager was pretty dumb in hiring a guy who is an academic. Theory is the work of the academic. In their minds, they have already gotten stuff done.
2) The manager labors under a false sense of urgency, the sort of urgency that makes the master so oppressive to the slave in Hegel’s version of the story.
3) A combination of both.

You might be calling bullshit right now, but I know of a multi-million dollar company that would never call someone out on being too geeky like Joel did or brandish academic like a dirty word. That company is 37signals.

They did a unique experiment with a 4 day work week, and it’s turned out great!

Basically, they argue that urgency is poisonous:

One thing I’ve come to realize is that urgency is overrated. In fact, I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic.

Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days. It’s OK. There are exceptions (a trade show, a conference), but those are rare.

When a few days extra turns into a few weeks extra then there’s a problem, but what really has to be done by Friday that can’t wait for Monday or Tuesday? If your deliveries are that critical to the hour or day, maybe you’re setting up false priorities and dangerous expectations.

If you’re a just-in-time provider of industry parts then precise deadlines and deliveries may be required, but in the software industry urgency is self-imposed and morale-busting. If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. Don’t plant it if you can help it.