Lemmings

On wasting human potential

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Imagine you have a company and hire all sorts of people. One group costs more than the others. Besides being the most expensive, they can solve hard problems. But you don’t know that, or ignore it, or don’t care, or who knows… You use them as lemmings. Remember the little characters in Lemmings? They trudge along mindlessly or dig with a pickaxe. You guide them through the levels, and if you send them digging the wrong way, they all die. Game over.

Sometimes I think developers are used in exactly the same way. You send them off to dig without telling them why. If they happen to dig their way to the exit, you take it for granted. More likely, they dig themselves deeper into a hole they can’t get out of. They dig their hearts out, but that’s on them because they designed and estimated it that way. It’s their fault. Using developers this way, or failing to use what they can do, strikes me as one of the biggest wastes of human potential. An expensive waste, too, judging by the average developer’s salary.

Developers certainly don’t have a monopoly on good sense, though it can look that way sometimes. Most of those I’ve met have a gift called curiosity. Sometimes it’s downright irritating. Why do we have to do this when it makes no sense? Or: we could do it this way, but it’ll cost you a fortune. The answer usually sounds like a line straight out of the Czech fairy-tale film S čerty nejsou žerty: “…we do the thinking around here. Yes, us. Definitely not you, Drápal!” I hired smart people, and now I’m surprised they think and have opinions.

The developer you or I would hire has, on average, read more books than the rest of the population, has a broad perspective and ideally isn’t narrow-minded about their own field (thanks, Bantere). They can get by quite well in English, and if they don’t know something, they know how to ask Google. A little much to ask of a lemming, I’d say. Of course, lemmings aren’t all alike. Some of us like digging holes and don’t mind at all. You give them a pickaxe and they dig. But with a bit of good leadership, context, purpose and autonomy, even a digging lemming can turn into one that adds value.

I don’t know why most companies hire just about the most expensive people in the job market and then turn them into lemmings. I realize not every company can be 37 Signals, but I really don’t get the lemmings. It’s a general observation, and I’d say it applies to nine out of ten companies. Unfortunately.

I’ll finish with a quotation from Four Engineering Killers. It best sums up what I wanted to get across in this article.

…management needs to recognize that its engineers are a critical component of any major product decision. Too often, a company’s engineers are seen as a service organization that can be steamrolled when important business decisions arise (ensuring a healthy product-engineering relationship is one more reason it’s critical to have hired the right engineers).

Related

• Šrakyi on turquoise organizations on the CZ Podcast
• The book Reinventing Organisations, a way out of this, and a way to see where your organization stands
• What a foot soldier and a developer with a shovel have in common, on another way to build teams and what we can learn from the military.