Being Open To New Ideas
Daniel Read has a good post about the benefits of developers being open to new suggestions and directions from other people. These people can be on your team or other teams. They can be gurus in the industry or complete strangers who believe they’ve had success with a project. Being closed leads to stagnation. If you never evaluate new ideas within your context, you may miss some great oportunities to improve, or at the very least miss the opportunity to justify and tweak what you are doing now. Listen to what other people have to say and see if what their experiences have taught them can lead to better software development for you.
From the post:
On a software project, if a team member says, “Hey I have an idea! What if we did our logging this way instead?” and your default answer is, “We don’t have time for that right now.” then opportunity is lost, and over time enough of this will grind down the morale of the team.
This is especially true if the developer(s) are unhappy with how things are being done and there are people (managers or not) standing in the way of changing things. “We don’t have time for this right now.” is a giant red flag for me.
Of course, to be completely pliant you should also be open to dropping ideas on the floor that turn out not to be beneficial for you, or that the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t justify implementing. Just because someone (who presumably had succcess) said to do something, that doesn’t mean you should do it. It does mean you should likely listen to them, learn from what they’ve done and see if the ideas can be applied to your situation.
on August 14th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
I wrote about this idea a few years ago in my musings, and actually just republished it last week. The key is to find a balance that leads to the best path to your particular goals, as usual. The guidelines I posted reflect the balance we found in our organization with low turnover and high system ownership, which themselves are desirable qualities, although I don’t know how to go about achieving them. Perhaps they are emergent in a well-managed dev shop.