Mojomonkey Coding

Man power at a company is easily the most important equity you have. It’s not the awesome state-of-the-art server rack, it’s not the worthless software patents you hold, it’s the people. For this resource to operate at peak efficiency, you must keep the people happy. An employee who is happy about the working conditions and foresees a future with the company will produce significantly better and substantially more work for you.

I’m continually surprised when decisions are made that are a detriment to the employees to save a few dollars in the short term. You should be spending MORE money to provide your team with the best environment possible. Large work areas with substantial personal space, computers that are top of the line (go above and beyond what you believe the developer will need). The best chair you can get, the best food in the break room, etc. Per employee this probably adds a couple thousand dollars more a year than you would get otherwise. But, I guarantee you will make that back and then some by employees who are happy and feel appreciated.

The MOMENT you start cutting corners at the employees expense you are creating a long term expense that you may not be able to recover from. Resentment will swell and is contagious. People will start doing the minimum to get by and not get fired. You will lose any of the work that people do that go above and beyond the requirements, and that is the work that push a product from being good to being great. Higher management usually seems oblivious to employees losing that drive (they must be oblivious to have made the decisions in the first place). They don’t see many people quitting, so feel that everything is good. However, an unhappy employee quitting is not the worst thing that can happen, an unhappy employee staying is. An employee who feels under appreciated and beaten down will contribute very little to the whole, and will often times enlighten employees who are less aware of the poor treatment.

There is such an easy fix for the whole issue. Don’t treat your employees like shit, give them the absolute best, never cut corners, never treat them like whiny ungrateful sods. Never assume that one complaint is an isolated event, but assume that it is a complaint shared by everyone. Spend more money up front, and treat it as an investment in the greatest capital you have that is guaranteed to pay off dividends.

Yet another big developer has abandoned the platform.

Stack Overflow has become one of the greatest resources on the web for programmers. Giving programmers a way to promote the high quality questions and high quality answers allowing the cream to rise to the top. It has a great tagging system and has attracted some of the best programmers around. Imagine, asking a question and having a Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood or Wil Shipley answer it.

Recently, at the DevDays Conference, Joel Spolsky announced the Careers functionality being added to Stack Overflow (and the entire Stack Exchange network). For a fee (to remove the Resume spammers) members can create a CV (not a resume, a distinction I’ll get into in a minute). This CV can be uploaded, and then the member can switch their “looking for a job” status as needed. Then an employer can pay a fee to view the programmers that are marked as “looking for a job”. They can then view their CV as well as their account profile. This removes the confusion for the employer reading a resume of not having any real measure of quality of the programmer’s work (by combining the CV and the post history, an employer can get a better feel for the programmer). If this takes off, it means a couple major things.

First, no longer are employees hunting for the best job, but employers can now hunt for the best programmers. This is a major shift and will have far reaching consequences. Cold calls will become much more prevalent, and quite exciting for the programmer. And don’t worry, Joel did mention that a filtering system is in place to prevent current or past employers from seeing that your status is “looking for job” if you elect.

Secondly, your ability to get a job may be relegated by your ability to answer or ask questions on Stack Overflow. This really drives home the importance of managing your on-line identity and puts a significant emphasis on a single site. If this does take off, talented programmers that don’t use Stack Overflow will be at a disadvantage. This, perhaps, may be a little unfair, but also promotes more people to Stack Overflow, helping and asking questions (and thinking about the quality of those questions and answers before posting).

Back to CV. Stack Overflow went with a CV rather than Resume as a Resume is a job finding tool, while a CV is a document listing your life’s accomplishments. They are promoting the CV so programmers will keep it up to date whether they are looking for a job or not. Keeping such a document up to date is something programmers are notoriously bad at. This will help keep everything in order, and keeping up a CV is a bit different than Resume, as you don’t necessarily need to be looking for work to do so.

So, do I think Stack Overflow will be the only place programmers are hired in the future? Of course not, but I do think it will be where a lot of opportunities are found and perhaps the best jobs are located. Places like Fog Creek that put an emphasis on the Best Programmers, Best Equipment, Best Environment, etc, will flock to Stack Overflow.

Is the development of a stand alone iPhone application a viable model to run a business on? I tend to wonder. With the current state of the App Store, the inability to quickly, easily and effectively find an application that might meet your needs, the difficulty of the developer to get it in front of the user, the reliance (and ultimately the bottleneck) of waiting on approval that can take weeks or months, can you run a business that does nothing but write iPhone applications? Maybe, if you are one of the top 5% who happens to really nail a market and appear in the Top 5 repeatedly, but that’s not going to be many of us (even those who do write an awesome app). My feeling is, you had better enter the iPhone market as a complement to a primary business strategy. Almost every app I use on my phone (save for the couple games I play) complement a service I have already used. Evernote, Instapaper, Netnews Wire, Twitter, Facebook, etc. All of these applications do not require an iPhone to use, but having the iPhone Apps make the experience significantly better. My current feeling is to make iPhone development worth it in a financial sense, it needs to be a value-add to a current service you already provide. Using the iPhone to enhance an existing experience will make the existing service more profitable.