How software companies die

The conditions that feed creative programmers kill managers and marketers - and vice versa. Programming is a Great Game. It absorbs the player completely, including the soul and body. If you get caught, then you get caught, and nothing else matters anymore. When you next get out of your lair, the extra ten kilograms, a beard up to your knees, and such a number of empty pizza boxes around can be found that spring has probably come already? But for you it's all not important. Because your program works, and the code is fast and elegant. You won.

You realize that some people consider you a nerd. So what? They are not Players. They have never fought with Windows or built a relationship with Linux. For them, that “C ++”, that “b--” sound the same gibberish. Yes, they generally barely exist. As a soldier or a scientist, you are not very much waiting for a fair assessment of your work from the inhabitants. You build something intricate and beautiful. They will never understand.

Beekeeping

Here is the secret on which any successful software company is based: you need to deal with your programmers, how beekeepers deal with their bees. You should not talk to them, trying to explain something in your language and get an answer to it. But you can only give them the opportunity to create their own hive in your company and do what they love. And when they do not look - you can collect some medka from their work.

You keep these bees from stinging everyone with money. More money than they can spend. In fact, it may not be as big as it seems. All these programmers hear the voices of their parents or wives, saying something like "And when you stop staring at this box for days and start doing something worthwhile?" So, all you have to do is pay them enough so that they can answer these people: “Hey, wait a second! I get more of you - what other questions do you have? ” On average, this amount is not so great.
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And you can make them stay in your hive, providing an opportunity to equip it according to their wishes and find yourself with whom to dig. The only one whose opinion is important is another programmer. The opinion of a good programmer rises to the rank of canon. And if you want to have a good swarm - there must be at least one brilliant programmer in it. It doesn't matter what he will work on and how he will look, but he should be, his eyes should be burning, the red-hot keyboard hiss under his fingers, and his charisma should overwhelm everyone around.

He is a player, young programmers think. He will look at my code. It's enough. If the company builds such a hive, the coders will stop sleeping, eat and generally get into reality while the company collects honey a couple of times a season.

Without control

But the problem that continues to kill the company for the company. All successful companies have a Technical Leader who inspires programmers. But none of them can hold such a Leader forever. He will either be lured into, or drawn into the irresistible machine of the bureaucracy, or he himself will become the manager, or the management will demand “better control of the processes” or something else will happen. One way or another, the Technical Leader will lose, and the Manager will come to power instead.

But ... to power over what? Instead of a working and ready-to-release product, this same Manager will find in his submission a bunch of highly unpredictable, asocial, disobedient people who violently resist all attempts to lead them. And where did the former cohesive team that produced such a wonderful product go? Give them a tight schedule, a dress code and a warden with a stick - and now you got a group of people who sabotage the project. They hate you, they laugh at you and you know it.

Ruin

For a programmer from such a command, shock is even greater. He suddenly discovers that his life is controlled by some alien creatures with strange names: Meeting, Report, Time Tracking. And now someone demands that he plan in advance all his work and adhere to this plan. No branches, tweaks, ideas. Just work on the clock on the wall. And never touch someone else's code. The work that once inspired becomes a yoke around the neck.

The hive is crumbling. The most freedom-loving and talented bees fly somewhere to build their own new one. Managers and marketers, left surrounded by mediocrity and sycophants, get a sense of control, which accompanies them all over the next few years - while their product loses users, becomes filled with bugs and finally dies (which of course, some seemingly weighty explanation in "It was predetermined by the market").

This is how software companies die.