jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #29 on 19 Jun 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing A Team: Other
Today was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers - André N. Meyer, Earl T. Barr, Christian Bird, and Thomas Zimmermann
Interesting study of how 5,971 software developers spend their day in general, and how they spend it on days they feel were good days and typical days; the idea is that this could be used to help managers have their developers make more good days.
It’s an interesting and short read. I walked away with two big points, but there’s others in there too. First was about expectations - developers expecting one type of day and getting a different type of day generally doesn’t work well. Second wasn’t necessarily surprising on an individual level but it was surprising to see how widely it held - the developers didn’t hate meetings. They hated bad meetings, which we can do something about, and they hated meetings when they were in the middle of deep coding work. The developers polled seemed happy in either meeting-filled, requirements defining/design/collaboration mode, or heads-down coding mode, but having a mix of the two wasn’t great.
