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I'm a student in software engineering in Montreal. For the last 3 years I've had a few interships (once per year). The first two (in the same company) were mostly sysadmin jobs, but I did get to do a few Perl programs (mostly log file analysing and statistics generation).
My other intership was in the IT security field. I did a huge CGI Perl script to analyse time spent by users on the Internet.
The thing is, what I really want to do is programming, but my interships were mostly sysadmins jobs with some programming (due to my previous experience with Linux and UNIX).
I have another internship this winter, however I would like it to be in the OO programming field, and SW engineering.
I have a background in system administration but I know OO quite well, due to my college courses and projects (C++, Java, VB.NET, ASP.NET, but not C# unfortunately :( ).
My question is this : how can compete, in interviews, having no previous work experience in the OO field (though I build some projects in Java, Swing, etc., and am learning JSP right now), with other students with OO experience in previous interships?
What should be my "selling points" ? I consider myself quite a good programmer, but my previous interviews didn't turn out well due to my lack of experience. In fact, I got an intership last winter in system administration, since, well... that's my background!
Any tips on how to convince a potential employer that I am the perfect candidate despite my lack of professional experience (but lots of personal knowledge (and interest)) ?
Thank you,
Guillaume.
[EDIT]
Thank you all for your support!
I'm not out of school yet ; I am still a full-time student! My university program is a cooperative one : I have to get 3 internships to get my diploma.
Let my explain briefly my background : this winter will be my 4th internship.
My first two were while I studied in CÉGEP, Quebec's post-high-school but pre-university schools.
The first one was pratically given to me by CÉGEP : a employer called in, searching for someone knowledgeable in Linux system administration. I fitted the job perfectly since I was the only student who knew Linux outside of school. My interview wasn't even a real one, since all the details had been discussed between my school and the employer : I knew that I was hired even before doing the interview.
The second one was in the same company, one year later, since I liked my first one very much.
Then I arrived at my university, where every student is required to have 3 internships to get his (or her) diploma. Having no real experience in computer science interviews (since my first internships were "given" to me), I did a few screw-ups when doing interviews for OO jobs. I finally managed to get an interview for a security / sysadmin / Perl programming job at Bombardier Aerospace.
My internship went well, but now I want a real software development job. All the people I know had one last winter, which mean I am disadvantaged in terms of experience.
However, I DO have programming experience. All my internship required me to do a substancial amount of programming, especially in Perl. My Perl skills are quite good, and I got to develop some nice tools for both companies I worked in. I solved real problems not seen in school (like how to parse efficiently 5 GB log files while keeping memory usage as low as possible).
Obviously, I can easily get an internship this winter if I apply on jobs in the sysadmin domain or Linux world. There are a few of them available each year and I've got a lot of experience in the field, but as stated previously, I would like my next internship to be in SW development.
I am currently working on a personal project in Java, which is a small UML class editor. So I get to deal with the Swing framework, listeners, MVC architecture, etc. This is not as big as what is being done in the "real world", but it a fun project and I am having a lot of fun doing it, and if I can get it quite advance in the next month, I will probably put in on SourceForge. In the same time I am learning JSP.
As for OO open source project, this is something I should be looking into. I probably won't have time for it right now, one month away from my first interviews, being a full-time student, but I am not putting this option away.
Anyway, thank you!
no offense, but from your description it would appear that you're not really qualified for a 'real' OO programming job. Academic classes are a good introduction to a language but no substitute for solving real problems with fluctuating deadlines, finicky users, cholicky managers, et al ;-)
this leaves three options:
join an open-source project that uses OO and a language you know, and contribute to it significantly. This will provide an analogue of real programming experience [but not real job experience] and may help you get a programming job in another year or two
or, apply for an entry-level OO programming job and impress the heck out of the interviewer with your communication skills, contagious enthusiasm, eagerness to learn, commitment to the customer/user/whatever, etc. In other words, present and sell yourself truthfully but as the 'complete package' needing only the opportunity to explode.
Don't be discouraged if you get turned down a lot
don't apply for jobs you don't really want
expect to stay in the job for at least a year if not two or three, to really learn how to program in a non-academic environment
start your own business as a consultant, programmer, freelance, and/or develop products, and learn at your own pace. This is risky when out of school, less risky when in school, and if you happen on an unoccupied niche can be quite lucrative
Well, one place to get immediate, documented, experience is through open source projects. Join a project, or start a new one. Help with documentation on OSS projects (employers would love to see that). Help with writing unit tests, contribute patches, etc. And the sooner you get started, the better.
Open Source experience is good and experience and it shows a level of dedication to development and the language that you work in.
Good Luck
Aptitude and enthusiasm will get you a long way. If you can answer interview questions, work through programming problems, and you have personal projects that you are working on, lack of experience shouldn't hold you back too much.
Make sure you nail the questions, though. If you don't have experience, you've got to know your stuff cold to make up for it.
Be sure to emphasize side projects. If I interview someone who likes to spend their free time at home coding, they get lots of bonus points.
First, one thing I always follow that has never led me wrong is honesty. If you don't know something just say "I don't know". This is so important when it comes to programming interviews and very easy to follow.
Next, take the time to start and/or get involved with some open source projects. Saying that you worked on an open source project says alot. First, it shows that you can grok other people's code and have the resolve to work collaboratively with other people in the programming community. This goes a long way. I have come across employers that actually skip the screening process when they can confirm that I contribute to various open source projects. This is probably your best defense against little experience in the field.
If you have the experience/drive then do presentations and/or coding sessions at user group meetings and/or code camps. This also goes a LONG way. Displaying that you can talk and converse with other programmers in a scenario like this, it shows employers that you enjoy programming and working with the community.
Finally, start low. You will need to start at the bottom of the totem pole, but work hard and show that you are a quality programmer and recruitors/employers will be banging down your door.
By the fact that you A) posted a question to this site and B) have a blog it appears, it shows you have passion. That is one thing a lot of people don't have so you that to your advantage. Use that passion to further your knowledge.
If you are truly passionate about programming as you say, then just start programming. You can't learn how to program by thinking your way through it. The only way to get experience is to program. For someone like yourself, find an open source project you want to help and start contributing. That will give you valuable experience in using source control among other things.
The other thing is find a technology that you feel you can really get behind and go deep on it, learn any and everything you can about that technology and that platform. Immerse yourself. The reason I say that is because someone isn't going to hire you if you know a little about this and a little about that. They expect you to be able to walk in and do a job. That doesn't mean you shouldn't "play" with other things, but do yourself a favor and leave them off your resume unless you have production experience with them.
Hope that helps.
-Keith
Bring with you some Perl code that:
demonstrates a programming style that you can be proud of,
does something significant and useful, and
is object-oriented (for good reasons, not just to demonstrate that you can regurgitate syntax)
Contribute patches to some CPAN distribution. This will show that you: 1) use CPAN - managers love peoples that can write code faster 2) can read and modify someones code.
Study Moose/Mouse - it is modern OO system for Perl, it is much better that old OO system that was copied from Python.
Every company is different. I have been a Senior Software Developer at Software companies, and I was never even asked a programming question.
Do your best in the interviews and just be yourself.
I find OOP to be useful, but sometimes overrated paradigm to work within. Functional decomposition can get you pretty far.
You may have received a good grade in your C++ class, but would the professor recommend you for an internship?
Your school's reputation or lack of it may be influencing the selection process.
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Having recently worked with a bunch of people (from two different companies) right out of school or with 1-2 years experience, I was initially quite impressed with their knowledge of the various industry buzz words and design patterns etc. Furthermore they each had a good understanding on OO design principle and use of interface.
To cut a long story short…. In just a few days of working with them I found that things were not as they appeared.
Let me define some terms I’ll use here
Knowledge – Something you learn either in school or book or on the Internet etc.
Experience – The amount of time you’ve been doing something
Skill – Only gained through experience. That is acquiring skill (over time) and knowing how to apply the knowledge you have
What I found was that even though they knew this stuff, they really didn’t know how to apply this knowledge. You’d have all these patterns waving in your face but any code they had to write of their own accord had basic flaws with it. They could tell you the virtues of a certain design pattern and could come up with somewhat of an implementation but could not recognize basic flaws in the design.
Of course I had my fair share of the “One who knows not that he knows not –Confucius”.
Each night I’d spend a lot of time re-iterating everything that was said during the day trying to understand who was saying what and why, trying to figure out what I could do by way of examples during training or code review. But frankly I was quite puzzled.
After about 2-3 weeks I started to figure it out.
Anyway, the questions first
1. Have you experience this sort of thing?
2. How did you (or do you) tackle this?
My conclusion was that either schools are doing a bad job or Google is their friend and they’re getting all this “knowledge” and think they know.
But I feel
In order to be able to recognize and appreciate good design one MUST write code that is well,… not so well designed. Struggle with it and then fix it to know the pain and therefore recognize good and bad design and appreciate it
Practice and Experience – you just can’t beat that. There is so much that experience (and the quality of experience) brings to the table that you just can’t match it with just knowledge or a little bit of experience.
Some other things I experienced:
“Why is this an interface and not a base class” – you’ll get all kinds of answers but none of them is the right reason.
Why this design pattern and not that, or forget design patterns for a minute and just design (they’re utterly lost – that’s when you see their real design coding skills)
Over engineering – don’t recognize it and can’t appreciate they it could be a maintenance nightmare as the system grows. I found this to be a big issue. It's as if everything has the potential to change. A simple process of sending an email has 3 classes in addition to the various classes the in the .NET framework you'd use to send an email.
Using all the new features in the framework or language just because (I’ve even seen this in some of Microsoft’s source code for a certain framework for which source code is available)
So 10 years from now, everyone writing code is writing it using all the fancy framework or language features using all the possible design patterns, such that “legacy” code is well written and well designed. Or is it? What do you think?
Does anyone else feel that 10 years from now we’ll just be shifting through a different kind of muck. Muck that’s scattered about in a dozen more code files then it used to be because now we’ve got classes and so called loosely coupled code but it’s just a different kind of mess and in fact harder to clean up?
Interesting deliberations. I have always felt that with time we are over engineering our systems with all the patterns flying around. An extra layer of abstraction means more failure in understanding in future. My personal approach is to keep things simple and only introduce complexity if it is required. Decouple if decoupling is required. Many of the design requirements do flow in systems because we blindly put in requirements document that it should be maintainable, reliable and all *able. It's also necessary to understand the degree in which we want these *ables and more importantly how they impact our budget and business values both in shorter and longer term.
One important aspect is always to keep a very tight focus on business requirements, at every stage, both in terms of functionality and budget.
I completely agree that the newer breed of developers appear to be very knowledgeable when it comes to design patterns and the latest buzzwords like hibernate, jason, nant, ajax etc. In the other hand I have found that even the best among them, those who can be considered star programmers appear to have limited understanding and knowledge of what is really happening under the hood.
I had a several conversations in the past with young guns who were viewing spring as a major innovation trying to convince them that what this framework is providing us through reflection consist the evolution of things like IDL, type libraries, COM and CORBA.
When it comes to design patterns and the terminology introduced by the gang of four, we all know that their proposed architectures have been used for decades before and a senior developer was using them almost intuitively without knowing the formal differences of a regular factory versus an abstract. There is no doubt of course that the formalization that was introduced by the movement of DP was beneficial for the industry although the recognition and successful implementation of patterns still (and probably always) rely in the experience and talent of the developer since this process is impossible to become a purely mechanical and deterministic.
An additional point I have to make regarding newcomers to the field of SD is their inclination to spread their skill set very horizontally, trying to cover as many technologies possible as opposed to deeply concentrate in a specific domain and master it.
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I know that this question is too abstract. But. How much time do i need to learn LabVIEW to become average LabVIEW developer? For example, if I buy good book about LabVIEW and have 8 hours per day (on my work) dedicated to LabVIEW learning how many days i will spend on LabVIEW learning? Could you please provide example from your own experience. More information about me that can be helpful: I'm a developer and know c\c++\python and a little bit of java languages.
Like Swinders said, it might depend a lot on your sensibilities. I have seen people who had a really hard time migrating to the data flow concept. It's a different paradigm from the classic text-based languages and some people can't easily think in these concepts.
If you get past that hurdle, you'll find that the IDE handles a lot of the annoying things you used to take care of for you (things such as syntax and memory allocation). This allows you to become productive very quickly.
It doesn't mean, however, that your level would be high. One potential pit you should try hard to avoid is casting your existing experience onto LV. The most common example is probably local variables. This may be shocking to people coming from a text-based world, but LV does not have variables, per-se. Unfortunately, it does have elements called variables and people migrating from C who find them jump on them and use them as they would use variables in C, leading to LV code which looks like C code and is bad code (at least in LV).
If you do manage to work around this, I would guess you would become better than the global average in less than a month and better than most professional developers after creating three projects you would later look at and say "what the hell was I thinking?".
I never took any of the NI courses (although I understand some of the advanced architecture ones are pretty good), but I would suggest you also spend some time in some of the online communities (such as LAVA or the NI forums) and look at some of the examples and discussions there. There's a lot of material about best practices, design patterns, etc., which would allow you to become a more professional developer.
Above all, do not abandon your current professional conduct. If you have a structured process for designing and developing software, you already have a leg up on the majority of LV programmers. Just make sure you adapt and keep using such a process.
I started with no commercial programming experience (I have always programmed for fun) and followed an on-line tutorial to pick up the basics of LabVIEW. Within a week I was able to understand existing code and could develop a small application.
It is hard to give an estimate on how long it would take to become an 'average' LabVIEW developer as this depends on what you mean by 'average'. One thing to consider is how easy you are able to think in terms of data flow rather than procedural languages. If you can pick up new programming languages quickly then this will help.
Would you be the only person using LabVIEW or are there others at your place of work that could mentor you? You may also find that there are user groups operating near you which I would recommend (check the NI website or contact your local NI office).
There is then the experience that you will need to gain to allow you to produce good LabVIEW code. I was lucky to be able to attend the National Instruments training courses a few years ago which I think helped me but only by using it have I become an 'average' LabVIEW developer.
I'd say a few weeks or most with devoting the majority of your work time to it. I had a similar background to you when I started to develop in LabVIEW. The hardest part was adapting to the lack of variables. There are local variables, but it's not what you're used to at all. Additionally, their functions, called Virtual Instruments (VIs) can have multiple inputs and outputs, similar to how Python can handle n-tuples.
I will warn you, their array handling features are terrible. A lot of general concepts you might be used to are difficult to implement. My mantra when working with the language is it makes hard things easy and easy things hard. There are also a lot of "gotchas" in the language set, especially with their DAQmx function. I'm not sure what you're planning on developing and their Real-Time module has it's own issues as well, different issues from the main language set.
I would definitely spend some time on NI's website and read as many whitepapers as you can, especially about good design practices, here and here. Learn their State Machine (here or here) and Producer/Consumer pattern well, that's the backbone of many applications you'll be writing.
Good luck, it will make your head spin for a while.
There are some excellent resources to help you get started. If your employer can afford training, you can get started pretty quickly by taking a week of training run by National Instruments. The NI website also has an outstanding developer community that is highly responsive to questions even from novice developers. But I would say that the key to being comfortable with the idioms and style of the language is just plain old practice that you get by solving problems using LabVIEW on a regular basis.
You will find eventually that there is the question of hardware and instruments. Labview is really all about data acquisition-- either through NI's DAQ hardware or through traditional GPIB instruments, or through 3rd party api's (activeX, .NET assemblies). If you're using LabVIEW, you're probably interfacing to hardware of some type. This can get really challenging with complex instruments and measurements. If you're getting started, I would recommend making sure that you have unlimited access to at least some of the hardware you'll be working with. In other words, make sure that your manager understands that you need a lot of access to the hardware in order to get good at developing with it.
We are using LabVIEW to create test software for our factory test systems. In the past years I have already trained some beginners to understand LabVIEW. I would say it depends on how good you are at learning new concepts. I have trained some to be able to produce standalone applications using the queued message handler concept, doing dynamic GUIs and using hardware drivers within about 3 weeks. Unfortunately there were others aswell that were only able to learn half of that within half a year.
The most important thing in my opinion is the learning source. Having an experienced LabVIEW user that can guide you is the best option. If there is no one not available I would recommend Youtube Tutorials combined with the shipped LabVIEW examples.
The LabVIEW core tutorials are not very handy in my opinion. Those are quite boring and far from what you really need to get started.
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I work in a small company (2-4 software developers) where software is "only" a part of the main product (specialized measurement instruments). So far the software has been built from start to end with no formal process at all, but as we're steadily growing in both in number of products and people involved, it's evident that we need to adopt some kind of methodology for the whole thing (designing, building, testing, maintaining) to avoid blowing into a mess
The problem is that none of us has much real-world experience on such processes. Wikipedia's software development methodology and software development process entries list lots of practices, and I'm aware of the modern buzzwords (agile, extreme, etc.), but we're still lost on how and from where to start all this.
What should we do to get started, given that currently we have no formal process, and the goal would be to have a light process that helps us keep things under control without slowing us down? Is there some:
Essential de facto literature that we should read first?
Essential tools? (We do have a SCM, but should we start using something like FogBugz?)
Practical "do this and this" guidelines?
Any guidelines are welcome, as long as they're not 1000+ page books! I want to avoid both the religious hype and the dull academicity that seem to surround this field, and find out what to do in practice.
Highly recommended reading includes : The Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer. Subsequently, you'll probably want to get familiar with Scrum software development, or Test-Driven Development. At the very least you should have:
Source Control repository
Bug tracking system
Standard set of tools
for communication (A wiki tends to be
popular for documentation, these
days),
IDE
Testing framework
A lot of things will depend on the skills of your team and the application domain that you're seeking to go into. Get yourselves familiar with some methodologies, then practice them. Have 15 minute standing meetings at the start of the day. Develop code incrementally with a write a failing test, make it pass, repeat mindset. Etc etc.
I would suggest to try Scrum for start. As lightweight project management framework it should suite your small team needs.
To do that less painful I would also suggest temporary hiring someone familiar with scrum (certified scrum master maybe), after 3-4 months you should be able to keep it running by yourself. Really investing in few months of experienced team member should pay off. And I don't mean analytic, consultant or whatever you call person that comes, analyzes, makes presentation, takes money and goes while you stay with a problem. I mean Team member that will work with you but also introduce scrum to you via daily practice.
You could also just read some books instead, or send one or two team members to a training, but I think that having someone to incorporate Scrum into your daily work and start learning by examples is the best.
Good description detailed description (based on daily work) would be Scrum and XP from the Trenches (alternative source).
Subscribing rigidly to someone else's view of the development process isn't going to work for everyone. Start with the real basics
Get the basics of the development process right - see The Joel Test.
Track everything. Use a system like JIRA, FogBugz or so on to track all issues, features and bugs that are ever reported. Track how long you spend on each task; the information you have the better prepared you'll be.
Triage - Work with stakeholders to make sure what you are doing is actually important, rather than just what you think is important. In my experience, developers and customers often have wildly differing views!
I'm a huge fan of the recent Lean literature by the forerunners of the movement, Mary and Tom Poppendieck:
Lean Toolkit
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash
Leading Lean Software Development
These are very practical books that look at the whole business value chain from a software team's viewpoint, instead of being head-down in software land and ignoring business goals.
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If you have a room full of capable developers, what can be done to encourage those developers to become excited and enthusiastic about software and software development?
No gimmicks, but a genuine move to create an environment where people want to work in software, not just because the company is a good company to work for overall.
In my opinion, the absolute, #1, most essential thing that motivates developers to be enhusiastic about their work is a sense of ownership over their product. All the team-building excercises, reading groups, etc. are good but ultimately ineffective if the developers don't have a sense of ownership.
Here's a quick, off the cuff list of things that are important, in my mind, to ensuring this is the case:
Developers have a real and honest stake in the future design of the system. There will always be requirements that come from outside the development team, but developers should be represented when those requirements are discovered and be able to give real input into the future state of what you're working on.
Developer championed requirements or changes to your solution should be given a voice. A balance needs to be found, certainly, but all too many companies don't have proper mechanisms to allow pure development-focused requests to get through. These could be product enhancements, building up unit tests or simple refactorings, but they are essential to the quality of your product and for giving developers a stake in your project.
Developers should have contact with users. A development staff that's treated like the guys in the basement who churn out code are never going to have a very enthusastic approach to the product or developing their own skills.
Embrace new technologies, even if it's only for a PoC or prototype of what the technologies can do. No developer in the world has ever been excited about churning out boilerplate code, and they never will be.
Let development teams own their process. Development methodolgies decreed from on-high will without fail demotivate the development team, who now need to deal with the added burden of planning meetings and waterfall development. Require that a process exist, but until there's a problem, keep your hands off the specifics.
"Just the way things work" is NEVER an excuse for a broken process. If developers have a legitimate concern with a process they need to follow, they need a honest chance to argue against it. As a manager, one of the worst things you can say is "That's the way the VP / Executive / CEO / God wants it, so we need to follow it". You need to champion your developers concerns, or failing that, allow them direct interaction with the person in question. If you as a manager are viewed as a sockpuppet for the executive, good luck ever motivating a developer again.
Shield your developers from all the politics to the best of your ability. Let them what they do best, develop software. Nothing kills a productive team like having to squabble in inner-office politics.
This well-known conversation says it best:
Peter Gibbons: Bob, I have eight
different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that
means that when I make a mistake, I
have eight different people coming by
to tell me about it. That's my only
real motivation is not to be hassled,
that and the fear of losing my job.
But you know, Bob, that will only make
someone work just hard enough not to
get fired.
Hire the Right People
During the interview process ask questions that let you see their passionate about the craft.
Some examples, Do they:
Read software books or blogs, listen to podcasts?
Play with new languages/libraries at home?
Contribute to open source projects?
Once you have good people stay out of their way. Have the right amount of process, don't force unnecessary standardization, listen to issues, be honest about reasons things are happening.
Read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister.
I've yet to meet a capable developer who is not already excited about making great software. The trick is to stay out of their way and not destroy the natural enthusiasm.
The Joel Test is a good start.
what can be done to encourage those
developers to become excited and
enthusiastic about software and
software development?
Nothing.
A passion for software development comes from within, and cannot be created from zero. Feeding an existing passion is easy- resources, training, and a visible appreciation for that passion from management are all it takes.
The only exception may be to lead by example. If you're excited, others may follow.
UPDATE: As has been said in other answers, it's much better to hire well up front. I'd pass over ten good programmers who just want a paycheck for one good programmer who codes in his/her spare time for fun.
ANOTHER UPDATE: This answer has been jumping around with up/downvotes, so let me clarify. The OP's wording specifically asks how to make an existing team excited "about software development". It is my contention that if they are not already interested in their chosen professions, there is not much an employer can do to engender an interest. A disinterested, unmotivated team will make a mess of the most fascinating project. By contrast, a motivated team of professionals that like their jobs can make the best darned calculator program out there, and enjoy every minute of it.
Having an interesting, challenging and profitable problem to solve, where all developers have a stake in the results. If not, you have a room full of developers sticking around as long as the pay checks clear.
I have to agree a little bit with the comment made by Pascal, but I'm not going to start off that way.
Overall, it has been proven that one of the best ways to give developers an environment that allows them to like their work is to give them freedom. However, your looking at a different route here, you are trying to find "passionate" developers.
To be 100% honest there is not a direct connection to "capable" and "passionate". There are hundreds of developers out there that are capable of being programmers, and mighty good ones at that. But many of them do not have any desire to become passionate developers.
To create a team of passionate developers, you really have to start with the recruitment process and HIRE passionate developers, not try to "create" them.
For me, the things that keep me motivated are:
A problem/task that I find challenging, that I can learn from
A plan to implement the solution in a way I think is reasonable. Nothing is more de-motivating for me than a management team that forces technologies I don't believe in down my throat.
Other folks to discuss the possible solutions with, be they on the same team or not.
A management team that appreciates the hard work I'm putting in.
Just to be precise, is the question "I have a team of developers, and I want to make those specific developers enthusiastic about software development", or simply "I want a team of enthusiastic software developers"? In the latter case, simply don't hire people who aren't enthusiastic.
In the former case, you're pretty much screwed. It's hard to change someone's personality so much that they start to care about something they didn't really take an interest in before. Of course it can be done, but let's face it. How many here have been unable to convince their better half that programming is interesting? For that matter, how many people have failed to adopt their girlfriend's enthusiasm for shopping, or shoes? ;)
Convincing people to share your interest and enthusiasm for something is hard work.
Unless you're willing to set aside a few years of your life for getting into the head of each individual developer, getting to know them and what makes them tick, and gradually push and prod them towards taking an interest in something that they previously simply considered a job, you're probably better off letting them go and hiring people who are motivated to begin with.
Give them interesting problems.
Give them the means to solve those problems.
Minimize the amount of crap they have to deal with that isn't directly related to solving those problems.
Reward them for successfully solving those problems. Don't underestimate the value of a sincere pat on the back from the guy who signs your paychecks.
Give them a stake in the larger venture -- beyond the next paycheck.
And when they suggest a new problem they think is worth solving, listen.
I think the biggest thing is the company has to value what the developers can do for the company. If the company is run by cheapskates who just see your developers as an expense they can't wait to be rid of then you are doomed. The developers' team needs to be viewed by management as a strategic asset that makes them money now and will make them more money in the future.
Also good communication in the company is vital. The developers have to be able to find out what it is the company needs them to do. Autocratic top-down bureaucracy and mushroom management can wreck morale and make it impossible for developers to add value, regardless of what level of enthusiasm they brought to the job. The software your team builds will be only as good as the communication in the company--I think that is what Conway's Law is about.
So that is a big challenge, in many cases an impossible one, because senior management will have their own ideas about priorities and communication and good luck influencing them. But the alternative is guerrilla development, where you're fighting an endless battle against your own company.
money, money, money... and don't say that money doesn't matter if the project is exciting or boring routine.
You don't.
You either have people in the team that love learning and always want to push themselves to be better, or you don't have those people in your team. Of course reality is, you'd have a mixed bag.
Just employ people who are enthusiastic (it's easy to tell), and don't employ the ones who see programming/developing software as 'just' a job.
It's impossible IMO to turn complete non-enthusiasts into passionate programmers. There is no silver bullet.
In Weinbergesqe fashion:
You've asked the wrong question. The right question is "What are the things that managers do that dispirit developers and reduce moral?" Then don't tolerate those things in your environment.
And oh by the way, you should already know the answer to that question. If you don't find another job.
Hookers and blow?
How about giving them a financial stake in the outcome of their software project(s)? For example, corporate profit sharing.
That being said, passionate developers are the kind of people who go home and write software in their spare time.
Going to a software development conference with good, inspirational speakers can make a huge difference.
Read "Dynamics of Software Development" by Jim McCarthy. Seriously, nearly the entire book deals with this and related issues.
Although I agree that it is not easy (or even possible) to create passion about programming, I think it is possible to keep passionate developers enthusiastic about their work. Even the most passionate programmer developer can become disillusioned if placed in a stagnant work environment.
So what can be done?
Provide plenty of opportunity for personal development, give lots of freedom to learn new things. Let the developers have some choice in the courses they take, and the conferences they wish to attend.
Toys - Not in the traditional sense, but being able to use the latest technologies
Provide a nice place to work. It doesn't have to be Google, but it does have to be somewhere you would want to spend time.
Of course money helps. Not in the sense that a company can pay for enthusiastic staff, but people need to feel suitable rewarded for their efforts.
I have found working in an organisation that has embraced agile development has many of the correct qualities for building enthusiastic teams.
If they're fundamentally unenthusiastic about software development, there's nothing you can do.
If they're enthusiastic, that's great, and you need to avoid squelching that. There are some excellent recommendations elsewhere in these answers.
If they used to be enthusiastic, and have had that beaten out of them, you are likely to get good results by giving them reasonable challenges, shielding them from bad management, and in general treating them like valuable and respected people.
If you have a room full of capable developers, what can be done to encourage those developers to become excited and enthusiastic about software and software development
The correct question is actually "What can be done to encourage those developers to become excited and enthusiastic about software and software development in our company".
It's quite simple actually. The answer has never been a secret. It's just nobody listens to it.
Very simply elements:
Let those enthusiastic developers work among other passionate people. Remove those who don't care from the team. Otherwise they will act like diseased cells proliferating apathy and depression to the other team members.
Aspire to develop a quality and professional product
Establish a professional and effective process
Trust and respect people. Value their knowledge. Respect their opinions. Actually, it's part of a bigger strategy: let your developers be able to make a difference and let them see they can really influence and change things.
Let them grow professionally and let them see this growth is appreciated and needed by you
Now what doesn't help at all.
Pay them badly. Developers are also humans (for the most part) and they also have their bills to pay.
Reject their initiatives, proposals and improvement suggestions. Tell them each time they come up with something that their attempt to introduce change make them a foreign und unwelcome element in the company.
Have low quality product and have no interest to make it better. Hacks, copy/paste code, accumulating technical debts, things falling apart after each release, that does not motivate developers.
Have badly run development and chaotic process. Tasks, projects and small decisions taking a new vector every few days will finally remove desire to be involved from anybody. Failing schedules because of unpredicted work load and feature set, they all go down the road. It will suffice to run out of coffee some day for some of them to start moving elsewhere.
Have a boring and uninteresting social environment. Developers having nobody to talk to to share their interests will finally feel dull. Not everyone is interested in taxes, football and kindergarten issues as the only topics on social gatherings.
I am inclinced to say nothing like others have, and i must agree that a real passion for it is not something you can create, it either exists or it does not however there are things you can do.
Scoring high on Joel's test is a great start,
Fire all the PHBs and hire smart managers who maximise the chances that the software will actually be finished and work right.
A management team that knows computers and can hold their own in a technical conversation is a very helpful feature. Don't try to sell passionate developers on hype, tends and buzzwords.
Set clear and stable goals and communicate the goals accurately to the team or people. And then just get out the way to let developers get that done. Do not go far away from developers though, you need to tackle those issues like out of free food, purchase of fancy office equipments and other trivial things that developers do not care to do yet useful to improve productivity and add perks to developer team.
Dan Pink notes 3 things that motivate people if there is creativity required in a job. RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us is a 10 minute video about these but here are the 3 things:
Autonomy - Give the team control over the schedule and empower them to own their work.
Mastery - How well are they developing their craft of building excellent software.
Purpose - Why are they making this software? What massive benefit will it have?
A few other sources on this stuff:
Top Three Motivators For Developers (Hint: not money!)
Autonomy, mastery, purpose
Empowered Teams Are Dead – Long Live Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
Why Open Is Better Than Proprietary?
Money vs Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose
Creating an Organization that Values Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
The 3 Things That Motivate Us
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I am looking for an easily digestible book to present to my boss/team.
Background info: More and more of our meetings at work involve my boss/team pondering how to implement more "best practices" around here. ("Here" = a very small application development shop. 4 developers)
The following things are items that my whole team agrees that we need:
Nightly builds
Decomposing "bugs" in our bug-tracker into smaller, more-specific items
Automated testing
The problem we face is how to get started.
I believe that if my shop could simply choose a clear and specific plan or set of rules, then everything else would fall into place. Right now we are stuck in discussions of fuzzy, feel-good ideas and nice-sounding buzzwords.
Please recommend to me your favorite book (or online resource) that contains clear, discrete, sequential steps for implementing a management scheme for guiding a TDD or Agile team/shop.
I realize that there are other paradigms besides TDD and Agile that would also address these concerns, but my own self-interests and biases point toward TDD and Agile so I would love to harness my team's desire for change and "nudge" it in that direction. Or feel free to slap me down if you vehemently disagree with my sentiments! I will take no offense. :)
As others have stated, I think these questions are answered best when respondents list only one book recommendation per answer.
Thank you all.
To throw another Pragmatic Programmers title in the mix: Ship It!
Great book - take a look, might suit your needs with management.
For your needs I recommend Test Driven Development: By Example (Kent Beck). It is clearly-written, more practical than theoretical, and prescribes time-tested recipes to adopt an agile, test-driven approach.
I suggest that you start with what you agree on: Nightly Builds and Automated tests. Nightly builds is a no-brainer. For Automated tests I would start with:
Each commit with new functionality should have at least one automated test
Each commit that fixes a bug should have at least one automated test that fails without the fix and succeeds with the fix
If you do this, you will start to gain experience. With this experience it will be much easier to understand all the good advice that the literature has.
There is a lot of good books on good practises, but you have to figure out what works for your team.
Agile methods are not really methods...
There are more a spirit. The main is a focus on :
communication
reactivity to changes
customers orientation
This can be achieved in lot of ways, and it's more important to find your way to do it. If you want an example of what this spirit can be, you can read the free 37signals' online book, Getting Real.
But there are some steps you can start with
They are no big rules you must enforce, but you can try the following and see how it goes with you team :
Quick stands up meetings. 5-15 minutes daily meeting where everybody stays up on his feet and explain what he has accomplished, what need to be done and what can prevent him from doing it. Keep it under 15 minutes, with the minimum number of people.
Set simple goals for short term deadlines instead of big goals in weeks.
Build small team (3 persons) and divide the work between them. Put them in the same room and ensure they have at least half a day to work without ANY interruption.
Set many little regular review with your customer. Don't write specs. Sketch, design, prototype, show to the customer, fix/adapt/change then build. Then do it again.
Testing, versioning, bug tracking are tools, not methods. No one cares how you do it and with what software are long as you do it. They are not the issue.
It's not really a step-by-step book, but full of great advices and easy to digest: Practices of an Agile Developer. And if you want to have in house TDD training, I recommend netobjectives. I had their TDD course ones and it really opened my eyes.
Sadly, even the most clear and specific plan can turn out to be disputable.
I'll tell you what works. Starting TDD immediately. It has boundaries. It's relatively easy. You'll still have a million questions.
You are free to say, "But what about nightly builds?" "What about using the bug tracker?"
A lot of pondering can mean one of two things.
First, it can mean that someone is muddying the waters with "concerns" and "questions". Sometimes this is really displeasure at changing, voiced as "concerns". Sometimes this is really crushed egos ("I thought I was pretty sharp, now someone is saying I must have improvements imposed on me.")
Second, it can mean that this is dauntingly large. Consequently, don't look at this as "Many New Best Practices". Look at this as just a few incremental improvements. You're not changing yourselves fundamentally (well, that could happen, but don't start out with that as your plan.)
My experience is that you can only do one new thing at a time. Do TDD until it's boring. Then do something else. Often nightly builds become obvious after you have a robust test suite. Then when that's boring, do some other small, incremental process improvement.
One thing at a time. Baby steps. Avoid throwing out babies with bath-water. All you want is to be a little better next month than you are this month.
If there are concerns on adopting one small incremental improvement, find the root cause. Who's ego is bruised? Who's worried about change?
You can print him Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg, It's more focusing on agile development process that on TDD, but it's an easy and quick read.
Check out books by Marty Cagan.
my favorite is Planning Extreme Programming
EDIT: it provides a complete replacement for traditional project management geared towards an XP/Agile team
the danger is, adopting modern development methods and then strangling them with archaic project-management and administration practices!