Certain Extent

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As a developer, your basic job is to create things. Since the world needs software in every industry you might think that one is the same as the next, and you’d be shamefully wrong. Outside of the obvious questions you should ask yourself when looking for your next gig - how sharp are the coworkers, how good is the tech, how hard are the problems, how good are the tools - you should also ask: “Who are we working for?”

It turns out that who you produce for can more directly impact how much you like your job than you might think.

Internal vs. External client

Internal clients don’t matter as much as external ones. Yeah I said it, wanna fight about it? Working for a bank on their internal accounting software is not the same as working on banking software that is sold to banks. Period, close bracket, EOF. The reason for this is that one is a profit center with real financial pressure, and the other is a cost center, with pressure to simply exist cheaply. A profit center has direct competitors that you sometimes have to react to, but a cost center rarely implements new product due to hearing that an internal customer at another company is happy.

The internal vs. external switch plays itself out in multiple subtle ways*:

Rate of Change
A profit center tries multiple things, watches competitors to match features, explores new lines of business, etc. A cost center does not take much risk, and thus is more setup for small improvement or the support of company growth.

Rate of spending
Another way this plays out is in lack of budget flexibility - since a cost center is under pressure to lower costs their budgets are smaller and less innovative. The type of managers that run these organizations are the special type of demon that is good at finding ways to save money - like on hardware or crappy coffee.

Rate of Respect
In a profit center the business leaders interact with the technical leaders and producers enough that they begin to understand their importance. Over time a mutual respect grows and is a healthy team behavior. In a cost center at times the cost center is in a servant position and the IT functions are not held in the same level of respect.

Producer vs. Maintainer

There is another subtle difference in “software developers” at times that can play out in affecting you position. Some people build tools and processes and some people build deliverable product. In the software realm the tools can include continuous integration modules, deployment tools, operational helper tools, code generators, etc. Product includes things that directly sell outside your organization. If you are a developer working on the toolset *primarily* you are secondary to those working on the end product - you are in effect serving an internal customer.

Deadline driven vs Shame-driven

When we interview someone we always ask how the end game of projects work - “Do you work off of deadlines?”, “Who sets these deadlines?”. Many internal customers have false deadlines because there is no competition - are they going to go use another internal accounting department? The same fire does not always exist in those working in internally-facing companies. Just because your coworkers are smart this doesn’t mean they have any hustle.

Industry and Economy

The industry that you are building solutions for can matter because the level of tolerated innovation differs across industries and product categories. My first full-time programming job was working on an audio-dispatching call center product that was sold to air traffic controllers and 911 call centers. The sales cycle for this product was very different than other industries - if a client saw a demo and a single thing went wrong they would typically say: “We will reevaluate changing our product in 5 years, get back to us then”. This is obviously different than the change cycle for a web-based project management tool that might receive changes every two weeks.

Customer distance

How “close” you are to the customer matters as well whether that customer is internal or external. While only some developers are interested in directly speaking to customers, the dev team’s distance to the customer can affect whether or not what they are building matters. As a producer you should care very deeply about whether you are building the right thing.

* Internal clients means full-time - if you are working on a project for an internal client the effects are more minor.  Most of what is mentioned above is when you wake up everyday to a world of internal client demands only.

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In software development there are three levels of complexity that are in play.

Primary complexity in software is taking a complex business problem within its native domain and designing a technical solution. Examples of primary complexity issues are designing a strategy-based plugin architecture for mortgage calculations, designing a star schema to later use for predictive analysis of snack cart Skittle consumption on college campuses (spoiler alert: finals week and wild berry are a solid marriage).

Secondary complexity in software include items that the folks in the domain don’t understand but the technical folks need to do their work quickly. The QA team, the fact that you need to upgrade Visual Studio every two years in a Microsoft shop, your check-in policy and coding standards - these are typical examples of secondary complexity.

Tertiary complexity are items that the domain folks and the technical folks don’t fully understand. The fact that Steve and Ralph freaking hate each other, the morale impact of low raises on a team, the fact that communication can kill a team over a certain size, poor meeting practice, etc. are all examples of tertiary complexity. This type of complexity is colloquially referred to as “bullshit” (in some provinces “horseshit” or more rarely “dogshit”)

Consequences
The levels affect each other predictably. If the problems of one level are not solved, they affect levels above them. If half of your team are French and the other half hate French people, that’s a tertiary complexity problem that will lead to awkward code reviews, poor rework throughput and affect your ability to ship software that solves domain problems. If your QA and UAT databases “timeout” more than a cranky 2 year old, you can’t ship software.

Talent Effect
By “effect” I don’t mean slow down only. If you have too many secondary and tertiary problems, the people that work in the primary domain will grow frustrated. In software development these are creators - developers and those that feed them information (BAs, User Interface folks, reedit). This is a dangerous situation. If you hire a talented pizza chef but all the pizza shows up two hours late (or not at all) you have secondary problems (failed delivery channel - broken down Civic) or tertiary problems (your delivery guy likes pot more than tips) eventually the chef will feel that their work doesn’t matter and leave.

Management
If you make the move from developer to manager, you are effectively saying that your team will handle the primary work while you work on secondary work (processes) with their input, but try as much as possible to shield the tertiary problems (bullshit) from them. Where this gets more complex is when tertiary complexity is high in an organization. The most striking example of tertiary complexity in some organizations are middle managers jockeying for promotion position - this activity does not improve processes or help with production, but creates a situation in which these things are harder.

The balance of tertiary vs. secondary complexity is indicative of where a company is and whether it can heal its key problems. If the tertiary complexity is low, then there is enough management capacity to solve secondary issues and allow producers to create great things.

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As DBAs, software developers, Homo Sapiens, and lovers we have to solve problems.  There is a common misconception that support is for the more junior folks on a team and thus being good at it is a sign of “being a little baby”.  While support is a great way to learn a software ecosystem and organization and thus “grow” a junior person into a senior one a lot of problem-solving falls to the rock star programmers or wizard DBAs in most organizations.

Yet some of these people aren’t any good at it.  In fact, they are awful.  I’ve seen people that are very good at doing very hard technical things - creating something from nothing, thinking of all the things that could go wrong, refactoring and integrating a large subsystem, etc. - fail at simply fixing a problem with an existing system. You can take your rock star and send them off to fix a support issue and they will return with a confused look, eight hours of wasted effort, and an STD.  Working with some truly gifted problem solvers I’ve witnessed some differences in Attitude, Practices, and Skills that separate the junior and senior problem solvers.  Let’s start with Attitude.

First, there IS a problem

Never deny that there is a problem.  If someone is at your desk, on the phone, flooding your email with red exclamation points, or outside your house knocking on the window there is clearly a problem.  The problem might be that they don’t understand something and the problem might not be your fault, but the issue should be treated with respect as a real problem if they took the time to contact you.  Don’t deny it or argue.  Why would you deny it anyway, because you see support as negative.

Don’t see support as a negative shameful thing or a junior task

As long as things keep changing, there will always be problems.  (This next part is hard to put down in writing) If you aren’t writing bugs you aren’t writing software.  If you aren’t changing systems you aren’t working.  A support issue is not an insult, a bug is not a breakup.  Yes, you should make sure that you don’t write infinite loops, and yes you should make sure that you test the latest SQL Server upgrade before you install it in production at 10 am on the last day of the month.  But in most organizations there is a constant to and fro of creating new things and then fixing issues that crop up with them, so don’t pretend as if a problem is an anomaly.  True root cause and issue prevention are topics for another post, but don’t act surprised that software systems don’t always work as expected.

Confidence

In my home office I have a fortune cookie taped to one of my monitors that says: “You have the ability to analyze and solve any problem”, and over time I have started to believe it (by looking at it 27 times a minute).  The fact is that most people that are good at support are good because they believe that given enough time they could fix any issue.  ANY issue.  Given 20 years and enough coffee they could learn C/C++, reverse engineer SQL Server, learn about cross-platform multi-threading, and fix that bug.

The ability to not freak out and lose it

Something is broken but don’t be scared (its just moving electrons for the highest bidder).  The fact that someone is at your desk and not someone else’s is a good thing, don’t panic and freak out and yell things that you’ll regret later (Aside: yelling is always regretted - only thing I’ve not regretted yelling “OMG ITS MILEY”). Don’t blame people or come off as condescending; assume that they are your desk because they know you can fix it, not because they think you caused it.  Figuring out root cause and a long-term solution are separate things; as are fixing and blaming.  You are in charge of fixing for now, so just focus on that.  Besides, over time a calm person is going to be relied upon more while those who freakout will only end up on reality shows. (They don’t make reality TV shows about guys sitting at keyboards fixing complex technical issues - YET)

Next post - Practices that improve your ability to fix complex technical issues.

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