The Human Element

It’s been nearly two years since I became an official “manager” of software engineers. While it comes with its share of challenges, I find it more fun than I’d initially expected (it doesn’t hurt that I still have time to write code).

Software development has a reputation for being the domain of anti-social nerds who work in isolation on esoteric technologies with scientific precision. But the truth is that human beings write software, and development is just as much an art as it is a science. Each engineer brings his or her own unique skills, personality, and craftsmanship to a product, and the result bears that image.

The best software projects are those that recognize this and use it to its full advantage instead of fighting against it with process and policies that seek to stamp out individuality at the altar of predictability. It’s a self-defeating approach, at least until the time when AI can write good code (and if that happens, we’re all doomed anyways).

Only tangentially related, but this is the best article on software development ever written. Until tomorrow?