This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (or at your option any greater version of it).
Copyright © 2008 Shlomi Fish
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (or at your option any greater version of it).
Revision History | ||
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Revision 1841 | 2008-04-30 | shlomif |
Forked the template from a previous work and working on it. | ||
Revision 5762 | 2008-07-02 | shlomif |
The first revision as publicised on Reddit.com, by pkrumins. | ||
Revision 2319 (svn) | 2009-02-27 | shlomif |
Added missing id=""'s to footnotes, so they won't be randomly generated. |
I originally wrote "The End of Info-Tech Slavery" about a year ago, shortly after I was fired from a job I liked and for which I worked about three months. Some people who commented on the article found it of good value. However many people who commented on it have voiced some criticism.
One of the comments I received said that I kept giving bad examples for conditions I disliked from previous workplaces, instead of positive elements I would have liked to see. Another commentator told me in private, that he felt that the "End of IT Slavery" and other essays of mine reflected the fact that I had a "primadonna attitude" instead of a more positive "team-player" attitude.
I can see why people would think so after reading the "End of IT Slavery". However, my intention in the article was to guide employers (and employees) as to how to best treat their employees, and give them good conditions, so they'll be happier and more productive. Going over the original article, I can see that I indeed had a very ranting tone, and gave bad examples for what not to do exclusively.
So this time, I'm going to try again and hopefully be more successful. This article aims to cover the elements that great programmers would love to see in a perfect workplace. By implementing as many of them as possible, or at least giving them a serious thought, you can make such potential employees want to work for you, love to work for you, want to stay, and be happy as long as they are working for you. Furthermore, you will know better than to irrationally fire perfectly good employees.
I'm not trying to be original in this article, because an essayist (or any kind of artist) does not get credit for coming up with perfectly original concepts or ideas (as I note later in a different context). What I'm trying to do is summarise everything I've learned, judged and concluded, so far, based on the many sources I've read. I may be just a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giant, but hopefully I'll still be able to see farther than most.
There is a lot of material on good software management out there, and not everybody took the time to read all the important one. This material can sometimes be contradictory, and sometimes false. Nevertheless, I decided to integrate it here into what I've perceived and concluded to be the best choices.
This is a non-exhaustive list of major sources of influence.
Eric S. Raymond's Homepage and especially his the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" series and his "How to become a Hacker" document.
The wonderful "Joel on Software" site by Joel Spolsky.
Paul Graham's essays - tend to be interesting, but often suffering from some problems.
"Extreme Programming" - seems a bit too rigorous, but still has many good ideas.
Damian Conway's excellent book Perl Best Practices