What can I say?  I love BitchWhoCodes (Stacy Mulcahy)… I anticipate any developer who has lived through some of the scenarios she was mentioning and who saw her presentation at FlashForward would say the same thing.  She came off like some sort of super-hero, sent to rescue developers from the bowels of project purgatory.

What she did was step back and look, from the perspective of a developer, at the overall development process typically found at a misguided agency or company.  The sad truth is that most companies do not think about how to actually make their employees happy.  Companies will bend over backwards to get a “rock star” developer, but then often times expect he or she to be able to pull some sort of coding rabbit out of the magic hat of late-night, over-caffeinated death marches.

Even companies founded by technically astute, so-called “rock star” developers often forget (walk away from?) the magic that gave them the opportunity to be in the position of influence in which they find themselves; the challenge that made them what they are (were?).

My favorite quote of hers was, “Adding more developers to a project doesn’t solve the problem [of poor planning].  Can 9 women give birth to a baby in a month?” haha

Following is a brief list of my favorite words of wisdom from Stacey:

• “Meaningful innovation is a competitive edge”
• “Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”
• “Constant chaos is not an effective motivator”
• “Schedules have more important purposes than perfection or accuracy”
• “What would MacGyver do?”
• “Just because I know how to do it, doesn’t mean I should be doing it”
• “Deadlines: always closer than they appear”
• “Developers deadlines get shafted when anyone else blows theirs”
• “Anyone is typically a designer”
• “Iterative graphic design can lead to duct tape development”

She was even nice enough to comfort project managers and reassure them that they are in fact very important… what a gal.  But she did emphasize the fact that they need to respect the personal lives of the developers they are coordinating.

Preach on sister, preach on!

Caleb Adam Haye
Fire, Inc.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 5:23 am and is filed under Flashforward News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.