Welcome to the Lounge

Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary of England during World War I, wrote in his memoirs that "Happiness consists of having all that one wants and none of what one does not want." This applies to one's work environment as well as anywhere else. Accordingly, the key to happiness at work has three components:

1. Work at something you enjoy for its own sake;
   
2. Establish adequately comfortable conditions in which to do it;
   
3. Contrive to screen out irrelevancies, distractions, and intrusions.
   

In a corporate-employment setting, items 2 and 3 can be a challenge. Item 2 can sometimes be partially covered out of one's own pocket, but there are limits; few of us are willing (or able) to purchase our own cubicle furniture or computers. Item 3 is the toughest of the nuts by far.

Most dissatisfaction among software people arises from managerial and supervisory sources. It's not just schedule and deadline pressure, either. Managers and supervisors sometimes seem incapable of letting an engineer do his work without sticking all their appendages into it. They're "above" the lowly practitioner, they "think," and therefore have a right and a duty to perform frequent layings-on of their sacred hands to "ensure quality." That can drive just about anyone to despair, drink, or on occasion, violence.

I've come to regard the front-line supervisor -- i.e., he who directly supervises working engineers, and might well still be technically hands-on himself -- as the optimal spot for the solution to this problem. If he can be persuaded to fulfill three functions:

• Give his people clear and specific tasks to perform;
  
• Stay away from them as much as possible while they're working;
  
• Rigidly exclude all "higher-level" management from their work environment, except for "ceremonial" occasions scheduled well in advance;
  

...his engineers' working conditions can be brought as near to optimal as capital budgets permit.

Finding such a supervisor is not easy. He must be smart, humane, results-oriented, and very tough. For his engineers to retrain one who possesses the "raw material" but is not yet enlightened can be just as hard. But the alternatives are all unsatisfactory.

I try to be such a supervisor. It often demands more humility than I naturally possess. That highly unappreciated and increasingly rare virtue might well be the critical factor -- and can anyone sincerely say he's sufficiently humble?

Don't all answer -- or laugh -- at once, now.

Fran Porretto wrote:

Contrive to screen out irrelevancies, distractions, and intrusions.

ahmed zahmed wrote:

Otherwise how'd the photog get the brightness?