(Why You’d Better) Ask Your Developer
Picture Vince Gilligan, the showrunner of Breaking Bad, and his team of writers huddled up at the beginning of a season. Vince pulls out a thick notebook in a binder and distributes copies to those around the writers’ table.
“These are the locked-down specs for Season 4! There’s the set-up, the crisis, and the final resolution — broken down to scenes. They have all the twists packed in there. Now, bring it alive!”
And the writers look at each other wondering if they had walked into the wrong room.
Television writers are premium creative class and writing is perhaps the poster pursuit for creative problem solving. Imagine then if that pursuit itself were a luxury. Writers, just like painters or musicians or puzzle makers, are problem solvers. Why should one imagine them without the crucial privilege of problem solving itself?
Because that scenario itself is not implausible. In his book Ask Your Developer, Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, points out that more businesses than you would think tend to treat their software developers like digital assembly line workers. He argues that developers are creative problem solvers and investing in them offers businesses the best chance to stay differentiated in the market.
Leverage
Before we get to why it is pertinent for a business to nurture an #AskYourDeveloper mindset, allow me a segue into leverage. Leverage is why we do things. If the output was the same as the input, Archimedes’ quote would not have made the cut here. Leverage is the multiplication that leads to outsized returns. Naval Ravikant lays out an interesting framework for leverage. He defines three classes of leverage, of which the first two are labor and capital. Both require permission — permission from people willing to work for you or from someone willing to invest in your ideas.
Permissionless is where the magic happens. What nullifies the need for permission is marginal cost of replication. Sow once, reap forever. Technology is continually expanding the set of commodities that can be made just once and lived off for good. In doing so, it is putting the role of gatekeepers to test by questioning the value of their permission. Do we need a record label to put out an album? Do we need a production house to make a movie? You can make a movie in your backyard that people find interesting. And you only need to do it once. Then you go to sleep while what you’ve made earns for you.
Companies today don’t need to sell software to be in software. Every business needs technology to grow, every industry is in the software industry. No wonder then that the professionals that can build software have the widest span. If digital infrastructure has been democratized to an extent where the Internet today will allow anyone to write a few lines of code, build software that solves a problem for an audience, distribute it on Google and Facebook, and make a living off their creation, what is stopping problem solvers from creating their own wealth? Businesses need developers, not the other way round. That makes developers the modern levers, and the better you utilize them the more your leverage. This is the keystone idea in the #AskYourDeveloper edifice.
What’s eating developer hiring?
When it comes to what developers want, one of the more common themes I have seen emerge is that of compensation. If you are a recruiter looking at tech talent in India, you are likely to hear and engage in a lot of talk around compensation. Better remuneration simply reduces dissatisfaction. It is not a source of fulfilment. The fact that a high proportion of hiring conversations (this is especially true for junior developers) devolve to pay-package negotiations means recruiters and candidates are only talking table stakes. Maslow’s pyramid has been reduced to a quadrilateral, with only basic needs covered.
Remember the earlier analogy about software engineers and digital assembly line workers? If we follow the construct through and ask ourselves What would we look for in a creative problem solver? and then How do we (most commonly) pick developers?, the answers are apples and green apples oranges. More hiring managers probably identify with ‘whiteboard interviews’ than the ones that don’t. It is only consistent that if you want someone who will help you solve real-world problems in a way that is economical, quick, and simple, you should throw at them some real-world problems. Technical puzzles, riddles, and brainteasers are more homework, less real-world problems that developers have to solve day to day. Which leads me to this observation about tech hiring: The ability to write code is overrated; the ability to think is incidental.
A common peeve among recruiters is that candidates are interested in little more than their cost to company. They point to negotiate-and-switch tactics among engineers as evidence. But this could be a chicken-and-egg situation. Recruiters may have converged on a narrative of compensation because that is what they are (by now) most familiar with, and developers find it natural to respond to that. Someone has defined the problem as one of compensation and everyone else seems to have accepted this definition. There are far fewer developers available than businesses need today. No wonder then that developers call the shots in deciding how much they are worth, even though the notion of their worth is somewhat narrowly defined.
Software supply chain and the API economy
Businesses today have niche needs and the software powering them reflects that specificity. Software has evolved from a one-size-fits-all monolithic kind to a super niche atomized kind. This has given rise to the software supply chain where component software providers focus on narrow specializations. Much like, as Jeff Lawson analogizes, there are ancillary companies that specialize in making steering wheels and tyres, there are software companies that deliver microservices via APIs as building blocks for applications. One could build a web application where Stripe powers payments; Intercom, communications; and Amazon Web Services, the data center. We will see more companies stand on the shoulders of others who have solved the same problems before them, rather than bother to do it all by themselves.
Peter Drucker said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” The emergence of the API economy, marked by success of companies like Twilio and Postman, are signposts to this Drucker thought. As businesses become disincentivized to build software of the garden variety, they will look to invest in building to differentiate. Every business will both buy and build software. And it is developers whom executives will turn to.
#AskYourDeveloper
In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink advocates autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the three pillars of motivation. Seen from the perspective of developers, this is about being entrusted with the freedom to take decisions independently (autonomy), being given the opportunity to learn and hone skills (mastery), and being assured that their contributions will be meaningful (purpose). A professional environment where these attributes are in abundance is a lightning rod for creative talent. Yet, these are elusive intangibles. It is easier for cheaper proxies to take their place: perks for autonomy, hackathons for mastery, or designation for purpose. And these suck up a lot of the oxygen at workplaces.
Running a successful business is like show-running Breaking Bad without an end date. A great idea is a good start. But to keep it going you will need to make your creative problem solvers matter more than ever.
Thanks to Atul Sinha and Pratik Bothra for reading drafts and sharing thoughts.
