It is far too common that companies are not investing enough in their coders, and I don’t mean strictly monetary compensation. Developers need to learn and network with other developers about new projects, technologies and methodologies in order to stay fresh and current. Developers need to know that they’re not alone in their concerns, and that there is a larger network out there that has either been through what they’ve been through, or has a suggested road map to completion. I believe there is a strong need to utilize conferences, community involvement, and/or inter-company learning sessions to effectively invest in your developers.
Equipment, equipment, equipment! It is beyond me why some companies do not put a higher emphasis on high-performing, current equipment for their developers. Economic reasons aside, laptops should be replaced every two years, I believe, in order to keep up to pace with the newest developer environments, especially when your developer environment is virtualized via VMWare, or Microsoft’s Virtual PC (or even Parallels if developing Windows software on a Mac). When visiting a local software shop recently, I noticed more than a handful of Dell laptops that were 4 to 5 years old, and the developers were constantly groaning at how long it would take to build. Regular equipment replacement should be considered a given when your company relies on your developers to turn a profit.
Conferences are an easy fix to a lack of developer investment in a company. Let the devs pick a yearly conference to go, and listen to the conversations that begin to happen when they return. Conferences like CodeMash, DevLink, TechEd or the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference are some great ones, to name a few.
Another way to invest in your developers is to encourage community involvement. Attending user groups, or volunteering to speak at a conference like KalamazooX or the West Michigan’s .Net University can go a long way in not only improving your developers’ public speaking skills, but it’s also a way to let the community know about your company’s human assets.
One of the development teams I came across on my travels met weekly in a conference room, and discussed a chapter from “Code Complete 2nd Edition” that they had read the week before. An educated and collaborative discussion of what each developer understood and took from the chapter went a long way in getting every dev on the same proverbial page (gah, pun!). I thought this was an excellent practice to have, and that was almost five years ago now. I imagine you could even save the expense of buying a book for each developer, and instantiate a weekly web-article review, or find a few problems on StackOverflow.com, or ProjectEuler.com for the team to solve collaboratively.
Investing in your developers can go a long way in helping the team dynamic by getting them to work more closely together as they find each others’ strengths and weaknesses, and not see them as barriers but opportunities for learning.
