Resist for promotion, until you can accept it

Ecris le 12 juin 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

Dave Hoover is currently doing a wonderful job of formalizing apprenticeship patterns for software programmers. He recently described two very interesting patterns: For love, not money, and Resist the promotion. In this last pattern, Dave states the following:

Craftsmen must not be fooled into believing that you can be a “technical manager”, since every day that you are not programming is another step down the wrong path.

This reminds me some thoughts I had during the last XP France session. The main issue was about the difference between master and apprentice, or more generally between more advanced programmers, and the one who is not.

The advanced programmers knows that things that might seem boring are not, and are indeed very important: writing automatic build script, cleaning the code and the comments, naming carefully variables, classes and methods. All those things are like “Sweeping the floor”, and they are the starting point for apprentices. But the master keep doing them to show how those things are important and are mandatory. By doing them himself, it give to them the “master” dimension.

The judo master (actually, I don’t know his Japanese name) knows also that he must provide the Dojo, and provides also some public to motivate the judoka to perform their art. This is a kind of a context enabling the art to happen and progress.I think there are similar things in programming. The master knows that some tasks must be done to enable the programming task: finding sponsorship, giving feedback to sponsors, managing actors who are not part of the team, etc. All those things which are sometime called “management” or maybe “politics”. You could prefer to have a specialized manager doing that full time, but how could he still really understand the needs of the programmers?

For sure, those tasks are not programming, but maybe, a master has the ability to keep an eye on all of them, at the same time, and drive them into the right direction to enable the programming task to happen in the best possible context.

You must resist for promotion if accepting it will put you away totally of programming, but maybe, you could be at a sufficient level to keep doing it, while addressing more managerial tasks.

Hence, resist for promotion, until you can accept it