What in the hell is engineering joy? Good question, I may not be 100 percent sure myself. Recently whilst having coffee with a good friend we got talking about work struggles. We started off with the usual, companies not realizing how to budget, and folks being put under pressure to deliver stuff customers don’t even want or need. So, we went down our usual rabbit holes of, bah nobody understands agile, nobody seems to get how software is delivered, etc.
It was then he stopped me and said what companies are lacking is Joy. Thinking back to the best places we both worked, that’s exactly what we had…Joy. We ENJOYED not just the work but the atmosphere, the fun, in Ireland we would say “the craic”. I know this might sound ridiculous, but it was in those environments where we learned the most, made the most friends, and even delivered the best work.
Why?
I think it all comes down to this, happier people produce better quality work. Big companies have figured this out, granted some have flipped it too far and nearly made it impossible to leave the place, I don’t think that’s healthy either. So, there must be a happy medium. You need to empower people not just teams.
How?
You can’t just force this. Throwing in some beer fridges and forcing mandatory fun time won’t work. If anything, this will turn people off, and make them resentful. Don’t get me wrong beer fridges are nice to have, along with free cereal in the mornings and even a free lunch day or something. But they are not real, it’s a forced fun time. It’s not any use when you are offering free lunch but forcing folks to hit nonsense deadlines and piling the pressure on after lunch.
So, engineering joy MUST start with your practices. It MUST be a top-down lead process. I have worked in places where we as a team got everything in place and were really enjoying how we were working and what we were doing only for higher level management to not realize the value, and to push back on it. This stopped the joy dead, and instead of allowing it to spread over the organization it killed it.
If you build good practices for teams, you will allow them time to learn and grow, thus enabling Joy in the workplace.
Let’s take the simple example of WIP limits. Just one small thing can generate happiness for teams. If you control the amount of work coming at a team and lower it, you get some side effects. One of them will be a higher quality output as there is less work so there is more time to make sure the work is tested properly. Another side effect is engineers have more downtime. This allows them to HAVE FUN AT WORK. Maybe they want to learn something or investigate something. They now have time for it, they can also pair and work together.
Next:
This is just one simple way we can start down the path to engineering joy. There are many others, and I will start to try and share more here. I and the friend from the start, Rob Meaney (yes he has at least one friend), are looking to collect stories and ideas and start a new drive for Engineering Joy in our communities. We look forward to hearing from you.
To reach out my twitter is: @dar_dar
Rob is contactable via twitter: @RobMeaney
Thoughts On Testing 