http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/habits-kill-career/

Older developers are killing their careers from their bad habits.

Sorry, the sound you just heard is your jaw hitting the keyboard.  "What!?  But Dave, you said experience was valuable and..."

Yes, I know what I said.  And I meant it.  Every word.  But there is one distinct advantage the younger set has over us fogeys:  they haven't formed as many habits yet.

I'm not talking about a $5,000-a-day-hooker-and-blow* kind of habit.  I'm talking about the practices that you've codified into your daily routines as a developer since you started.  Like your (in)ability to write clear, concise comments.  Or comments at all.  Your constant lack of communication with other team members when you're making major changes because you don't think it's necessary.  Your refusal to write documentation.  Or your passive refusal to learn new technologies because you think you have enough information to do your job already.

From Lessons of Failure:

If you walked into a store and asked to have someone make you a suit and you agreed on a price of $100 and week's sewing time, a week later you'd expect to walk back in and be trying on your new suit after parting with a $100 bill (at least in America).

What if you went into a different store, after that initial price quote and they offered to make it for $25?  You'd think, "Great!  One fourth the cost of that previous guy!  I'll take it instead."

How would you feel if a week later you came back and they said it would be another week and $50 instead?  Think you'd be mad?

How much madder would you be after TWO weeks, and now the shop owner is telling your it will be $75 and one more week, but this time he'd definitely get it done.  And after you get it, you notice that the pocket is sewed on slightly funny and the trousers don't fit quite the way you'd expect.  Would you be steaming mad now?

Yeah, I would too.

This is exactly what happens with outsourcing projects in most software companies.  If you ask companies why they do it, invariably they answer that outsourcing will save money AND time over local resources.  That's an unbelievably huge lie. It's time to tear that apart.

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http://blogs.flexerasoftware.com/ecm/2010/04/governance-for-effective-software-licensing.html

As an extension to last week's topic of software license policies, is the topic of licensing governance. "Licensing Governance" is the effective management alignment of all licensing (and perhaps pricing) activities across and ISV's or device manufacturer's organization structure.

Software licensing has a significant cross functional impact to any organization. What we see is that the deployment of effective software licensing can go awry if there is a misalignment among 3 core functions - commercial intent (what Marketing & Sales intended or wanted), product design (product structure and design), and IT systems and processes (the effective deployment of software through the sales channel.

Take for example, the deployment of a subscription license model for a company that has historically only sold perpetual licenses. This can be problematic if many elements of a business don't align: if engineering doesn't implement "time out" messages in the software, if the ERP Systems can't adopt new revenue recognition systems, if the CRM systems can't track expiring licenses, or if sales management doesn't consider the effect of a new revenue model to sales compensation. The result of such misalignments can cause product failure, revenue leakage, high operational costs, and a poor customer experience.

These problems can be minimized and effectively managed by managing your software licensing infrastructure in a holistic manner by deploying a centrally managed, cross-functional team that is organized as a triad it its core. This triad is chiefly responsible for ensuring alignment among commercial intent, product design, and business systems & processes for current and future license models. This triad consists of the following business leaders:

• The License Czar: This person is the overall "owner" of the business of licensing and is usually hired specifically for this role. This person will often have the title of "Director or Pricing & Licensing", or "Licensing Director". They often report into a Marketing or Finance Organization. This person is responsible for organizing a cross functional licensing team, owning the development and socialization of the license policies that we described last week, and, managing policy review processes. As if that isn't enough, this person should be looking to the evolving market needs for licensing, and, be an effective internal politician.
• License Architect: The License Architect is in development, and responsible for the development and deployment of core license technology and business policy that will be adopted by the products in a consistent fashion, as prescribed by the corporate policy. This person may be dedicated to license technology, or, to managing the deployment of a common services layer.
• System Architect: This person(s) usually resides in the IT or Operations organization, and is responsible for the deployment of business processes and systems that enable for the effective deployment of software with license models prescribed in the policy document.

From ThousandtyOne!

Question: I am in front of my computer ten to fourteen hours a day. I am supposed to be writing code. But I find that, I spend a lot of time getting distracted, surfing the web, trying to keep up with rails. Did you have any similar problems? What advice can you give to developers to keep on track and what motivated you to crank down and crank out a product?

Answer: I think the problem is you are trying to work fourteen hours a day. Who the hell gets anything productive done for fourteen hours a day? Try working five hours a day. If you only have five hours a day to spend on something, you'd focus your time a lot better. We've just gone down to four day work weeks. We are trying to work just eight hours a day. The amount of productive time I get out of that... two hours... three hours? I think people are just not willing to accept the fact that you can't, in a creative endeavor as programming, work for fourteen hours a day. It's ridiculous! If you could just get three great hours in per day, you would get a ton more done.

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From skorks.com:

The sunk cost fallacy, also known as the Concorde fallacy, is a very interesting phenomenon. What it basically boils down to is the fact that it is human nature to throw good money after bad. The more resources (time, money) we invest in something, the more likely we are to stick with it despite all the indicators of our venture being a failure (I am not going to give generic examples; you're welcome to check out the links above). It is therefore no big surprise that when it comes to software development, we're not immune. In fact we take the sunk cost fallacy to new heights of awesome :).

In the world of finance, the sunk cost is accepted. If the money is spent and can't be recouped, it can no longer influence any further decisions. On the other hand, in software, once we have spent any kind of effort/money on a feature/project, we just can't let go. We would much rather delude ourselves and everyone around us that we can still turn everything around and make it all come out for the better. Developers do it, managers do it, it's an industry wide trend. No matter how flawed the product vision turns out to be, we are much more likely to try to adapt the whole ecosystem to the flawed product/feature rather than starting over from scratch and building something that will better fit the ecosystem we have. More than that, we will go to great lengths, bring in extra people, do overtime, whatever it takes, as if we can make an incorrect decision right by sheer force of will and sweat. I am not just talking at the project level, even at the code level we (developers) will often stick with a technology/library choice through thick and thin long past the time we should have abandoned it and found something that fits our needs better. There are always, good reasons to justify all this, but what it comes down to in the end is self-delusion - the sunk cost fallacy at work.

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From Business Week:

Meet public enemy No. 1 in today's workplace

If you're reading this article sitting down--the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day--stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they're not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you're doing--sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn't offset it. "People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

Theft-of-time, no-references, and certain other HR rules take the "human" out of "human resources" and drive talent to your competitors

From Business Week:

Thinking about the problems facing the business, a CEO is likely to pinpoint such bogeymen as competitive pressures and labor costs. The organization's internal policies aren't likely to make the list of things that keep a leader up at night. Maybe they should. Most organizations of more than a few hundred people are burdened by unfortunate and misguided policies that serve to slow operations and drive away talented employees.

Overwritten or heavy-handed policy manuals hurt your business in three ways. First, they take your employees out of the realm known to sports psychologists as The Zone--the most productive mental place to be. It's the arena where staffers can push your agenda in a fully engaged, minimally distracted way. Bad policies force an employee to stop and look up a rule or consult a manager, slowing down the action. Second, policies are expensive to disseminate and costly to administer. Third and most destructive, policies speak loudly about CEOs' trust in themselves and their management teams. Where trust abounds, policies are few. In organizations where trust exists, leaders have confidence in themselves to hire and manage team members without minute-to-minute supervision. In fear-filled environments, policies rule the day.

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Confirmation of what we always suspected: mandatory password aging doesn't work.

From The Boston Globe:

Please do not change your password

You were right: It's a waste of your time. A study says much computer security advice is not worth following.

To continue reading this story, enter your password now. If you do not have a password, please create one. It must contain a minimum of eight characters, including upper- and lower-case letters and one number. This is for your own good.

Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more -- those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another "urgent" directive from the bank or IT department -- time to reset those codes, for safety's sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you've concocted won't last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year's batch? Who can remember?).

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