Company culture affects your code
If you produce bad code now you can blame your boss. Well at least there’s some research you can use to justify that reasoning.
According to Conway’s Law
Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
Have you ever thought about how much your company culture affects how you code? I do make a bit of a leap between a communication structure and the company culture but I’d argue that they’re the same.
Not long ago I was under the reigns of an evil manager. It was a waterfall project so it was doomed from the start but I was naive. I would work long hours and the manager would ask me to work late everyday.
The software we produced was
- rushed
- full of bugs
- had poor solutions that weren’t thought out
- That was my last poorly made piece of software but I bring it up so we can be realistic about the culture in which we build software. Can you think of examples where different cultures have been reflected in the software you make?
At sportinginsider.com we’re a splintered group of developers spread from London to Seoul. We communicate over skype and IM and meet in person every few months. Without collocation its a lot of work to keep communication happening. The communication we have is generally high latency since we’re overlapping at different times during the day. What we produce reflects this broken nature of our communication by separating concerns with SOA and plug-in support.
the quest for quality is a good thing. the quest for perfection gets you no where
