Follow-up Thoughts on Aligning Business & Programmer Goals

My recent entry on Aligning Business & Programmer Goals led to an email conversation that I thought might be worth sharing.

From A. Nonymous:

I have an issue with tying bonuses to performance due to, basically, performance being out of the programmer's hands. Where I'm working right now developers are treated as code monkeys: We're there to implement features the business people dream up, and nothing more. How could I provide more value when I work in an environment where

• The visual design phase has already happened (no pushback on any design elements taken seriously)
• The business development phase has already happened (i.e. the business decides to create a new service tells it's code monkeys: "we need feature x, y, and z")
• The individual projects we're working on is out of our control.

I can't figure out how to tie what I do to business value in the short term (or even in the year-long-term), because I don't have the autonomy to work on things that I think would benefit the business. I'm forced to do the work that someone else assigns me. Are the new features/bug fixes creating value? Definitely. How much value? Not a clue. How can the value I bring be measured? The only metric I'm seeing is "ease of implementing the next new feature", but the next feature that touches the code I wrote probably won't be developed for months, if not years.

So, it doesn't seem justified to assign me a bonus based on the value that features create, when I have no control over the features.

My response:

Given your context, I wouldn't want a bonus either. I imagine that many people are in the same situation... probably most people.

2 notes-

• The blog entry isn't solely about bonuses, the ending is all about a visible P&L and nothing about a bonus. I hope people don't completely miss that point.
• While your position is status quo, I think we should strive to do better as an industry. I don't think it's healthy that we (programmers in general, not necessarily you or me) work for organizations where we know little about the business, don't trust our business counterparts, and are not trusted by our business counterparts. Programmers are often ruthless about measurement and improvement, and wasting that effort on resume driven development or process tweaks is bad for our businesses and our reputations.

It's easy for me to say that the good programmers should quit companies that don't expose a P&L and don't empower their programmers, but I know that personal situations can limit people's choices. At the same time, I feel good about continuing to write about the path that I take, which includes quitting companies that I don't feel are aligned. Even if my ideas can't help you at this point; hopefully, something will come of them in the future.

A. Nonymous followed up with:

I totally get the visible P&L part and agree with you on it. Having more visibility into the inner workings of the business can only help focus effort where it's important. Not every business leader feels that way, unfortunately. I'm currently fighting with my boss about a similar issue. I alluded to it before, but he wants to follow what many consultancies are now calling "Agile":

• analyst meets with business team
• analyst comes up with features
• qa writes acceptance test for features
• developer receives/estimates/completes features

At no point in this process does the developer have any contact with the business team.

Do you have any idea how I'd go about convincing upper management that sharing the P&L would be a good idea?

And, my final response:

I've never seen studies on the impact of sharing the P&L. Most of the discussion around this stuff is still in it's infancy as far as I can tell. Brian Goetz has been talking about 'language & framework introduction' for awhile, but I've never heard it combined with P&L.

I would attack your situation in one of the two following ways-

• Fully support your boss' plan, but request to be put on a 'research' or 'experimental' team where you interact directly with the business on a new product (assuming that's possible). I've done this successfully. The rest of IT followed the traditional approach that your boss is proposing, but I broke off with 1 PM and we worked directly with the business on technology for new business lines. I never got to see P&L (though, I never asked), but I would get requirements and deliver features on demand and we ended up constantly impressing the business. e.g. "business: How quickly can you deliver this? (I start thinking of my estimate) business: August? me: (shocked, it was March) I was thinking in the next 2 weeks. -- that conversation actually happened, I'll never forget it. If you get this approved, your boss still gets to do what he wants, and you get to try to do better. If you succeed, he can take the credit for approving the experiment - win/win.
• Assuming you cannot find a way to interact with the business, focus all your efforts on reducing the delivery cycle. If he's going to force the team to be basically skilled labor, you need to deliver at a rapid enough pace that you fail quickly and pivot toward profitable business goals. You build, they point you in a better direction, you build, they point you in a better direction, on and on. Your 'interaction' with the business is delivering them software, and you will benefit from doing that as often as possible. So, focus on things like choosing the best tools for the job, getting the build time down, reducing the test running time, etc, etc. Anything that's slowing you down from delivering faster, it's in your best interest to remove that, so you can get the business feedback as fast as possible. Even if your boss forced you to only do a roll-out monthly (or worse), the more you have to roll-out, the more feedback you'll get - so removing any thing that takes your time and isn't contributing to feature delivery. Dan Bodart is doing interesting stuff with build times and you should be able to find plenty of advice on speeding up tests - attack that stuff so you deliver as much to the business as possible.

While A. Nonymous may never get to see the P&L, and may never be in a situation where we would want a bonus - there are steps that can be taken to align the business & the programmers.