Founders at Work.pdf

326 Founders at Work
with them and review their code and show them how to do things more
cleanly—how to use features of the toolkit instead of writing extra software.
The idea was that, once they had done two or three projects for customers, they
could take on an apprentice and mentor that person.
We had younger people, and we had more women than other firms. We had
Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams—two of the most senior people at the company
were female, which was kind of unusual. We never wanted to have more
than two or three people on a project. The consequence of that was sometimes
they would have to work pretty hard. But my model of the world was MIT
biology grad school.
When they’re young, people need to work pretty long hours to build experience
and get things done. But the benefit was that then they get a big chunk of
the project, and they are able to say, “I built half of the site for the customer.”
They put their name on something, instead of their résumé just saying that they
were part of a 20-person team.
You never really know what most programmers have accomplished. There
are a handful of people that you can say that about. Linus Torvalds built the
Linux kernel, but it’s hard to say what the average programmer working at a big
company has ever accomplished. Maybe he or she knows, but, from the outside,
the projects are so big and their contributions were so small.
I wanted them to have a real professional résumé. In the end, the project
was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don’t
want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap.
They want them to be using inefficient tools like C and Java. They just want to
get them in India and pay as little as possible. But I think part of the hostility of
industrial managers toward programmers comes from the fact that programmers
never had been professionals.
Programmers have not been professionals because they haven’t really cared
about quality. How many programmers have you asked, “Is this the right way to
do things? Is this going to be good for the users?” They reply, “I don’t know and
I don’t care. I get paid, I have my cubicle, and the air-conditioning is set at the
right temperature. I’m happy as long as the paycheck comes in.”
It’s no surprise that programmers’ salaries are headed down to what an illegal
immigrant working at a slaughterhouse in Nebraska would get paid, because
they just don’t think about if they are doing high-quality work for the end users.
I think because of that, managers have said, “I’m tired of these people. I don’t
want to see them. I haven’t had a good experience. They’ve been late, they
haven’t done what they’ve promised, and what they’ve done has been bugridden
and not very good for the end user. So if I can’t have a good experience
with these people, then I’ll just get rid of them. I’ll have them in India or China
where I can’t see them and they won’t get on my nerves as much.” So I think
there’s an emotional component to why programmers are being offshored: it’s
simply that the businesspeople hate them.
Livingston: You ran a tough ship, but you were trying to empower them?