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Developers Don’t Understand Communication
Programming languages, APIs and protocols. Understanding how one system communicates with another is interesting for each and every person.
As software developers we learn how one system tells another system precisely what it wants and precisely what it expects back in return.
So why when we add a human being into the mix, does everything fall apart?
Talking Isn’t the Same as Communicating
I’ve worked in development teams where we’ve had stand-ups, refinement meetings, planning meetings, retrospectives, Slack channels, pull requests, documentation and enough Jira tickets to reconstruct human civilization after a nuclear war.
Yet somehow nobody knows what anybody else is doing.
Perhaps developers don’t understand communication, and it is a problem which goes to the heart of what it means to be a developer and what work means.
I’m on holiday right now. I didn’t even have a Slack group to say I’m off for a few days. Nobody cares, and I’m here to say that might just be a systemic problem and not just a The Secret Developer problem.
Stand-Up Theater
We never seem to share what actually matters in any particular stand-up.
