Encouraging Engineers

Mistakes will be made. It is the nature of building something from scratch to become a fully functional application. In order to realize mistakes, fix them and learn, software engineers need flexible leaders. Mistakes are ok if we recover fast and don’t let them happen again. Encouragement is a far better tool than punishment.

Change Is Awesome, Except for Engineers

There is one constant in the world of IT and that is constant change. Also, old tech never dies, it just stays in you shop as technical debt. Both challenges require leaders to make change part of the plan. Some engineers who are steeped in legacy knowledge will have trouble letting go. Communicating the long-term need for change is key.

Motivation by Leaders

Information technology takes a degree of risk-taking. Leaders can find software engineers to take these risks by creating a fear-free environment. If the leader takes a risk, and the idea does not pan out, the leader needs to shoulder most of the criticism. If the idea was not good enough, that is an issue with the leader’s judging the degree of risk. If the team made critical mistakes, that is a leadership problem in getting the right folks on the team. The good news? By making the environment safer for software engineers, far more risks will pan out.

Leadership: Mining Gold

Natural leaders may be a bit more rare among the software engineer job family compared to other fields, but they are there. How can software engineers be assigned responsibilities that begin to move from deep tech to greater people responsibilities?

Future Trends

Since we know change is constant, leaders must have an eye to the future of the software engineering field. Is the type of talent we recruit today going to be a fit for the techniques of the future? Perhaps it is not the type of talent, but the mix of those software engineer personalities that will change? Communicating about the future we see and challenging software engineers to peer into the crystal ball is part of education.