The 6 Strings on a Rock Star Developer's Axe

Vilfredo Pareto, in one story, noticed that 20% of his pea pods produced 80% of the peas. He further noticed that this 80/20 rule, as it came to be known, applied to many other measures. 80% of income was generated from 20% of the work. 20% of sales people generated 80% of income. From modern development: 80% of bugs come from 20% of the code base.

Roughly speaking, this 4 to 1 ratio keeps popping up in the business world on a regular basis. Anecdotally, you'll find lots of support in management circles that their best employee regularly does 4x the work of others on the team. There are many studies that support this, but there's some that don't. One in particular talks about software developers. In this study, they found that, by all objective measures, top developers regularly outperformed the average by 10 to 1. They are known as the mythical 10x'er in Silicon Valley. [Study: Coding Wars, 1984, Book: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Discussion: Origins of 10X – How Valid is the Underlying Research?] Talent, of course, makes a big difference, but there many contributing factors that affect that 10x statistic. Workplace and workspace are the main ones. How many times out of 10 would you expect the Yankee's to win against their AA league team? Is that solely due to raw talent? Managment? Team vibe? The culture and talent, or nature vs nurture discussion, is not something I'll be pulling apart here, they are too intertwined. Together, though, they account for 100% of the difference between a high functioning team and a low functioning team. When it comes to a field where deep knowledge and logic can make the difference between a high-value product and "meh", the performance gap can be even greater than 10x.

It used to be that many Americans grew up fantasizing about being a rock star and playing in front of millions of adoring fans. Increasingly, this dream has gravitated toward the socially awkward coder genius who stumbles on to a unicorn $1b valuation. Rock stars only wished they had that sort of market cap and influence. Haha, ok, ok maybe that's a bit far. Here's the thing, if you are looking for this article to tell you how to pop a $1b unicorn out of your crumb covered keyboard, read on!! I only say that to generate angry comments below. Woot! Ok, Fine. Let's examine each string on a rock star developer's axe.

The developer stands before her source code editor in the same way the author confronts the blank page. There’s an idea for what is to be created, and the (daunting) knowledge that there are a billion possible ways to go about it. To proceed, each relies on one part training to three parts creative intuition. — J. Bradford Hipps

🎵 Pride in Craftsmanship

This trait comes from a deep sense of pride in what you are creating and the follow through that naturally flows from this. The evidence you or your team are craftsmen:

1. Well written code is indexed in such a way that you (or anyone) can easily find segments and understand the gist even months after development.
2. Refusal to build to requirements (or time constraints) that will systemically offer poor performance, brittle uptime, or expensive upkeep.
3. An obsessive interest in the performance of your code in production, monitoring its success long after it’s deployed, and fixing any issues without being asked and preferably without anyone even noticing.
4. Failure is not treated as a bad thing, but you take it personally and learn how to prevent it next time. You voluntarily share lessons learned.
5. If you can, try and leave the code better than you found it. See Broken Windows Theory

🎵 Constant Learning

Learning isn’t work, it’s a passion. Really, it's a sickening, romeo-and-juliet, co-dependent love affair.

"I'm deathly afraid of becoming irrelivant. There's stuff being invented right now that will change your life, somewhere on this planet. It's just a question of how quickly it gets out and we know about it, and figure it out. It's terrifying and it's lovely. — Micheal Lopp

1. You should be reading at least one blog article a week. Tip: Find a way to listen if you drive to work. If you are a team lead or manager, find a great blog and subscribe your team to it, if you aren't, do it anyway.
2. You should complete at least 5, outside work, developer-related learning modules (or events) during the year. There are always tons of free conferences and meetups.
3. If you come across a great article or event or video, please share it with your team!!

Technical learning is ephemeral unless you apply it right away. If what you learned doesn’t fit your current work you can a) create a proof of concept using it or b) share or teach someone else what you learned (see Knowledge Leadership).

🎵 Steal Ethically

Good programmers write code; great programmers steal it

If you think you have a unique problem that no one has solved with code, stop, sit, and rethink your conclusion. Before writing a line of code, assume it’s already been written.

1. Did you ask your peers or other development groups if they have tackled this issue?
2. Did you find out if there is a reasonable open source or paid library?
3. Google the gist of what you are doing and adapt it. If you really can't find it anywhere, well, maybe ask "why am I the only one having this issue?" (else: sounds like it might be a great start for an open source library.)
4. Repeat these steps for EVERY new module. New options appear every day.

If you find a great library or time saver, tell everyone you know.

🎵 Innovation

This is a loaded word, but here it's simply wisdom applied. Take that Constant Learning and apply it to X. Make something better, it doesn't even have to be novel.

1. Be the captain of your own ship, don’t wait for the business or your boss to drive value or innovation.
2. You should be constantly looking over past work and seeing if you’ve overlooked an opportunity to extract value or reuse
3. Work on and bring proofs of concepts and ideas to the group fairly regularly
4. Along with ideas or POC’s bring ways to test if your idea is valuable
5. Experiment and fail, a lot. Action brings inspiration, not the other way around.

🎵 Knowledge Leadership

Leading Peer Discussions, Writing articles, contributing to a GitHub or other open source projects. Make sure everyone knows your name. This comes naturally to some, but here's the thing, smartie, even if you are in the 90th percentile for the 4 traits above, without knowledge leadership and business domain knowledge, you will hold your career back.

In the traits above you will obtain a certain level of knowledge and reputation, which is great but the next step is sharing and influencing. Tell your peers about the innovation, lessons learned, great shortcuts and libraries you found, and what learning and sources of knowledge have helped you in each of these categories. This includes:

1. Reaching out to peers (not just your team) to give and receive feedback, bounce ideas off of.
2. Bring knowledge and ideas to all of your team of teams and/or management
3. Volunteer to lead discussions and upcoming group events
4. Creating or contributing to internal/external libraries, guides or helpful tutorials
5. Find a hack-a-thon to participate in or make your own
6. Participating in dev groups outside your scrum team and your company
7. Offer to speak about a topic at a local meetup or conference

🎵 Business Domain Knowledge

Know Thy Business Purpose! Discover the true “why” and the “what and how" becomes way more attainable and exciting. Who is really paying your salary? Why?

1. You understand the business value you are delivering and are able to look past the requirements to see faster or better or cheaper solutions
2. You frequently talk directly to the humans on the other end of your software. You ask why they think it's valuable. If there's a lot of "they don't, or because they have no other choice" thrown in there, you are doing yourself and your career a disservice.
3. Refuse to automate anything that will cost more hours to build than save. ROI is not just a business side concern. In many cases, you are closest to the problem and the only one can see the train wreck coming.
4. Find out users/customers “day in the life of” stories. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the pain an end user had to put up with because something got skipped or lost in translation. In a few cases, it was a simple 15-minute update that generated buzz and personal notes of gratitude for days.
5. Further Reading: One Question Software Developers Forget to Ask

Those 6 Magic Strings

"If you play music for no other reason than actually just because you love it, the skills just kinda creep up on you" — Nuno Bettencourt. Like mastering those 6 strings, the next level will always be just a little bit out of reach if you really don't love the grind. If you can't honestly say you'd be up at 2am flipping the debugger the double bird salute, even if you weren't getting paid, then you will only just keep up. Developers are constantly on the edge of irrelevance and keeping up is just the bare minimum. To hit the next level you have to find the love. If you examine some of the great software platform successes you will find a group of people who have deep knowledge of code and craftsmanship as well as a white-hot, direct connection to their business purpose.

Purpose and passion have a magical way of aligning skill and talent. Walk into any small shop on Main St. and you will immediately know who owns it and who merely works there. The customer experience is almost wholly different between the two, even though they might say the same things. You are the owner of your shop. Every "gig" isn't simply a wage, it's a chance to stock your shop with more valuable skills. You curate and hone your crafts selectively to suit your passion. You pay attention to your market and look to apply your creative spin to demand and trends. You sell and share your talents and knowledge openly. And finally, you take every opportunity to narrow your purpose from a scattered beam to a blinding laser focus. You are an owner. You love it and practice that 6 string until your fingers bleed. You are a rock star. 🤘

[Cross posted from rockstardeveloper.io]