Commando Coding - Leading a development team in a non-IT environment: Prologue

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of action movies. 80’s American action movies (yes, I just carbon-dated myself there) were almost always about Vietnam and the lone maverick who led a small squad of renegade soldiers behind enemy lines to take on the missions nobody else would. Those movies always took pains to show us how these few good men were different from the grunts who stayed at base. The grunts followed strict battle plans, engaged the enemy in large numbers and had all the air support and military hardware the army could muster. The commando, by contrast, had little more than his instincts, his buddies, his saw-tooth knife, and his sweaty bandana to keep him alive. Sometimes, leading a development team in a non-IT firm feels like John Rambo skulking around in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

These days, being “in tech” is definitely cool. A few decades ago, knowing your way around computers made you a nerd, and that was definitely not cool. In those dark times, companies knew they needed the IT guy but they didn’t necessarily want to see him shuffling about their hallways mumbling incoherently about kernel panics. So, the IT guy was mostly locked in the basement with all the servers and fed pastry and high-caffeine drinks from time to time.

Fast-forward to the world of today and the richest people on the planet were the basement dwellers of three decades ago. The tech superstars appear on the covers of fashion magazines and dine with presidents. The campuses they build attract the nerds and geeks from Jakarta to Jalingo with their promise of free pizza, giant pastel-coloured bean bags and indoor rock climbing. The geek workplace culture is now so pervasive that even the smallest startup in a corner of Ibadan has a mini snooker table crammed into their twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot office space. 

Outside of these somewhat superficial perks, the management structures of modern tech companies recognise their most valuable assets are the coders and engineers. Everything in the organisation is designed to ensure that those that conjure the magic are given everything they need to function - this is not always so for those tech guys working in non-IT companies. Think of the girl re-programming process control software off on a distant oil rig; the database manager for that big pharmaceutical company; the analytics guy at that football club; the data science geek at the agricultural parastatal. Think of the totally hypothetical (nudge, wink) guy who had to build custom cloud platforms and a development team from scratch at an Oil & Gas company. Think of all those people who have to endure working in places where nobody else gets the joke about the SQL query that walks into a bar and approaches two tables. How sad.

Hopefully, I have gotten you to shed a silent tear in admiration of these brave souls who are out on patrol deep in the uncharted jungles of the corporate world. For my next trick, I will, through a case study of the work experience of the totally hypothetical guy mentioned above, outline exactly the kind of commando skills necessary to survive behind enemy lines. I will talk about a few things such as;

• Identifying the business process that needs to be automated
• Selecting the optimal approach for automation
• Building early prototypes on zero budget
• Convincing management your approach is indeed optimal
• Managing user expectations 
• Building and growing your team
• Managing the inevitable deluge of requests as everyone realises this was a great idea after all

Like any good bad movie franchise, there is always a sequel. Or four. Or nine (looking at you, Fast & Furious). Watch this space for the next instalment of this series where we will be tackling some of the issues above. We will also be taking a deep dive into some of the architectural decisions, tooling and technology stacks implemented by the hypothetical guy in building a suite of cloud applications to serve a globally distributed business. 

Until next time, remember the words of that great Nigerian military hero, Samanja, who told us - “Barrack, come, barrack go, but old soldier never die”.