You’ve just started a small software project with just one programmer or a small team. You’ve read Peopleware and Joel and your specifications are so lucid they bring a tear to the eye. You think you’ll be done in a couple of months.
This is how to screw up.
- Don’t enforce high standards from the start. Tell yourself you’ll mention any sloppy work ‘later’ when things ‘kinda work’.
- Micromanage. Whatever you do, don’t chunk tasks into interesting, self contained problems and certainly don’t trust the programmer to work out a good solution by himself. Got a little technical knowhow? If you can make enough highly specific suggestions you might just be able to atrophy his creative thinking completely.
- Ignore gaps in your programmer’s skills; treat every task equally. Demand feats he finds impossible without offering training and motivation.
- Be a bottleneck. If you’re lucky you’ll completely drain the momentum from the project.
- Don’t communicate every day. It only serves to maintain the sense of urgency, and nobody has ever needed forum to resolve issues before they escalate.
- Allow your programmer to ignore good testing practices. Also, make sure you test his work for him, so he never feels that quality assurance is his responsibility.
- Never set clear, reasonable deadlines.
- If by some freak chance you do set one and it is missed, never talk through the why and how.
- Never, ever, ever communicate the impact of your coder’s hard work on the business. Keep it abstract, you wouldn’t want any perspective to creep in.
What have I missed?
