DaedTech

Stories about Software

Sep
11

By

The Servant Leader and the Illusion of Corporate Empowerment

Category: You Asked For It |

Last week, I answered a reader question about what scrum masters are worth, financially speaking.  This gave rise to another reader question that I’ll tackle this week, and it has to do with the idea of the so-called servant leader.

Now, I usually follow sort of a FIFO approach for reader questions.  But I’m making an exception here because several people asked me the same question in the immediate aftermath of that post.

What do you have against the term “servant leader,” anyway?

They asked that because I threw some shade at the term in last week’s post, using the words “loathe” and “detest” to describe my opinion of it.  So I suppose it’s fair for people to follow up asking what my deal is.  And I should probably respond.

Here be dragons, like this one, when you accept a counter offer.

The truth is, up until now, my revulsion had been mainly visceral and subconscious.  But the exercise of outlining this post has helped me put more thought out bullet points behind a better thesis.

First Things First: Servant Leader, The Accepted Definition

Before I go any further, let me briefly explain the term itself.  This section will be journalism, rather than op-ed, as I explain the term to anyone unfamiliar with it.

A servant leader is, tautologically, one who practices servant leadership.  And servant leadership was defined in an interesting essay back in 1970, I believe, by a gentleman named Robert Greenleaf.

This essay is categorically not about line management of knowledge workers in the enterprise, nor was it about the enterprise at all.

Instead, it was a journey through ethical, moral, and even metaphysical considerations contrasting Messianic (servant leader) leadership impulses with will-to-power (autocratic) leadership impulses.  Greenleaf does not explicitly mention God, but he touches on faith, parables, societal ethics, and even, without irony, concepts like telepathy.

Eventually, the corporate world discovered this and does what the corporate world does — adopted it as the inspiration for a management fad.  It interpreted the historical, Taylor-esque corporate pyramid as the autocratic force in the corporate world.

And it defined a new, Messianic analog in which management exists to empower, rather than boss around, the line level employees.

So fast forward to the present, and “servant leader” is an in-crowd signaling term that represents “manager as enabler” rather than “manager as dictator.”

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Sep
6

By

DaedTech Digest: Picking Your Next Temporary Home

Category: Digests |

At one point of the week, I forgot what day it was.  Probably due to the US holiday last week.  But fear not.  I’ve recovered my equilibrium in time for yet another digest Friday.

Moving on from last week’s discussion of how we started slow traveling, let’s talk about perhaps the next logical subject.

How do you pick your destinations?

I wish I had a satisfying answer for this question.  I’d love to pro forma lifestyle blogger thing and lay out some complex evaluation matrix.  This would probably cross reference cost of living, seasonal trends, and a handful of other metrics that attempt to quantify happiness.  And then it would spit out, “yep, Charleston, South Carolina!”

But honestly, it doesn’t go like that at all for Amanda and me.

I’d compare our decision making process more to how we decide where to go for dinner.  There’s no conversation at all about it, and then, bam, out of nowhere “hey, do you feel like Thai food?”  When that impulse strikes, all the reasoned consideration in the world doesn’t deter you from gut feel.

So it goes with our slow travel ventures.  We’ll idly think of different places with a kind of “that might be interesting someday.”  Or, perhaps it’s destinations that would be really interesting right now, but won’t work logistically.  But there’s always one that sticks in the metaphorical craw, in a good way.

Like the Thai food, it’s out there, and you can’t send the idea back from whence it spontaneously emerged and embedded itself in your head.  It started out innocuously enough as “hey, I’ve never been to New Orleans” or “the leaves are really pretty in New England in the fall,” but it was destined for whim fulfillment.

And, that’s really it.  The only exception I can think of was a decision to spend time in Phoenix to see Cubs Spring training.  And that was because there was an obvious mission with an objective.

Picks

  • We had our wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and my wife got me this awesome present: a super durable leather wallet that’s nice to the touch.
  • Speaking of which, if you’re celebrating the leather anniversary with someone who doesn’t really like leather, you might be interested to know that leather roses are a thing.
  • A few weeks ago, I used NordVPN to get around a series of mlb.com blackout restrictions (boo!) and it was pretty seamless to setup and use.  That type of tool has come a long way.

The Digest

As it turns out, Hit Subscribe’s growth has left me in a position where I’m writing ever-fewer blog posts myself (at least publicly, I do also handle some ghostwriting for the business).  So this week, I’ve got nothing but podcast appearances.

As always, have a good weekend, everyone.

Sep
4

By

Should Scrum Masters Make More than Software Developers?

Category: You Asked For It | 7 Comments

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a reader question.  Let’s fix that today by examining a question that is simple in the asking and complex in the answering.  Should scrum masters make as much or more money than software developers?

The actual question was a little more nuanced, and it came from the Developer Hegemony Facebook group.

The numbers on this chart show that scrum masters could make as much as some senior level developers in Los Angeles.  I’d be curious do you guys think this is a “market distortion” brought on by the fact that the “MBAs” need a way to manage the “propeller heads” or do you really feel the market is accurately reflecting the true value a scrum master can bring to a team?

So let’s dig in.  But first, let’s make sure that everyone reading is up to speed.

What Is a Scrum Master, Anyway?

If you’re in the software world, you’ve probably heard the term “Scrum Master” before.  But let’s level-set with a definition, because for a lot of you reading this might have a fuzzy definition.  Let’s go back to first principles and snag a definition from the Scrum guide:

The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. Scrum Masters do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master helps those outside the Scrum Team understand which of their interactions with the Scrum Team are helpful and which aren’t. The Scrum Master helps everyone change these interactions to maximize the value created by the Scrum Team.

First of all, this is sort of ingenious and fascinating from a meta perspective.  Scrum is a wildly successful approach sold by consultants to organizations.  It’s so successful that it’s created a job whose primary purpose is marketing the product being sold to the company.  I say this because job one is, apparently, “promoting and supporting Scrum.”  This would be like Microsoft convincing a .NET shop to create a job whose primary purpose was extolling the virtues of Microsoft products.

Should I incorporate? The monopoly guy here thinks the answer is yes, and so do I.

The Scrum Master in Practice

But I digress.  Apart from process evangelism, and the unfortunate use of a term that I personally detest (“servant leader”), the Scrum Master does provide some serious potential value.  They serve as sort of internal referees for the team, officiating collaboration and keeping it on track.  But, perhaps most importantly, they defend the team from outside distractions.  And that matters.

Of course, someone in a role like this will also develop situational dynamics with the team.  They’ll develop a knack for goosing development along, keeping people happy, and finding other ways to pitch in.

So think of Scrum Master as being sort of a process-specific hybrid of dev manager and project manager, but (most likely) without direct reports.  If you wrap your head around that concept, you can see a person whose value to the team could fluctuate pretty wildly based on myriad factors.

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Aug
30

By

DaedTech Digest: How Did You Start with Slow Travel?

Category: Digests |

Happy Friday, everyone.  And time for yet another DaedTech digest.  Last week, I talked about what it’s like to settle into a home as a slow traveler.  This week, on the other hand, I’m going slightly more existential.  At least, from my personal perspective.

I’m going to talk about what gave me this idea and how it got started.  People ask me about this with some frequency.

What Put the Idea of Slow Travel into My Head?

If you exist anywhere near the union of slow travelers, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and lifestyle designers, this is going to sound incredibly trite.  Nevertheless, it’s what happened.  I got the idea from the Four Hour Work Week.  For those of you not among the set of people I’m talking about, this is trite because it’s so expected.

This book covers a lot of ground, but the salient part here is that it asks why you can’t secure some kind of remote work arrangement and then just travel for months or years at a time.  At the time I heard it (audio book), I was in the middle of some years of non-stop commuter travel as a consultant.  I was listening on flights, in rental cars, and sprawled out on hotel room beds.

And I started thinking, “hey, yeah, I could do that!”

I mean, I was already traveling all the time.  It had been over a year since I’d spent more than 4 consecutive days at home, so it wasn’t exactly a reach to be on the road.  And, it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter where my flights originated.

How Did You First Pull It Off?

The biggest barrier, at the outset, was my wife’s job.  I presented this idea to her in the summer of 2015, saying that, if she could figure out how to work remotely, we could both travel and work from anywhere we wanted (with me doing some commuter travel).

By mid-fall of that year, the idea had firmly taken root.  She quit her job, boomeranged her erstwhile employer as her initial freelance client, and became a freelance editor, working remotely.  And, just like that, it didn’t matter where we were.

A few months later, in January, a brutal chill hit the midwest, and we’d had enough.  We opened AirBNB, started meandering around the southern parts of the country, where it was warm, and then just kinda picked a place.  The location?  Covington, Louisiana, a sorta-suburb of New Orleans (it’s across Lake Pontchartrain).

We bundled up, packed up a U-haul, and headed south for 3 months.  And we’ve never looked back.

These days, I don’t do commuter travel anymore.  And these days, when we hit the road, we pack a lot lighter and are generally a lot more efficient at this whole game.  But heading out with that U-haul in tow on our first foray is an incredibly liberating and important memory for us.  And we wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Picks

  • We’ve set up a 401K for Hit Subscribe through a company called Guideline.  I haven’t done anything with it just yet, but the onboarding was really simple and painless.  Definitely worth a look for small businesses.
  • I’ll throw Marriott a pick.  It’s been a while since I’ve booked hotels, but I had occasion to do so yesterday.  Since my last visit, they’ve made some definite UX improvements to the logged-in experience.
  • I’ve spent a lot of time at our fire pit this week, since the weather cooled off a bit.  And we have these awesome Adirondack chairs, which we’ve had for several years.  They’re the right combination of durable and comfortable for just this type of use.

The Digest

And, as always, please have yourselves a great weekend.  It’s a holiday in the US, so enjoy 50% more weekend on the house.

Aug
28

By

Transmuting Low-Value Programmer Cred into High-Value Status Illegibility

Category: The Life of a Programmer | 11 Comments

Not long ago, I wrote a post about that one, “top” software engineer role that companies don’t hire directly into.  I’m going to pick up where I left off there.

For a quick recap, recall the diagram I made (and my wife kindly GIF-ified for me).  In red, you have the positions that a company will hire into, and in white, you have that one position that they won’t.  It’s usually “Principal Engineer” or something like that.

A Recap of The Surface Narrative and the Real Motivation for This

In the last post, I talked about the surface explanation for this, accepted by idealists and pragmatists.

This role represents the most valuable software developers in the group to the company.  These developers combine technical skill with a certain je ne sais quoi that combines experience, domain knowledge, inside company baseball, and embodying the company’s values and training.

But I also talked about how that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  I talked about how if you picked the brains of leadership, you’d probably hear something like this.  (Assuming you also gave them truth serum.)

It seems like a win for everyone.  It rewards people for staying, makes us seem more prestigious, and it’s a non-monetary reward.  They love it, and it doesn’t cost the company anything to do.

Significantly, that top role that requires hanging around the company for years, serves a very pragmatic purpose.  It creates a position whose salary can creep up, unbounded, without dragging up the salary for the rest of the group.

In other words, create a bucket, put your lifers in that bucket, and give them 2% increases a year forever.  Without that bucket, you’d either (1) have to stop giving them increases or (2) potentially have to pay new hires a lot more.

So you create this policy to keep labor costs down.  And then you stand aside while the pragmatists and idealists manufacture and believe a merit-driven narrative.  Easy-peasy.

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