The Waiting Place

How the way we work slows down the work we do

I have expansive music tastes, but one genre that was never among my favorites was the late 70’s-early 80’s classic rock period. I do not mean punk, new wave or hard rock, but the mainstream rock from bands like REO Speedwagon and Bachman–Turner Overdrive.

There was one song though that got stuck in my head. It was “Takin’ Care of Business”. I think it’s the piano riff* that bored into my skull, but the song is the typical work life versus rock star life trope. The “9 to 5” crowd are chumps, while the rock stars live the good life. That being said, I think right now we are all longing to get back to the “9 to 5” routine.

Even in normal times, getting work done can be a major drag, particularly for developers. There are endless meetings, searching around for stuff, getting answers to questions, prodding others to respond to requests. It is no wonder that depending on which survey you refer to, developers only spend between 32% (The New Stack) to 50% (Infoworld) of their time writing code.

I read The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim this weekend which brings to light the struggles of many developers on enterprise technology teams. While it’s a work of fiction about a fictious company Parts Unlimited, it reads like the real life travails of many organizations.

The story follows a senior developer, Maxime Chambers, on her journey to make life a little bit better for her fellow developers. It begins with Maxime being demoted and sent to the troubled Phoenix Project, an epic disaster of a three year digital transformation initiative to turn around the fortunes of an ailing, laggard retailer.

Despite being sent to IT purgatory to “document’ stuff, she starts poking around as any curious problem solver would. What she finds would put the paperwork nightmare of Brazil to shame. Whereas the protagonist in Brazil is the bureaucratic Central Services, the morass at Parts Unlimited is one of their own making.

You know when process has gone wild when even the simplest task is impossible. Maxime spends over a week to get a Phoenix build to run on her dev machine. She only gets that far because she decided to take the initiative to file numerous tickets, track down helpdesk staff, bug…