Is A “Positive Work Culture” Even Possible?
Addressing morale is the fundamental thing your management should be doing.
You can talk¹ about bad management, idiot development methodologies, suffocating over-engineered processes, and box ticking busywork (and I frequently do in many of my articles) but the fundamental thing in the Grand Game of Software Engineering is to keep up the morale of your workers out there on the front line of development.
It came to me during some deep reflection on the state of the industry, something I spend way too much time doing to be considered healthy, that many of the problems we face in our day to day lives as software artisans² come from a very small number of root causes.
Flawed Doctrine
Management spends an awful lot of time shuffling the deckchairs around on the Titanic-like nature of software projects, making it look ridiculously ineffective, utilising outdated, misguided, and frankly bizarre learned principles in a notional attempt to improve things, when in actuality they’re really only tangentially addressing the symptoms of what’s going wrong.
Let’s take a few examples, ways in which management could potentially improve a project but often just fails dismally instead.
