A Guy In A Room

Another software management proverb I once heard:

Beware of a guy in a room.

What does this mean? Aren’t many programmers guys, and don’t they typically work in rooms? And why should we beware of them?

In this case, “a guy in a room” means a programmer working in isolation.

Imagine you are an engineering manager working at a large company. Somewhere in the building, there’s a long corridor, and at the end of which is a door. The door has a little window in it, and if you peek through it, you can see a cluttered office with a single desk. Hunched over that desk is a shaggy figure slowly pecking away at a keyboard.

You knock on the door, and open it a crack. “How’s it going?” you ask.

“Not done yet.” they grunt. “Come back later.”

Unless you are a fan of pair programming (I am!), coding tends to be a solitary activity. Worse, a lot of programmers, especially junior ones, are embarrassed to ask for help. Instead of reaching out when they come to a challenging problem, they will toil away like Sisyphus until they can solve it themselves. Many are introverts who have an instinctive aversion to “interrupting” people.

It’s important for software engineers to stay connected with their team and share the details of their work. I have observed many cases where a junior engineer spent a lot of time trying to solve a difficult problem, only it turned out that the problem they were working on didn’t need to be solved; the engineer had a mistaken notion of what the problem was.

(Sometimes the most valuable and productive thing you tell an engineer is to stop working.)

For a software engineering team, isolation is a dangerous signal. If a programmer is not communicative, if they are working on something that no one else on the team understands, that is a major red flag. It means a critical part of your project is at risk.

This can be a particular challenge in this age of telecommuting, where engineers spend part or even most of their time working from home. It is not uncommon for an engineer to work on a problem for days or even weeks by themselves. In such situations, extra effort has to be made to keep the team connected and in sync.

So “beware of a guy in a room” really means “beware of an engineer working in isolation on a critical part of your project.”

Read more in the Engineering Insights series.