The Human Factor in Software Engineering

I want to recommend this article about "Twenty Dumb Things Organizations Do to Mess Up Their Relationship With Employees". When reading through the list, I had to smile several times, because I could remember real-life stories from my own work life as an employee. Frequently, I thought that our motivation would have been higher if the boss simply had done nothing and said nothing. We were intrinsically motivated, but management activities destroyed this motivation. Being a freelancer, I now do not need to deal with this type of obstacle. I do not need to find out how to overcome demotivation caused by the boss or by bad team work. Customers are almost always motivating. The fact that they need my results is motivating. And work is fun anyway.

However,... The article makes clear claims, but things are not so simple. For instance, Susan M. Heathfield recommends to treat all employees equally, and in the same time to not do it. When single persons make errors, do not solve the problem by defining new rules for everyone. In the same time, this is how process improvement works. You see errors been made, make a root cause analysis and solve it. But of course, the root cause can also be that single persons need a training or supervision. So, you do not need to punish the whole team for errors made by single persons, but then you do not treat them equally. Some will have more freedom than others. When I was a boss, someone complained that I do not treat the whole team equally. My quick response was: "You do not treat me equally, neither!"

Anyway, the more experience I have, the more I think that life is too complex to solve problems with single rules. In each situation, a fitting decision is needed. Rules can help define alternative solutions, but then intuition comes into the game because you need to predict what will happen when you act so or so.