PDC05: Day Three (BoF: Managing Programmers & Deep Coder)

The Birds of a Feather sessions were great, but they ran until very late at night. I was already exhausted when I headed off for the first of them, but it was worth the loss of sleep.

The session called "Help I Have to Manage Programmers" was moderated by the redoubtable John Moody (blog). He did a great job keeping the previous discussion on track, and this session covered material far more incindiary showing him at his best. There was a lot of great exchange of ideas. I talked about using Evo to help improve estimation on developer-by-developer basis and to manage short-horizon planning. Another guy shared his planning and management tactic:

• senior developers
  can design classes
  works about a week without synchronizing
  
• intermediate developers
  can implement a class
  works about two days without synchronizing
  
• junior developers
  can implement a single method in a class
  works about two hours without synchronizing
  

When the discussion turned to software cost estimation (scheduling), the disagreements started to heat up. Moody showed his real skills be putting out the fires and encouraging discussion without creating any winners or loosers. He was a superb moderator, particularly given the topic.

The session "Fate of the Deep Programmer" was fairly interesting. There was a lot input by everyone with all reaching the same basic conclusion. To be an effective deep programmer you have to be trusted, to be trusted you have to be visible, to be visible you have to go to meetings, to go to meetings you lack the time for deep coding.