#19 Michael O Church and state of software engineering

Summary Michael O Church and I discuss whether software engineers have become the manual laborers of the 21st century, open allocation, agile development and how companies could be better. Details Michael’s background; being an engineer vs a manager; poor perception of engineers, value of engineers, makers vs takers, engineers as a commodity; not everyone with an MBA is a bad person; engineers are the manual laborers of the 21st century, craziness of interview processes; continuing low status after staring a job, getting credit for work done; open allocation solves many problems, better work, better rewards, happier engineers, language choices, learning new code is harder than learning a new language; agile in an open allocation company, agile as micromanagement, scrum masters, lords and knights, sprints; what Michael’s company would be, constrained open allocation, small, profit sharing; how companies can improve, become engineer driven, engineers should engage more with business, understand convexity; understanding company politics; hard to challenge bad ideas, open allocation helps; arrogance is rewarded; engineers are not always the best at communication or accepting criticism, engineers should learn to fight for themselves; reading broadly, book recommendations, Breaking Bad executions and map reduce.