Software Engineering Culture, Shared Cultural Traits

I have given some thought to traits that are common within individuals in the software culture.

Common Cultural Properties:

• Describes learning as exciting
• Caution - Pessimism
• Long Work Hours/Personal Responsibility - Doing anything it takes to get the job done.
• Strong Personal Sovereignty
• Anal - Process oriented
• Oriented towards knowledge acquisition
• Prone towards empirical experimentation
• Skeptical - proofs require measurable result

It is easy to see that when asking a knowledge worker if “learning is exciting?” All will know the only acceptable answer is yes. Not only would their peers would make fun of them (peer pressure?), but ansering in the negative during an interview will most likely cost you the job.

The cautious streak comes from the fact that we work in environments filled with possible problems with implications that can get us fired. If someone foolishly destroys the database server and all staff and all customers are not able to perform work related functions for days, there can be quite severe repercussions. We learn caution from getting burned a couple of times.

On project deadlines we all ramp up towards the end, crashing project timelines, leading us to trying to get things finished by the imposed timeline, which does not represent the amount of work that needed to be done, but the desired time to finish the work. We get used to very heavy workloads, and very late evenings. Most of us develop mitigation strategies like “work from home, ” to offset this. Even still it is common to work until 2am at least 5 times a year, in even the most relaxed environments.

I think a large part of the personal sovereignty comes from the monetization of the software engineer skill set. The negotiating leverage is useful far beyond acquiring money and benefits. After a knowledge worker achieves their financial goals, they can use this leverage to have a say in the development of the environment they work in.

Software engineers are process oriented as a group. The work attracts Type-A people and rewards “anal” behavior.

Knowledge acquisition is rewarded in our culture with more money, and career advancement, this positive re-enforcement causes this trait to be common amongst member of the knowledge worker community.

When dealing with complex problems that need to be solved I have heard, “when the going gets tough, the tough get empirical.” To ascertain the root cause of a wickedly complex issue (a quandary all software engineers find themselves in) empirical methods to test hypothesis is a necessary debugging tool.

Our skepticism and desire for measurable truths results from the relationship software engineers have with the business. In bad environments (you know we have all been in them) we work with the subjective emotional experience of “The Business” and try to convert that to testable rubrics and machine instructions.