The alien in the nature

Until last month I enjoyed the weekend with various spare time events.

This month is different. I try to spend much time on finishing my projects except last weekend.

I was helping my brother to cut down a few trees. Two professional tree cutter were cutting the tree and afterwards some other guys were cutting the branches using chainsaws. Then me and few others were cleaning up the branches.

Sometimes I felt like an alien ripped out of his natural environment (which is the office behind a desk). Usually I feel strongly connected to nature when I'm outside. But every time I'm doing something practical it felt unnatural. After half a day I looked dirty like hell while the others still looked clean. I should do it more often. In some book it was written that doing work in the garden is best for health and psyche. 

Anyway this is more my style:

Upcoming

This week I plan to go into iOS development and learning Swift.

You can expect some nerdy articles and I also plan to share my progress on github.

The Developers Way

Currently I'm reading The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler. He is a former Saxophone player and now converted to a programmer.

Which sounds kind of funny but he is authentic in his book. He transfers many things from playing professional saxophone into programming (and vice versa). But most of it is about his experiences.

He was doing the career every programmer is supposed to be doing: Start programming at free time for fun, then applying for a Junior position, gaining experience, being Senior and then finally going to be a Team Lead and managing other people.

For me its different (currently). I'm a passionate developer because I love creating things. Currently I cannot imagine giving up on this. Once I had an interview and at the end we were talking about the usual career of a developer. I was really surprised that for him its completely clear that every developer will end up in a management position sooner or later.

For me passion is connected to fun. For becoming a developer its absolutely necessary to start programming at home and in your free time. You need to have the practice. If you experience that you don't have fun while doing the first steps in programming I recommend switching to something more easier. 

During my education I had my first programming experience with turbo pascal and C++. I always had an affinity to software and was keen to get in touch with the tools which have the power to create it. My first steps in Turbo Pascal really pulled me down. I just didn't understand how many lines of code were necessary to create a simple command line with some text to work. What I didn't understand at this time was that it was all about the basics and to understand how everything behaves.

Well I lost interest in programming until I discovered HTML. Ok it doesn't have anything to do with programming. Its just a markup language but it led me to programming.

I was amazed about the simplicity of HTML. Forms, buttons, layouts etc. etc. could be created in no time. Everything was pretty static and I wanted to have more user interaction. At this time Pearl scripts where pretty common so I've used a script called Newscript pro (or plus) to create a news page where the user is able to post news.

Then I wanted to customise it more and more. Someone pointed me to PHP which is more easier for beginners. My first PHP Code (which wasn't even pure PHP because I mixed it with HTML) was ugly and I wasn't able to work with it the next day. But I was happy and it was fun for me. Luckily nobody had to read it except myself.

Redefining company

Huhu,

first what are the takeaways of the article from yesterday:

1. Don't loose the point
2. Condition and status of an employee can directly influence the motivation

Ok, now I'd like to setup an optimal environment. This is all related to my own perspective resulting of the perception within my working time.

Lets get back to the 4 funny guys from yesterday.

My question now: Is it possible to evolve the same conditions for each and every employee in a company?

Work

Is it possible to that every employee delivers the same amount of work within a company department?  How to define "same amount of work"? Since I'm a developer I'll refer to that:

Are two persons doing the same amount of work if:

• the lines of code are equal by the end of day? No.
• they do the same amount of tickets? No.
• they introduce the same amount of new technology in the company? No.
• they are focused on the work all the time? I strongly believe so.

What happens if you work for 4 hours continuously and intensively at your tasks and every time you look at your neighbours screen he is not working. Every time you look at his screen he is doing facebook, ebay, watching youtube and doing his private stuff. Would you complain to yourself? Wouldn't it be demotivating for you?

What happens if you are at work for 8 hours and there are people who come and go like they want?

I'm back at the motivation and condition point. If your colleagues would focues the same amount on the work like you do you wouldn't complain. Even if the code wouldn't be in the best conditions or unit tests are not done.

Responsibility

In my opinion everyone should have the same responsibility. For me this is directly related to the position and condition of the employee within the company. If the conditions are unequal the employee would feel disadvantaged and reduce his responsibility and workload to a level from which he thinks it fits best or he starts comparing his own conditions with the of the people in his social environment.

Business sense

For me I never really had a sense of business in my former company. Where did this come from?

I never had access to business critical information. I never had this in all of my companies.

Is it something highly secret to share some numbers or targets?

To evolve business sense for every employee it is necessary to connect all tasks with business objectives. Additionally I think the time for keeping the status of the company secretly is over. If you would like your employees to think in the company way you have to make the business more transparent.

Salary

Ok now it will become controversial but:

In my opinion every employee should get the same. This is not a joke. I've written about equality and here it is.

Every employee should get the same salary, which is the money one needs to live. It depends on the country. Additionally every employee will receive a "Share payment" in uniform intervals. This payment is directly related to the profit the company. Its not the same every time. It depends on the company status.

I like to point something out: I'm completely against any type bonus payments.

Since the Share payment is directly related to the status of the company it completely differs from the bonus payment approach.

Conclusion

My conclusion is: If people are expected to bring the same work and motivation equality must be established. If people are expected to understand the business transparency must be introduced. If people are expected to develop business sense the payment must be adapted to the company profit.

Flat hierarchy

This article is about motivation and responsibility. Speaking of motivation I avoid to refer to the common explanation about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. I just want to write about my experiences regarding motivation of employees within a company.
During my work at different companies I was always asking myself how is motivation related to the employees connection with the company. Most companies are advertising flat hierarchies and this is what you will most probably get:

If you are lucky "Lead Developer", "Guru", "Master Chief" and "Architect" roles are missing. To keep it simple I've reduced the roles to Developer, Senior Developer, Tech Lead and CTO.

I experienced that motivation is directly related to responsibility and business inclusion of employees.
If you take a closer look at the picture you will see that the bars are raising the higher the position of the person is.
The Developer at the lowest level shouldn't have a high responsibility. Thus he is not that well into the business. If the company gets stuck he is just looking out for a new position without strong feelings.
Same for the Senior Developer. He knows the application very well and assigns tasks to the Developer. If live bugs occur it is up to the Senior to analyse and act. He doesn't have to be so much into business but he can.
The Team Lead should have a stronger connection with the business and the company. He often gets business targets which have to be fulfilled in a time frame.
The CTO/Owner has the strongest business connection. He knows the numbers and the health status of the company.

So what  advantages does this hierarchy have?

First: Titles are looking good in your CV. You have the possibility to claim the latter of roles within the company (until a certain point).

Second: Faster decision process.
Decisions can be met very fast and pushed from upper levels to the lower.
The problem is that Developers are known to have their own opinion about things and could get very grumpy if they will be ignored. If they aren't involved in the decision process the responsibility and business rate will lower even more.

Third: if something went bad we know who to talk to ... do we?
Problem is that lower level says "I've just implemented it the way you said" and upper level says "I've done all I can to push the task but it didn't work out."
A decent finger pointing will be evolved and if it gets ugly the person with the higher responsibility will be blamed.

Of course there are people who take high responsibility at the lowest level. These people want to have their work appreciated. How to do this?
Give them another title (one can be very creative at this point)? Raise the salary?
These solutions are just short-range solutions. At some point there is no free title anymore and the salary cannot be raised higher than the next level.

But wait. Its a company. A company can grow. If its growing new departments can be opened and new positions are free.

So at this point I definitely lost the point...
What was this all about? A Motivation. I'll write about it tomorrow.

Startup feeling

Since I'm currently doing my own projects I'm in charge of everything. This is an amazing experience compared to my former job.
Running larger websites or apps multiple development layers are included like Frontend, Backend-Cronjobs, REST-APIs etc. Working in a big company you are mostly focused on one Software-Component which is part of a big puzzle. But currently I'm responsible for all puzzle parts which includes (atm) an Android-App, a REST-API and a Website for the app.

One can say that this is too much to handle for just one person. Currently I really enjoy to work on all  components. I don't have to rely on others people work. If I want to do it, I'm doing it. I experienced that its quit difficult when switching too often between the layers. Its better to focus at only one or two layers within a day otherwise the head starts buzzing and I start getting hasty.
Another problem which most developers experience is to focus too much on details. This is something I have to remind myself quit often.

Anyway for now its simply a great learning experience not only for development but also for self organising. I started to create detailed daily plans using my google calendar. It doesn't take so much time. Just 5-10 minutes per day and (for me) it results in better work and more satisfaction.

Having that much responsibility reminds me at the first time within my former company. We were working long hours every day and sometime on weekend. During this time I was annoyed simply by the fact of doing unpaid overtime. Still I remember very well about the feelings during the startup period and it seems to repeat right now: Time slows down because I'm working on many things, having sleep problems because of too many written code, nice weather outside while I'm inside :)

Tomorrow I'll to write about motivation and passion.

Moving on

Yesterday I wrote about non existent identification with a company.
But there was indeed a bound but more to the product... well not to the product but to the code I've written (which resolved into the product in the end).

I don't know if its possible but I never really cared about the product itself so much. Looking back now I can see that this was bad because as a developer you need to support the business part as well as the development part. If there isn't 100% identification with the product you are not thinking from business perspective.
This can lead to certain misunderstandings during planning and implementation phase of a project.
I never really cared about the planning phase. My thinking always was like "Just give me the specs and I'm going to implement it". Another bad move because developers should be involved during early planning to contribute their knowledge and avoid bad practices or requirements that are simply impossible to implement.

Looking at the future I want to make this not happen again. I'd like to invest more time into understanding and using of the products I'm working on. I even like to use them for myself or if thats not possible at least talk to the users and/or watch them while they are working with the software.

Speaking of using self developed software: During my work I always had my own projects I was working on. But I never had the time to finish them. Now the time has come. I'm going into full time development of my own ideas. For me this is simply great because I can spend 100% of time for learning and developing things I stand for. My projects are both web and app development and I'll write about them in future articles.

I quit my job

Hi folks,

I did it. I quit my job as a Senior PHP developer at a well known international e-commerce fashion company.

I was working there for almost 4 years. When I started back in 2010 I knew from the beginning that my time there is limited. The main reason was and is that I cannot identify myself with the company.

Back then I told myself I need to have a well paid job and must gain experience , which isn't a bad thinking at all. Starting there I was impressed and keen about all the new things to learn. The people acted very professional (mostly freelancers). There was no time where anyone lost his nerves even in difficult situations with occurring live bugs. Also I was impressed about how new things were introduced. There was the feeling you can do everything you want, just create a presentation and then implement it. During first period there I got responsibility for many projects.

But then something changed. People were leaving the company for different reasons. For me my work changed as well. I had to spend all my time at one product only. I stayed because I had a strong feeling of ownership with the product I was responsible for. Still I had the power to change everything within the product scope.

Time moved on, I was rewriting the product, did refactoring, tried out new technologies, implemented "highly demanded features" from business side within short range. I also introduced new developers to the product.

Slowly and somehow undetected I grew anger in me. It showed especially during daily stand ups where I was angry about different circumstances. And I showed it.
I was discussing things with my team lead and of course my colleagues. I had several pain points to claim:
New people started there who haven't had the same motivation and output as the old team members.
We had no one dedicated for our server environment. Server tasks where coming often unplanned and we had to deal with it additionally to our work time.
But these were things we could've worked out somehow. I was thinking hard about reasons and I remembered how I started at the company. Completely no identification with fashion and the products. I always wanted to do software which was the main product and not some tool to sell goods to someone.

So at some point I realized my days are counted as part of the company. I need to change something in my live and we all know that there is only one. But what can I do?
First I need to get rid of my contract. So I decided to quit the job.
What I do now? I'll write it tomorrow.

Hello World

Hello world.

I decided to continue my blogging career and will publish a new post every day. Starting from today.

Well at least thats the plan.

Why am I doing this?

I feel that the time is right for me now to start blogging more intensively because I have time and want share some thoughts (even if I just doing it with myself).

It feels good to write. I have some posts in the pipeline.

I even introduced a new label called "me" and it contains posts about me (surprise).

Its a try to write about my feelings and thoughts and to give the blog a face and personality.

Ok lets get serious.

My name is Florian Biewald and I live near Berlin in a small suburb called Panketal.

Its very quite here but I like it. If I want to have more action I'll take the train and be in 25 minutes in Berlin centrum.

As you can see by my previous posts I'm a software/web/app whatever developer. Everything that has to do with programming languages which enable me to create outstanding cool things are within my center of interest. Developing and creating things is unbelievable satisfying for me. Because I can learn and create so much during a few hours of a coding session I have a strong feeling of being in control about pretty much everything... which isn't the case of course :)

Until last month I had a job at a international well known fashion e-commerce company situated in Berlin. But I quit the job. More about reasons and the future follows tomorrow.