Throughout my experience, I’ve always been the type of developer to spend 60+ hour weeks grinding out bug fixes when its crunch time. What does this really mean? It means working all days of the week and making that final push towards a flawless demo to the client.
Recently I’ve been thinking about what really triggers my productivity and how one might motivate others into working harder whether they are your peers or if you’re managing them directly.
Here’s a list that I’ve come with.
- Work hard yourself; make sure your peers know it! This will most likely encourage them to inherit your dedication and work ethic!
- Encourage pair programming! Believe it–it really works! This makes programmers think at different levels and approach problems at different angles.
- Developers constantly hunger knowledge whether its learning a new language or figuring out how to increase performance of X components–that said, always present them with challenges!
- Ensure that they know they are valuable to the project. I can’t stress this enough; if you’re under-utilizing a senior developer by giving him junior level problems to solve then you’ll quickly drain his motivation to work hard.
- Theorycraft! Theorycrafting allows your developers to think of new innovative ways to solve new and old complex problems. Book a meeting room with a whiteboard and think about what problems are at hand when developing new projects and figure out ways to make your lives easier. An example is a reuseable components respository! How many websites have modal dialogs? Can your developers create a reuseable component that would be easily portable to any project they’re thrown on?
This may be a short list; but I’d like to hear your thoughts on how you really encourage your peer developers or the developers you manage yourself to work harder. The “gets things done” attitude is in every strong developer; it’s just a matter of trying to unleash that power.
Cheers,
Jaime
PS: I’ve been planning out my gaming blog for quite some time now but it’s just been pretty hectic at work lately that I’ve been pushing it out more.
