How to Provide IT Projects of our Employee

If we treat such things as important, rather than tertiary components of the project, any team member should have a general idea about them in order to be able to at least appreciate their significance, even if he himself is not involved in them. They should be considered as the basis for individual roles in the team, on a par with front-end, back-end or security, and distributed to specific people.

It's okay if every engineer doesn't have the right skills to fulfill all these responsibilities. I will say more: I will be amazed if there is a person who can cope with a complete list. But making them "invisible work" that no one appreciates and is not taken into account anywhere, and pretending that the skills it requires do not exist, we will not achieve anything, we will only harm ourselves.

This harm is not only in direct consequences (that is, that the necessary work is not being done), but also in less obvious ones - we have to deal with unnecessary fears. The anxiety mentioned at the beginning of this article is a symptom of what we realize: we are missing something critically important, and this missing unknown is becoming more necessary every day. If we consider what we lack to be “not a skill”, but something that some people just know how to do from birth (the most popular applicants are women and “party people”, it’s good if not at the same time), while others (programmers) don’t , from this state of affairs we become uneasy. After all, it turns out that we are about to be thrown out of work and replaced by some incomprehensible people who will look down on programmers. But if we recognize all these skills as true skills - that is, those what people learn and improve (well, or do not improve) all their lives, then this is a completely different conversation. And this conversation sounds something like this: “Damn, no one in our team knows how to [insert the right one] and we get out as we have to” - that is, painfully familiar to anyone who has been involved in at least one project. Yes, the people who are best at these tasks usually come from non-programming fields, it's true - in the field of programming for several decades it has been customary to neglect learning such things. But this does not mean that they will not have the slightest understanding of programming and respect for this area. no one in our team knows how to [insert the right one] and we get out as we have to” - that is, it is painfully familiar to anyone who has been involved in at least one project. Yes, the people who are best at these tasks usually come from non-programming fields, it's true - in the field of programming for several decades it has been customary to neglect learning such things. But this does not mean that they will not have the slightest understanding of programming and respect for this area. no one in our team knows how to [insert the right one] and we get out as we have to” - that is, it is painfully familiar to anyone who has been involved in at least one project. Yes, the people who are best at these tasks usually come from non-programming fields, it's true - in the field of programming for several decades it has been customary to neglect learning such things. But this does not mean that they will not have the slightest understanding of programming and respect for this area.

Perhaps I will say a banality, but if the person whose duties include coordinating programmers or debugging their interaction with users, or something like that, treats programmers with no respect, he will not cope with the work and should not be hired. “From communication with this person, everyone drops their hands” is a serious wake-up call, and not just an inevitable side effect of the profession itself.

But it should be noted that this also works in reverse: each of the project participants must respect all the skills that are necessary to work on it, and understand them sufficiently to take part in the dialogue. If there is any legal hitch related to the operation of the system, everyone should know the relevant articles. If user research has shown that something causes them a positive or negative reaction, everyone should take these facts into account when designing. If the delay is blocking some types of user behavior, everyone should understand what the problem is. And in the same way, everyone should understand and value people skills - after all, the system you build includes at least yourself. In the new digest visualization of the build graph and OAuth in mobile applications, a solo developer startup and mobile application security, testing stereotypes, a new Performance Index, natural language and much more!