“I had a conversation with Tyler about project management software the other day, because I invited him to start using Asana to start keeping track of features and ideas for our app. Tyler was vehemently opposed to any kind of project management software…Getting e-mails that say “UserName has assigned you task: XXXXXX” sucks. Developers and designers aren’t fucking robots. They are literally a highly valuable class of modern artisans. If you give them shit like this it’s pretty damn boring and they’ll quickly find other places to work.
HANDSOME CODE: On Project Management
In case you’re wondering just how vehemently my colleague Tyler Love dislikes software project management software, one of the first shared interests we ever bonded over was a strong antipathy for startup darling Pivotal Tracker. While I would never dispute the need for some minimal level of software for tracking the backlog of work in an engineering project, particularly when a team gets to a certain size, I’m pretty convinced based on personal experience that a preoccupation with project management methodology and meaningless, scientific management fictions like “velocity” and “points” is one of the surest signs of a dysfunctional engineering culture and, as this post points out, one of the quickest way to dehumanize and demoralize engineers.
My philosophy about this is pretty simple: hire smart engineers who work well together, trust them, include them in planning, communicate with them effectively, and help remove any obstacles preventing them from getting their work done. In my opinion, if you really do all of that well, an artificial layer of project management software to act as an interface between management and engineering shouldn’t be necessary.
