Do you know this exciting feeling when you work on your own side project? The incredible motivation when you work on it and this magical feeling when you publish it! What is the difference between those kind of projects and the projects you are working on at work? I think the most relevant difference is that most people do what they are told to do at work instead of what they would love to do.
Imagine a working environment where nobody tells you what to work on! How great would it be if you could work on what you really believe in! If you could talk to colleagues about your ideas and everybody who truly believes in it would join you. Teams would be fluid! They would form spontaneously and exist until the work is done. Then you could join another team that convinces you.
What do you think how productive this would be? I think the potential would be amazing! Features would be developed so much quicker and with so much love!
The question is what would happen with the tasks that nobody wants to do? Maybe, if nobody wants them done, it is not so important. If something doesn't excite anybody from the company, maybe it also doesn't excite most of the users.
I would like to try it out but it's hard to convince a company to give up all the control and hope that everything will be fine. I read that Valve, a software company from the United States, did it very successfully. Have you any experiences with experiments like that? I would love to hear about it!
Top comments (2)
I try to push for this sort of thing with our plans for future dev.to development. So much of its success has been as the result of really doing what I felt passionate about, and we will need to keep this up as we grow. I think it's for the best.
Just today, I implemented the site's search functionality from start to finish without consulting anybody and now it's in production. As teams grow, it becomes more challenging, but I agree with the philosophy.
Fred George preaches the concept of developer anarchy, which is sort of the same idea.
I think if you establish this kind of culture from the beginning it's much easier than completely turning around the company later! Nice to hear that you actually plan to do this :)
I haven't heard of Fred George's concept of developer anarchy before. Thanks for the hint, sounds very interesting!
By the way: I like the new search feature ;-)