This is a follow up to my previous post about investing in your own IT. The more I think about the more I keep coming back to the thought that it’s not about investing in IT, it’s really about investing in your people. After all, without your people you’re nothing. Yes, without your people you are nothing. Zilch, nada, zero, nil, null.

You’re not spending money on new computers so that tasks are done faster or made easy to achieve. To claim that is to say that the key to success lies within the tools. It doesn’t. It lies within the people. “Well”, you may say, “then it doesn’t matter what equipment I give them then!”, and with that you would join the many number of managers I’ve heard say the exact same thing and who I believe had no a clue as to what their people actually did. Good tools do not create good developers, but bad tools do create bad ones. And I don’t mean bad in the sense that all of a sudden they start writing bad code, but that they become de-motivated, uncaring and uninterested in their work, to the point where it has a significant impact on their deliverables.

Now you could say that a developer worth a dime will rise above and make best with what they’ve got, but we’re a proud bunch of people and of course want nothing more than to do good. But if you begin to even start to feel like you’re being set-up to fail or that you are not important, then it’s lights out and that is going to have a major impact on your motivation and which will affect anything that you are supposed to deliver. A motivated developer will always create something faster, better and stronger then one that isn’t. A motivated developer is a productive developer.

“Hey, I’m paying these monkeys! So they can just lump it or get the hell out.”

Well at least you are brave enough to admit that you’re paying people to put up with your shit. But why? Why be shit? Isn’t there some part of you, deep down, that just wants to blow the fuck off the roof and do extraordinary things? It all comes down to self-development, whether that be the self as an individual or the self as an entity, like a company. I touched very briefly on the subject in my post about typing, the short of it being, if you have the opportunity to improve, why would you not do it? There are, of course, reasons not to. Perhaps it’s fear. There is the fear that if you make the effort to try, that you will fail and others will laugh at you, or there is the fear that the actual process of trying to improve will only expose your flaws, and no one one wants to be exposed as being a complete moron (You know who you are). Perhaps it’s monetary. To get better, you may need to buy new equipment, new materials, go on courses, whatever. It’s easier to steer the course then it is to make waves. There are always reasons not to do something, but does that mean we shouldn’t do anything? Of course not. Let’s give our developers a moral boost. Let’s motivate them. Let’s make them feel important. Don’t stick them on shitty machines with small monitor/s.

Fuck it, where’s my new machine?