Friday 1 January 2016
Workplace environment plays crucial role in the development of an app or project. Employer or client cares only about the outcome of the program. No one is happy about how quickly developers change the world. However there are many barriers at the workplace that can affect your productivity while at work. Today we have listed eight barriers that can highly affect your workability.
1. Meetings
This is the most common complaint amongst developers. Programmers mostly blame the manager ruining meetings. Some bosses keep them in dark and avoid to share all the details of the meeting. Some complaints about the meetings are foolish too. If programmers are told to attend all the client meetings, that can have great impact on actual work. Switching mind from out of the space and then back to coding can be difficult for programmers.
2. Emails
Emails, email conversation threads are worse than the meetings. Developers find it too boring and waste-of-time to reply to all the email communication threads. Reply to dozens of email can take lot of time. And if you stop replying to mails, it becomes hard to quantify your work with your employer or project manager.
3. Measurement of Productivity
A management team is only concerned about progress and final version to the product. They start counting lines of code, code repositories or bug fixes. According to them, counting is measuring and measuring must be good. So, programmers focus on lines of code, bug reports and such minor problems instead of solving a real problem. Measuring the productivity can actually make the code worse.
4. Technical Debt
There is never enough time to build the product in time. It takes days and days to plan the project to build what we need to build. Programmers often cut the corners, patch some code in order to build the product. This approach is known as technical debt. Debt is something that needs to be paid off. Every project has some technical debit, sometimes it can be paid off very quickly while, sometimes it takes more time than the projected time for building the product.
5. Non-Programmer Managers
There are always some people who are major in something other than computer science involved in your programming project. They are there due to somebody’s recommendation or they are there due to coincidence. Most programmers hate these managers. The non-programmer manager does not understand the code or the efforts programmer took while building the product. Programmers want a manager who can give little guidance or somebody who can offer bit of quality testing.
6. Selfish Coder
Everyone has these people in their teams. Selfish or cowboy coders do not intend to share the code or the progress of the program. You might get just a null pointer from his code. You may end up spending lot of time in just catching the error in his code. As a team worker, it is your job to catch errors in his code. Many teams end up finding this too late.
7. Poor Documentation
Writing documentation of your software project takes lot of time. Programmers are often measured by the lines of code that they write. As a programmer, it is your responsibility to write proper documentation for the software that you are coding. Sometimes there is plenty of documentation to write. Programmers are bored to go through the old documentation and fix the errors.
8. Distraction-rich environment
Some clients put too much on programmers. They insist developer to come in their office and use their PC everyday to work on the project. Most start-up offices have too small place of work. Some service companies may not have enough number of clients. While sales and marketing teams can function and even thrive with some background noise. Something as small as ringtone can have significant negative impact on productivity of programmer.
