Now You're Thinking With Systems

2012-08-03
One of the best Computing Science courses I took in university was actually more of a writing course. It focused on some of the well-known disastrous case studies of our field. It warned us against both technological utopianism and the idea that technology is somehow neutral in our society. It served us well by reminding us who our products work for: the users. People. Society. Humanity.I was indirectly reminded of this years later while working for a company in the hotel industry. Our dev team was being led and assisted by a few outside consultants. Along with architecture, processes, and best practices, part of their job was to change the dev team's culture. One teaching that has stuck with me is to actively fight the urge to develop an Us vs. Them mentality across teams. Dev vs. QA. Dev vs. Sales. Dev vs. Marketing. Dev vs. Management. The fact is,...