Nicholas C. Zakas – The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy):

“Software engineers aren’t builders. Software engineers are creators.

[…] In software there’s “not enough time” to gather all the requirements ahead of time. The importance of moving quickly is hammered into us from day one. And so engineers learn to fill in the gaps left by product managers just to keep the project going.

[…] The frequency with which people above us change their minds is incredibly frustrating for software engineers.

[…] We like building small things to ship quickly and then later combining them into a big thing. Why? Because that’s how we get our work out to people.

[…] Being creative people, we put up with all of this because we know that one day people will use our work. That’s really what drives software engineers more than anything else: the idea that people we don’t even know will be affected by our work.

[…] Make sure that your engineers have, every single day, at least four hours of uninterrupted time to code. […] Also, take at least one day a week to have no meetings. That includes daily standups.”

(Via Matthias Marschall.)