Behind the code

“Software Developers need to write code which means something to the consumers who are going to consume that code, specially on how that code will provide a “Wow” experience which inspires them to share this experience with the World” (Pedro Fernandes)

The job market in Mozambique has been interpreted by recruitment companies as not skilled or talented enough up to degree which would fit a major organization profile, specially when we compare the local workforce with the rest of the World. In the early years of my amazing and grateful journey in one of the multinational companies in Country, I was also exposed to this perception and belief by some of my foreign peers who I used to work with at the time.

Likewise, in the opposite way, I always had the perception that the so called developed countries, don’t have the resilience, drive, ambition and capability to strive beyond the economic and social challenges as we do, specially when we look at the young generation of the 20s and 30s. To witness the creativity, drive, passion and resilience of the Mozambique's young entrepreneurs, the great talent in some organizations, and the birth of new startups which are having an impact in society, made me "construct" this belief that skills and degree are not the main ingredient for us to succeed in life, specially in the Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous and Digital (VUCAD) world we live in. All boils down to Attitude, discipline and consistency. 

I believe each one of us is able to learn quick enough and upskill ourselves through self learning as any other individual around the World. If we look specifically at the local software development community, the talent and skills are there, and some might be just dormant because of the context they are exposed to.  

This is the main reason why I have decided to motivate and lead the creation and deployment of a software development department to inherent our software development journey which is mainly outsourced. The vision has always been to put Mozambique in the Map as one of the best Center of Excellence of Software Development, promote the exposure of the best software developers in country to a Global Software Development Community, contribute to the local software development resource upskilling, contribute to the Open Source Software Development community not only in country but worldwide and, to finalize, promote the birth of new startups which will be led by the software developers which have been through this journey with us and consequently enable the development of the local ecosystem with impact on society and economy. 

Because I have this firm belief that we will not succeed alone and because each one of us around the World have a role to play in the creation and materialization of a more collaborative World where we evolve together, I have decided to share with you the principles I have followed throughout this journey to create this amazing structure with different teams of amazing and outstanding souls.

“Impossible” is a word which you should take out from your Vocabulary, when you want to pursue your dreams

When I was reflecting about the vision and mission of our software development journey, once considered to be impossible, I got exposed to a Steve Jobs speech at Harvard. I felt so emotionally connected to it, that I have placed it in the list of my favorite speeches, and up to today, occasionally, I still listen to it. In that speech there was a phrase which struck me in profoundly manner:

“If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right” (Steve Jobs)

If we apply this principle to our dreams, and if we break them down into actionable items, from the moment we assume something is impossible or that we can’t do, we will most probably be right, because we will be the ones setting ourselves the limited boundaries and constructing those beliefs. So my first step was to get over this thinking. It took me 4 years to bring it to reality. 

Build your support system to turn what you want into reality

“… It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do…” (Steve Jobs)

In the university days, I always considered myself as a very good programmer. Today, as some people call me oldie, dinosaur … more specifically Pedrosaur 😊 😊 , or belonging to the past generation. I look back and understand how much of that is actually true, if I compare the programming languages used in the university at the time and in some of the work I developed compared to what is used today. Cobol, Assembly, Pascal, C, Prolog and very little of the early days of Java, surely are nowhere near the most used programming languages in the world today. Nevertheless, I find very positive to have the foundation of the software development languages, specially considering that C language is considered to be the mother of all programming languages which were created since then.  

So it’s important to ensure that you have someone next to you on this journey. This individual will be your soul mate, your right arm which will believe the vision and lead the mission, but above all, that person will be your teacher. And here is an important catch which leaders do not take into account or are fearful when setting up new structures or departments, which is to

hire individuals which are, by far, more evolved in terms of knowledge, vision and boldness.

What will probably happen as a result, is not only you will evolve, but the end product will be far better than what you’ve envisioned.

Learn how to sell your vision

Communicate your vision with clarity, passion and a belief that it can be materialized with the people you are bringing onboard. Make them believe in something which is beyond themselves, but also what it’s in for them which should be sufficiently appealing for them to join, first your vision and mission, and then your organization. Ask yourself :

• What will differentiate yourself from a “normal” software development organization?
• What you really want to be different?
• Why the developers should believe in you and your vision?
• What will make your cause appealing not only from an upskilling perspective, but also from a career growth/path perspective? 

Always remember 

“If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, they key is to become a person of quality yourself” (Jim Rohn)

Deconstruct the generalist myth

This means that you shouldn’t expect to have a team which has the principle of everyone knows how to do everything. The idea is to deconstruct the generalist myth, and build a structure consisting of members which are skilled in a particular field, with the intent of bringing efficiency through the value streams of the SDLC and be more strategic when it comes to scale or restructure, and provide a space for each team member to “unleash the dragons” of creativity. Each individual who joins your team should join for a deep sense of purpose.

A vital part of setting up the structure, is segregating and setting up how and which team will manage the software development applications and infrastructure, and how the transition from development to operational will be done and under which team structure. The risk of not doing this, is you ending up with developers doing operational work, going against all the principles of a proper software development structure. It’s important to take into account that for this kind of structure to succeed, communication plays an important role, as the different specialists spend a sufficient amount of time interacting with each other. Therefore, communication skill become important when it comes to discuss project details, perform assessments, negotiate timelines, etc. 

Operating Model 

Your aim should be to deliver software with a quality beyond of what the customer thought they wanted. The buy product should not be the end product, but the emotion you will be able to trigger in your customers with the experience they have from using the product. 

This is where the foundation of your operating model becomes important. Share what is expected in terms of standards of excellence, expected behaviors and what are the unacceptable rubrics in each of your development practices. Why? Because the idea is not only to mold software developers, but individuals to strive at their personal and work lives. If one day they leave, they should leave with a sense of fulfillment and with a remarkable experience for their lives.

This should also include how will you adapt and become flexible to the continuous emergence of new software development tools and frameworks, and what will make sense to test or not and why, creating a practice of proper pros and cons analysis so that you can always say you’ve been there and have all the evidences to support the decisions.

Nurture and master the craft of choosing the right tools

With the variety of tools available, selecting the proper software development tools can be quite overwhelming, and it’s surely not a thumb suck exercise, or about doing a search on google to find out what fits into your strategy. It’s also not about copying what others have done on their journey either. You can always leverage on the expertise and insights, but don’t expect to find tools which will become the silver bullet and solve all your problems and challenges. That is a myth. Having the right tools implies looking at what do you want, what budget you have available, what categories you may want to consider (IDE, Source controls, CI/CD, Security, Testing, API Gateways and Integrators, etc), what golden rules your organization has from a technology perspective, how much of learning curve you are willing to tolerate based on the team’s background, despite the fact that in your hiring process, it’s expected for you to hire individuals with two major “skills” such as flexibility and adaptability. The reason behind this is because throughout this journey, it’s expected for you to run Proof-of-Value or trials to evaluate new tools which will fit your evolving purpose. Just because of what is above mentioned, it’s clear that the software development journey is a life learning process which will never end and should be continuously adapted and reinvented to fit the purpose of the SDLC itself and of the organizational goals.  

Manage the immediate ROI fallacy 

So how much do you think it takes to setup a proper software development structure? I have no straight answer, or an answer which can be considered correct, because all depends on your vision, on what is the foundation which will hold your SDLC, on the internal processes of your organization, etc. There are two things you need to understand in this space.

1.      From a software development perspective, time to market will not be reduced by coding faster or code optimization, but by optimizing the whole process of value chain which include dependencies within the SDLC and of other departments.

2.      A Software development structure comes do disrupt the value chain process as we know, and how it has been driven before its existence. Therefore, there are underlying processes which need to evolve as part of this journey.

One of the things which will arise from this process is the pressure from leadership to get an immediate return of investment (ROI) based on the investment done on headcount, tools, and infrastructure, justified also by the cost return factor which sustained the approval of the development structure. You will surely have situations of executives asking you, “How complex can it be to just code and get things done?” or who will compare your journey with other department/organization software development journeys. To minimize this exposure, a clear, concise, and constant communication upwards on the progress being done and getting everything set up becomes crucial. The message will eventually reach the top level, however, irrespective of that, nothing should deviate you from the discipline, focus and consistency you need to have throughout the process. You need to embrace the pain and the challenge of incurring costs and not deliver anything visible to the business within the expected leadership timeline. Failing to manage this accordingly is room for an overall failure on your journey. 

Embrace a state of “Flow”

Create such a team dynamic that you are able to switch or rotate positions as “pieces of a chess board”, embracing a state of “Flow” as if it was a beautiful dance, where despite people changing positions, the quality is not compromised. Software development is one of the most challenging departments to manage, as people like to be pushed to the limits of their creativity, skills and out of their comfort zone. To keep a software development team motivated has to do with your ability to continuously boost their creativity and your ability to “let them go” and trust them on new challenges. 

Ensure you have something to keep you awake at night

Many times, I have this thing of waking up at night to write an idea, or a thought on a notebook or laptop, probably because I have a superficial sleep I would say.

This might be a strange and awkward advice, but when you are leading in the technology space, you should have several things which should keep you awake at night. Software development belongs to that space, and it’s not different. Something within this space should make you stay awake at night, and if your head is not running 1000 rpm with two basic questions,

• what else can I do to improve?
• What would trigger the inner spark of innovation, creativity and passion within the people belonging to that space?

then most probably you need to follow another path in your career.  

You will loose people

Software development skills are at a high demand around the world and will continue to be in the future as technology evolves. This means that today, competitiveness in the market is not only for market share, services, technology, etc but also for people & talent. Even if you hire the best, and you believe you provide them all the benefits & conditions, bottom line is that while that is reality today, tomorrow is an utopia. The sad truth is that you need to be prepared to loose people, and you need to understand in detail the WHYs behind each loss, so that you can adjust, fix, and evolve in your capability to retain talent. 

My journey in the software development space is still in its early stages and with baby steps, and most probably in the future more articles will follow to share this amazing journey, with new insights, new perspectives, lots of successes, failures and opportunities. We have already succeeded in setting up the structure, but now we need to transition to another level where the results of this period of nurturing and detailed preparation become visible to the end consumer. I hope this article inspires and serves as a guideline for those starting this journey. 

With love, gratitude and respect 

Pedro Fernandes