Setting the Bar Low

I work in a company that is primarily concerned with doing just enough to get the next contract. That is a demotivation for any employee who wants to keep up with technology, or branch out into a new area of development. The problem with that mindset is that it is difficult to convince anyone that any change is a good idea. You will be met with answers such as "It worked fine (we delivered something on time), why change?" and more simply "That's the way we do it."

That's a perfectly fine mindset if you are working on an assembly line. But, as I've stated repeatedly, treating software as simply production is to do disservice to it. More importantly, the company will lose their top developers who would quickly tire of doing the same thing over and over. But this is not change just for the sake of change. Rather, it is change for product improvement. Doing it better, and/or faster. Take the old vi argument. Sure, you can develop software in vi, but I can do it much faster with Netbeans or Eclipse. But the metrics are already skewed toward the development rate with vi, so I've now got free time on my hands. What do to with it? I'd like to work on something else, investigate something new, or otherwise improve the product in development, deployment, organization, or maintenance. But I'm told I can't, because "There's no budget" or "You're not authorized." So we keep on happily cranking out buggy whips (no pun intended).

Einstein's old adage "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" is well understood in a large company. The side of it that's not noticed is the side that wants to keep talented developers, but doesn't realize that we're really just doing the same thing over and over. What's really needed is to totally throw out the existing schedule and really challenge the developers. Don't give me three months to do a task, give me three weeks, or three days. You will get a radically different solution, simply by being prevented from solving the problem the same old way.