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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slacking a few hours here and there from my duty as a Product Manager to a more mundane, less-appreciated, mind-numbing task. Namely, writing great software that actually works.

Cubicle dwellers are usually ranked in hierarchy by their geographical floor plan. The bigger your desk is, the higher you rank in importance. On a normal day I’d be running from my slightly bigger desk from one end of the office to the other end at top speed. Think of a cat running back and forth on a newly waxed slippery floor. It’s just a fun thing to do.

It wouldn’t be long before Human Resource starts putting up a sign that says “Walk, do not run” but that’s not due until the first casualty occurs. Most likely one that involves a cup of hot coffee on a deserving crotch.

Great office environment is almost non-existent in most software companies. They tend to treat programmers like factory workers on a production line, and for most part the people they hired deserves to be treated that way because they’re the below average developers whom only take instructions. Software companies like these have a philosophy that they only need 2% of employees to be brilliant and the rest are, well, code monkeys that feed on bananas and can be trained to perform tricks but not come up with a better one.

In my elite team, I tend to filter people out throughly. My colleagues tend to disagree because they say my standards are too high, but that depends where their benchmark is coming from. They took 7 years to figure out that they need a log file on the TCP/IP modules while I figured that out 7 years ago and actually implemented them.

It gets worse. When I called a meeting to plan out improvements on our documents and technical design, they said I can’t do that because then the other teams would clearly be seen left out and our customers would make unsatisfactory remarks on the quality distinction between modules. Guess what guys, that already happened and no one was harmed in the process. If anything, it should stir competition and desire to become better, not quench their spirit unless they’re genetically defective or a supporter of a Democrat bill for that sort of thing.

Which gets me back to talking about running in the office hallway. It’s an expression of freedom. In an office where great programmers, deserving prima donnas who should have been treated to a private working space behind a closed door, companies like these thinks that all programmers are equally monkeys that love to socialize.

For most part, I don’t blame them. There are too many pretenders; prima donnas wannabe that have tarnished the reputation of these authentic coders of codes that actually works. They claim credit to works that they copied from the Internet and whenever it breaks they usually blame it on a third-party, buying their time to fix a problem that would take a mere 10 minutes to fix if it weren’t for their stealthy incompetence.

Just this past week I had to steal (corporate espionage is one of my skills) a nebulous source code from a different team (where they refused to show their codes) to convince them where they’ve gone wrong.

Granted, some people are smart but they’re just no good at programming. They’d be better of doing something else, like management or marketing or taking the trash out but the problem is that these are weasel-proned jobs, and weasels are plenty in the programmer’s department since the Internet boom. Not all weasels get a promotion, and incompetence usually goes unpunished. Which also means competence is hardly recognized.

Good programmers are hard to find, and those that I have in my team, are the ones that I want to keep. They work great on their own without supervision, and I allow them to take sometime off from official tasks to work on something they like; RCP and GEF, for example. In the long run, it pays off because they work on acquiring new skills themselves.

While the office space may be beyond my control, I grant freedom to those that write excellent codes in the same way my VP says nothing about my deadly high-speed running around the office while humming Smurf tunes.