Lesson Learned: Developers and Free Time

"This is ridiculous", I gasped. Steps heavy with purpose and voice thick with satisfying exasperation. "How can I not have a project? What am I meant to do?". My colleague walked beside me, politely listening and nodding, offering no rebuttal. I considered this silence to be an acceptance of truth.

The project I've been working on for the past few months came to an end and I was ready for the next piece of work. The new adventure. When it wasn't presented to me immediately, I quickly grew frustrated.

That frustration wasn't pleasant, but something very interesting was born out of it. Productivity. Not direct, revenue generating, product owner pleasing productivity. Something a little more pure. Just a few people in a room, talking about the things that annoy us and how we can fix them. It was a pleasant reminder of why I'm a developer in the first place. I like to play with things and see if I can't improve them. I've experienced this before but always in an academic context; never in a professional setting.

The lesson I've taken from this is simple. If your developers don't have a project and they're on "the beach" (as the venerable ThoughtWorks like to call it), they're not wasting money. Have a think about their last projects. Raise these issues with them and get them thinking, discussing and hacking away. Value doesn't need to come in the form of direct revenue. Developers automating annoying parts of their day, or improving how they develop new code. That is value.

Summary: Value comes in lots of different forms. No official project doesn't mean no value delivered. If you are in between projects, trust and empower your developers to self organise around a problem in their day to day