There's Something About Techies

We need to speak about our technologists again - what are they like? Who are they? Who needs to spend time comprehending them and accommodating their needs? Obviously, the most immediate answer is "the team leader" but anyone who has a vested interest in getting a product job done in a certain time frame and has therefore realised that waterfall won't suit their needs and has instead introduced agility. Is it their own tech peers, their managers or HR? All of the above.

Of them, let's be honest, the one least equipped to do so is HR. Not only can they not relate on a professional level with the lives led by technologists because their own professional experience called for less of the extreme qualities techies develop over their years in the field, but they don't have any practice of the pace, philosophy or purpose of Agile. Of course, many HR orgs know what Agile is and many are running some of their own programs in Agile methodologies, and, encouragingly, we see more and more "woke HR" type of consultancies or solution makers popping up by the day, sometimes run by technologists as is our case at PeopleNotTech so chances are, in the future this gap in understanding will disappear but for now, as a broad stroke let's admit - HR doesn't understand either the psyche of developers or the pace of work and learning they have to keep.

HR and Technology... what a topic. Does HR comprehend what it takes to support and empower tech teams? Do they have what it takes? I'm bracing myself for what kind of reactions this article may get, there's always backlash -if I'm lucky, it will be "out loud" and in a fashion that encourages exploration and dialogue, if I'm very unlucky some may feel so insulted it would have cost us some client engagement or other but for the most part, it will be of the eye-rolling and dismissing me kind. And that's ok. If I liked being liked there are many other avenues I ought to have taken and none involve fighting to bring business, HR and Tech together working on the human work so that technologists have a better life.

The more time I spend thinking of this -and I'm delighted to semi-break the news here that there's a new book announcement on the way so there will be much more time spent researching and thinking of just this, the more I believe that technologists have a significantly different mentality than people working in other fields.  I believe that technologists have a significantly different mentality than people working in other fields. And I also believe that there's no deep exploration to discover the adaptive mindset advantage that technologists with an agile thinking frame have and how to replicate it and nurture it.

To me, it stands to reason that, the experiences of technologists while obviously individual, shaped by their own prism and that of their context, multifaceted and complex, have very strong characteristics that are common. All technologists (and my broad stroke definition does not stop at developers but product people, ops people, delivery people and obviously all the agilists and the scrum masters, etc, the CTO, the testers, the technical writers, the technology solution sellers, the consultants advising on tech, you get the picture, everyone that comes in contact and creates technology in some way, shape or form) all of them have some things in common, a shared lived experience.