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Practical realities of pushing budgeting decisions to developers
In my company, I have a simple rule. If you want a tool, ask for it, you’ll get it. If you want training, ask for it, you’ll get it. If you want technical books, let me know, you’ll get it. I don’t ask questions, and I don’t try to enforce any rules around that. I got requests for things like Pluralsight subscription (very relevant) and technical books on topics that we probably would never touch (which I happily purchased). But by far, I don’t get many requests for stuff. Things gotten so bad that we had a marketing effort internally to get people to ask for stuff.
I’ll repeat that: I had to actively make it attractive to have people send me an email “can you get us XYZ”.
There is no tedious process involving multiple pitches and getting buy in. There is literally just send an email and you’ll get it. And people don’t take advantage of this option.
Recently, I tried outsmarting my folks, and put that as an item for the current sprint. Something like: “Suggest a courses / conference / training that you should to this quarter”. I got push back from the team leaders, saying that no one could find something that they wanted to go to.
I’m still in the process of trying to find a solution to this problem, to be frank.
I thought about just giving individual people a budget and just letting them handle that directly. That actually fails for a bunch of reasons:
How do you pay for this? Simplest would be to just have the developers pay and reimburse them for that money. I don’t like this option, because there is no need for the dev to float money for the company. Especially since some of these can be fairly high. The cost of a training course, for example, can be thousands of dollars. At that point, it is likely that we are going to have a discussion on this anyway, so I might as well pay that directly. The same applies for tooling / books, etc (although they usually cost less).
Of more interest to me is that if there is a tool / training that one dev wants to go, it is likely that others will want as well. That matters, because you can usually get volume discounts instead of paying for multiple individual options.
Finally, there are tools, and then there are tools. What sort of text editor you use doesn’t really matter to me. Nor do I care what sort of Git client you use. But a tool that is used to generate code, or part of the build / test process, is something that I do care about and want to look at.
What we end up with is a situation where you can’t decentralize the process, but we also can’t seem to get the people involved to just ask.
I would like to hope that this is because they have everything they need. I have tried to make the process as smooth and painless as possible, with no takers. At this point, I’m just going to go an meditate over this bit of wisdom.
Comments
I absolutely love this! I do have some experience with this as an employee. When I'm new to a company it takes time to be comfortable enough to ask for the things that I need let alone things that would be nice to have. Also sometimes as an employee I think with my wallet thinking if its expensive to me, its must be expensive to the company, and it would be rude or greedy to ask for a company to provide me with something I couldn't afford my self. After I get comfortable then I may ask for things. I think most people who enjoy development want to keep learning and growing their skills, and this is a great opportunity for them to do so. I hope your employees realize this and take advantage of it.
I had a manager once that required that once per quarter we were to unplug from the work network and do an 8 hour self directed training day and then prepare a 1 hour presentation for the group on what we learned and any potential for us to incorporate the tools or training that we had chosen. One of my favorite policies now. At another group the manager picked up 8 copies of Uncle Bob's Clean Code and sanctioned a once a week one hour book club which led to some fantastic discussions about styles and patterns.
Instead trying to convince the devs to ask for budget, how about ask them to try one new tool, tech, language, book each month of their choosing and share the experience with everyone in a 10 min presentation at end of month.
For me, it is often more about having time than money to learn or try something new then getting any book or tool.
If more companies were like this.. I've been through many companies where the developers have to justify the need for tools like Resharper, to fight for 2 tickets to a conference that cost 200-300$ or to explain why they need 24 instead of 16 GB RAM on the development workstation.. :( It seems the bigger a company gets, more bureaucratic it becomes.
Where I work you can't even have 2 monitors.
Have you tried to push the ownership of getting developers to buy stuff onto the team leaders? This takes the job to the people who know the developers best?
Otherwise I'd be looking into gamifying it. Make it public who has requested stuff and reward them with "internet points" this provides them with an incentive to ask for what they need and can show those more introverted/new/shy/etc. that it is a good thing to ask for stu.
Paul,
We tried that, people got stage fright because of that and couldn't sleep at night.
Bruno,
The baseline dev machine here is based on my machine's specs.
James, At some point, I have to stop and ask myself if I'm trying to hard.If I need to gamify things, that is probably it.
If the requests have become less over time could it be that the average age of your work force has increased? Seeing things from a different perspective can help. Perhaps you can get some team event to e.g. a high tech lab of a chip maker and get some details about chip verification software. It could be an interesting experience to see how software in a different domain is developed together with hardware. After such a trip I would hope that some new books lying around in the office about new stuff can find more readers than before.
I wish our company was like that, trying to buy anything is such a pain and we are a small company <15. I'm even stuck with an outdated version of NHProfiler that no longer works
I hear from colleagues that most conferences are not worth going to. You learn little. It's my impression, too.
Maybe offer to your employees to take work-time to learn anything they like? Same time cost as a conference or training.
Interested to hear your opinion on that.
Tobi,
That is something that we are also doing, yes. We'll see how it goes in 6 - 12 months.
Thanks.
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