By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady
Two computer programmers sharing a single keyboard? Hey, it works, says our CEO as he reports on a novel form of job sharing.
Computer programmers have the reputation of being loners who sit in their cubicles, hunched over their keyboards, headphones on their ears, silent and oblivious to the rest of the world, for hours on end. They specialize in small, narrow aspects of business systems and work for months on narrow, focused programs. They are expected to work long hours, with overtime the norm.
That is not the way things are at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Instead, teams consisting of two programmers sit together, job-sharing on a single computer with a single keyboard. There are no cubicles. There are no iPods. There is a high noise environment as many teams working in a single, large room discuss and debate what they are doing.
At the end of each week, teams are reassigned. Different groups of two work on different jobs the following week. Overtime is almost unheard of.
Talking Through the Issues
The teams work by talking through issues. Then, typically, they rotate the work, with one member typing at the keyboard while the other reviews, comments, and instructs. “If there is not a lot of interaction and talking, they are not doing their jobs,” according to Richard Sheridan, the company founder and president.
Speaking at this year’s Work-Life 2007 Conference & Exhibition in Scottsdale, Arizona, Sheridan said that his company’s unusual work practices have allowed it to grow and prosper.
He said that most IT projects take twice as long as scheduled and cost twice as much as budgeted, largely because of the time needed to fix mistakes, such as when elements of a large program do not fit together. Menlo’s team practices, he reported, improve quality dramatically. Rotation of duties and staff ensures that everyone working on the project knows how the pieces fit together. “Team coding” (he calls it “extreme programming”) minimizes errors by making quality control a truly continuous process.
Breaking Down the Towers of Knowledge
Sheridan said that the practice is very popular with his staff for a variety of reasons. In traditional shops, programmers become “towers of knowledge” because of specialization, but as time goes on, they become prisoners to their specialties. Under his system, their knowledge is wider and their skills more versatile.
Someone in the audience asked if this wasn’t counter to the “introverted nature” of programmers. This is not a problem, according to Sheridan. “Introverts prefer fewer, deeper relationships,” he said, adding with a smile, “not like extroverts like me, who prefer lots of shallow ones.” They like being assigned to the teams, he said.
Sheridan ended by saying that the company is beginning to expand the “extreme programming” model to other jobs as well… including his own. Perhaps because he’s the company’s founder, he doesn’t need to share a computer with anyone. But he does share a single desk.