This week while I was talking to my co-worker and he said “your team is delivering on time and needs to slow down so we can catch up”. He was 100% joking. It just happens that my team isn’t facing the issues the other teams are having. But it got me thinking… In development there is only one thing that matters.
Do you deliver on time!
It’s as simple as that! Can you deliver your code on time every time? I don’t care weather you code in Swift, Java, SQL or whatever. As an engineer you have one responsibility and that is to deliver on time.
Now I know you are going to say it has to be high quality. And I agree with that. But if you code passes QA then the quality is there, right?
Look I’ve been a developer for 20 years and the one thing that sets me apart is I can close! Just like a top sales person I close 100% every time. Do you?
You are most likely a better coder than me. You know every frame work and all the latest and greatest. Big Deal… So What… All I want to know when I hire developers is do you deliver on time every time?
Think about this… Developers work in 2-week cycles called Sprints. Before the sprint the developers sit in a room and scope out what they are going to work on for the next 2 weeks. So not only are the committing to the work but they are deciding how much work they will do.
It’s the greatest job in the world. I tell you how much work I will do and you just have to accept it. If I’m lazy I can commit to very little and if I’m crazy I’ll over commit. Either way, the developer gets to set the bar and everyone in the company has to deal with it.
So I’ll repeat it again (a little stronger this time)…
If you cannot deliver on time you suck!
The one thing I always stress to my teams is “If we deliver on time we all are going to get a raise and be loved. If we don’t, we are going to have to have bullshit meetings and point fingers. People are going to get poor reviews and possibly fired.”
It doesn’t matter where you went to college, where you work or how amazing you can code.
I have only one question: “Can you deliver a finished product on time?”
Contact Me!
Jeremy@jeremycallahan.com
Twitter: @jeremycallahan
Jeremy Callahan is a Mobile Commerce Expert, App Developer and Founder at Flip Shop Marketing