2013/03/11

The importance of trusting your developers

It’s not the first time, and sadly it won’t be the last, that I’ve had to work behind a paranoid firewall. I can understand an enterprise concern with regular employees surfing the web unrestrained (I’ve seen computers rendered almost useless from large infestations of virus, malware and other things I’d rather not mention). But developers? Please...

At my last gig there was no access to any cloud storage service. None? Really? That’s what they thought, any geek could find a way to export data, even with USB ports disabled! But restricting cloud storage makes sense, you limit potentially dangerous traffic which you must monitor.

But restricting access to social networks, blogs, etc? What year is this? Don’t these people know we live in an ever-changing environment? What are they trying to accomplish with these restrictions? Maybe this? Or this? I’m confused...



In order to keep our knowledge sharp we need to access developer communities, blogs, forums, custom libraries, etc... We need to interact with other developers so that we can learn from them. That includes chatting with them, sending them emails with code snippets, hearing their issues and trying to resolve them...

My last blog post is a perfect example, I finished it with a question: “How do you mock all dependencies of a unit under test without dependency injection?” I thought there was no answer but, after no more than 3 hours of being published, +Maarten Seghers gave me a great solution to my problem.

Had I been able to reach the hive-mind before, my productivity would have skyrocketed. But no, I was behind a paranoid firewall. Let me finish with another question: If an employer doesn’t trust their IT experts, why did it hire them in the first place?

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