Employee compensation

Should we train the team?

Note: probably, this quote belongs to Steve Baker, but I'm not sure as I've heard it in narration.

SPAM should be short

If you are sending SPAM, and really want it to be read by someone... keep it short, very short.

"Gurus"

Will you ever read a book called "How to become a millionaire" if it's written by a person who has never made a million dollars?.. So why do people blindly trust IT trainers who have never completed even a single significant software project successfully?

Are we motivated well?

Yesterday, one of my friends forwarded me the link to very interesting presentation on motivation factors, and I want to share it with you. The style is really impressive, and some findings are quite surprising:



Few years ago, I wrote about Self-Motivation indicating that beginners are more motivated because they want to be recognized. The video above describes it as the natural need of mastery.

Does it mean that quick salary growth can kill this need of perfecting oneself and reduce both performance and personal value significantly?

What happens to task board stickers when a sprint finishes

What do you do with completed story stickers when a sprint finishes? I believe that most people just throw they away.

Some time ago when I was visiting one of our scrum teams, I noticed the following scrum rose, which illustrated amount of user stories completed during the sprint:
More petals this flower has means more stories completed during the sprint. When there are several scrum teams working on the same project, they can even use such roses to illustrate overall project progress and dynamic during recent sprints.

Disclaimer: the picture was taken without permission from that particular development team. So I'll remove the article if any team member asks me to do it.

Time Management :)

IT Salaries in Belarus (Year 2009)

Long time since my previous post... Well, as it was expected year 2009 was a busy one, and it brought a set of changes both to IT industry and IT labor market.

Beginning of January is a good time to look back at the previous year, so I'm publishing updated salary statistics that was collected from Belarus software development companies.

While combining this statistics I have not been using any materials available in public domain, so do not be surprised that provided charts are significantly different from information available on dev.by and some other web sites. Yet, several sentences, which explain the meaning of the charts, were copied from one of my previous posts on the same topic.


The first image contains two curves, that reflect proportion of the actual salary values in comparison to the maximum value reached during this period of time. Please note, that two lines differ only in the rate between USD and Euro currencies.

As we can see, average salary in USD/EUR equivalent returned to the level it was 2 years ago.




The second chart shows salary growth level for different categories of expertise. In the terms of this article, the following terminology is being used:

• beginner - entry level technician (0 years of experience);
• specialist - intermediate level (1-2 years of experience in particular area);
• professional - advanced level (3-4 years of experience in particular area);
• expert - a professional with 5 or more years of experience in particular area.

Average went down for all categories, however most experiences specialists lost less than others, which is not surprising because companies tried to keep valuable players especially in this crisis time.



On the next chart, you can see how much IT people earns in comparison to Experts' salaries. Please keep in mind, that Expert's salary doesn't mean highest possible salary in the industry. In this data, it's the average among IT professionals having strong experience in particular area.

As it was stated above, the difference between Experts' salary level and other levels of expertise was increasing during the last year and a half.



The next two images take into account the level of inflation. It might look strange, but last year (2009) was better than 2008 for most IT specialists in terms of the purchase power. Average salaries in USD went about 12.5% down, but local currency exchange rate changed much more outrunning the inflation.


The last chart shows, how the salary grows while a person gets her/his IT experience. Red line uses historical data from the previous graph. Blue line uses only up-to-date salaries and assumes that they are not changing through time for each level of IT employee expertise.



NO charts or source data from this article can be re-republished without written permission from Serge Stepantsov, this blog author.

Why customers do not want Agile

In one of my recent article s I wrote about misunderstanding of Agile development term in the community of IT specialists. Now, I want to share my notes about interaction between customers and software development teams who pretend to follow agile. In other words, I want to continue the topic why customers do not like Agile even with developers who think they do know what Agile is.

One of Agile development principles is close interaction between developers and a customer. Extreme Programming, for example, insists that the customer has to be on site. Scrum says that the customer (product owner) is completely responsible for maintaining the Product Backlog.

Well, it would be ideal situation, and developers believe it has to be such, and otherwise Agile does not work!

Really? If you believe in this conclusion, then forget about Agile... forever :) or, at least, postpone until you learn this methodology better.

If you believe that Agile can also work in real world, which is far away from being ideal, then let's continue.

Let's think about the reasons why customers do order software development service instead of hiring personal programmers The reasons are simple:

1. They do already have their own IT team (by the way, it can be a one-person team - the customer himself/herself), need to extend it, but can't do it by hiring new employees.
2. They do not have IT department, so they want to find some professionals outside who will solve their IT problem.
   

In the case of staff augmentation, the customer usually already has their own development process. It might or might not be Agile. But it's already established, and to change it we have to show that our approach is better than their existing. So to start following Agile we have to follow Agile showing its benefits. Hm... to start follow Agile we have to follow Agile. Seems like a dead end.
Actually not, if we say it in a different way: to involve the customer with his local IT team in Agile, we need to follow Agile ourselves demonstrating value of this methodology.

In the second case, the customer expects that a software development company will solve her/his IT problem completely, not just code some his ideas. The customer expects that professionals will say how to implement his idea and even to recommend some extends. Of course, she/he doesn't want to create hundreds of papers that we call story cards and toss them to some Product Backlog. All they want is to receive what they need :-)

So, the customer do not want Agile, until it's explained as a set of extra bureaucratic steps required from her/his side.

The solution is really very easy: do not expect the customer to do the work they wanted to avoid when ordering your service, and you will see they do not mind Agile :-)

IT Salaries in Belarus (October 2008): crisis or just an expected trend?

I've updated salary statistics information, so graphs on Salary Statistics in IT, Belarus page shows fresh values.

We can clearly see that average salary went down last few month. However the trend looks quite similar to one, that we could see during the same period of time in 2006 and 2007.

The only sign of the crisis is the difference in salary equivalent in Euro. But it's still doesn't mean significant problems in IT business.

May be it's too early to make conclusions.