Applying 3 lessons from Star Trek to Software Engineering
For anyone that knows me offline, you will understand I am a big fan of Star Trek (very cliche). Personally, the most fascinating part of the Star Trek universe is the different species and their cultures. For example; it’s interesting to understand how the writers envisage the human race will evolve sociologically in 200 years. The writers seemingly have taken key parts of the human psyche/ways of living from our near past and adapted those to different species throughout the Star Trek universe.
One of the more widely debated cultures is that of the Ferengi. The Ferengi outwardly portray the capitalistic and free trade nature of modern society, to an extreme. To a Ferengi, earning profit is the key driver of success, at the expense of all other societal and personal endeavours. As their society evolved they formed a list of 285 rules which everyone in their society should live by; these are known as the ‘Ferengi Rules of Acquisition’. I have attempted to take 3 of these rules and apply it to field of software engineering and the Engineering Leadership role specifically:
Rule no. 43: Feed your greed, but not enough to choke it.
As an Engineering Leader you will constantly need to facilitate discussions with the development team, and other stakeholders around priorities; i.e. ‘What are we going to work on next?’.
I can guarantee, in any organisation, there will be a strong thirst from the development team to spend time addressing technical debt, and rightly so. It’s important for Engineers to want to improve the status quo and better their playing field. The role we can play as Engineering Leaders along with Product Leaders is to understand that desire and act as a translation service to non technical stakeholders to help understand the cost/value of these proposals and engage buy in.
This is where we can use rule no. 43 to apply a thought pattern here. As an engineering leader feeding that desire for the pursuit of technical excellence is extremely important, for the technical estate and team morale. We need to be careful, however, that we don’t choke ourselves whilst doing so. We need to ensure that we pick the right battles and, ultimately, that these proposed changes will enhance the delivery pipeline.