-Ofun

Here's an interesting link on development environments I found from Sami Shalabi. The premise is simple: create an environment that's fun to work in and your team will thrive. Fun in this context doesn't mean playful or frivolous, it just means a productive work environment. Developers want to create stuff. If you create an environment where people can work together to create, it will be fun.


Back in the day, Iris/Lotus used to include the goal of a fun environment in their mission statement. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, this was one of the first things expunged when the big blue glue flowed through the works. Right after the take over there was a new mission statement that clearly removed the word fun from the list of goals.


To be fair, I had some of the most fun of my career working at IBM. Unfortunately this was short lived and probably only occurred because we were working on the first version of Workplace in a kind of stealth mode outside the normal bureaucracy.

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