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While in school at the University of Illinois from 1995-2000, I spent some time working at NCSA. This was just a few short years after Marc Andreessen had worked there, but even by then, the stories about the development of Mosaic were starting to become legend.

His work on Mosaic with Eric Bina changed the world forever, and he’s clearly a brilliant guy, so I’ve always enjoyed hearing his thoughts on things.

His talk with Charlie Rose on the February 19 episode of The Charlie Rose Show is a great one. There are few conversations I enjoy watching more than when these two hook it up. You will, too. Give it a look.

Without fail, if you work at any small software company long enough, you will one day end up in a meeting where someone is introducing new ideas or new tools to “keep Engineering on track.”

“It seems like we’re slipping deadlines a lot lately.  With this tool, we’ll be better able to communicate the current status of Project XYZ and keep that from happening.”

This will undoubtedly have followed weeks of rumblings about how “the Engineering team is talented, but just seems to be a little off track.”

In my experience, when this happens, you can almost always bet that the Engineering team isn’t lacking process, it’s lacking passion.   And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that process can never replace passion.  Never.

This S%!t Is Gonna Be Huge, Man

Small, agile, talented engineering teams can change the world, but it can only happen when they passionately believe that this is in fact what they are doing.

That’s why hackathons are such a beautiful thing to watch.  That’s why startups in their first 6 to 12 months are such a beautiful thing to watch. 

Super-talented engineers often love both, because while some traditional rules of software development get broken, you’re completely engrossed in a blissful state of Flow.  Simply put, you’re passionate about what you’re doing and, because of it, you’re at the top of your game.

Fix The Right Problem

My advice for any Engineering organization that feels like there’s a process breakdown occurring is to investigate whether the real problem is that their engineers simply aren’t passionate about their current projects. Diagnose this incorrectly at your own peril, because introducing new formal processes when passion is low does nothing but bring the failboat into harbor more quickly.

How do you tell the difference? It’s fairly simple. If the general sense is that productivity is too low, and you’re attempting to introduce a process to raise it, you’re solving the wrong problem. On the flip side, if productivity and the rate of activity is so manically high that you need a tool to herd the cats and keep track of it all, you’re probably solving the right problem. Nicely done.

That’s More Like It

If there’s a passion problem, and you fix it, you won’t have an organizational problem with keeping them on task for 8 hours a day, you’ll have a problem of angry significant others asking where your employees are at and why they’re not making it home for dinner like they promised they would.

Passionate engineers won’t bitch about not having mockups for the latest design; they’ll get into Photoshop themselves and hack some up.  They won’t complain about not having completed specs; they’ll write up some user stories themselves and pitch you on them.  They won’t complain about having to write status reports; they’ll be excited and anxious to proactively show you what they’ve completed.

Before you know it, the urgent issue of “needing a better process” to “keep Engineering on track” will melt away, because in this environment your developers will do the extra work to fill the gaps and keep things moving. Count on it.