Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way.
A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen."
Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way."
YMMW on the practicality of his advice, but it was super inspiring.
Without knowing Alexander's concept in detail, once I learned to work (and live) that way, doing otherwise has seemed like a waste of time, almost pointless. The only point is that, unfortunately, many people don't understand - and scoff at - working 'with love', but in those cases I often feel like I'm mostly building a road to nowhere.
I once had a high trust (love) team. We kicked ass. Together. I miss it every day. Everything since has tasted like ash. I've been trying to get back to that happy place ever since. Sadly, I eventually stopped talking about trust (in the workplace) IRL; people don't much like crazy talk or zealots.
I've been on a number of teams like that, and miss them. There's a phrase 'the song of friends at work' that I can't find the source of, but it serves as a kind of navigation point for me as I try to steer my career and efforts.
This is the reason I changed how I approached software projects. Alexander made me rethink how software should be built: with love for the user, but also with love for other developers.
Adjust your own mask before helping others with theirs.
It always appalls me when developers reason that a software development system that barely functions for themselves will somehow result in an application that the users will enjoy paying to use.
Software that doesn’t work for the developers will eventually stop working for everyone else too.
> This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world—and above all the built structure of the world—alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure. I realize that you may be surprised by my conclusion. This is not what I am, technically, supposed to have been talking about to you. Or you may say, Well, great idea, but we're not interested. I hope that is not your reaction. I hope that all of you, as members of a great profession of the future, will decide to help me, and to help yourselves, by taking part in this enormous world-wide effort. I do think you are capable of it. And I do not think any other professional body has quite the ability, or the natural opportunity for influence, to do this job as it must be done.
>"Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way."
Interesting quote. It really makes me think about the great resignation and WFH movement. I think lots of people truly were asleep to how bad their job and consequently life had become due to working with all the negative corporate aspects of America. This is a succinct way to describe the trend.
I wonder if we will see drops in pharmaceutical and alcohol sales in the coming years.
I wouldn't call it love per se, but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
Alexander advocated getting the people who would live or work in the buildings involved in the design and construction of the buildings. Get the people who will live in the place out in the field and work together to peg out the outlines of the buildings & refine the design.
This philosophy is succinctly summarised in the book Peopleware:
> local control of design by those who will occupy the space
Unfortunately this aspect of Alexander's philosophy of letting the users participate in the design, construction or customisation of building and towns was ignored, while the other idea of design patterns became very popular when adapted to software.
Some software is built for a market where the buyers are the end-users to software. Other software is built for markets where the purchasing decision is made by a committee of stakeholders, perhaps excluding the people who will be the day to day users of the software. If you contrast the two in terms of usability, you can start to appreciate what Alexander was getting at.
It isn’t as if the tech was not out there, but we made a conscious choice to move away from user-participation platforms — Hypercard and Smalltalk among the examples.
Minecraft has some of these elements, and is why it is fun for people.
Arguably, Roblox is the largest scale example, though my understanding is that it is still not so easy that end users can really participate in creating their own designs.
I have several junior developers on my team who came from the customer success / support side of the business who grew themselves into developer roles. They typically have not only the strongest desire to learn & improve, but also the most empathy and understanding of our impact on customers & their livelihood.
I believe every developer needs to spend regular time in a customer-facing support role (if possible). They will learn much more clearly how difficult (or less likely easy) their product is to use.
Yes! If you can get somebody on your team that has worked their way up from, for example, a customer service contact center, they'll be immensely valuable. Just their insight on what customers love and hate about your product is probably worth their hire.
This was my path into software development! It's served me so well, now I want to figure out how to "recruit" future engineers from customer service teams.
The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their teams.
I think it's a long term obvious win. If you care larger, you avoid painting yourself in corners. See what really needs to be done, do just that and enjoy the harmony.
I worked in the ad industry for years and made good money doing it. I now work, unpaid, on a FOSS passion project.
What I would advise is treating each job as a college course which you also happen to be paid for. For me, this meant not allowing myself to become emotionally invested in the work, taking good notes about what I learned each day, and looking for a new job (typically with a raise) once those notes were sparse for too long.
A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen."
Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way."
YMMW on the practicality of his advice, but it was super inspiring.