Shiny Happy ... Developers by Semi Coen

Happiness is an interesting term. I was working with an engineer a few years ago who was struggling to gel at his new org. Digging in, it seemed that he had had a great deal of ability to influence the product at his previous job. The new job had a product team that made all the decisions and rarely included engineering input in prioritizing. We talked about, if he was going to make that job stick, finding other ways to direct his desire to participate in diverging activities. Some of them included ideas like turning inward towards the team and thinking about CI/CD as developer experience products. As I said this, his eyes started to light up a bit, so I said "I think doing this, you might even find yourself happy at this new job."

He gave me the strangest look. "Happy?"

After an awkward pause, we picked up the conversation by talking about the past. The idea of happiness at work, for a variety of reasons, was both foreign and somewhat threatening to him. This is an engineer, BTW, who you never would guess would be anything but confident and, dare I say, happy at work.

So when I hear developer happiness, I'm interested, and I think of that conversation, and also this tweet by Marco Rogers.