In article <11**********************@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups .com>,
<br**********@unisoncoaching.com> wrote:
Please forgive me if this is a little off topic, but I'm trying to
reach a population of active programmers and this newsgroup is an
popular gathering place.
I am conducting research on the relationship between some components of
organizational culture and the productivity of individual programmers,
development teams, and software companies. If you would be willing to
take 5 minutes to answer a few questions, you would help me very much
and win my undying gratitude.
This is NOT a stealth marketing campaign or a recruiting troll. Your
data is collected completely anonymously and will be reported only as
aggregate statistics.
Programmers are a bit more complex, and hence motivating them to be
productive is a bit more complex, than is implied by the quality of
questions in your survey.
Frankly, I'm a bit saddened that some company out there may take your
simplistic research and use it to try to motivate their programmers
but will instead end up insulting their intelligences with management
buzzword "solutions" to what might be some fairly entrenched and not
easily solved problems.
Some specific advice:
1. Read joelonsoftware.com, at least the stuff having to do with
programmers and management. While I disagree with a lot of his
conclusions, he does a great job of identifying the important areas
and outlining the real issues having to do with programmer
productivity.
2. If you want to do another survey, try asking open ended questions
instead of yes/no or agree/neutral/disagree questions. I dunno,
something like "what kinds of things would make you more
productive?" You'll get all kinds of lame answers like "free soda"
or "ping pong table in lounge" and a few very difficult answers like
"so and so is unfairly taking credit for my hard work" or "stock options
that are not $18 underwater" or "why bother when they're just going
to offshore my position in 6 months."
That's where you come in, to separate lame from serious.
Best of luck...it's not going to be easy.