Brian On Software

What a great joy I had reading, this morning on my way to church, “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)“, an 80-pages book written by prolific blogger and marketing guru Seth Godin.  The author has an unique writing style that I enjoy very much because he delivers his message in many ways by using simple terms, concrete examples, proven facts, and sound statistics.  In a nutshell, the basic idea of his book is that whether you aspire to succeed in your personal and professional life (who doesn’t?), or whether you want to be the best in the world at what you do (you being yourself, your team, your company, etc.) or whether you want to achieve your goals on time, you should accept this little fact: sometimes quitting is a winning strategy.  That being said, it’s more important to know what to quit, when to quit, why to quit and how to quit something (a relationship, a job, a project, an education, etc.).  The author does a great job at describing sound strategies you can choose whenever you’re in that moment in life and need to take proper action: should I continue or should I stop?  In software development, we are more often than not forced to make this kind of decision:

• Should we continue using this process to build our software?  Or should we perhaps stop and decide to change it or replace it because it’s not getting us very far?  And what if we’re in the middle of an iteration?
• Should we continue developing this application?  Or should we perhaps stop and decide to buy one from a third party?
• Should we continue putting our resources in the development of this feature?  Or should we perhaps cancel this feature and concentrate our resources on other more important features?
• Should we continue with this process improvement methodology or should we stop and rethink our strategy?

I could go on and on…

So what exactly is this ‘Dip’?  As it is written in the book’s back cover:

It’s the fifth job interview where they never even call you back.

It’s the garage band playing to an empty club in the middle of nowhere.

It’s the seventh time you fall on your butt while learning to snowboard.

It’s the middle of the marathon, when the excitement of the starting gun is a dim memory, and the joy of the finish line is a distant dream.

It’s any rough patch you have to get through before achieving your big goal…if in fact you’re chasing the right goal.

What else?

Oh yeah, it’s also the key to your career, your company’s future, and maybe your ultimate happiness.

I’m often in situations where I need to ask myself this same question when developing software.  For example, should I continue building my application with the initial design or should I pause for a moment and perhaps modify the initial design to reflect some changes?  Should I really invest my time in learning this new tool, this new technology or this new language?  Should I continue working on this open source project that I started a year ago?  Should I invest in this hardware to support my software?  Why? Why not?   There’s always a tradeoff when you take a decision.  Knowing what the tradeoffs are and knowing what strategies you have at your disposal is essential to adapt to the situation and successfully reach your goals. 

I strongly encourage software developers to extend their knowledge beyond ‘just software’.  See what you can learn from other cultures, leadership, team work, continuous self-improvement, etc.  I believe that the real foundation of a software is neither the tools nor the technologies, but the people (at least 95% of the time).  And since people’s behaviours change more often than requirements, it’s important to know how to adapt at any moment.  Sometimes quitting something you were working on can be the best long-term strategy you could have chosen to successfully reach your goals.

As another quote from the author,

Whether you’re a graphic designer, a sales rep, an athlete, or an aspiring CEO, this fun little book will help you figure out if you’re in a Dip that’s worthy of your time, effort, and talents. If you are, The Dip will inspire you to hang tough. If not, it will help you find the courage to quit-so you can be number one at something else.

I won’t tell you more about the book, because I think you’ll do yourself a better favour in investing a couple of hours to read it on your own. 

Meanwhile, I’ll invite you to read Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Seth Godin on The Big Dip: Ten Questions with Seth Godin, and also take a look at Kevin Donaldson’s review on the book.