Bridging the Gap

According to researchgate.com 57% of software engineers programmers are introverts as opposed to only 50.9% of the general population. 67% of programmers would rather appraise the facts of a situation than try to intuit their way through it. 81% prefer to think on a topic instead of introspect on their feelings about the matter. So what does this all mean?

If communication is difficult, communicating with programmers is at least doubly so. Traditional businesses who try to formulate a software division in order to meet their own needs tend to focus on the team initially, but soon treat them as mushrooms in a dark closet. This is typically A-OK individual developer, as programmers don't like noise. I don't mean noise like Nicky Minaj or Skrillex. I'm talking about mandatory meetings, team building exercises, group projects, and continuous interruption of their Flow. But managing programmers is an affront to this, because detailed information feedback is required all the time. The secret is that good programmers incorporate code versioning systems into their everyday workflow, and these systems provide everything one needs to effectively manage a team: the name of the developer working on a task, the changes which were made, the date of the changes, the motivation or reason behind the changes, and (if the project structure and social order are maintained well) the ID of the task itself. All this information is a figurative gold mine for project managers to utilize, but this information is largely discarded by non-programmer managers of programming teams because it's simply too much and in the wrong format for non-programmers to understand.

A good software team manager has to speak both "languages". He needs to know the requirements of the product owner to communicate to the programmers, and (arguably more importantly) he know the tools of a programmer well enough to interpret the information about a project and communicate it back to the product owner. That is the primary expertise we bring to the table with our clients: we can turn business needs into business solutions.

So, here's Mershon Enterprises, a Bakersfield software company built on modern principles of design. We all work remotely and we have practically zero overhead, but what our potential and existing clients need is a traditional business face that they know how to approach. Mershon Enterprises chiefly uses Slack for topic-oriented discussion, and we occasionally text message each other. But our clients understand email and phone calls. So, we host our own email system and phone system, and we're subscribed to Twilio for about a dollar a month to get a local phone number. We have a swath of programmers, yet clients deal with the same representative for the entire life of their project. We put forth the effort to bridge the gap between traditional business and the modern age so that you don't have to. This gives both parties the ability to focus on what we do best.