« Engineering will never be a commodity

One of the harshest anti-patterns I’ve seen in organisations in my career is to treat the engineering team as a commodity.

Let’s have a look at the definition of commodity:

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Raw material, that can be bought and sold.

To start with, engineers will probably have studied and learnt what they are doing, they might have a degree or spent nights learning to code and hack servers, but the point where everyone seems to get it wrong is the bought and sold bit.

I have the feeling that often companies ‘buy’ engineers in order to produce ‘software’, once an engineer is ‘bought’ it’s just a commodity, surely valuable, just as water would be, but easily replaceable, if one brand of coffee doesn’t work let’s change to a new one right?

It’s the contracting model, you hire some consultants or contractors, experts in their field, in order to solve a problem that you have no idea how to solve.

I often said to people that if you hire a consultant you do it because you can’t even hire people: you don’t know where to start or distinguish good from bad.

This is at the bottom of an ideal maturity model of managing your ‘IT floor’, climbing the ladders you might try to hire some people but then still treat them as a commodity, or as contractors.

The issue is that in a digital world every single business needs to inspired and driven by technology and not force technology to implement old models in code.

Art challenges technology, but technology inspires the art.

John Lister

The engineers, demotivated at this point because treated as commodity will start searching for new jobs, trying to find a place where their craft will be recognised and where they might influence the business.

Let’s remember the 3 pillars from Daniel Pink for Motivation:

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

In my experience even if one of the 3 pillars is missing the team will under-perform, the engineering team can be very autonomous (in fact, working as a commodity often implies silo work), can master their craft using state of the art process and tech but without a purpose, just taking orders from ‘above’ won’t last long.

No matter how much you are following your principles as an engineer, if your are not driving the company decisions and you have zero chances to change your status, you should leave your job, now, and tell everyone why you are leaving!