Our Most Significant Enhancements are Non-Technical: Interview with Noonies Nominee German Tebiev

Howdy Hackers!

I’m German Tebiev, the Software Development Process Architect @ Devexperts.

First off, I’d like to express my gratitude to the staff, and all other beautiful humans of HackerNoon, for nominating me for a 2022 Noonies award!☺️

I’ve been nominated for the following category, and if you think my writing offers good value, please take some time to check out these award pages and vote for me:

1. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year- PRODUCTIVITY

   
   

As a writer in the tech industry, I believe that the most significant enhancements we can make in our industry are non-technical. Our software development processes are rather basic and we also try to solve everything with software. I firmly believe in the following words by Peter Drucker:

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the twentieth century was the fiftyfold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the twenty-first century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

Learn more about my views on productivity, IT management, and my tech industry journey via the interview below.

1. What do you currently do, and what’s your favorite part about it?

What I do has a well-known name: management. Unfortunately, quite a few people would be happy to hear something about management. In books and articles covering the topic, you can regularly find something like: be a leader, do not be a manager. I can understand this request. The major problem is that overwhelmingly, ones with the management title often try to achieve the system’s (e.g., the team’s) goals violently.

You have been there: long hours, poor requirements, no explicitly set expectations, and no learning.

There is the opposite way, based on the knowledge of Deming, Drucker, Ohno, Goldratt, and many other diligent people. This way is about continuous learning, empathy, statistics, systems theory, and more. In the end, it is about making systems so capable that they surmount yesterday’s challenges with much less effort.

Now I try to apply all my knowledge of scientific management to software development. I like that we are at the beginning, with so many things to do.

2. How did you get started with your Tech Career?

I entered my first university to get a bachelor’s degree in management in 2009. After the first year, I thought, well, I enjoyed this, but how can I be helpful to the world? There was no answer, and I started looking into programming. I started with the markup language in the vk.com social network. Then I switched to learning HTML and JavaScript. These days, I was trying to write down my lectures in HTML to receive some practice.

After a few years and a few trials of running a project with my friends, I decided it was time to go in-depth. I entered for the second bachelor’s degree in computational mathematics and cybernetics. Seven months later, I was on my first job creating educational games for children.

3. If Utopia were a color what color do you think it’d be and why?

I like green. Especially when green trees fit into our cities’ landscapes.🙂

4. If everything about HackerNoon changed drastically, what is one detail you’d like to keep exactly the same?  OR What’s your favorite thing to do with HackerNoon and why?

My favorite thing about HackerNoon is the editorial support you provide. It gives a pleasing sense of teamwork.☺️

5. Tell us more about the things you write/make/manage/build!

I write on two topics: personal productivity and IT management from the perspective of several praised theories. These two topics are of the most significant interest to me as I feel they are where we can gain the most important win as a programming community. I also have several articles on technical topics in the Uploadcare blog. The funniest ones I find there are about monorepos and polyrepos.

6. What’s your favorite thing about the internet?

The fact that here we can meet people whom we would never meet otherwise.

7. It’s an apocalypse of ‘walking dead’ proportions and you can only own a singular piece of technology, what would it be?

I would take what we now know as a kanban board with flow analytics attached to it. With these two things, we can restore civilization. Here is an example of what we can achieve knowing the flow-oriented approach:

In fact, the antecedents of a focus on efficient flows can be traced to the sixteenth century, more precisely, to the Venetian Arsenal in Northern Italy, which was the most powerful and efficient shipbuilding enterprise in the world. The arsenal was capable of producing a fully equipped merchant or naval vessel in less than a day. Elsewhere in Europe, it could take months to produce a vessel of a similar size.

8. What is your least favorite thing about the internet?

Good things sometimes are hard to discover.

9. If you were given $10 million to invest in something today what would you invest in and why?

First, I would need to invest in discovering something that would provide a constant cash flow, as I’m not sure that $10 million would be enough. Then I would invest in the giant books graph, containing all the references between all ever written books. It would provide us with some insights into the structure of the knowledge of humanity.

10. What’s something you’re currently learning or excited to learn?

Currently, I read about the evolution in Richard Dawkins’s “The Blind Watchmaker”. It has rather interesting logic, quite different from what we are used to.

11. Would you rather travel 10 years into the past or 10 years into the future? Give reasons for your answer.

I would instead discover opportunities to help me feel good in 10 years and later.🙂