I've been obsessing for the last 8 to 10 months about developer moral and productivity. Early last year, I read the book Team Geek and ran a book club over it with the developers I work with. Everything went downhill from there. I've been pouring ideas into a OneNote document for about 6 months now. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get too broad on the topic if I don't start focusing on getting stuff on paper... or on the web.. whatever. The ultimate goal of this series is to build a foundation of ideas that I can take and present at tech conferences, user group meetings, and other gatherings of tech leadership.
I've collected topics from sources such as Fog Creek's blog, Base Camp's blog, and several other books and blogs, but the bulk will be from my personal experiences. I've gotten to work in an excellent environment for analyzing morale and productivity and I'm in a position/role where A LOT of developers come to me when efficiency is a concern, something is bothering them or they are down in the dumps. I've gotten to experience rapid growth in a company, extreme leadership shifts, no leadership, shifts in company focus, failure, success, politics, head count fluctuation, too much work, not enough work, politics (yes, twice) and most importantly.... drama. These sound like some pretty common topics that people in the industry can talk about, but I've experienced 100% of them as a developer. I can discuss many of these topics with confidence and I really look forward to putting all of this together.
I will be touching on these topics and more: debunking stereotypes for a better relationship, managing vs leading developers, trust, equipping for productivity and success, finding and retaining good developers, simple perks and benefits, how and why you should minimize distractions, and why no good code is written after the 10th hour.
Feedback will be more than welcome and I'll answer any questions that are brought up in post comments.