Be The Program

Be The Program

Years ago I was hired right out of the Air Force by an MRP software company. I was one of 12 in an RPG training program taught on site by an employee with RPG development and IBM iSeries experience. A couple of years later I was teaching the course. One of the phrases I used to encourage trainees to understand the programs they were developing and debugging was “Be the program.” The idea is that the programmer should understand the objectives of the program, the flow of the program, and anticipate potential issues from the inside, so to speak. And that they should take ownership for the code that they write. This type of attitude is needed to develop solid, dependable fax and form software. That and discipline, common sense, and creativity.

A coworker recently said to me, when we were discussing some programming changes, that I was taking the work too personally. When sharing my opinion about the programming changes I was thinking in terms of what the program was written to do, as well as the impact of modifications. This is what triggered my memory to recall the admittedly Dilbertesque phrase “Be the program.” The reality is that we all need to take our work personally to do our jobs well. Regardless of job title or position here at Quadrant Software, what we do impacts our customers. By putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes we better understand how our day-to-day work impacts their business. The developers at Quadrant Software take work too personally, which is exactly how it should be.