Book Review: Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton

Hot Spots by Lynda Gratton is a book about building well working teams and workplaces. It gives reasons why some teams learn to work together effectively and start create new innovative ideas. Also it tells why some teams don't ever get to this state and why even the most effective teams die away at some point.

I love the idea of the book. I think it is important to try to learn building more effective teams. The theories and ideas in the book are good ones, but still something is missing. Theories and ideas do make sense, but I'm not sure are those more than just theories. It is really easy to like the contents of the book, but still I didn't.

I had hard time to believe the contents of the book. Maybe one reason was the it used Nokia team as one of the main examples in all around the book. I've been working at Nokia for 7 years and I have seen few great teams there, but I didn't really believe the story in this one. It's so easy to use companies like Nokia as example, at the time of the example Nokia was doing so great that even the adequate teams were seen as great.

I didn't really believe any of the other examples in the book. Maybe it was the style those were written, but there was nothing really special on those teams. There was no actual prove that those teams really were hot spots as Lynda Gratton tells us.

I liked the ideas and theories, but I didn't get any actual prove that those really work. Maybe my expectations were just much higher for the book.

I don't really recommend this book. It's much praised and it has been getting good reviews, but I will not give it to anyone to read. There are good insights, but there's nothing that person who have seen many teams couldn't figure out themselves.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Price of the coding - is it a nationality issue?

Couple of weeks ago Finnish magazine 3T got their hands on secret internal report from an large Finnish company about efficiency of coders in different countries. Report stated that even though Indian coders cost approximately 30% of what Finnish coders do, Finnish ones are 4,5 times more efficient than their Indian counterparts. This then means that Indian coders turn to be 35% more costly than Finns eventually. (Source: (in Finnish) 3T - Salainen selvitys: Intialainen koodaus on suomalaista kalliimpaa).

I've worked with at least, Finnish, Indian, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Slovakian, British, French, Mexican, US and Canadian coders and I have to say nationality doesn't make a difference. Despite the nationality there are really efficient coders and coders who just can't make it happen. There are noticeable national differences on work methods, but those don't explain the efficiency.

Trend in buying coding from some specific country drives to the situation, that there are too much demand for the knowledgeable resources. In these countries some less capable people do get hired and easily sold to high demand customers in countries where coding prices are high. This might make it look like coders in some countries are less capable than in others.

In countries where price of coding is higher, only the efficient ones get to keep their jobs. When the competition is fierce, less capable ones turn to do something else than coding (I bet many of you think managing of the coding now).

I like to believe that, in most of the cases price of the coder is irrelevant. Good coder can easily be 100 times more efficient than some other. I don't mean they make code 100 faster than others, but they can make much more clear code and create much less errors than others. So the overall result might be 100 times less work was done for some piece of software.

Also a good team can make a difference. Team with good internal ways of working, like code conventions, code review practices, architectural guidelines and open discussions will improve efficiency dramatically. These in their own sense make evaluation of SW project length a challenge. It's the team and following their efficiency that make it possible to estimate what's the cost and time of certain SW project.

There are noticeable differences in efficiency of certain coders and team of coders. I don't believe it's a nationality issue, it's always about how competent the individual and the team is. It doesn't make buying of SW development easy. What it should state to the buyers though, is that price is small function in SW development efficiency. There always need to be other measurements in use, to know the real price of the coder and the team.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen