Sanders quit because Lions weren’t winning

— ESPN.com headline

Background

Barry Sanders, as you may already know, was a running back for the Detroit Lions — one of the best running backs ever.

It was shocking news — to the extent that an athlete’s retirement can be considered “shocking” — when Sanders retired in 1998 because, at age 31, he was at the peak of his career, and on the verge of breaking the all-time NFL rushing record.

Some Lions fans — to this day — still expect him to change his mind and play again.

What Sanders Said

Sanders has an “as told to” autobiography coming out, in which he says that he retired, not — as the above headline says — because the Lions weren’t winning (which they weren’t), but because of his realization that the management of the team no longer cared about winning.

Big difference.

Here’s what he says in the book:

“That realization trivialized everything I did during the off-season to prepare myself. It trivialized everything I dreamed about from the time I was a kid in Wichita . . .”

It’s very similar to something DeMarco and Lister said in Peopleware:

Most forms of teamicide do their damage by effectively demeaning the work, or demeaning the people who do it. Teams are catalyzed by a common sense that the work is important and that doing it well is worthwhile.

People want to do great work. People are dying for opportunities to do great work.

I wish this information could somehow be implanted into the brain of every IT manager.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

I saw the new Jackie Chan movie today . . . it was pretty bad, but the thing that resonated with me was that the movie, like all movies of this type, had an evil villain, and the villain would gather his evil henchmen and say things like

“Which one of you would like to explain this latest failure?”

He sounded just like one of the managers I work with . . .

We recently put the following message, in a bold blue font, at the top of a client’s home page:

The store portion of the site is being upgraded and will be inaccesable for a few hours.

Note that “inaccessible” is misspelled.

And that it’s not just off by one letter so you might think it’s a typo. Clearly the person who wrote it didn’t know how to spell the word and couldn’t be bothered to look it up.

I really hate things like that. It’s a minor defect but it has a high embarrassment factor, in that it’s going to be perceived as evidence of overall negligence.

We might as well post a message saying

Dear Customer,

We hold you in complete contempt. If we can’t be bothered to find and fix errors as obvious as this, you may rest assured that we employ no quality control measures whatsoever.

Please go away.

How does something like this happen?

I’ll tell you how:

People need to have a sense that the work they’re doing is important and that doing it well is worthwhile.

Unfortunately, our management team has shown a willingness to build and launch web sites that they know do not meet any sort of professional quality standards.

The result is an anti-quality culture that breaks down people’s inherent pride in their own work.

How hard are you willing to work in pursuit of excellence if it’s obvious that no one cares about it?

Thus spoke The Programmer.