Somehow, the software developers I’ve met were very difficult to convince. Even as simple as using tabs in code for readability. I, at times, were difficult, too.
I found a script one day. It worked most of the time, if not every time.
I asked engineers to have the product send out email notifications when the product runs into an issue. As usual, they passively refused to do so. One day, at 6 pm, I found R sitting in his cube. I asked “R, shouldn’t you go home now?” He told me he was waiting for a long-running ETL script to finish. He needed to babysit the script so that if there were any errors, he could take care of it as soon as possible. I said that you should implement the email notification so that you can go home and only hop on then computer only if you got an alert.
They key is to tie the desired behavior to their benefits. Since then, I have been using the same trick.
If one is going to have a long vacation, I would ask him/her to document things like how to support the product, troubleshooting steps, etc. so that I don’t have to call him/her to be log in to fix the issue while on vacation.
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