Avoid Coding

Do you find coding to be depressing? Perhaps you think it is a lonely pursuit? Maybe your pair partners all hate you. Maybe you're simply no good at it. There's an adage:

Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, manage.

As an Agilista-mentor-alista, you get to do anything but code. You can focus on process, you can focus on coaching, which is the same as just irritating the people who are doing the actual work. You can focus on training, which involves insulting people who have done things you don't like, and insulting the intelligence of everyone in the session as you read out text-book definitions of dogma which even you don't know how to apply. Or, you can focus on the process, which involves plenty of administration and reporting, but very little actual production. If you are very clever, you can even create a process which monitors how busy you are being made monitoring the process. Anything to get away from the actual production side of things.

Interestingly, this is a muda, but it is a muda to talk about how much of a muda it is, so people will back off and leave you to it.

Once freed from coding, you can spend your time on any of the following:

• Annoying people
• Suggesting the obvious
• Suggesting new ways which have no benefits, take longer and make you feel satisfied when they're tried
• Finding new ways to train people on the things they already know
• Invent new terms for things
• Look at new Toyotas online

Remember, though production makes products and products make money, your role is compromised if you get on with anything directly useful.