My military career was exceedingly short and undistinguished.  I spent a month in US Marine Corps boot camp before they sent me home because of a preexisting medical condition.  As an organization, the Marine Corps has a well deserved reputation for being highly motivated, having exceptional esprit de corps, and being extremely effective in accomplishing their missions. During my brief stint as a would-be Marine I learned about what I feel to be one of the keys to the Marine Corps' long history of success.  It's their deceptively simple notion that everyone is a rifleman.

The rifleman is the backbone of the military.  It's the individual on the ground, literally in the trenches, that does the hard work and heavy lifting required of the infantry.  While the profession of rifleman is one generally held by young men of lower organizational rank, every Marine, no matter their rank or "day job," takes pride in being a rifleman.  There are hundreds of job descriptions in the Marines, but everyone understands that the rifleman embodies their core competency.  It's the "business end" of the organization.  This all sounds a bit grandiose, I know, but it does have real meaning within that culture.  From a practical standpoint, this literally means that any Marine -- whether a pilot, a general, or a cook -- must be capable of wielding a rifle and performing the job of a basic rifleman.  Perhaps more importantly, though, it implies an emotional thread that connects all Marines.  It's a sort of lowest common denominator that means everyone is in the same clan, a part of one team, and all decisions and actions will be undertaken with this fact in mind.

There are interesting parallels between the Marine Corps' "everyone's a rifleman" philosophy and the decidedly less-than-lethal profession of software development.  For example, you might consider a software company's "riflemen" to be the individual developers and testers that embody the organization's "business end." They do the thing that provides the essential reason for the organization's very existence.  One pattern I've observed over the years is that high performance software development organizations have an "everyone's a developer" philosophy.  In these organizations, the ranks of company leaders and decision makers include people that understand what it means to be a developer.  And I'm not talking about a CTO-token-techie type.  I'm talking significant representation within company leadership of those in tune with what it means to be a developer.  Think about some of the software companies you most respect and admire and then see how many of them didn't get that way without having "riflemen" calling a good number of shots.  And, speaking anecdotally, I know some of the most frustrating times my career were spent in organizations led by individuals or groups that I believed were unwilling or unable to be riflemen, which severely compromised their ability to lead.

When I was considering whether to join Microsoft, one of the things that attracted me to the company is that the organization to a large degree is a manifestation of an "everyone's a developer" philosophy.  Microsoft at its core recognizes that developers are not one trick ponies whose scope must be limited to All Things Coding but they instead recognize that the secret to a winning is finding and promoting those individuals whose skill set combines a little developer kung foo with other skills important to leading and managing a business.  Of course, just like it's a mistake to promote an rifleman to general of he or she doesn't understand strategy and logistics, you don't promote a technologist to leader unless they have those other skills.

What about your organization? Is everyone (or almost everyone) a rifleman? Do you think it helps or hurts?