Tech Studio Culture: A Creative Take on Software Dev

The question I keep asking myself over the years in this space is "why isn't a software development company a software studio?"​

We just love to call a place where websites are designed and made a "web design studio". A design and branding place is definitely a studio, so is an artist's workplace or a photographer's business.

The word studio conjures this nice image of creativity at work, a feeling of something beautiful being made or an expectation of seeing something breathtaking.​

Compare the word studio with what most software places are named or referred to as. The nicer ones with at least some feeling for the art are: software houses, shops, services or pods.

The more formal ones are: companies, centers and offices.  But the award goes to outsourcing places with depression oozing from flowery phrases like: low cost, offshore, cost effective, transparent, time tracked, video monitored, screen captured, toilet-time controlled, caged programmers...I'm just joking about the last ones but only just.

​But isn't software all about creativity? The art, craft and engineering war is not new - but even the most ardent engineering fan would accept that there is creativity involved somewhere in the process of making software.

Whether you are making the software in-house or you are outsourcing it to be made somewhere far away the fact remains that there needs to be a certain amount of creativity and element of art involved in the story. So there is no big crime in using a word like studio to describe the place where all of this is taking place.

The theory of software studio

And what a difference does a single word make! Software Studio - brings to mind pictures of cozy places, of dark rooms with splashes of light where there are screens and of places to relax and chat.​

Words reinforce our view of the world and that in turn changes the way we think about things and eventually our actions. So here is my simple theory:

If a software company just starts calling itself a software studio (or something cushy like that), soon it will become a place where work is fun and creative.

A bit rash, random and without proof for sure - but aren't all theories something like that at the beginning? ​

N.B. Just in case you are new here: we are a software company in Bangladesh making custom web, desktop and mobile apps for other companies and being very good at it!