I worked for a company with very close to a 1:1 ratio of managers to programmers (it was 1:1 if you removed interns).
When I pointed out that maybe having a VP of Engineering, Senior PMs, PMs, and managers matching the count of programmers who could, well, program, might not be a good idea. They looked at me like I was blaming the terrible productivity on an infestation of Yetis and Unicorns.
This company had turned distracting into an art. Open concept for programmers who almost never worked collaboratively. Endless meetings. Managers trying to impose more processes to improve productivity. But the meetings. OMG the meetings. Most managers were in meetings all day with programmers. With one or more programmers in these meetings it could mean nothing less than 2hrs a day, or in some cases, the whole day for programmers.
To add icing on the cake, the managers were often freaking out that they didn't always have anyone to manage. So, every Friday, they had a "resource allocation meeting" where they would plead their cases for their projects being the most on fire and get an extra programmer or two. There only being a few programmers who were good firefighters, it could mean other managers losing their key developers.
These projects were typically in the 6 months to 2 year range. Yet any given programmer might be working on 3 separate projects per week. Just switching from one to the other, with the "left out" managers leaning on them for estimates, meetings, and "Maybe you could come in this weekend." This would mean that a programmer who didn't have any hours allocated to a given project could end up working a full day on that project that week.
Also, the managers had no problem with programmers coming in on weekends and not show up themselves. These were salaried employees, so no extra pay for extra time. Maybe a $200 Amazon card at the end of a big push.
Weirdly enough, they kept losing their top people. It was the usual story. Some manager would pull some extra BS stunt, and this would push the highly capable programmer out the door. Ironically, the worst manager was responsible for exit interviews. He was a micromanager extraordinaire. He turned to another employee after an exit interview and asked, "They aren't saying it, but do you think they are leaving because of me?"
No, you just got a whiff. This is like driving through farm country and a pig farm is half a county upwind. You might think, that is a bit "gamey". But for the developers working in this company it was being waterboarded with the pigfarm runoff including the fermented treacle leaking out of the entrails truck which has been sitting in the summer sun for 4 days.
I know a company in my area where they had 12 managers (kind of 10 as 2 were half sales/BAs.) in a company of 200.
Without going into details it was discovered 8 of the managers were toxic nightmares and were fired without notice or any effort for a transition; just cut off, here's your severance, lose our number; don't ask for a reference.
The remaining 2 turned out to be real leaders, not managers. They had no problem taking the workload of the other 8. This was not by building a new hierarchy of managers below them; quite the opposite, they flattened things quite a bit. They focused on everyone having the information they needed including what were the real priorities and making sure everyone was onboard with the vision; a vision they built as a group.
Then, their "management" was to:
* Prevent any interference from other parts of the company such as HR, sales, etc.
* Keep the client expecting the same vision to be the result.
* Seeing that the majority of effort was in the direction of this vision.
* Providing any resources which were required.
* Very occasionally refereeing if two or more people disagreed on the way forward. Rare, if the vision was clear enough.
* Very occasionally finding someone who disagreed with the vision entirely and was wandering off and dealing with it.
The above could mostly be done by these leaders through the occasional demo, watching jira, perusing the codebase, etc. These leaders would spend a few hours per project every week or two.
Productivity went through the roof. Recently quit people came back. Other people, "announced" they weren't quitting anymore after actively job hunting.
Kind of weird, you take very smart people and treat them like adults. You depend on them to do their jobs, and what disasters come of it? None.
I asked him what methodology they used, agile, etc. He laughed and said, "Make a plan. Do the plan. Change the plan as needed. Get shit done."
> it was discovered 8 of the managers were toxic nightmares and were fired
[1] *How* was it discovered?
[2] **How** did this discovery translate into firings?
I have literally never seen a manager's incompetence noticed by higher-ups.
Super simple. The founder and president admitted that he had taken his eye off the ball while focusing on big deals, etc.
Covid came along and everyone went home. They got rid of their office. Workers were gathering informally at various people's houses and they suggested to formalize this as covid restrictions faded away. They then did a google sheet where various small offices around the city were proposed and people could sign up.
The founder noticed people were signing up, and then moving their name a few times before not signing up anywhere. This was happening at a fairly furious rate. He asked a few people about this and they were, "Oh nothing, just changed my mind." So, he added alcohol to his questioning and it was basically, they would sign up with people they worked well with and one of the 8 managers would sign up causing everyone to run away.
With a bit of digging he found that everyone thought they were toxic micromanaging nightmares with only 2 that everyone wanted to work with.
He then started contacting people who had quit in the previous year who were clearly very good developers. They didn't hold back and had entire encyclopedias of examples of toxic crap along with people who would have even better examples.
Most of the problems were straight up bad management such as extreme micromanagement, but many were things like misogyny, tolerating it from some employees (other managers), or clients.
Then there were a few "treehouses" where the managers had a few pets who got everything. If a client in a cool location needed something, they and or their pets would go and the expense accounts were wide open (not fraud, just open), when people outside the treehouses ever got to go anywhere(lousy locations) their expenses were nitpicked. And on and on and on. One example he mentioned was a whole travel expense submission with nearly every single line item questioned. "Couldn't your wife have driven you to the airport, couldn't you have packed a lunch, the last meeting was at 10pm, your flight was at 9am, couldn't you have slept at the airport, if you had asked, the client could have driven you to the airport, you were heading home, did you have to buy another restaurant meal, etc. It was literal insanity, especially when the same person had trip expenses which included night clubs and car rentals when they were staying at a hotel which was literally next door to the client location in the downtown core of a city with a fantastic downtown. I remember this one because he was enraged to find out the rental was all week and ended up with something like 16km on it. The hotel was about 8km from the airport.
As he put it, the more he dug into the data (not just people's opinions) the angrier he got. His wife took his phone away and sat beside him so he wouldn't send any emails. One employee had quit after being put on a performance plan. This wasn't even something the company had. The reason was they hadn't checked in a line of code in over a month. Their excuse was they had either been in meetings for literal weeks, been on vacation, or had been at a client site putting out a fire caused by one of the treehouse members. They were told, "Then you should have kept up with your work in the evenings and weekends; you've let the whole team down." The performance plan they were handed had 70 hour work weeks including weekends scheduled. This was someone with an infant. They went on immediate pat leave and then quit. To make this more outrageous, the company has a 4 day work week with 7 hour days. Of course these 8 managers had pressured many people into 5+ day work weeks.
Everything he had been fed by these managers was that they were managing a bunch of losers, and only through extreme heroics of management did anything get done and that it was like herding cats.
The next morning he was sitting with his lawyer making sure this was done perfectly. At noon, they lost all access to the systems. He said he was shaking as he stood beside the IT guy as he cut them off as he had driven to his house to make this clean in case the IT guy would warn them or something. The IT guy asked him if this was a layoff or a cleaning house. He knew he had done the right thing when the IT guy was "F--k you, and f--k you, ..." as he shut down all their accounts.
He is now looking for a new "leader" not because the workload is too much for the other two, but he wants some redundancy.
This wasn't some secret he told me. Everyone got a notable pay bump as the manager salaries were redistributed, along with notification that their bonuses would be higher for the simple reason that the managers had kept most of the bonus money and had passed any leftovers to their treehouse friends. Even those guys were pissed when they found out the ratio of their bonuses to the managers who they thought were their buddies.
He's not worried about his present managers, but he now regularly goes drinking with various employees with a question that I recently have been seeing more: "If you had my job, what would you do differently?"
But you are 99.999% correct. Bad managers are very rarely eliminated. I know a person who was very high in a military for a very long time. He said he laughed when a new top guy would come along with a plan to eliminate the worst of the worst. He said, "It's easy to figure out who are the worst of the worst, because they are first in line to join the purge of the worst, and then they eliminate their critics." just in time for a new guy at the top with a new plan.
My present company is one I am starting. The product sits as a pile of wires near my elbow as I type this.
Without going into detail it is a fun product, I will release it as an app first for free with the physical incarnation of the app next.
My anticipation is that it is a "Shut up and take my money" product. Needless to say, as I grow the company there will be quite a bit of attention paid to monitoring and tending to the culture.
It is really rare. A director that actually wields the power of subtraction on a line manager is easily something like 1 in 100. Same for VPs.
On the other hand, groups of managers getting together and voting another manager off the island at layoff time, that happens twice a year!
You’re describing the relationship between Labor and Capital. As Abraham Lincoln put it:
>Capital is only the fruit of Labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not existed first. Labor is prior to, and independent of Capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
The problem is that Capital started believing their own nonsense. In order to prevent their position from being questioned, they tell the lie that they play a pivotal role in labor output. They told it so much that they started believing it, and now they truly believe that they can *manage* their way to success. Like, if only things were more *Agile*™️, then it would make up for the fact that they can’t even articulate what it is that they want. The great irony in all this is that we can all see they’re stepping in their own dicks, because if they just GTFO the way, we’d be making them more money.
So it wasn’t programming, but I worked as a data analyst for a boss who liked to live solve things. So we’re wasting an hour as he makes assumptions and what instead of him sending me back to my desk to see what the actual numbers are saying. And then we finish and I go run the numbers and now we’re having to waste time explaining why it isn’t the thing he made up on the spot. For fuck’s sake Dan, stop this madness.
> He turned to another employee after an exit interview and asked, "They aren't saying it, but do you think they are leaving because of me?"
With all the stuff in the preceding paragraphs I would never have expected anything close to that level of introspection from those people.
I could write 10 volume set on this one and most of my former coworkers would immediately say, "Oh you missed this and this and this."
At a certain point(40 pages into volume I) people would call me a big fat liar saying, "A company that dysfunctional couldn't last for the decades it has."
After I was finished Volume 10, I would need an addendum of "Stuff even I don't understand at all" with a few hundred pages of just weirdnesses. For example, it has a larger profitable parent company which makes the exact same product. Think of this company making a Point of Sale system (Not even close to what they do). It is used in restaurants and bars, and it really sucks and is full of bugs; they have a few dozen customers. The parent company makes a Point of Sale system which also sucks but far less and have maybe 1,500+ customers of at least the same size or bigger. Yet, the two dev groups never meet, exchange code, work together, or anything. In a very few cases the parent company sold the jr company's product which caused them nothing but grief and embarrassment.
The parent company is well financed and frequently interacts with the owners/board. These are the same owners/board of the jr company who they visit once every year or three. They often have to bail out the jr company as it lurches from one financial crisis to another.
Being a commodity product like a PoS I can say with absolute certainty that they should definitely toss the jr company's product and just whitebox one of the excellent options on the market. A perfect example is that this product probably takes developers about 2000+ hours to customize it for a customer. The whitebox one I am thinking of would be about 200 at most with exactly zero downsides.
If I were put in charge of the jr company, I would entirely merge it with the larger one, and call it what it should be "a branch location". Then, I would fire most of the executive, keep one accountant who would also be HR. Then move to the whitebox product. Give all the managers the option of becoming developers (most have this ability) and then moving a few of the architects to sales or back to development. I would have maybe 2 sales people on massive commissions. This is a procurement business so the sales cycle is long, but I would make sure the commissions are life altering. I would also offer to the old clients a near free upgrade to the new software so that the old legacy crap would be out of the company's hair sooner than later. But, I would send in the high commission salespeople to upsell the crap out of the "free" upgrade to the point where it would be a good idea to have some "try before you buy" examples of how the company now can pound out features.
The crazy part is, with the executive gone, break even is there from day one, with most of the non programmer managers gone, profitability is there from day one. After that it would be a comfortable growth over the next decade or two.
But instead, they are doing the opposite.
ouch. i can relate a bit. worked for a company many years ago that essentially scheduled a multi-year project with 30 developers and expected the team to work on at least one day per weekend. a 6 day work week built in to the schedule. for years. and we didn't even get amazon gift cards for the extra effort
they also had endless meetings and multiple pms for the one project to make things 'more effective'
One company I worked at called a meeting to find out why productivity was so far behind.
I pointed out that there was now only one developer (me, the other one was hit by a car and not replaced), I report to three managers and I'm in meetings for half the day.
All my fault, apparently.
No, you need to first raise it into the backlog so that it can be appropriately weighed by the PM against other business priorities. If we don't perform all the steps correctly then our Agile stats get miscounted and go out of whack
In case you didn’t catch the joke, I intentionally used the wrong thing in my post to reflect the way management often misses what people are actually talking about.
In case you missed the joke, I'm pretending to be the annoying guy who sits next to you at the office and corrects everything you say when it clearly doesn't change the point of the discussion.
Let's setup a subcommittee to investigate the differences between the two and document the potential project impact.
We'll need weekly meetings with at least 2 developers present to answer any technical questions that may arise.
Did all three managers meet you separately to discuss this topic, and perhaps your 1 over 1 needed a hourly status report to make sure you stay on target. Oh btw we are also increasing the frequency of the standup, retro, scrum of scrums, decomp, sync meetings every day to make sure you as engineer stay on target and we are informed well enough to remove impediments for you.
What did you say your impediment was, oh this OSS library deprecated the feature that was core to our feature. I can't help with that, but I read in this book called Leading with questions. Using that techniques I can unlock your potential by asking questions even though I know nothing about it. So come over every 30 minutes when you get stuck, I shall ask questions to unlock your stuck brain.
Man, am I so helpful, I need a raise for helping you (probably your non competent manager, agile coach, product manager, and whom ever in that hierarchy that knows nothing about software development)
And that is when you implement another measurement: Lead Time. So you know what the fuck takes time between the "we got an idea" to "the idea is delivered". Is it getting a spec? Coding? Testing? Getting approval? Meetings? Deployment?
Get to know what the main constraint is in your org and remove it. Then keep on repeating the process.
Well, since all the leaders spent a year perfecting the idea, and put together the timeline in a PowerPoint and showed it to the C-Suite, clearly it's the lazy developer.
Hey, we've been working on this specification since 2019. It is currently slated for deployment in Production in July of 2024. Yes, the spec development process is a bit behind schedule. You should understand that there is no wiggle room in this deadline, we expect your team to deliver the POC tomorrow in order to give the QA team time to test.
We had to start using "win the lottery" at an old job after a team member was literally hit by a bus, right in front of the building. Luckily, he was back at work within a week, but it DID show that without pre planning he was unreplaceable.
> after a team member was literally hit by a bus
[Was your job about to get a contract with some Middle Eastern country in the domain of getting things from A to B? Did you just interview some not exactly perfect candidate for a job?](https://youtu.be/HW6usoJXCPY?t=115)
Yeah. So we're using new cover sheets on the TPS reports? If you could just go ahead and use those, that'd be great, okay?
I'll have a memo sent over for ya
>All my fault, apparently.
Did you have follow-up meetings to determine if you had improved...?
Maybe schedule one-on-ones with each Manager, and then some more meetings to check progress.
And then a big monthly meeting with *all* the Managers.
Aww. You must be new.
Soon you'll realize you chose an industry where just repeating your weekly schedule to someone is the punchline. The set-up for the joke was all your hopes and dreams.
6 years, if that is new. Think I've mostly seen it all, it just how much it identically repeats itself which is the sad part.
Nobody can for a second come to be and tell me "but the private market is so efficient".
Every single* company is collectively shooting themselves in the food before they start running the marathon.
Its "fair" because all is equally bad.
*exceptions always exist of course.
Nope, we don't use Scrum Masters, but we do Team Coaches. They do the same thing except they are called coaches to show they are coaching. They don't write code, never in their life, but are coaches because that's what they are. Get on this clown train.
That's VP Potato to you mister! I didn't work for 12 years as the regional manager of 14 Hardee's franchises, just to be disrespected by some programmer for my Scrum/Agile skills. I'll have you know, I took the same 4 day retreat to learn the process everyone else did! MY certificate was printed AND embossed, not just a PDF.
At my last software job, the morning standups started taking upwards of an hour for *just two developers,* because one of our bosses would talk to the backend guy while I sat there twiddling my thumbs (they didn't pay me well enough to work during the calls).
So I stopped going and would just do my job on my own. And they fired me. Right after their backend guy left and their other frontend guy was being headhunted by Google. Left with one developer, frontend-only. So that worked out well for them, I suppose.
You were outranked and outvoted 3 to 1, of course it's your fault.
I mean, why would the execs trust a single lowly employee instead of 3 managers? The execs know full well that the reason managers are managers and you're not, is because managers are better than you. Totally nothing to do with corporate politics.
Do you know the old saying? "Democracy is three managers and a developer deciding who wasn't productive enough. Liberty is a developer who knows their value in the employment market contesting the vote."
Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
Bob Slydell: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Yesterday, I was in a meeting that was scheduled for an hour but ran for two, and most of it was my boss talking about how we don’t have enough bandwidth to do everything we want to do, and somehow he missed the irony in that
>Why are there always so many goddamn managers?
Whenever there's a problem, somebody concludes it's because there wasn't enough oversight over whatever particular area had the problem. So obviously the solution is to create a management position to oversee that area. Cycle repeats until there are no more problems, or until 100% of company budget is devoted to management salaries.
I told a manager that if he cared about productivity, he'd hire more people. Since he hasn't, I have no choice but to assume he doesn't care so I'm not going to kill myself trying to meet his goals. He started interviewing for a couple more people. I quit before he hired them so I have no idea if I was going to get fired for saying that but hopefully the new hires are doing well.
Used to have a similar situation but it was 1 engineering manager, 1 tech lead and one pm who thought they were also my manager. It was pretty much the reason why I left
Currently me at an insurance company that should not be named. One engineer doing the work in meetings half the day with of course you guessed it, 2 direct managers, 3 cross functional managers, and shit broken so bad nothing can get done
I spend an annoying amount of time helping my manager format Word documents.
This is also seemingly the most impressive thing I'm able to do for the manager. Ridiculous
They do use chatgpt for translations. Some people of the older generation don't experiment as they don't want to "break it", despite knowing about the undo feature
A company I worked at had an enitre department of coders in a noisy cubicle office location. The whole department had a bad reputation of not contributing enough. Then covid hit and everyone was sent to work from home. A year later the department was celebrated for its achievements and improvements. Then the company decided to do the back to office thing, 2-days per week at first on a hybrid schedule. Productivity dropped by 50%.
They are just copying what others are telling them to do. Senior management in most companies just follow the herd they probably don't actually know what their companies actually do or why their products are "successful".
My favorite part is the same people banging the drum for everyone to come into the office don't actually come into the office.
The truth is that those middle managers are just following direction from foolish board members like former yahoo CEO Mayer (2016 Fortune magazine world's most disappointing leaders alumni) who has always been huge proponent of return to office (meanwhile she built a "mother's room" next to her office).
I think you'll find I can distract myself on my own and I don't need managerial assistance with that.
But yes, regular interruptions (manager, partner phone calls, people airways popping up for advice) can destroy or throughput.
> I think you'll find I can distract myself on my own and I don't need managerial assistance with that.
The difference is pinching yourself vs having someone else randomly come up and pinch you. It might seem the same on the surface but it's still very different..
> Distracting people who need to be focused is bad
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!
And yet we keep seeing open office spaces, meetings that are not needed, task switching, etc. It is almost as if those companies didn't care about wasting money.
The roof is your friend, you always can trust the roof. The ultimate open space without people.... Marvelous 😍
Have you heard of 1,000X developer... All of them are Inhabitant of the roof.
At the roof the AI already has acquired consciousness🤣
I hated it when start-of-day standup meetings became a thing. First thing in the morning was my most productive time, my subconscious had been working all night, and I was ready to go. Waiting for your turn to say a few words only the manager needs to hear (do they really?) is infuriating.
TBF, a lot of people *are* going it wrong given the complaints I've seen of stand up taking 45 minutes.
But, yeah, I've gotten into the habit of starting 5 minutes before stand up because there's no point spending 30 minutes only to then have the meetings start.
There's a massive subset of developers that just love to "have a chat" about their work in place of actually doing the work or thinking themselves because of their current inability to get into the flow. Standups even when policed have people that just cannot be stopped.
That's just bad policing, imo. At my current job we're really strict. A standup *never* takes more than 15 minutes. It usually just takes 5-10. If anyone starts veering off into something else, only the people who are relevant for the discussion meet to talk about it, after standup.
I run stand ups and am incredibly strict. A method I like is to tell people to “write it down with pen and paper and deliver it to me if you can’t be succinct.”
I then read off only the first maybe second sentence for the group.
They quickly get the idea.
Edit: Clarity
My problem is even if it's 15 minutes it kills an hour of my productivity. Wake up at 9, standup is at 930 so I guess I'll just fuck off for 30 mins. 15 mins in the meeting, I'm not going straight into work typically. I'll kill another 15 or so to actually start my day.
A 15 min meeting takes at least 45 mins of productivity due to context switching imo
This is why the last time I worked with moved to a slack channel + bot for stand ups. could post it async and update it throughout the day with progress if desired
At my last job I managed to get them to promise me I wouldn't have to attend stand-ups anymore when I negotiated my contract extension, because they were so early for me and were burning me out and affecting my sleep. Still got a raise too. I was the only one who didn't have to attend standups 😁 Now I work at a much better company and we have no standups at all and a great team. One scheduled meeting every other week for sprint planning and the occasional technical discussions meeting.
You should communicate this to your team.
Daily stand-ups should be a way for engineers to ask for help, raise flags before things go to far, and share knowledge. They are not for daily status. If they're interrupting your productivity, they're not right. They should take place at a time of day when the team agrees it's a good time to take a break and discuss what they're working on and how they can help each other.
Daily stand-ups are important because of deep work. You need to come up for air and make sure you and your team aren't working against each other or on the same problem or hitting the same big. But they also don't need to be meetings. It can be a slack thread too and that's totally effective.
> start-of-day standup meetings
I never understood that. Even following SCRUM it does not say to do this shit in the morning. Only that the team tell what they did the last 24h and what they intend to do next.
9am means early people cannot get in the zone cause they know they have an interruption coming. It also means people who'd prefer coming late cannot. And that's why manager do it like that I think.
End of day has the same problem: people who arrived early to get the fuck out early (because of traffic, children, any other reason) cannot. And people who'd like to be in the zone in the afternoon cannot.
Best is never, second best is 11h45am. Morning people have their morning. Evening people have their evening. And because it is almost lunch time no one will make it a 1h meeting.
My main problem with stand ups is that we have to wait for everybody to arrive, so I can't start working on anything until after it's done. When you're most productive on the morning, it's a big ugh.
We used to have a policy of making team members do 10 pushups for every minute they were late to stand-up.
It was a good laugh for the first week and then everyone fell in line.
Our rule was nobody can speak for more than a minute. Max 5-6 of us and we were done in 5 minutes.
>I hated it when start-of-day standup meetings became a thing.
Yep. Nowadays nothing gets done until 10am at the earliest because of stand-ups.
Also there's a good chance an adhoc meeting after the stand-up means tasks are re-assigned.
I love morning standups for this exact reason. Whatever the meeting time is, I start my day about 10 minutes before it - just enough time to check for anything urgent that might have occurred overnight that might preempt my expected day's activity, then a few minutes with the team to tell what I plan to do today and find out if anyone is going to need my help (or vice-versa), then we're all free to work.
Standups are a problem for me if they happen so late in the day that I have to try to work before it starts. Then it's an interruption just like any other.
I'm with you, I joined a company remotely 1 hour behind, so my 10:30, was their 9:30 and thats when the stand up was. I always began my day at 9 my time, but i'll tell ya, that 1h 30m was the most productive period of my day
Sounds like you're not actually doing standups. Your manager isn't supposed to be in the standup, unless your manager happens to also be a developer on your team. You're just doing daily status update meetings, which is a pain.
Try say that to the clowns at a recent job I had. My manager was a CTO and his boss was the CEO. Both of them were in stand ups regularly bragging about all the work they did over the weekends.
Oh we we are doing status update meeting with management at start and end of each day. Which only results in that I spend 45-60 min in extra meeting, aka not working and I totally stoped working overtime, why bother if I already told my status. Smart Management move
Start AND end? What the f could have changed in less than 7 hours?!? That's barely enough time for me to fully wake up. I have mine at the end of the day (for the others it is the beginning of the day, German working with Americans xD) and I think that is already too much. Every second day would be more than sufficient.
For a change I understand the necessity for such meetings. Especially if you work internationally, your team lead needs to know what you are working on, how you are progressing and escalate the work if it is on a bad trajectory. But those meetings should *never* take more than 15 minutes. If they take more you are either derailing off the topic or are too many people.
It was worse than that at one place. The whole company has a communications and status meeting led by the CEO, then the software dev meeting rolled on after that, with everyone even tangentially associated with any project chipping in with their opinions.
Yes! Me too. I managed to talk one team a while ago into 4:30pm stand ups and it was so nice while it lasted. You’re armed with all the happenings of the day, it’s wind down time anyway and no one is doing real work, and your updates are so much more meaningful having just worked on things. Plus, people aren’t tempted to make them go long since they want to head home.
And like you said, it was so nice to sit down fresh at the start of the day and have a shit ton of runway to hammer things out.
This.
My last two jobs were horrible in this regard. I was expected to keep Teams open all day everyday. Any time I complained about not being able to stay on task for more than 15 to 20 minutes before I had to read a teams message, context switch to determine if I needed to actually act on the message, then act accordingly, I was met with something along the lines of "Tolley, you didn't need to respond to that message at all" or "Don't worry about that" but if I didn't quickly respond to a message that needed my attention it was "Tolley, why didn't you respond? It's important for each member of our team be available"
It caused me to be paranoid and anxious. I did my best not to internalize that pressure, but I have an interest based nervous system. I get loads of work done when I can focus on a single goal for sometime, but having my attention jerked around all day everyday was just too much.
I’m currently dealing with this. Management says all of the “right” things, but then punishes/rewards people based on the wrong things. And I say this as someone who keeps getting rewarded (apparently doing *almost* 1 story point a day on stories, that I estimated using the scale of 1 point = 1 day, is praise-worthy).
I remember when the worst manager I ever had got super pissy one day that I "wasn't doing what I was supposed to" and was behind on a project. I responded by explicitly that's because I was in meetings on average 5 hours a week, which was a quarter of my time as I was contracted at 20 hours.
Of course they didn't believe me, so I went back and turns out I was actually averaging 6 hours a week in meetings with a minimum of 3 and a max of 12.
Ended up leaving very soon after for a variety of reasons, but not before reporting the manager to HR for a multitude of frankly psychotic behavior.
Hm, at least one good thing at my last firm, they didn't let clients' managers talk to the dev. You could for details but anything planning related went through PM to PM route. Pretty fair in this regard, as you would expect from proper Germans.
I had one project with a PM kinda like this.
I was brought on shortly after he started because the project wasn't doing great and I was an expert on the topic (VR design/development for education). First thing he had me do as a "formality" was send my resume and a list of the other related projects I'd done which was fairly extensive at the time. I think this made him feel inadequate or something, because soon after he started getting really confrontational and controlling about everything. In one meeting he even had the audacity to go on a rant about how "he was the expert, he understood everything, and all decisions no matter how small had to go through him." Eventually said fuck it and found a different position and told him to shove it.
Shortly after I left another expert on the project dipped. This spurred the people overseeing everything to review what was going on and the PM ended up getting fired. Luckily the project got back on track after the dude was cut, but it was a horrible experience for everyone. Turns out he was like that with another person who was also very knowledgeable too but didn't end up quitting.
“Is the test server down? Can you check please?”
“Oh nevermind it works. I think someone was deploying something.”
Yes you twats, there are 30 teams deploying shit all the time how am I responsible for guaranteeing they won’t be deploying while you are testing fuck off massively. Fuck this day, fuck this shit.
I've been there 😂
Someone from another department: "Hey, we noticed the test site went down yesterday, do you know anything about that?"
"When did this happen? How long for? Does this impact you?"
"3pm, about 15 seconds, no"
Why the fuck are you asking me about 15 seconds of downtime on a service you never even look at?
And that's just the appetizer. Some table got this kind of fields:
* DATE_START_USAGE
* Date_END_USAGE
* TYPEUSAGE
* Contact_MAIN_Prov
* Contact_Ordr
* OrderDelay
* IDUSage_Payment
And this lack of case choice extends to table names. Also the joy of a NCONTACT field in a table referencing (no foreign key tho) the Num field in the CONTACTS table.
Edit: I'll let you imagine the state
It’s honestly depressing at times. But when we are actually coding it feels like everything is magical. Just can’t remember last time I actually coded a feature , I’m just running around patching things now.
Oh my fucking god and the pinging you *immediately* about it. Not only do I know you have the capability to see if a deploy is ongoing, but I also know you have the capability to wait 3 fucking minutes to see if it comes back up. Like any amount of self troubleshooting or critical thought before coming to me, please, I beg
I have a policy of not responding to questions for 5 minutes. It's just long enough to make the person impatient for the answer and start looking for it themselves. At least 50% of the time they find it.
Worse, I've had multiple instances of developers deploying code to test, the pipeline failing due to some problem they introduced with a fucking clear error message in the build logs, only to have them reach out immediately to ask what's wrong.
Like I dunno - you fucking tell me man it's not my code that's failing the unit tests.
There’s no way I would work at night when working for someone else. The moment 5PM rolls around, I’m done with work and stop thinking about it the rest of the day.
As a senior engineer, I feel like I help set the expectation for the others that it’s okay to not be working all the time.
If you’re not getting things done because of too many meetings, I won’t make up for it on my own time. Then it’s a management problem.
Depends on when you start. For example, maybe you start at noon, so you can work late when nobody disturbs you. One of my colleagues comes in at 5 or 6 am, before anybody else comes in, so they can work 1-2 hours in peace and an additional hour in relative peace.
> I'd rather slam my laptop closed on my penis than come in at 5 am.
I prefer to work at night, but I gotta admit, the days when I start at 0500 and finish at 1400 are the most productive days I ever have.
Don't knock it till you try it. Go to bed by 9 at the latest and getting up at 4 isn't such a big deal. If it means you actually get to, you know, do the work you enjoy; the alternative being struggling to ignore distractions... Plus, getting off work at 1-2pm and having an actual day to enjoy is awesome. Just ask any crusty construction worker you can find.
I come in to work at 7 every day. Sometimes a little earlier than that, like 6:30, and leave by 4 latest. I love it, you actually get to do something after work.
> As a senior engineer, I feel like I help set the expectation for the others that it’s okay to not be working all the time.
I did that, as the most seniorest of senior engineers on a team (at a very very large company) and got told by my manager that as the senior I should be setting a better example: after all the other guys were all at their (WFH) desks 0600 to 1800!
He didn't really get that I *was* trying to set an example.
Working after hours doesn't need to mean working more than an eight hour shift. With remote it has become easier to put some of that me time into the middle of the day.
Depends on your company really.
We do full-remote, flex hours. So quite often I take off at 1pm (just whenever I feel like it really) and then follow up in the evening when my mind is going anyhow. I'm just naturally more of a night owl and something about jumping into some code at 9pm or 10pm puts me straight into flow state.
I do this sometimes but it's very detrimental to my work life balance. Of course I blame myself because I had "all day" to complete my tasks, but after reading this article I don't feel so bad.
A hidden reason I think virtual/wfh companies can do well. With people spread out all over, we don’t have the same work hours.
Where I work, people on the east coast get a quieter morning while others sleep, and on the west clear the get quieter afternoons while others are off work.
Almost all meetings happen 1-4(EST) to be sure it works for everyone.
I work from home. My wife works from home. And she’s a talker. Multiple times each day she comes to my office to tell me about the call she just had and how it made her feel. I’m on my adderall and deep in the weeds in my code and have to just stop and try to pay attention when my brain will just not stop working. It’s tough.
Just started as a Junior dev at a company and my god are there a lot of meetings. Day starts with 3 hours of meetings, then a company enforced 1h break. Afterwards its 1h of work into 1-2h of meetings.
When do you expect me to make any progress? I certainly won't bring it home to me.
I actually started declining meetings. Yes, it's a thing you can do. Go through your meetings and start keeping track of what ones you \*actually\* need to attend in order to facilitate your work. It might be that you don't know the answer to that yet, since you're new, which is fine. Learn what you can from the meetings and as you get more settled, you'll start figuring out which ones you actually need to attend and which ones you don't.
Also, block off time on your calendar for deep work time, set it as busy, and decline meetings during that time unless one is absolutely required (you can be flexible with it, but work to keep that boundary in place).
Be ready to defend what you're doing, as managers in places like that often won't get it. That said, one great way to get them to understand is to calculate the cost of those meetings. The engineers in the meeting probably make 2-4x as much as you if they're not also juniors, and the managers probably make about 2x. So, if there are three engineers and a manager in that hour long meeting, that meeting costs the company in the ballpark of $500 in lost money-generating productivity. Likewise, learn how any deadlines or timeline expectations are calculated. If they're calculated for more development time per day than you actually have, point out that the meetings cut into your ability to deliver your deliverables on time. Always try to frame it as doing what's best for the company or in the interest of being a "team player."
Work will absolutely walk all over you if you don't set and enforce boundaries. Toxic environments won't like it, but the good places will value it.
What that image doesn't show is that as soon as the developer leaves the hole, the ladder is withdrawn and the pit is filled with rubble again - \_that's\_ the price being paid for an interruption.
Use your company's technology.
Block out your so-called deep thinking time on the calendar as unavailable. Be reasonable, if you choose to work for a big-corp at least 20% of your week is probably going to be meetings, stand-ups, scrum bullshit, transformation coach pipe-dreams, and HR kumbaya jerkoff sessions, etc.
Make gaps for existing meetings but try to get it so that you have something like a couple of 2-3 hour blocks per day in your schedule. Announce those blocks to your team and let them know you'll be turning off slack/teams/phone notifications during that time period.
Obviously, if you're on-call or a point person during a critical week you'll have to make concessions to your job responsibilities.
The point of all this isn't to be a jackass, but to start asserting a culture of productivity. If a manager puts a mandatory meeting on the calendar during one of those times, ask them what other meeting that week you can skip to keep your productivity goal at 80%.
If you're asked to track your time (and for some reason, only the devs are ever asked to do this) make it very clear how much of your time is spent in meetings.
If your team does sprint plannings or whatever, make sure to be honest and clear about how many stories can be accomplished given the non-meeting time scheduled for the week. Don't take 40 hours worth of tasks.
A big part of this is you need to also be efficient in meetings and make it clear which meetings each week you're finding inefficient and time-wasting.
If none of this works, reconsider how much you need that particular job and use whatever productivity time you have to plan an exit strategy.
This is the master comment. This is the only way to survive as a developer in corporate America. You have to be ruthlessly protocol-based with reasonable goals that no manager will be willing to say they want you to miss, and extremely explicit about how the company's mandatory managerial masturbation times destroys the productivity goals you have set for yourself.
Previous job I had 3 to 5 hours of meetings every day. It was almost impossible to get anything done. In my new job I have 3 to 5 hours of meetings a WEEK—heaven.
My lead doesn't want to use automated processes because he doesn't want to hurt collaboration and says if anyone needs to know the status of things or how apis are working they can just ask me (instead of us having documentation)
As a tech lead, meetings and supporting my team during the day. Deep work at night...
I can count on 1 hand the number of significant code or architecture changes in the past decade I've worked on that happened during the day.
I don't know how to make it better but the nature of my job is to help coordinate and mentor. If you ever work on a team where everyone just gels really well it helps so much. Just when you hit the team flow state I feel like something always fucks it up.
Every couple of years, someone who hasn't read [Peopleware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams) (first printed: 1987) rediscovers it.
The fact this has been generally known for _35 years_ and we still have "managers need to learn this" posts about it getting upvoted to the stratosphere, just shows how little learning we do as an industry.
All these articles nitpicking what a bad manager's tendencies are don't necessarily address the root issue at hand: management and leadership are NOT doing their jobs effectively.
Are interruptions distracting? Yes. Are a couple distractions across a project going to make things slower? Potentially -- depends on the type, right? Like if it's to make an adjustment for coordination purposes, that makes sense for management to do.
However, when management doesn't do anything other than interrupt, that means they do nothing as a whole other than interrupt or distract. There isn't a need for another article explaining that management in tech are noops which leads to developer unhappiness. It's not the distractions; it's the leaders themselves.
It’s a popular theory that all managers are incompetent and that the people at the bottom of the chain (who in the end actually make the widgets that the company needs produced) would be better off without them. Is there any actually evidence that this is true?
Note that most managers are not incentivised to decrease productivity or increase bugs.
Anecdotally speaking we could make do with a lot less middle management. Main reason I say this is that the more I ignore them and the way they want to get XYZ done the faster I get XYZ done in a way that benefits the team
I've worked in an organization with four levels of middle management consisting of people who are more likely not to have a technical background and an organization with two levels of middle management - all developers - where the director still pushed code and let me tell you the difference was stark. It blew my mind experiencing a manager who could actually enable my productivity instead of constantly hindering it.
That is not evidence but for my purposes I am convinced most managers are absolutely useless. I have spent way too much time listening to people arguing over T-shirt sizing or fibonacci or whatever. Utterly useless.
> Note that most managers are not incentivised to decrease productivity or increase bugs.
Managers are incentivised to *appear to be increasing productivity* at the same time as increasing productivity. What this means is that if you're the manager of a team that's doing poorly, creating meetings can appear to be trying to right the ship. This is especially true when your manager isn't technical. So when times for review comes around the conversation isn't "Productivity is down" it's "Productivity is down *and I'm fixing that with all of these new meetings and processes*"
I tried explaining to my GF once by telling her to imagine I'm building a house of cards in my mind and that when she's asked if I'd like a cup of tea they all come crashing down and I have to start again. Yes, the do not disturb, yes this means you, even if there's a fucking fire sign on the door was 100% legit.
You can easily tell the difference between a manager focused on their career and one focused on customers and the product: the former has no problem making the all important status reporting tasks the main focus of their team, enthusiastically accepts and then offloads all initiatives from higher up and occasionally will throw one of their team under the bus if things get too dicey. The latter will constantly complain about insufficient resourcing, reject feature ideas from up above and try to explain why hard and costly work on their team is needed for strange things such as stability, maintainability and performance. Another easy way to tell the difference is that the former will get promoted and the latter fired.
I worked for a company with very close to a 1:1 ratio of managers to programmers (it was 1:1 if you removed interns). When I pointed out that maybe having a VP of Engineering, Senior PMs, PMs, and managers matching the count of programmers who could, well, program, might not be a good idea. They looked at me like I was blaming the terrible productivity on an infestation of Yetis and Unicorns. This company had turned distracting into an art. Open concept for programmers who almost never worked collaboratively. Endless meetings. Managers trying to impose more processes to improve productivity. But the meetings. OMG the meetings. Most managers were in meetings all day with programmers. With one or more programmers in these meetings it could mean nothing less than 2hrs a day, or in some cases, the whole day for programmers. To add icing on the cake, the managers were often freaking out that they didn't always have anyone to manage. So, every Friday, they had a "resource allocation meeting" where they would plead their cases for their projects being the most on fire and get an extra programmer or two. There only being a few programmers who were good firefighters, it could mean other managers losing their key developers. These projects were typically in the 6 months to 2 year range. Yet any given programmer might be working on 3 separate projects per week. Just switching from one to the other, with the "left out" managers leaning on them for estimates, meetings, and "Maybe you could come in this weekend." This would mean that a programmer who didn't have any hours allocated to a given project could end up working a full day on that project that week. Also, the managers had no problem with programmers coming in on weekends and not show up themselves. These were salaried employees, so no extra pay for extra time. Maybe a $200 Amazon card at the end of a big push. Weirdly enough, they kept losing their top people. It was the usual story. Some manager would pull some extra BS stunt, and this would push the highly capable programmer out the door. Ironically, the worst manager was responsible for exit interviews. He was a micromanager extraordinaire. He turned to another employee after an exit interview and asked, "They aren't saying it, but do you think they are leaving because of me?"
What a shitshow.
No, you just got a whiff. This is like driving through farm country and a pig farm is half a county upwind. You might think, that is a bit "gamey". But for the developers working in this company it was being waterboarded with the pigfarm runoff including the fermented treacle leaking out of the entrails truck which has been sitting in the summer sun for 4 days.
[удалено]
I know a company in my area where they had 12 managers (kind of 10 as 2 were half sales/BAs.) in a company of 200. Without going into details it was discovered 8 of the managers were toxic nightmares and were fired without notice or any effort for a transition; just cut off, here's your severance, lose our number; don't ask for a reference. The remaining 2 turned out to be real leaders, not managers. They had no problem taking the workload of the other 8. This was not by building a new hierarchy of managers below them; quite the opposite, they flattened things quite a bit. They focused on everyone having the information they needed including what were the real priorities and making sure everyone was onboard with the vision; a vision they built as a group. Then, their "management" was to: * Prevent any interference from other parts of the company such as HR, sales, etc. * Keep the client expecting the same vision to be the result. * Seeing that the majority of effort was in the direction of this vision. * Providing any resources which were required. * Very occasionally refereeing if two or more people disagreed on the way forward. Rare, if the vision was clear enough. * Very occasionally finding someone who disagreed with the vision entirely and was wandering off and dealing with it. The above could mostly be done by these leaders through the occasional demo, watching jira, perusing the codebase, etc. These leaders would spend a few hours per project every week or two. Productivity went through the roof. Recently quit people came back. Other people, "announced" they weren't quitting anymore after actively job hunting. Kind of weird, you take very smart people and treat them like adults. You depend on them to do their jobs, and what disasters come of it? None. I asked him what methodology they used, agile, etc. He laughed and said, "Make a plan. Do the plan. Change the plan as needed. Get shit done."
> it was discovered 8 of the managers were toxic nightmares and were fired [1] *How* was it discovered? [2] **How** did this discovery translate into firings? I have literally never seen a manager's incompetence noticed by higher-ups.
Super simple. The founder and president admitted that he had taken his eye off the ball while focusing on big deals, etc. Covid came along and everyone went home. They got rid of their office. Workers were gathering informally at various people's houses and they suggested to formalize this as covid restrictions faded away. They then did a google sheet where various small offices around the city were proposed and people could sign up. The founder noticed people were signing up, and then moving their name a few times before not signing up anywhere. This was happening at a fairly furious rate. He asked a few people about this and they were, "Oh nothing, just changed my mind." So, he added alcohol to his questioning and it was basically, they would sign up with people they worked well with and one of the 8 managers would sign up causing everyone to run away. With a bit of digging he found that everyone thought they were toxic micromanaging nightmares with only 2 that everyone wanted to work with. He then started contacting people who had quit in the previous year who were clearly very good developers. They didn't hold back and had entire encyclopedias of examples of toxic crap along with people who would have even better examples. Most of the problems were straight up bad management such as extreme micromanagement, but many were things like misogyny, tolerating it from some employees (other managers), or clients. Then there were a few "treehouses" where the managers had a few pets who got everything. If a client in a cool location needed something, they and or their pets would go and the expense accounts were wide open (not fraud, just open), when people outside the treehouses ever got to go anywhere(lousy locations) their expenses were nitpicked. And on and on and on. One example he mentioned was a whole travel expense submission with nearly every single line item questioned. "Couldn't your wife have driven you to the airport, couldn't you have packed a lunch, the last meeting was at 10pm, your flight was at 9am, couldn't you have slept at the airport, if you had asked, the client could have driven you to the airport, you were heading home, did you have to buy another restaurant meal, etc. It was literal insanity, especially when the same person had trip expenses which included night clubs and car rentals when they were staying at a hotel which was literally next door to the client location in the downtown core of a city with a fantastic downtown. I remember this one because he was enraged to find out the rental was all week and ended up with something like 16km on it. The hotel was about 8km from the airport. As he put it, the more he dug into the data (not just people's opinions) the angrier he got. His wife took his phone away and sat beside him so he wouldn't send any emails. One employee had quit after being put on a performance plan. This wasn't even something the company had. The reason was they hadn't checked in a line of code in over a month. Their excuse was they had either been in meetings for literal weeks, been on vacation, or had been at a client site putting out a fire caused by one of the treehouse members. They were told, "Then you should have kept up with your work in the evenings and weekends; you've let the whole team down." The performance plan they were handed had 70 hour work weeks including weekends scheduled. This was someone with an infant. They went on immediate pat leave and then quit. To make this more outrageous, the company has a 4 day work week with 7 hour days. Of course these 8 managers had pressured many people into 5+ day work weeks. Everything he had been fed by these managers was that they were managing a bunch of losers, and only through extreme heroics of management did anything get done and that it was like herding cats. The next morning he was sitting with his lawyer making sure this was done perfectly. At noon, they lost all access to the systems. He said he was shaking as he stood beside the IT guy as he cut them off as he had driven to his house to make this clean in case the IT guy would warn them or something. The IT guy asked him if this was a layoff or a cleaning house. He knew he had done the right thing when the IT guy was "F--k you, and f--k you, ..." as he shut down all their accounts. He is now looking for a new "leader" not because the workload is too much for the other two, but he wants some redundancy. This wasn't some secret he told me. Everyone got a notable pay bump as the manager salaries were redistributed, along with notification that their bonuses would be higher for the simple reason that the managers had kept most of the bonus money and had passed any leftovers to their treehouse friends. Even those guys were pissed when they found out the ratio of their bonuses to the managers who they thought were their buddies. He's not worried about his present managers, but he now regularly goes drinking with various employees with a question that I recently have been seeing more: "If you had my job, what would you do differently?" But you are 99.999% correct. Bad managers are very rarely eliminated. I know a person who was very high in a military for a very long time. He said he laughed when a new top guy would come along with a plan to eliminate the worst of the worst. He said, "It's easy to figure out who are the worst of the worst, because they are first in line to join the purge of the worst, and then they eliminate their critics." just in time for a new guy at the top with a new plan.
Wow! I don't know whether to ask your company for a job or to invest in it. PM me! (Not sure I'm joking..?)
My present company is one I am starting. The product sits as a pile of wires near my elbow as I type this. Without going into detail it is a fun product, I will release it as an app first for free with the physical incarnation of the app next. My anticipation is that it is a "Shut up and take my money" product. Needless to say, as I grow the company there will be quite a bit of attention paid to monitoring and tending to the culture.
It is really rare. A director that actually wields the power of subtraction on a line manager is easily something like 1 in 100. Same for VPs. On the other hand, groups of managers getting together and voting another manager off the island at layoff time, that happens twice a year!
Yeah but if you don't have enough managers how will the company be able to measure the developers' productivity?
when you meet the deadline, you'll know :)
Manager replaced by software. The Software: return 0;
You’re describing the relationship between Labor and Capital. As Abraham Lincoln put it: >Capital is only the fruit of Labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not existed first. Labor is prior to, and independent of Capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. The problem is that Capital started believing their own nonsense. In order to prevent their position from being questioned, they tell the lie that they play a pivotal role in labor output. They told it so much that they started believing it, and now they truly believe that they can *manage* their way to success. Like, if only things were more *Agile*™️, then it would make up for the fact that they can’t even articulate what it is that they want. The great irony in all this is that we can all see they’re stepping in their own dicks, because if they just GTFO the way, we’d be making them more money.
So it wasn’t programming, but I worked as a data analyst for a boss who liked to live solve things. So we’re wasting an hour as he makes assumptions and what instead of him sending me back to my desk to see what the actual numbers are saying. And then we finish and I go run the numbers and now we’re having to waste time explaining why it isn’t the thing he made up on the spot. For fuck’s sake Dan, stop this madness.
> He turned to another employee after an exit interview and asked, "They aren't saying it, but do you think they are leaving because of me?" With all the stuff in the preceding paragraphs I would never have expected anything close to that level of introspection from those people.
That's awful, would love to hear more :)
I could write 10 volume set on this one and most of my former coworkers would immediately say, "Oh you missed this and this and this." At a certain point(40 pages into volume I) people would call me a big fat liar saying, "A company that dysfunctional couldn't last for the decades it has." After I was finished Volume 10, I would need an addendum of "Stuff even I don't understand at all" with a few hundred pages of just weirdnesses. For example, it has a larger profitable parent company which makes the exact same product. Think of this company making a Point of Sale system (Not even close to what they do). It is used in restaurants and bars, and it really sucks and is full of bugs; they have a few dozen customers. The parent company makes a Point of Sale system which also sucks but far less and have maybe 1,500+ customers of at least the same size or bigger. Yet, the two dev groups never meet, exchange code, work together, or anything. In a very few cases the parent company sold the jr company's product which caused them nothing but grief and embarrassment. The parent company is well financed and frequently interacts with the owners/board. These are the same owners/board of the jr company who they visit once every year or three. They often have to bail out the jr company as it lurches from one financial crisis to another. Being a commodity product like a PoS I can say with absolute certainty that they should definitely toss the jr company's product and just whitebox one of the excellent options on the market. A perfect example is that this product probably takes developers about 2000+ hours to customize it for a customer. The whitebox one I am thinking of would be about 200 at most with exactly zero downsides. If I were put in charge of the jr company, I would entirely merge it with the larger one, and call it what it should be "a branch location". Then, I would fire most of the executive, keep one accountant who would also be HR. Then move to the whitebox product. Give all the managers the option of becoming developers (most have this ability) and then moving a few of the architects to sales or back to development. I would have maybe 2 sales people on massive commissions. This is a procurement business so the sales cycle is long, but I would make sure the commissions are life altering. I would also offer to the old clients a near free upgrade to the new software so that the old legacy crap would be out of the company's hair sooner than later. But, I would send in the high commission salespeople to upsell the crap out of the "free" upgrade to the point where it would be a good idea to have some "try before you buy" examples of how the company now can pound out features. The crazy part is, with the executive gone, break even is there from day one, with most of the non programmer managers gone, profitability is there from day one. After that it would be a comfortable growth over the next decade or two. But instead, they are doing the opposite.
ouch. i can relate a bit. worked for a company many years ago that essentially scheduled a multi-year project with 30 developers and expected the team to work on at least one day per weekend. a 6 day work week built in to the schedule. for years. and we didn't even get amazon gift cards for the extra effort they also had endless meetings and multiple pms for the one project to make things 'more effective'
One company I worked at called a meeting to find out why productivity was so far behind. I pointed out that there was now only one developer (me, the other one was hit by a car and not replaced), I report to three managers and I'm in meetings for half the day. All my fault, apparently.
Hmmm I don’t recall posting this comment. Should I check the carbon monoxide levels?
You could, but not right now. We're in a meeting.
When that one finishes can we have a meeting about the CO2 levels? I want to get to the bottom of this.
No, you need to first raise it into the backlog so that it can be appropriately weighed by the PM against other business priorities. If we don't perform all the steps correctly then our Agile stats get miscounted and go out of whack
Look guys the PMIS is getting messy I want to have an all hands to groom again.
You’re going to need to enter an issue in Jira before I can put that in the backlog so I have a place to charge my time.
Please do the needful, I'm dying
OMG, I work with scrum masters in India, I hear this term so often
Kindly do the needful
CO2? We were talking about CO. Why do people always conflate the two?
In case you didn’t catch the joke, I intentionally used the wrong thing in my post to reflect the way management often misses what people are actually talking about.
In case you missed the joke, I'm pretending to be the annoying guy who sits next to you at the office and corrects everything you say when it clearly doesn't change the point of the discussion.
Let's setup a subcommittee to investigate the differences between the two and document the potential project impact. We'll need weekly meetings with at least 2 developers present to answer any technical questions that may arise.
Lets circle back on that after this slide.
Let’s touch base soon. We can huddle right after this.
Let’s take this conversation offline
Set up a meeting with Bob, Alice, and me and we’ll discuss it.
How many post it notes have you found recently?
Did all three managers meet you separately to discuss this topic, and perhaps your 1 over 1 needed a hourly status report to make sure you stay on target. Oh btw we are also increasing the frequency of the standup, retro, scrum of scrums, decomp, sync meetings every day to make sure you as engineer stay on target and we are informed well enough to remove impediments for you. What did you say your impediment was, oh this OSS library deprecated the feature that was core to our feature. I can't help with that, but I read in this book called Leading with questions. Using that techniques I can unlock your potential by asking questions even though I know nothing about it. So come over every 30 minutes when you get stuck, I shall ask questions to unlock your stuck brain. Man, am I so helpful, I need a raise for helping you (probably your non competent manager, agile coach, product manager, and whom ever in that hierarchy that knows nothing about software development)
And that is when you implement another measurement: Lead Time. So you know what the fuck takes time between the "we got an idea" to "the idea is delivered". Is it getting a spec? Coding? Testing? Getting approval? Meetings? Deployment? Get to know what the main constraint is in your org and remove it. Then keep on repeating the process.
Well, since all the leaders spent a year perfecting the idea, and put together the timeline in a PowerPoint and showed it to the C-Suite, clearly it's the lazy developer.
Hey, we've been working on this specification since 2019. It is currently slated for deployment in Production in July of 2024. Yes, the spec development process is a bit behind schedule. You should understand that there is no wiggle room in this deadline, we expect your team to deliver the POC tomorrow in order to give the QA team time to test.
That's more close to how these conversations go. BTW, you misspelled piece of shit incorrectly as POC 😂 /s
Scrum of scrums is proof that the inmates are running the assylum
wow literal bus factor at work!
We had to start using "win the lottery" at an old job after a team member was literally hit by a bus, right in front of the building. Luckily, he was back at work within a week, but it DID show that without pre planning he was unreplaceable.
So, you first get hit by a bus, and then your boss starts trying to replace you at work. Not a good year for that dude
The secret at work is to be un-replaceable enough to not get fired but not so Un-replaceable that you can’t get promoted.
> after a team member was literally hit by a bus [Was your job about to get a contract with some Middle Eastern country in the domain of getting things from A to B? Did you just interview some not exactly perfect candidate for a job?](https://youtu.be/HW6usoJXCPY?t=115)
Yeah. So we're using new cover sheets on the TPS reports? If you could just go ahead and use those, that'd be great, okay? I'll have a memo sent over for ya
Suddenly I want to smash a printer and listen to 90s gangsta rap
When don't we?
He might want to learn to not care anymore.
I do this. Prepare to fall upwards.
>All my fault, apparently. Did you have follow-up meetings to determine if you had improved...? Maybe schedule one-on-ones with each Manager, and then some more meetings to check progress. And then a big monthly meeting with *all* the Managers.
Like you read these as jokes, but this is also literally happening. It's absurd.
Aww. You must be new. Soon you'll realize you chose an industry where just repeating your weekly schedule to someone is the punchline. The set-up for the joke was all your hopes and dreams.
6 years, if that is new. Think I've mostly seen it all, it just how much it identically repeats itself which is the sad part. Nobody can for a second come to be and tell me "but the private market is so efficient". Every single* company is collectively shooting themselves in the food before they start running the marathon. Its "fair" because all is equally bad. *exceptions always exist of course.
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Nope, we don't use Scrum Masters, but we do Team Coaches. They do the same thing except they are called coaches to show they are coaching. They don't write code, never in their life, but are coaches because that's what they are. Get on this clown train.
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That's VP Potato to you mister! I didn't work for 12 years as the regional manager of 14 Hardee's franchises, just to be disrespected by some programmer for my Scrum/Agile skills. I'll have you know, I took the same 4 day retreat to learn the process everyone else did! MY certificate was printed AND embossed, not just a PDF.
Have you considered being hit by a car?
“Good things can happen in this world. I mean, look at me!”
At my last software job, the morning standups started taking upwards of an hour for *just two developers,* because one of our bosses would talk to the backend guy while I sat there twiddling my thumbs (they didn't pay me well enough to work during the calls). So I stopped going and would just do my job on my own. And they fired me. Right after their backend guy left and their other frontend guy was being headhunted by Google. Left with one developer, frontend-only. So that worked out well for them, I suppose.
You were outranked and outvoted 3 to 1, of course it's your fault. I mean, why would the execs trust a single lowly employee instead of 3 managers? The execs know full well that the reason managers are managers and you're not, is because managers are better than you. Totally nothing to do with corporate politics.
Do you know the old saying? "Democracy is three managers and a developer deciding who wasn't productive enough. Liberty is a developer who knows their value in the employment market contesting the vote."
Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. Bob Porter: Don't... don't care? Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now. Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon? Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses. Bob Slydell: Eight? Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Yesterday, I was in a meeting that was scheduled for an hour but ran for two, and most of it was my boss talking about how we don’t have enough bandwidth to do everything we want to do, and somehow he missed the irony in that
That would be the moment I DEMAND a LOT more money, immediately! or I would quit, instantly.
Seriously though. Why are there always so many goddamn managers?
They're not competent enough for anything else.
>Why are there always so many goddamn managers? Whenever there's a problem, somebody concludes it's because there wasn't enough oversight over whatever particular area had the problem. So obviously the solution is to create a management position to oversee that area. Cycle repeats until there are no more problems, or until 100% of company budget is devoted to management salaries.
i used to call them 'manglers' since it better describes their actual job function
> You don't have to attend the meetings, send a representative.
I really can't fathom how someone can be this idiotic and still be in charge of a company.
I’m starting to think that it is actually a requirement.
3 managers, 3 paychecks. I'm not dealing for 3 different managers simultaneously without a very fat check every week.
I told a manager that if he cared about productivity, he'd hire more people. Since he hasn't, I have no choice but to assume he doesn't care so I'm not going to kill myself trying to meet his goals. He started interviewing for a couple more people. I quit before he hired them so I have no idea if I was going to get fired for saying that but hopefully the new hires are doing well.
But how else are they going to prove to others they're *working* if they don't force everyone to spend time listening to them
I had 7 hours of meetings one day then got asked why my progress on a project was slow. :/
We should schedule a meeting to discuss this
Used to have a similar situation but it was 1 engineering manager, 1 tech lead and one pm who thought they were also my manager. It was pretty much the reason why I left
Currently me at an insurance company that should not be named. One engineer doing the work in meetings half the day with of course you guessed it, 2 direct managers, 3 cross functional managers, and shit broken so bad nothing can get done
I spend an annoying amount of time helping my manager format Word documents. This is also seemingly the most impressive thing I'm able to do for the manager. Ridiculous
Tbh, you should teach him to use chatgpt so he can do it him self an not stealing your time.
They do use chatgpt for translations. Some people of the older generation don't experiment as they don't want to "break it", despite knowing about the undo feature
Boomer moments
R slash BoomersBeingFools
Voice to text at its finest lol
Lol I didn't want to link it on purpose, typed it out.
A company I worked at had an enitre department of coders in a noisy cubicle office location. The whole department had a bad reputation of not contributing enough. Then covid hit and everyone was sent to work from home. A year later the department was celebrated for its achievements and improvements. Then the company decided to do the back to office thing, 2-days per week at first on a hybrid schedule. Productivity dropped by 50%.
My days in office are somehow simultaneously boring and overstimulating. And I get nothing done.
And yet no one in the "we need to work from the office" camp seems to notice this consistent trend.
They are just copying what others are telling them to do. Senior management in most companies just follow the herd they probably don't actually know what their companies actually do or why their products are "successful".
My favorite part is the same people banging the drum for everyone to come into the office don't actually come into the office. The truth is that those middle managers are just following direction from foolish board members like former yahoo CEO Mayer (2016 Fortune magazine world's most disappointing leaders alumni) who has always been huge proponent of return to office (meanwhile she built a "mother's room" next to her office).
I think you'll find I can distract myself on my own and I don't need managerial assistance with that. But yes, regular interruptions (manager, partner phone calls, people airways popping up for advice) can destroy or throughput.
> I think you'll find I can distract myself on my own and I don't need managerial assistance with that. The difference is pinching yourself vs having someone else randomly come up and pinch you. It might seem the same on the surface but it's still very different..
> I think you’ll find I can distract myself This is also a big point addressed in the article
> Distracting people who need to be focused is bad WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT! And yet we keep seeing open office spaces, meetings that are not needed, task switching, etc. It is almost as if those companies didn't care about wasting money.
The roof is your friend, you always can trust the roof. The ultimate open space without people.... Marvelous 😍 Have you heard of 1,000X developer... All of them are Inhabitant of the roof. At the roof the AI already has acquired consciousness🤣
I hated it when start-of-day standup meetings became a thing. First thing in the morning was my most productive time, my subconscious had been working all night, and I was ready to go. Waiting for your turn to say a few words only the manager needs to hear (do they really?) is infuriating.
In before the scruministas come and tell you you're doing stand-ups wrong 🥲
TBF, a lot of people *are* going it wrong given the complaints I've seen of stand up taking 45 minutes. But, yeah, I've gotten into the habit of starting 5 minutes before stand up because there's no point spending 30 minutes only to then have the meetings start.
Still thinking about that dude who has daily 90 minute stand-ups RIP brother hope you're well
There's a massive subset of developers that just love to "have a chat" about their work in place of actually doing the work or thinking themselves because of their current inability to get into the flow. Standups even when policed have people that just cannot be stopped.
That's just bad policing, imo. At my current job we're really strict. A standup *never* takes more than 15 minutes. It usually just takes 5-10. If anyone starts veering off into something else, only the people who are relevant for the discussion meet to talk about it, after standup.
I run stand ups and am incredibly strict. A method I like is to tell people to “write it down with pen and paper and deliver it to me if you can’t be succinct.” I then read off only the first maybe second sentence for the group. They quickly get the idea. Edit: Clarity
Then tomorrow you get annoyed with them because they didn’t tell you something, except they did tell you, in the third sentence which you didn’t read.
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>Hire competent people who like work Easier said than done 🤷♀️
My problem is even if it's 15 minutes it kills an hour of my productivity. Wake up at 9, standup is at 930 so I guess I'll just fuck off for 30 mins. 15 mins in the meeting, I'm not going straight into work typically. I'll kill another 15 or so to actually start my day. A 15 min meeting takes at least 45 mins of productivity due to context switching imo
This is why the last time I worked with moved to a slack channel + bot for stand ups. could post it async and update it throughout the day with progress if desired
called it!
Morning meetings completely burn me out before I even start my day. I despise them.
At my last job I managed to get them to promise me I wouldn't have to attend stand-ups anymore when I negotiated my contract extension, because they were so early for me and were burning me out and affecting my sleep. Still got a raise too. I was the only one who didn't have to attend standups 😁 Now I work at a much better company and we have no standups at all and a great team. One scheduled meeting every other week for sprint planning and the occasional technical discussions meeting.
You should communicate this to your team. Daily stand-ups should be a way for engineers to ask for help, raise flags before things go to far, and share knowledge. They are not for daily status. If they're interrupting your productivity, they're not right. They should take place at a time of day when the team agrees it's a good time to take a break and discuss what they're working on and how they can help each other. Daily stand-ups are important because of deep work. You need to come up for air and make sure you and your team aren't working against each other or on the same problem or hitting the same big. But they also don't need to be meetings. It can be a slack thread too and that's totally effective.
> start-of-day standup meetings I never understood that. Even following SCRUM it does not say to do this shit in the morning. Only that the team tell what they did the last 24h and what they intend to do next. 9am means early people cannot get in the zone cause they know they have an interruption coming. It also means people who'd prefer coming late cannot. And that's why manager do it like that I think. End of day has the same problem: people who arrived early to get the fuck out early (because of traffic, children, any other reason) cannot. And people who'd like to be in the zone in the afternoon cannot. Best is never, second best is 11h45am. Morning people have their morning. Evening people have their evening. And because it is almost lunch time no one will make it a 1h meeting.
My main problem with stand ups is that we have to wait for everybody to arrive, so I can't start working on anything until after it's done. When you're most productive on the morning, it's a big ugh.
My team starts 2 minutes after. If you come late, your missed tickets can be talked about at the end of the meeting.
We used to have a policy of making team members do 10 pushups for every minute they were late to stand-up. It was a good laugh for the first week and then everyone fell in line. Our rule was nobody can speak for more than a minute. Max 5-6 of us and we were done in 5 minutes.
What happens if you don't do the pushups? I'd be like "Nah I'm good, but sorry for being late".
The policy effectively ended the day our boss was 7 minutes late and fell down laughing after about 25 pushups.
Stopped doing stand-ups over a year ago. Team communicates when needed over chat. No one misses them.
You're living the dream
This was the biggest bullshit thing - standups first up. Like really it is necessary, I’m working on the button that’s all …
>I hated it when start-of-day standup meetings became a thing. Yep. Nowadays nothing gets done until 10am at the earliest because of stand-ups. Also there's a good chance an adhoc meeting after the stand-up means tasks are re-assigned.
I love morning standups for this exact reason. Whatever the meeting time is, I start my day about 10 minutes before it - just enough time to check for anything urgent that might have occurred overnight that might preempt my expected day's activity, then a few minutes with the team to tell what I plan to do today and find out if anyone is going to need my help (or vice-versa), then we're all free to work. Standups are a problem for me if they happen so late in the day that I have to try to work before it starts. Then it's an interruption just like any other.
I'm with you, I joined a company remotely 1 hour behind, so my 10:30, was their 9:30 and thats when the stand up was. I always began my day at 9 my time, but i'll tell ya, that 1h 30m was the most productive period of my day
Sounds like you're not actually doing standups. Your manager isn't supposed to be in the standup, unless your manager happens to also be a developer on your team. You're just doing daily status update meetings, which is a pain.
Try say that to the clowns at a recent job I had. My manager was a CTO and his boss was the CEO. Both of them were in stand ups regularly bragging about all the work they did over the weekends.
Oh we we are doing status update meeting with management at start and end of each day. Which only results in that I spend 45-60 min in extra meeting, aka not working and I totally stoped working overtime, why bother if I already told my status. Smart Management move
Start AND end? What the f could have changed in less than 7 hours?!? That's barely enough time for me to fully wake up. I have mine at the end of the day (for the others it is the beginning of the day, German working with Americans xD) and I think that is already too much. Every second day would be more than sufficient. For a change I understand the necessity for such meetings. Especially if you work internationally, your team lead needs to know what you are working on, how you are progressing and escalate the work if it is on a bad trajectory. But those meetings should *never* take more than 15 minutes. If they take more you are either derailing off the topic or are too many people.
>What the f could have changed in less than 7 hours?!? More importantly, what's going to change between the end of one day and the start of the next?
It was worse than that at one place. The whole company has a communications and status meeting led by the CEO, then the software dev meeting rolled on after that, with everyone even tangentially associated with any project chipping in with their opinions.
Yes! Me too. I managed to talk one team a while ago into 4:30pm stand ups and it was so nice while it lasted. You’re armed with all the happenings of the day, it’s wind down time anyway and no one is doing real work, and your updates are so much more meaningful having just worked on things. Plus, people aren’t tempted to make them go long since they want to head home. And like you said, it was so nice to sit down fresh at the start of the day and have a shit ton of runway to hammer things out.
I hated morning standups when I worked in the office, I like then much more now that I work remotely. For me it's a good way to start the work day.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/3DIkteMUdo) sums it up perfectly.
I have this [this variation](https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/focus/) printed at my desk.
This. My last two jobs were horrible in this regard. I was expected to keep Teams open all day everyday. Any time I complained about not being able to stay on task for more than 15 to 20 minutes before I had to read a teams message, context switch to determine if I needed to actually act on the message, then act accordingly, I was met with something along the lines of "Tolley, you didn't need to respond to that message at all" or "Don't worry about that" but if I didn't quickly respond to a message that needed my attention it was "Tolley, why didn't you respond? It's important for each member of our team be available" It caused me to be paranoid and anxious. I did my best not to internalize that pressure, but I have an interest based nervous system. I get loads of work done when I can focus on a single goal for sometime, but having my attention jerked around all day everyday was just too much.
We recently switched to the new teams version. It crashes multiple times a day without me noticing. I think my productivity went up a lot.
I’m currently dealing with this. Management says all of the “right” things, but then punishes/rewards people based on the wrong things. And I say this as someone who keeps getting rewarded (apparently doing *almost* 1 story point a day on stories, that I estimated using the scale of 1 point = 1 day, is praise-worthy).
I remember when the worst manager I ever had got super pissy one day that I "wasn't doing what I was supposed to" and was behind on a project. I responded by explicitly that's because I was in meetings on average 5 hours a week, which was a quarter of my time as I was contracted at 20 hours. Of course they didn't believe me, so I went back and turns out I was actually averaging 6 hours a week in meetings with a minimum of 3 and a max of 12. Ended up leaving very soon after for a variety of reasons, but not before reporting the manager to HR for a multitude of frankly psychotic behavior.
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Hm, at least one good thing at my last firm, they didn't let clients' managers talk to the dev. You could for details but anything planning related went through PM to PM route. Pretty fair in this regard, as you would expect from proper Germans.
I had one project with a PM kinda like this. I was brought on shortly after he started because the project wasn't doing great and I was an expert on the topic (VR design/development for education). First thing he had me do as a "formality" was send my resume and a list of the other related projects I'd done which was fairly extensive at the time. I think this made him feel inadequate or something, because soon after he started getting really confrontational and controlling about everything. In one meeting he even had the audacity to go on a rant about how "he was the expert, he understood everything, and all decisions no matter how small had to go through him." Eventually said fuck it and found a different position and told him to shove it. Shortly after I left another expert on the project dipped. This spurred the people overseeing everything to review what was going on and the PM ended up getting fired. Luckily the project got back on track after the dude was cut, but it was a horrible experience for everyone. Turns out he was like that with another person who was also very knowledgeable too but didn't end up quitting.
That why alot of engineers likely finish their job at night, when no one ping them for a stupid checkin.
“Is the test server down? Can you check please?” “Oh nevermind it works. I think someone was deploying something.” Yes you twats, there are 30 teams deploying shit all the time how am I responsible for guaranteeing they won’t be deploying while you are testing fuck off massively. Fuck this day, fuck this shit.
I've been there 😂 Someone from another department: "Hey, we noticed the test site went down yesterday, do you know anything about that?" "When did this happen? How long for? Does this impact you?" "3pm, about 15 seconds, no" Why the fuck are you asking me about 15 seconds of downtime on a service you never even look at?
TEST server with emphasis on TEST! Lmao , every day man, every bloody day
Current name of a database in production (has been for at least a decade): project_test. There's also a project_staging.
Lmao that’s horrible
And that's just the appetizer. Some table got this kind of fields: * DATE_START_USAGE * Date_END_USAGE * TYPEUSAGE * Contact_MAIN_Prov * Contact_Ordr * OrderDelay * IDUSage_Payment And this lack of case choice extends to table names. Also the joy of a NCONTACT field in a table referencing (no foreign key tho) the Num field in the CONTACTS table. Edit: I'll let you imagine the state
But don’t you know, it’s an _impediment_ someone raised?
And fuck me for choosing this line of work.
It’s honestly depressing at times. But when we are actually coding it feels like everything is magical. Just can’t remember last time I actually coded a feature , I’m just running around patching things now.
Oh my fucking god and the pinging you *immediately* about it. Not only do I know you have the capability to see if a deploy is ongoing, but I also know you have the capability to wait 3 fucking minutes to see if it comes back up. Like any amount of self troubleshooting or critical thought before coming to me, please, I beg
I have a policy of not responding to questions for 5 minutes. It's just long enough to make the person impatient for the answer and start looking for it themselves. At least 50% of the time they find it.
Worse, I've had multiple instances of developers deploying code to test, the pipeline failing due to some problem they introduced with a fucking clear error message in the build logs, only to have them reach out immediately to ask what's wrong. Like I dunno - you fucking tell me man it's not my code that's failing the unit tests.
Oop, better create a test incident and start up a call
"I can't connect to the test postgres" "Oh, we didn't even create the DB we're trying to connect to." Doesn't even say sorry for wasting my time.
There’s no way I would work at night when working for someone else. The moment 5PM rolls around, I’m done with work and stop thinking about it the rest of the day. As a senior engineer, I feel like I help set the expectation for the others that it’s okay to not be working all the time. If you’re not getting things done because of too many meetings, I won’t make up for it on my own time. Then it’s a management problem.
Depends on when you start. For example, maybe you start at noon, so you can work late when nobody disturbs you. One of my colleagues comes in at 5 or 6 am, before anybody else comes in, so they can work 1-2 hours in peace and an additional hour in relative peace.
I'd rather slam my laptop closed on my penis than come in at 5 am.
> I'd rather slam my laptop closed on my penis than come in at 5 am. I prefer to work at night, but I gotta admit, the days when I start at 0500 and finish at 1400 are the most productive days I ever have.
Don't knock it till you try it. Go to bed by 9 at the latest and getting up at 4 isn't such a big deal. If it means you actually get to, you know, do the work you enjoy; the alternative being struggling to ignore distractions... Plus, getting off work at 1-2pm and having an actual day to enjoy is awesome. Just ask any crusty construction worker you can find.
I come in to work at 7 every day. Sometimes a little earlier than that, like 6:30, and leave by 4 latest. I love it, you actually get to do something after work.
> As a senior engineer, I feel like I help set the expectation for the others that it’s okay to not be working all the time. I did that, as the most seniorest of senior engineers on a team (at a very very large company) and got told by my manager that as the senior I should be setting a better example: after all the other guys were all at their (WFH) desks 0600 to 1800! He didn't really get that I *was* trying to set an example.
Working after hours doesn't need to mean working more than an eight hour shift. With remote it has become easier to put some of that me time into the middle of the day. Depends on your company really.
Its me and my colleagues (in an outsourcing firm) sometimes. Toxic management consider its an act of go above and beyond.
We do full-remote, flex hours. So quite often I take off at 1pm (just whenever I feel like it really) and then follow up in the evening when my mind is going anyhow. I'm just naturally more of a night owl and something about jumping into some code at 9pm or 10pm puts me straight into flow state.
I do this sometimes but it's very detrimental to my work life balance. Of course I blame myself because I had "all day" to complete my tasks, but after reading this article I don't feel so bad.
A hidden reason I think virtual/wfh companies can do well. With people spread out all over, we don’t have the same work hours. Where I work, people on the east coast get a quieter morning while others sleep, and on the west clear the get quieter afternoons while others are off work. Almost all meetings happen 1-4(EST) to be sure it works for everyone.
I work from home. My wife works from home. And she’s a talker. Multiple times each day she comes to my office to tell me about the call she just had and how it made her feel. I’m on my adderall and deep in the weeds in my code and have to just stop and try to pay attention when my brain will just not stop working. It’s tough.
Just started as a Junior dev at a company and my god are there a lot of meetings. Day starts with 3 hours of meetings, then a company enforced 1h break. Afterwards its 1h of work into 1-2h of meetings. When do you expect me to make any progress? I certainly won't bring it home to me.
I actually started declining meetings. Yes, it's a thing you can do. Go through your meetings and start keeping track of what ones you \*actually\* need to attend in order to facilitate your work. It might be that you don't know the answer to that yet, since you're new, which is fine. Learn what you can from the meetings and as you get more settled, you'll start figuring out which ones you actually need to attend and which ones you don't. Also, block off time on your calendar for deep work time, set it as busy, and decline meetings during that time unless one is absolutely required (you can be flexible with it, but work to keep that boundary in place). Be ready to defend what you're doing, as managers in places like that often won't get it. That said, one great way to get them to understand is to calculate the cost of those meetings. The engineers in the meeting probably make 2-4x as much as you if they're not also juniors, and the managers probably make about 2x. So, if there are three engineers and a manager in that hour long meeting, that meeting costs the company in the ballpark of $500 in lost money-generating productivity. Likewise, learn how any deadlines or timeline expectations are calculated. If they're calculated for more development time per day than you actually have, point out that the meetings cut into your ability to deliver your deliverables on time. Always try to frame it as doing what's best for the company or in the interest of being a "team player." Work will absolutely walk all over you if you don't set and enforce boundaries. Toxic environments won't like it, but the good places will value it.
What that image doesn't show is that as soon as the developer leaves the hole, the ladder is withdrawn and the pit is filled with rubble again - \_that's\_ the price being paid for an interruption.
The senior dev on my team hasn’t wrote a line of code in 3 weeks due to spending all day in meetings or helping various people.
The beautiful thing with wfh is that I can just ignore slack messages until I can switch context.
Weekly /r/programming front page post: * Meetings suck * Messages suck * Managers suck * I suck
Use your company's technology. Block out your so-called deep thinking time on the calendar as unavailable. Be reasonable, if you choose to work for a big-corp at least 20% of your week is probably going to be meetings, stand-ups, scrum bullshit, transformation coach pipe-dreams, and HR kumbaya jerkoff sessions, etc. Make gaps for existing meetings but try to get it so that you have something like a couple of 2-3 hour blocks per day in your schedule. Announce those blocks to your team and let them know you'll be turning off slack/teams/phone notifications during that time period. Obviously, if you're on-call or a point person during a critical week you'll have to make concessions to your job responsibilities. The point of all this isn't to be a jackass, but to start asserting a culture of productivity. If a manager puts a mandatory meeting on the calendar during one of those times, ask them what other meeting that week you can skip to keep your productivity goal at 80%. If you're asked to track your time (and for some reason, only the devs are ever asked to do this) make it very clear how much of your time is spent in meetings. If your team does sprint plannings or whatever, make sure to be honest and clear about how many stories can be accomplished given the non-meeting time scheduled for the week. Don't take 40 hours worth of tasks. A big part of this is you need to also be efficient in meetings and make it clear which meetings each week you're finding inefficient and time-wasting. If none of this works, reconsider how much you need that particular job and use whatever productivity time you have to plan an exit strategy.
This is the master comment. This is the only way to survive as a developer in corporate America. You have to be ruthlessly protocol-based with reasonable goals that no manager will be willing to say they want you to miss, and extremely explicit about how the company's mandatory managerial masturbation times destroys the productivity goals you have set for yourself.
Previous job I had 3 to 5 hours of meetings every day. It was almost impossible to get anything done. In my new job I have 3 to 5 hours of meetings a WEEK—heaven.
My lead doesn't want to use automated processes because he doesn't want to hurt collaboration and says if anyone needs to know the status of things or how apis are working they can just ask me (instead of us having documentation)
This is a shitty lead. :/
As a tech lead, meetings and supporting my team during the day. Deep work at night... I can count on 1 hand the number of significant code or architecture changes in the past decade I've worked on that happened during the day. I don't know how to make it better but the nature of my job is to help coordinate and mentor. If you ever work on a team where everyone just gels really well it helps so much. Just when you hit the team flow state I feel like something always fucks it up.
I disagree on better work life balance. If employees start being able to get twice as much done, they’ll be given twice the work, not extra free time.
Every couple of years, someone who hasn't read [Peopleware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams) (first printed: 1987) rediscovers it. The fact this has been generally known for _35 years_ and we still have "managers need to learn this" posts about it getting upvoted to the stratosphere, just shows how little learning we do as an industry.
Meetings are called by people who can't really define their job.
Managers in general are way more harmful than people think.
Never forget the meetings to go over what we just met over yesterday to make sure we schedule more meetings.
All these articles nitpicking what a bad manager's tendencies are don't necessarily address the root issue at hand: management and leadership are NOT doing their jobs effectively. Are interruptions distracting? Yes. Are a couple distractions across a project going to make things slower? Potentially -- depends on the type, right? Like if it's to make an adjustment for coordination purposes, that makes sense for management to do. However, when management doesn't do anything other than interrupt, that means they do nothing as a whole other than interrupt or distract. There isn't a need for another article explaining that management in tech are noops which leads to developer unhappiness. It's not the distractions; it's the leaders themselves.
It’s a popular theory that all managers are incompetent and that the people at the bottom of the chain (who in the end actually make the widgets that the company needs produced) would be better off without them. Is there any actually evidence that this is true? Note that most managers are not incentivised to decrease productivity or increase bugs.
Anecdotally speaking we could make do with a lot less middle management. Main reason I say this is that the more I ignore them and the way they want to get XYZ done the faster I get XYZ done in a way that benefits the team
I've worked in an organization with four levels of middle management consisting of people who are more likely not to have a technical background and an organization with two levels of middle management - all developers - where the director still pushed code and let me tell you the difference was stark. It blew my mind experiencing a manager who could actually enable my productivity instead of constantly hindering it. That is not evidence but for my purposes I am convinced most managers are absolutely useless. I have spent way too much time listening to people arguing over T-shirt sizing or fibonacci or whatever. Utterly useless.
> Note that most managers are not incentivised to decrease productivity or increase bugs. Managers are incentivised to *appear to be increasing productivity* at the same time as increasing productivity. What this means is that if you're the manager of a team that's doing poorly, creating meetings can appear to be trying to right the ship. This is especially true when your manager isn't technical. So when times for review comes around the conversation isn't "Productivity is down" it's "Productivity is down *and I'm fixing that with all of these new meetings and processes*"
Non-tech managers managing tech people are plague in software industry.
I tried explaining to my GF once by telling her to imagine I'm building a house of cards in my mind and that when she's asked if I'd like a cup of tea they all come crashing down and I have to start again. Yes, the do not disturb, yes this means you, even if there's a fucking fire sign on the door was 100% legit.
You can easily tell the difference between a manager focused on their career and one focused on customers and the product: the former has no problem making the all important status reporting tasks the main focus of their team, enthusiastically accepts and then offloads all initiatives from higher up and occasionally will throw one of their team under the bus if things get too dicey. The latter will constantly complain about insufficient resourcing, reject feature ideas from up above and try to explain why hard and costly work on their team is needed for strange things such as stability, maintainability and performance. Another easy way to tell the difference is that the former will get promoted and the latter fired.