News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan. Parent comment

Re:Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan by Clubber on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @11:36PM (#14965342)
>Because we all know that software estimation is a solved problem. Particularly with non-technical managers.

Oh wonderful. They don't do estimates at your company then?

This was explained to me by one of my professors 20 years ago. There are two types of company mentalities:

A: The high school mentality. You show up 8 to 5 but it doesn't really matter what gets done.

B: The college mentality. You pass or fail based on how well you do on the test. Show up if you want, or don't.

The way I see it, if your manager can't tell if you are productive, he or she has no business being a manager and they are the problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan by michaelt on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @03:24AM (#14966263) 

  Oh wonderful. They don't do estimates at your company
  then?
You can do estimates without thinking they're accurate enough to let you detect high- and low-performing employees.

Intern Ian's tasks are simple and well documented - so they always have good estimates. Veteran Victor is great at complex, poorly understood bugs - but he often takes longer than estimated to fix them, as often the cause is hard to find.

It would be a foolish manager that would punish Victor for performing worse than Ian.

[ Parent | on HN ]