Last company I worked for, the CEO said to me he doesn't care where anyone work as long as the work get done well. However, this was not the case with my own manager. He micro managed everything. He had an office manager sitting with the engineers reporting to him multiple times a day on if the engineers were sitting on the desk. You can feel you are being watch the moment you step into the office. It was an absolute shit place to work for.
I really related to this in my last role. It's the butts-in-chairs method vs output because let's be real... most of the people promoted to middle-management can't measure actual output.
I've always been on the edge of being a manager vs. being IC and the times I've bled over into management I have this style: you're expected to be here early by 30 minutes for meetings, and if you wanna leave directly after to go work from your home office I could care less. I expect workers to be highly available via chat and phone during normal business hours (adjusted to the timezone), and generally flexible if something comes up where I need 'em in the mothership.
To measure output and success, whelp I just get on the corporate GitLab and read everyone's commits daily. Not only do I learn a TON working with solid talent... I also know who's jerkin' me around. Does this work for every WFH-type employee? Nope. Managing devs gives you a ton of black-and-white paper trails to ensure people are working the right direction.
In contrast, throughout my IC career none of my managers have managed ME this way which blows my mind. I know I'm not the most talented leader but I don't understand why dev management doesn't look at real metrics to gauge success outside of "I don't know how to read code"... =|
The way I managed also bought loyalty... like a lot of loyalty. When you get out of the way of people's lives and say, "I'm willing to make this career work with you as a person" you get an insane amount of forgiveness for being a poop manager in other areas.
Did people take advantage of me giving them this slack? Yep. Did I fire 'em for poor output? Yep - at will state sucka. IMO you'll get people taking advantage of the system regardless of how you wanna lead so the best way to hedge that risk is looking at metrics + engaging consistently with your team. Bad apples tend to stick out in a few months and you just gotta learn to fire fast to maintain the integrity of the team vs pumping your staff numbers.
The truth is you need near-100% understanding of the code going into the product to really gauge someone's participation accurately. Looking at LOC, # of commits, etc. is all fluid so while they describe properties of the story, they're not the actual story itself.
Also, there's up and down weeks. I've watched my top performers have poop weeks where they've only been able to crank out a couple of small features, or maybe just resolved one issue, etc. I feel like if micro-managers saw this they'd put the hurt on em... for me it literally never came up because within 1-2 weeks they'd be back on the rails. I was always like "huh - musta been some human stuff." Or, heck... sometimes I could tell they just moved a bit slower on more mundane tasks. When I put myself in a position to relate to that I find that I have the same lulls, lack of motivation for mundane work, etc.
People NOT getting back on the rails after 1-2 weeks of meh was the exception! I also felt like I could demand more of my team during the 2-3 crank-it-out periods that inevitably occurred throughout the year because I had respected their time leading up to that... IDK.
All-in-all if specs were being respected, code was clean/reasonably PR'd, deadlines were hit, and meetings were well prep'd for + attended I felt that we were being successful.
When I'm having off-weeks, I'm painfully aware of them. It causes me a lot of personal stress and anxiety. My manager is like you and never calls me out of it during our standups. He may ping me and ask how I'm doing, etc. I'm glad he doesn't call me out on it because that would just amplify my anxiety and probably make things worse.
You're right, after a week, maybe two, I get right back on the horse and manage to catch up.
People wanna feel safe... And go figure, when they do their output usually goes from being minimal effort to above and beyond. Also feeling safe has sooooo many more institutional benefits etc. Errors are identified + corrected quicker, people don't play politics near as much, things just get "easier"... hard to explain.
But yea - definitely give that guy some positive feedback in your 1:1's. That was one thing that helped me really design a system that people wanted to work within, solid feedback when things work/didn't work =)
He put -1998 lines on his daily email?
And I think that hits to the core of Goodhart's law:
""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.""
This story came up often when I said I read the commits daily. I would just roll my eyes and say "I read code, I don't look at arbitrary LOC".
If the story is true it shows incompetence with the managers to pick such an arbitrary metric to measure with. Plus, when you start policing people like this you can damn-near guarantee motivation goes in the trashcan because now it's a "me vs. you" thing... and eww who wants to come to work with THAT?!
Thank you for finding it.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I learned quick to not make assumptions, and to hire/retain people who I could trust... I also requested informal reports ever 48hrs or so with links to what you'd been working on, PR's, documentation, etc. Reports were sent to a distro list of all team members and replaced traditional stand-ups. So generally if I was in the dark it would all be figured out in due time without having to get up someone's butt. I feel like it kept everyone accountable and transparent when everything was in writing.
Also with ramp-up specifically... since I was paying attention to the hard metrics I started to get a feel for when something was difficult vs. easy. Projects that would kick people down for simple tasks would get priority for refactor, difficult onboarding was usually met with aggressive documentation, etc. Over time you got a taste of what these beasts were without even being an IC on them.
The next set of questions: "If you are a higher-level manager, are your first-line managers capable of reading programs ... ? ... Our surveys indicate that nine-tenths do not ... Do you think it is possible for a first-line manager to know how good his programmers are or how well they are doing without occasionally reading their programs?"
I'm glad to read your report to know that at least somewhere out there exist software managers that seem to 'get' that code is (or should be) the central artifact in all the crap we programmers produce. Not that the other stuff isn't valuable, but things can still work without it, whereas without the code nothing works. My remaining fantasy is to encounter a software manager who is familiar with Deming's work and has thought about how to apply it to software management.
Am familiar and in my experience TQM is just as cargo-cult as Six Sigma, Waterfall, Agile, etc etc. You get these highly-stylized idealist models, often which have books and courses, then the consultants... Ugh. IDK - all of this crap is noise to me. I found Deming's work super thick, and honestly I'm probably too much of a simpleton to really "get it"... =|
In contrast, my personal commandments are near-100% inspired from the two lists:
* Tom Sach's "10 Bullets" (how to work)
* Joel Spolsky's "The Joel Test" (how to run an effective software company)
It doesn't surprise me to hear there's a ton of BS around Deming's work (it's had even longer to build itself up) but I still think there are valuable things there that software companies, especially larger ones, are missing... And we seem to have the existence proof of there being something to it (i.e. Japan's rise, and later on US companies adopting things... though as Jobs once noted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kib6uXQsxBA) customers won't think highly of your quality if you keep shipping garbage despite winning a Deming Award or having all sorts of advertising that claims high quality).
Even starting from the surface root level with Deming's "System of Profound Knowledge" -- his 4 key components -- I see a total lack of "Knowledge about variation" all over the place. Without some intuition of variation you can't even appreciate what you mentioned about how programmers sometimes just seem to have "off weeks", and from what I've read Deming wanted the understanding to be more deep than a basic "yeah things vary" instinct, and to know it applies not only to individuals or individual units of work (e.g. red beans experiment) but to larger scopes as well. Ultimately the knowledge needs mathematical grounding (specifically in probability and statistics), which is something else sorely lacking in management trees (and even more and more on the programming side). If there are things like TQM certifications out there that don't imply a holder has a certain level of mathematical sophistication with statistics, that's all the more damning to the certificates and bodies of work around them, but not I don't think to the importance of such knowledge...
> Ultimately the knowledge needs mathematical grounding (specifically in probability and statistics), which is something else sorely lacking in management trees (and even more and more on the programming side)
This is one of the biggest struggles of my career... dealing with quantifying something that's incredibly difficult to quantify.
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Glad you're checking out Tom Sachs' list! It's an odd one for sure - weird artsy video and all. It's about an art studio in NY and how it manages it's people/process. It's sorta hokey I'll admit, but I find the simplicity of it helps me get back on the rails myself during those times of variation =)
I think you're overly optimistic about this, most just see Covid as a temporary inconvenience and will go back to business as usual when this ends. Sure, some smart managers may see the value, but I'd wager most of them are set in their ways.
Many years ago I had a new skip-level manager who emailed me one day saying that he had dropped by my office a few times to introduce himself but I was never around and he was really concerned with the fact that I never seemed to be in my office working. I am relatively certain every time he dropped by I was either in a colleagues office discussing a work issue or had run down to grab a coffee. But to him this was “concerning”.
He didn’t last long. I believe he moved on in 8-12 months.
People who can't work, manage.
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach others to teach.
Those who can't teach others to teach become school/Uni administrators.
...
In reality I think it's hard to teach stuff you can't do, and teaching it becomes a great way to learn how it actually works.
People who can't manage, work.
Ultimately you will be judged on how well the work gets done -- but the social signals are table stakes.
That meant I spent most of the work week “at work” even though I was only actually working some of that time. I did all of my work and I did a good job but at the end of the year I was the only intern to get a bonus checks. Interns weren’t even eligible for bonuses but my bosses were so blown away by my dedication they decided to reward it. The craziest part is they knew I was doing homework half the time. I had gotten the okay to use my office as a study spot first and they were getting my timesheets every week. They were well aware that I wasn’t some sort full-time super intern.
I think the whole concept of “facetime” pretty silly but it definitely matters even if we like to think it doesn’t.
In my experience it’s consistency, more than anything else, that separates the best performers from average performers.
Grinding away and doing nothing can look like the same thing from your coworkers'/managers' point of view. Or, on days where you just aren't feeling it or can't be productive, you can't just look productive by sitting in your office chair. Instead you basically burn a day and it's easy to start having thoughts like "wow, they must think I'm useless."
I love remote work because I love the freedom to live where I please, but this is one aspect of it that gives me some anxiety. The subconscious "I see you in the office so you must be productive" signal really is strong.
Now I've had jobs where 100% WFH was fine, but that's when I was in a real home with a real office, not my tiny SiValley apartment.
The food isn't amazing but it's usually pretty good, there's little to no clean up (giving me back an hour or so a week of prep and cleaning time), it forces me into a routine of lunch at 12:30, and nobody is forcing me into it so sometimes I bring my own.
> I was like, dude, you live once, get a fuckin life!
Work is a big part of life (in terms of time spent), even if you stick strictly to a 9-5. Its not unreasonable to try and make it comfortable, or possibly even pleasant or enjoyable at times.
I feel this is pretty important. I am only renting a room (not making FAANG money) and as such quarantine has me spending nearly 24 hours a day in my bedroom. I can't follow the standard advice of maintaining a separate space for work
At one apartment I slept on a folding futon couch. I would "go to work" by folding it up and putting all the pillows away. Ta-da, now I'm "in the office", time to work. Done with work? Close the laptop, leave the apartment, walk around the block, maybe get a snack, come back home. Hey! I just came home from work, time to relax. Leaving the apartment and re-entering it, even if I was only gone a few minutes, was a really useful signal.
Later on I decided to strictly separate personal computing from work computing. No personal website logins on the work computer; no company code or email accouts on the personal computer. I also tried putting DNS blocks on my favorite recreational web sites on the work computer, so I'd be forced to swivel my chair around and use the personal computer. This way, I could carry on with email, browsing the web, and writing code on personal projects after work hours, using my personal machine, without feeling like I was still "at work" on my work machine.
I don't know what will work for you, but perhaps choosing to create some artificial barriers like these will help.
I very much hope all of GAFAM/FAANG are paying attention and learning from this situation.
(I've asked about remote work policies every time I've ever interviewed with GAFAM/FAANG. I've seen such a fascinating mix of hypocrisy about remote work in such interviews.)
The sentiment that this is heavily dependent on manager competence is correct IMHO.
I don't think this is true. Actually, most people would like to replace "N" with "M" in that acronym, but then it sounds much worse…
MAFANG (maybe?) if you really want to get Netflix in there? I know some people especially in the Bay Area think Netflix is important in the acronym not necessarily by market cap, but overall head count versus turnover and thus cultural swing (policies like "unlimited vacation" that started at Netflix and then in turn influenced a lot of other surrounding Bay Area companies).
I would spend it on renting a bigger apartment with an extra room to use as my office.
Don't get me wrong: I love my wife and kids dearly. But having anything done requires concentration and some moderate insulation from distractions. Achieving this from a coach in the living room is hard. Grabbing my kid's room only works as long as the school day isn't over, and not at all during a recess, like, say, the whole summer. My wife already works from home, so our bedroom doubles as her office.
I didn't need a proper workplace as long as my employers provided me with (a piece of) an office. Now that they stopped due to the quarantine, its lack becomes a significant problem.
Obviously, some would say: leave your expensive city, move to somewhere really cheap, in the middle of (almost) nowhere! Two problems. (1) What about schools there? (2) When enough people move into a cheap and convenient place, it quickly ceases to be as cheap.
During my exit interview after I resigned, I told my director I was leaving partially because I wanted to work remotely more and that they should either encourage or at least allow more WFH. She laughed, said they don't do that there, and told me that I'd be back.
Now they're all working from home and I'm with a new remote-friendly company with no plans on ever going back to the FAANG world. Good riddance.
I guess the benefits outweigh the costs now, so I hope those companies will more proactively consider more WFH friendy employment options.
I work at a FAANG company which was aggressively opposed to WFH before the covid-19 crisis. As matter of fact, I recently changed teams within said company and during the informational interview I asked about the team's policy on WFH - the answer was that "our team has a strong 'collaborative in-the-office' culture, so we don't encourage WFH"
I am not kidding, we're talking about one of the most advanced companies in history and they required domestic travel+hotel for trivial half-day, mostly passive interview training that could have been done easily over teleconference, that's how much this company values physical presence.
Fast forward a few months, everybody is WFH in the company and the sky hasn't fallen. Actually, my productivity vastly increased because I'm fortunate to have a solid WFH environment at home (despite kids/wife around).
While I'm not proposing mandatory WFH for tech companies, neither saying that it works for everybody, I believe our top companies could lead and finally allow people who demonstrate that they can be productive at home to just stay home - permanently.