> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?

I... talk to them? Ask them questions? Probe to see if they're running into issues? Offer help, support, possible solutions, or just be their rubber duck?

If I sense there might be issues, I probe into the team, solicit anonymous feedback, and otherwise discretely ask for other people's perspectives.

Is it a perfect science? No. Can you get fleeced by staff for a while? Absolutely. But the low performers eventually reveal themselves if you're paying any attention. And the reality is the vast majority of people genuinely want to do a good job. So my preference is to trust my staff to be honest and hard working, recognizing the rare possibility that I could end up the victim of a sociopath who deliberately tries to abuse that trust.

Sure, but then that really boils down to: be subjective, use your manager's intuition.

It's what most managers do, but I'd argue it is not very effective. People regularly overestimate their ability to judge others. Most rigorous studies have shown that judges make worse decisions when they see defendants in person vs. sentencing based on facts and history alone. Intelligence agencies are frequently tricked by moles despite intense training.

If judges and counter-intel agents regularly fail at this, isn't it foolish to think that eng. managers have some secret sauce?

> If judges and counter-intel agents regularly fail at this, isn't it foolish to think that eng. managers have some secret sauce?

But I'm not interrogating prisoners about terrorist plots. I'm not regularly dealing with scam artists and criminals.

I'm dealing with people, my staff, folks that I trust and respect; trust and respect based on years of experience working together, building relationships, while solving hard problems.

The question was: "How do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?"

Well, guess what? I am never, ever, going to have a perfect, 100% guaranteed sense of how productive people are. That's not how the world works. There is no "secret sauce", nor did I claim there was.

Your mistake is in thinking I'm trying to verify, with perfect accuracy, precisely how effectively everyone is performing and whether they're living up to their claims of productivity and effectiveness. I can only guess this is based on a misconception of what management is; that my job is to be a surrogate helicopter parent, policing everyone to make sure they're doing their jobs properly.

But that's not my job. Or, at least, it sure isn't how I do my job.

Rather, my goal is to hire good team members who are independent, driven, focused, and reliable; give them challenging problems and the support they need to solve them; coach them to be effective contributors; identify strengths and amplify them; identify areas for improvement and coach/train; identify long-term aspirations and career goals and set out plans to achieve them; when they achieve those goals, to recognize that fact in changes to title/roles/responsibilities.

In short, I treat them like functioning, responsible adults.

And so, I talk to them.

As I said before, yes, there is always "the rare possibility that I could end up the victim of a sociopath who deliberately tries to abuse that trust."

And I'm fine with that.

I can't agree anough with this approach.

> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working on a problem that is twice as difficult as everyone thought?

Why not... Ask them directly? If you understand the type of work your team is doing it should be easy to figure that out. If you manage software engineers and have no idea how software is created no metric is going to save you.

> Was another company or team able to deliver the same feature with less resource expenditure?

How many corners did they cut do deliver faster? And how long will it take before they get crushed by technical debt? There is always a trade-off between quality and velocity. High velocity is immediate to see, but good quality takes time to be appreciated.

>There is always a trade-off between quality and velocity.

This is a common trope but is rarely the case in my experience. Components designed to be flexible and 'future-proof' are the ones that quickly become overengineered, resulting in late deliveries and costly maintenance.

Writing the minimum code required to solve the problem is often a winning strategy.

Flexible and future-proof is not the same as quality.

> If you're a manager, how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking vs. working....

It's sort of strange that we even take this point of view: that somehow human output is to be measured in the way a machine's output is measured or the efficiency of a light bulb.

But that opens up a whole can of worms....

Agreed, a team that spends 50% of the day staring out the window may actually be thinking and come up with a solution that beats another team. Output/results are ultimately what matter and since we all have finite lifetimes, results per unit time is also quite important.

But isn't competition ultimately the only yardstick by which we can measure this?

One of my most experienced and respected colleagues likes to say: “when it looks like I’m not working at all that’s when I’m working the most”.

Well so the basic idea is this:

Either we can A) evaluate/measure engineers' output (e.g. commits/tickets), and promote/hire/fire based on whether they do enough of it per/day ("meritocratic"?)

B) Just plop engineers in chairs, and peer over their shoulder to make sure they aren't on reddit all day, and then trust that however long it took them to build the thing was reasonable.

A is really hard, it was the false-promise of agile. But in a remote culture, you either have to do A or install screen-monitoring software on your engineers to do B (or just hope/pray).

Of course perhaps there's another option, like a technical manager who reviews the volume/quantity of PRs and assesses based on that, but seems rare.

I'm a "middle manager" managing a team of 3 right now, and my team has been all remote since I started in this role 4+ years ago. I have over 20 years of software dev experience and I still contribute to our code base.

It's pretty easy for me to listen to my team's daily updates at our standups and figure out how they're doing without A or B. If something's taker longer than our estimate and they explain why, it's not hard to tell if they're making this up (FWIW, no one who works on this team has ever done that).

And yeah, sometimes their productivity dips because they're tired, distracted by non-work stuff, or they just find this particular piece of work uninspiring. That's ok, no one operates at top productivity all the time.

But all of this just highlights the fact that if you want a manager of a development team to be able to evaluate team members' performance, that person needs to understand the job that those team members are doing.

Agreed. I think the intent of the previous commenters was more along the lines of "How do we determine which employees are working earnestly and effectively vs working without motivation or ineffectively?"

Its important to take time out of the question, because time spent, after a very small minimum, isn't a strong indicator of performance.

While not fun to point out, there is such a thing as toxic people who intentionally under perform at their jobs.

> how do you tell if your team is spending 50% of the time slacking

You don't! As long as they deliver what you ask of them, and do it well, it is none of your business if they used 40 hours a week or 1 hour a week doing it, if they played with their kid while doing it, loaded their dishwasher, or called their mother while doing it.

Who is doing the estimates of how long thing will take to deliver?

Any GOOD manager. Probably in collaboration with the team and possibly a PM

So there's the rub. When the "good" manager asks you, "how long do you think this task will take" and you say "40 hours" but then you do it in 1 hour - do you still think you have the rest of the week to load the dish washer, play with your kids etc?

A "good" manager can at least broadly know how long something will take, and not accept "40 hours" for a 1 hour project. A good manager may not be able to know that a 40 hour project will only take the employee 30 hours, but at that point, who cares? Is the employee sandbagging an extra 10 hours that problematic? Do we really need employees correctly estimating time to completion as perfectly as possible? Is an employee completing a task the company wants them too, ahead of time and on schedule, with a few extra hours to decompress or live their life really a disaster scenario?

What happens if the employee says "30 hours" and if it takes them 40. Do managers/organizations then move things back, or do they expect things done by the deadline given previously, even if it means putting in overtime to get it across the finish line?

re: 40 hours vs 1 hour - I used that example because the commenter further up the thread explicitly said:

> it is none of your business if they used 40 hours a week or 1 hour a week doing it

Evidence based scheduling includes downtime.

That's already a problem in the office culture. I may be able to tell if you are diligent, but I can't tell if you are productive. And as a manager, I would rather have three hours of effective work than 8 hours of ineffective work.

That means you have 5 more hours for meetings.

Is that a joke or meant seriously? I really can't tell.

The first part was serious in order to set up the joke.

So you are saying is that the solution is to just cram people into an office. They are forced to work or something, some part of the time, right? It's not like there's much to do after gossipping and smalltalk. No need for you to do anything, really. Easy work, smart!