Re:Engineering Management
by packetlost on Monday June 21, 2021 @10:36AM
(#27579598)
To kind of expand on this, I actually like doing on-call and operational work. I find it very engaging and rewarding in the right context. The last company I was at, lower management had so little power, and the company was so unwilling to move anywhere (fairly old ISP) that it resulted in nearly all of the senior developers being either frustrated or jaded. It was a really toxic environment.
Compensation is important up to a point but nobody likes feeling like they are wasting their time and powerless to make positive change.
> No one likes to do Oncall or operational or migration work or deal with mess left by earlier group.
No one likes doing these things if they don't see the point, if there's no buy-in and the work is just a directive from above, if everybody feels like they are treading water and not making any progress, etc...
There are too many possible contributing factors to list them all but most solutions involve listening, communicating, and making small changes that compound over time.
Build teams that: make progress, understand why their work is important, have meaningful feedback loops.
Some good starting points:
[1] The Management Flywheel - https://skamille.medium.com/the-management-flywheel-c076f398...
[2] Work is Work (In which returns diminish) - https://codahale.com/work-is-work/
[3] Model, document and share - https://lethain.com/model-document-share/
[4] Why limiting work-in-progress works - https://lethain.com/limiting-wip/