Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that.
The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things.
I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.
Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge.
It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!
that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.
Do you have more info about the job. I keep seeing this, i did some interesting and hard work and it doesn't match what im coming across.
like remote ok? how much are you paying? whats the tech and problems being worked on?
I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation.
If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options:
- Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars.
- Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager.
- Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it.
And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain.
There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.