Re:Managers, Stop Distracting Your Employees
by opmelogy on Sunday April 02, 2023 @05:17PM
(#35415326)
> ...delivering results isn’t the end all be all. It’s delivering the right results on a known and predictable time scale without any surprises.
Well said. I've had a hard time articulating this but you nailed it.
Re:Managers, Stop Distracting Your Employees
by catiopatio on Sunday April 02, 2023 @09:32PM
(#35417468)
> I think lots of devs feel weird about coding for 20 or less hours a week because it’s the part we associate with work when in reality we’re delivering real business value in those stupid meetings, it just manifests outside our view.
Blink twice if you’re saying this under duress, because otherwise, this just sounds like post hoc justification from someone who gave up and dedicated themselves to promulgating the soul-sucking management games that made producing real value untenable.
Spending less than 20 hours a week actually writing software is a horrendous use of a developer’s time. It’s a marvel if anything intelligent gets written at all in such an environment.
At the end of the day delivering results isn’t the end all be all. It’s delivering the right results on a known and predictable time scale without any surprises. Above a baseline of speed it doesn’t really matter because you’re only as fast as the slowest business unit involved in your release and it’s not usually engineering.
Realistically my team could push out features that could fill a newsletter every single week but the parts of the business that figure out what features customers actually want, how we can market and sell them, how we tell users about them, getting them through qa, gathering incremental user feedback for the next iterations all work on human time and so we directly (or indirectly through management) get pulled into those concerns.
I think lots of devs feel weird about coding for 20 or less hours a week because it’s the part we associate with work when in reality we’re delivering real business value in those stupid meetings, it just manifests outside our view.
Dumb Hack: Treat meetings like card work, groom them, assign them point values, define ACs and retro them. You’ll discover really quickly the meetings that aren’t serving you and the value you’re providing to the rest of the business.