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Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

#21

All of the concerns you mentioned seem to be based on managing people's time instead of their output . Except the first one, 5-10 minutes is a normal break, so it wouldn't be anything notable to me how one chooses to allocate their break. They'll produce better results overall vs not taking an hourly-ish break.

Agree on games. I find it hard to manage output alone, it's a combination of both. Do you count hours where you work? How do you manage output? To me output is challenging, because any engineering task can take less or more time that what's estimated and thus how to set a realistic goals for the team members without making them go crazy.

I'm probably a bit of an edge case as a self-employed independent contractor. My comments were a reflection from good / bad past managers. I count hours for billing, but focus on output over hours.

Managing output over hours is definitely challenging and probably more of an art than a science, especially in an agile environment. I've found sprint pointing can help but is still pretty imperfect. I don't know if anyone necessarily does it super well, but as a manager you can help motivate and manage expectations so that your team members are each giving it their all and doing work that they care about. IMO people don't need much motivation when the work is interesting.

I'm starting to experiment more with time boxing vs scope boxing personally. Definitely a challenge in environments where scope is not clearly defined.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

#22
post #9

Breaks occur in every office (coffee, toilet, smoke). It's fine as long as it doesn't damage business interests.

Do you record when employees come and leave? we currently don't and it's pretty flexible and that's one of the questions that I don't have an answer for. Should it kept flexible and team can come and leave when they need to or set some rules to manage that.

When you have 1000 employees, you can't keep track anymore. Some large companies have computer systems that register total monthly time using chip cards.

I don't manage employees myself, just my experience.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

#23
The best way to manage output (since that comes up a lot in other comments) is to:

1. Figure out bottlenecks and fix them, they may be individual, they may be on level of way team operates. E.g. "our tests are slow", or "Jane knows C++ but Joe doesn't, so only Jane can do C++ code reviews when they come up."

2. Talk about the reasons you want stuff done. This gives the team the opportunity to figure out better solutions, rather than just being code monkeys writing a spec.

Focusing on hours is a mistake: you focus on the thing you can measure since it's easy, even if that reduces productivity. Micromanaging people's hours is not a good way to increase productivity.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

#24
I'm a developer, and in my company:

We have a bi weekly team meeting to discuss tasks/issues assignment. Almost all day. We make sure everyone has 2 weeks of work assigned, estimation on tasks is as best we can do.

Then everyday we have a tool to log time against each tasks we spent time on.

We have to log 7h. From a 8h30 day minus 1h lunch, 15m break morning, 15m break afternoon.

We have to log/distribute 7h every day between assigned tasks, or special tasks like: network/software/hardware problems; meetings (without active task); task planning and time spent logging time; releases deployment;...

It's a pain in the ass, but help us thinking/focusing on what needs to be done.

Team managers, project managers, and BAs also log their time.

Every other day my team manager verify if everyone is missing logging their time and send private email reminder(just a pic of weekly calendar with missing logs). If I start to fall back to much he starts calling every day asking what I'm I working on.

Quarterly, in my personal evaluation, time logged is used as one of the metrics to evaluate progress. But not taken to serious, as it is a hard one.

Edit1: Everyday we have to make sure the task remaning time to completion is updated, increase/decrease/maintain.

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