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Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

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Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#21
post #4

Earlier in my career, I would hear my manager say something about a specific situation and I would extrapolate that into a general belief and theoretical/academic debate that frustrated everyone. Make sure you're not doing that. As a manager, sometimes you need to say things like, "This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow" so that your team understands the urgency and your expectations. The more technical the manag…

> As a manager, sometimes you need to say things like, "This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow" so that your team understands the urgency and your expectations.

I'm sorry but you can do that without sounding both clueless and unreasonable. You can put everything else on hold, stop the line, explain why it's important for this to be fixed, etc.. to get the point across.

"This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow" would chip away at the trust I have with management and depending on other factors would lead me to brush up my resume...

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#23
As a manager - I've had to do crap like this now and then to light a fire under people. It can be done to indicate extreme urgency. There also are real-world implications to some delays - for example not being able to run payroll is a legal nightmare and an ethical nightmare for hurting your employees.

Generally, when I've had to do this, it's been my fault for not manangeing properly.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#24

I'll play Devil's Advocate here: there are sometimes critical business deadlines that absolutely require timeboxing a bug at the risk of losing a contract. I wish the world could conform to SDLC best practices, but sometimes reality is messy, and hindsight is 20/20. So that said, I think the real problem here is what you alluded: several people attempted unsuccessfully to solve it: how many man hours was this? How an…

> deadlines that absolutely require timeboxing a bug

To be clear, timeboxing is usually used in the opposite sense, to say "if this bug is not fixed by end-of-day then we should abandon the effort because the value of fixing it is limited".

It can be useful to timebox the amount of time that you spend trying to find the "right" fix before falling back to a workable solution -- like "if you can't fix the problem with the email sender by end of day we're going to send out the emails manually".

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#25
post #14

If you go to your mechanic and tell them "car won't start", does your mechanic have idea how long it's going to take to fix or how much money it will cost? Realistically, you will be charged a fee to figure out what is wrong, and another to fix the problem. When you have a bug, you are still figuring out what is wrong.

When you have the luxury of telling someone that in software, it's called consulting!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#26
post #4

Earlier in my career, I would hear my manager say something about a specific situation and I would extrapolate that into a general belief and theoretical/academic debate that frustrated everyone. Make sure you're not doing that. As a manager, sometimes you need to say things like, "This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow" so that your team understands the urgency and your expectations. The more technical the manag…

> As a manager, sometimes you need to say things like, "This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow" so that your team understands the urgency and your expectations. I'm sorry but you can do that without sounding both clueless and unreasonable. You can put everything else on hold, stop the line, explain why it's important for this to be fixed, etc.. to get the point across. "This bug needs to be fixed by EOD tomorrow"…

I agree, and I've been the manager in this situation. There's some reason he's saying "EOD tomorrow", so he should just share that. Like "It's likely we will lose this customer if this isn't fixed by EOD tomorrow...so please make this the only thing we're working until then".

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#27

As a manager - I've had to do crap like this now and then to light a fire under people. It can be done to indicate extreme urgency. There also are real-world implications to some delays - for example not being able to run payroll is a legal nightmare and an ethical nightmare for hurting your employees. Generally, when I've had to do this, it's been my fault for not manangeing properly.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#28
1. Communication is key here - it sounds like you have a breakdown in communication with your manager, or a breakdown in their understanding of your work.

2. You're attempting to turn something very specific (please fix this bug), into something very abstract (some bugs can't be fixed, some bugs take longer than expected to fix). That's not going to help, particularly if this was in the end a simple fix, it just makes you look obtuse and out of touch.

3. The manager's proclamation is probably born of frustration with previous experiences where bugs were not fixed quickly and they have no idea why. Communication is the answer - if you communicate before and during a bug fix, they won't wonder why, they'll know why if it is not fixed, and they'll know what you are working on or have to sacrifice to make that happen. They'll know when you are installing logging to track it down, or when you eliminate modules one by one in tracing it, they can follow along and explain to their manager why it is not yet fixed.

4. You need a process which you both agree on for escalating bugs or setting priority - this clearly isn't it, but what is it?

Instead of complaining to them if you possibly can fix this bug quickly (perhaps you already did), then talk to your manager privately about process, talk to them about timeframes and how best to frame them, and try to find a process that works for both of you. That process will involve compromise on both sides - the manager accepting that sometimes things go wrong, sometimes bugs are difficult to pinpoint, and that scope/quality will sometimes be cut to deliver on time, you accepting that your job is to communicate upwards (particularly when things are unexplained), and accepting that sometimes corners will be cut on quality to deliver on time, and some things which are important to devs are not as important to the company, and that schedules and estimates are required, even if they can never be completely accurate.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#29
I assume you are working at a exceptional company (FAANG level at least) since your management team is capable of estimating time required for bug fixes in such a precise manner.

But seriously, the best management I've seen had a pretty good way of communicating what was important to work on. For something like that they would simply have emailed the dev team and stated that "bug X is an absolute release blocker" along with a list of engineers in charge of leading the fix (said engineers would have been contacted privately and whatever tasks they had deprioritized). Then the email threads would be used to share the latest details on the investigation.

You can't put a hard deadline on something like a bug fix, but you can maximize your chances of meeting that deadline by making sure the right folks are 100% focused on that fix.

Now, is your management technical at all?

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with managers who set a hard time-limit on fixing a bug?

#30

I'd reply explaining in depth why that's an unreasonable approach, with painstaking care taken to make it sound like I assume they just haven't thought of, or aren't familiar, with these factors.

That makes it into a useless internal battle in what is probably a time of crisis. If it happens every month, absolutely, write the details down and have a very serious talk about it. But spending time to write in painstaking detail about something that is clearly a crisis while you could use that time to solve it is really not a constructive approach.
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