From my experience I see managing output is far better than managing time. Also, it's showing bad attitude when your team is playing games.
Can you share your experience in managing engineering team output?
Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#12From my experience I see managing output is far better than managing time. Also, it's showing bad attitude when your team is playing games.
Regarding games, read the comments above. It provided so much good information.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#13All 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for comment, it makes sense. Do you do anything to increase people productivity? for example: I hate to see people playing games in the office, but I know at the same time that it might be healthy to have this kind of freedom.
Again you have to pick one. If they get results, why does it matter if they play games? I have a guy who plays Warcraft on breaks, he says it pissed all his old bosses off, but this guy writes incredible code. He'll spend half his time not coding, but doing mindless tasks as he thinks. Then he writes code without running it for an hour right before leaving and hits run at the end and it all works. Never seen anything…
Thanks for the great feedback, much appreciate it.
Managing output alone is hard, how do you do it without setting unrealistic goals? Do you have a place where I can read more about this?
Usually everyone in the team knows what's required, and we have the tools, and the reports to measure things but usually things might take less or more than expected and the question here is really the actual software challenges that delayed the work or the actual time and effort spent on a problem?
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#15When I'm working contracts and my managers/team leads/whatever are inept at management, I establish the following. 1. I ask you for the high level roadmap. The "birds eye view". Then we talk about what my responsibilities are and how you want things to be prioritised. At that point im practically walking the manager through managing me but w/e. 2. Once I know what he wants from me, I appreciate it to be left alone. I…
Thanks for your honest feedback, much appreciated. Usually each team member knows the plan, and what should be finished and when. We have the right tools to generate reports and KPIs but the issue in software development is that things change easily, for example: a. on a specific day, the expectation is to finish task A, but then, the engineer discovered that it depends on unplanned task B and now we need to finish B…
I do not have a place to read about management technique. I'm not a manager outside of the companies I start myself and when I hire, I really only hire specialists who know very well what they're doing.
What you describe sounds like you don't really have people who are sufficiently senior to work like I do. Manage them more closely.
If you had to replace any one person on your team, would you be able to outperform them in terms of technical skill? If yes, just have them walk you through all the steps they need to go through to finish the task and then discuss things that they might have missed.
If not, I can't really help you. I don't know what to do in a situation where both the manager and the engineer don't really understand the engineers job. Never been in the situation.
But if you think that managing time helps with anything, think about what your own KPIs are. What do your superiors want you to do? Deliver results or appear busy? If its the second, my high level advice would be to find a better job, because your environment is going to become very toxic. Beyond that, if they want you to appear busy, just make your engineers appear busy while looking for a new job.
As far as how I want to be managed, you already know everything. Tell me what needs to be done and leave me alone. I'll talk to you when I need something. You talk to me when your priorities change or when you need something special. Beyond that, if theres any kind of meeting or something else that needs to go in my calendar, I want it in electronic text form. If you "tell" me about it, I'll have to write it down myself anyway.
^ This sounds antisocial af but I don't have an aversion to face to face conversations. Its just that whatever youre going to tell me is either irrelevant or it needs to be written down anyway. So why not just write it down.
Since this does not seem to be the case with your employees - if you tell me to do something, I will come back with a deadline and I will not miss that deadline ever. If the task is bullshit and cant be done, either in principle or because your deadline expectations are unrealistic, I'll tell you about that up front. I'll still work on it if thats what you want but I'm not going to work 12 hour days just because my manager is a clown. I'll send you an e-mail for my own documentation that whatever you want me to do is ridiculous and if you decide that you want to crash and burn over that, be my guest.
Does this sound like an unrealistic manager/employee relationship? May be. I honestly don't know. I've never been an employee.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again you have to pick one. If they get results, why does it matter if they play games? I have a guy who plays Warcraft on breaks, he says it pissed all his old bosses off, but this guy writes incredible code. He'll spend half his time not coding, but doing mindless tasks as he thinks. Then he writes code without running it for an hour right before leaving and hits run at the end and it all works. Never seen anything…
Thanks for the great feedback, much appreciate it. Managing output alone is hard, how do you do it without setting unrealistic goals? Do you have a place where I can read more about this? Usually everyone in the team knows what's required, and we have the tools, and the reports to measure things but usually things might take less or more than expected and the question here is really the actual software challenges tha…
I think programming as a full-time job is hard enough on the brain, and the manager's instinct of trying to squeeze extra productivity out of people should not be applied. Let people work at their own pace, if you see someone who seems to be consistently slow (say over 6 months), have a talk with him. Maybe he can put in some extra effort and the talk will make him do so - or maybe he's already at max capacity (max capacity over long term is very different than max capacity over 2-4 weeks) in which case you either accept it or fire him.
Also, if you evaluate people on speed only, ignoring quality of their work, people will eventually figure it out and the quality will of course suffer. To prevent this from happening, you'll need to pay attention to quality too, which in practice is probably even harder than tracking speed.
To summarize, IMO software development (like many other white collar jobs) is a ripe for exploitation by slackers. This cannot be entirely prevented, and can only be combated by being in the trenches with the team and careful observation of each team member's performance over the long run.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your honest feedback, much appreciated. Usually each team member knows the plan, and what should be finished and when. We have the right tools to generate reports and KPIs but the issue in software development is that things change easily, for example: a. on a specific day, the expectation is to finish task A, but then, the engineer discovered that it depends on unplanned task B and now we need to finish B…
I do not have a place to read about management technique. I'm not a manager outside of the companies I start myself and when I hire, I really only hire specialists who know very well what they're doing. What you describe sounds like you don't really have people who are sufficiently senior to work like I do. Manage them more closely. If you had to replace any one person on your team, would you be able to outperform th…
You are right about my team, they are not seniors but they are smart and getting the required experience. I am feeling good that we're building a solid ground and in the near future we would be operate in a better and faster rhythm. I am very technical and can understand their code and plans easily but it's not scalable, so I am looking at a way to make it run systematically although this will require middle managers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#18Breaks 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again you have to pick one. If they get results, why does it matter if they play games? I have a guy who plays Warcraft on breaks, he says it pissed all his old bosses off, but this guy writes incredible code. He'll spend half his time not coding, but doing mindless tasks as he thinks. Then he writes code without running it for an hour right before leaving and hits run at the end and it all works. Never seen anything…
Thanks for the great feedback, much appreciate it. Managing output alone is hard, how do you do it without setting unrealistic goals? Do you have a place where I can read more about this? Usually everyone in the team knows what's required, and we have the tools, and the reports to measure things but usually things might take less or more than expected and the question here is really the actual software challenges tha…
Check out the classic Andy Grove "High Output Management"
https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...
And Google's work with OKRs is a good practical model to follow. Also, humans being human, I find that my programmers like using practices that Google follows/pioneered. If you start using OKRs milk that "we're gonna do what Google does" mantra as a way to get buy in. https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
#20I'll just tell how it worked on the best team I ever worked on. Time was not managed at all. Show up for scheduled meetings (which are always between 11AM-4PM) and the rest is your call. Work from home, go golfing, whatever. Output was managed in the normal boring way. Estimates up front. Project schedule made. Daily 10-minute meeting for quick progress / problem reports. You tell the difference between normal project slippage and poor performance by paying attention. If one person was behind, we'd use a little light ribbing, e.g. calling them "the long tent pole" but we'd also have someone senior work with them one-on-one. If someone's output was chronically unsatisfactory and working with them didn't work, they're fired. If the whole team is behind, then that was probably just normal underestimation.