The art of interrupting software engineers

> This was mostly me passing by and asking how things were going

Hello Peter whaaaat's happening?

Yeah I cringed when I read this bit. If any managers are reading don't fucking do this. Your intentions may be benign (this person apparently thought they were) but most devs are going to read this as veiled micromanaging and get just as stressed out as the earlier approaches in the article.

Just use scrum as intended, maybe push for more detailed updates if devs are just saying stuff like "still working on x". Or just trust them and don't try to babysit.

Thank you for reminding me how much I dislike working with PMs

I especially can't imagine working with this one. Imagine constantly having to revise estimates and getting micromanaged by someone who isn't your manager. The "role responsibilities" conversation would happen very quickly

I find it especially ridiculous that this person is interrupting people two times a day for fresh updates on top of a daily standup. And they even admit their technical knowledge is not good enough to actually be able to help much if there is an issue. If you are bothering and interrupting every single person on your team multiple times a day just in case you need to increment a number in a JIRA board now instead of tomorrow morning, you are wasting people's time. Leave it to the standup.

Your job as a PM is not to micromanage engineers. If that is anybody's job, that is the engineers' managers. Your job is to make the engineers more productive and make sure they're working on the right things - but not at an hourly granularity.

> I would let time pass and, on occasion, stories that I imagined would take a few hours would turn into a day or more.

...or even more...

I've found the best way to avoid interrupting engineers is to have a daily sync (a.k.a stand up meeting). My team meets for 30 minutes each morning to give an update, have Q&A, and discuss priorities and issues. We're a small team (3 developers) but it works perfectly because folks either had their inquiry answered earlier in the day or can execute good judgement to try to figure it out and if not ask about it tomorrow. We all receive tickets and if it's critical enough we'll meet to devise a plan. Under this scheme we are rarely interrupted and have been grinding through features all summer.