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Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

blog.kera.io

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Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#11

Post by seivan »

ebiester wrote: post #7

If you want this, then: A. Let your engineers know they will never have to look or explain this code to anyone, and B. Their job isn't on the line if it doesn't work. The reason your engineers want clean, testable, fast code is because they know that the project manager won't be up until 3AM debugging the system because it's down and there's a giant pile of hastily written code and technical debt. (I agree with what…

Very well put! Especially about debugging.

Not to mention iterating or doing changes is easier with modular and tested code than with shitty code.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#12

Post by arocks »

This idea might backfire as the non-technical issues can easily mind-boggle an engineer working on a deep and complex problems.

Leave the meetings and reporting to managers. Some of the best teams I have worked in have managers who buffer/cushion every trivial externalities from the rest of the team. This is crucial for the sanity of many developers.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#13

Post by columbo »

Good enough is a struggle... but the one thing that should never be pushed down the pipe is ensuring the code is understandable.

Once you get beyond the basic crud-webapp-twitter-clone the ability for a new person to simply pick up and start working becomes increasingly more difficult. This is a cost that you will pay. You'll pay for it when one of the three people that understand the system decide to quit or when you have to put new hires through eight months of training before they can write a single line of code.

I've worked with systems that were written by people that have decades of industry knowledge. Every class, method and comment is using their lexicon and entire chunks of the system rely on assumed knowledge. Suddenly ranked_pct(std_dev_norm(userid,norm,v,arr,false,get_data(userid))) is returning 0.24 when it used to return 0.51 and the BA/PM would like to know what changed. That's when you'll realize that your growth has been severely limited.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#14

Post by kevinskii »

arocks wrote: post #12

This idea might backfire as the non-technical issues can easily mind-boggle an engineer working on a deep and complex problems. Leave the meetings and reporting to managers. Some of the best teams I have worked in have managers who buffer/cushion every trivial externalities from the rest of the team. This is crucial for the sanity of many developers.

The key word is "trivial." For significant business needs, engineers can almost invariably come up with cheaper and better solutions if they don't have a product manager acting as an information filter.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#15

Post by hanzq »

ebiester wrote: post #7

If you want this, then: A. Let your engineers know they will never have to look or explain this code to anyone, and B. Their job isn't on the line if it doesn't work. The reason your engineers want clean, testable, fast code is because they know that the project manager won't be up until 3AM debugging the system because it's down and there's a giant pile of hastily written code and technical debt. (I agree with what…

That's very similar to a philosophy I have about feeling pain all the way up to the decision maker.

If the decision maker (project manager in this case) doesn't feel any consequences for their decisions, then they won't have any incentive to make good ones.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#16

Post by hanzq »

columbo wrote: post #13

Good enough is a struggle... but the one thing that should never be pushed down the pipe is ensuring the code is understandable. Once you get beyond the basic crud-webapp-twitter-clone the ability for a new person to simply pick up and start working becomes increasingly more difficult. This is a cost that you will pay . You'll pay for it when one of the three people that understand the system decide to quit or when y…

That code blip sends a shiver up my spine.

My previous code shop maintained a fairly large rails base and we mitigated that risk by doing as many things "the rails way" as possible, even if it took more time than some ruby hack.

When you consider how quickly new hires could pick up the project, it easily outweighed the extra effort designing code in a well-understood format.

Re: Product Managers: How to get your engineers to love being lean

#17

Post by hanzq »

kevinskii wrote: post #14
arocks wrote: post #12

This idea might backfire as the non-technical issues can easily mind-boggle an engineer working on a deep and complex problems. Leave the meetings and reporting to managers. Some of the best teams I have worked in have managers who buffer/cushion every trivial externalities from the rest of the team. This is crucial for the sanity of many developers.

The key word is "trivial." For significant business needs, engineers can almost invariably come up with cheaper and better solutions if they don't have a product manager acting as an information filter.

Both places are nice at times.

My ideal engineering state is heads-down-leave-me-alone. I can write some awesome code in that place.

At the same time, when a compromise has to be made, I want to know as much about the problem space as possible.

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