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How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

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Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#111

Post by astatine »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #19

Just today, my team had a developer meeting. The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes. He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary. We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issue…

I have seen this happen (and in a few cases the cause for this to happen as well). All code (or releases, for that matter) are not created equal. There are some teams which are working on something which is more critical to the business of the company, at that moment, and there are other teams which may be able to absorb some tasks to let the first team focus on what's needed. Not saying that this was the situation with the OP, but this usually falls in the "greater good" category. I have seen organizations where inter-team boundaries are fought over and defended vigorously and others where these are more fluid and accommodative. I am not sure that the firm boundary teams end up doing better work or be happier overall.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#112

Post by omegalulw »

hsn915 wrote: post #96
jreese wrote: post #40

As a member of a core infra/"foundation" team, the biggest drain on my soul is the number of other engineers that are helpless, or never learned how to find solutions on their own. They never search wikis, look for similar posts on internal groups, or even read the error message from the tool that tells them exactly how to fix the problem they're asking about. When the culture has become "google everything", but you…

Think about it from the other side: Dealing with the infrastructure is your job. You know the ins and outs. It doesn't seem complicated to you. For someone who is dealing with the application logic, having to context switch to infrastructure is painful. I have no idea how you have set things up. When I read your documentation I'm just baffled at the sheer amount of complexity. I don't want to deal with it. It's not m…

> My intuition is that this complexity is not actually needed if you remove all the cruft and think from first principles about what the actual problem is you are trying to solve.

Have you ever worked on infrastructure? This comment is wrong on soo many levels.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#113

Post by JohnBooty »

geoduck14 wrote: post #109
JohnBooty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hit so close to home for me. At my last two jobs, I've simply burnt out from hitting this sort of wall over and over. Everything I suggested was just flatly denied as impossible [...] I feel strange because I've seen this same thing for my whole career and I still try fight for what's right when others appear to moan and carry on. For anybody (100% rightfully!) wondering if it's my fault: (1) I've been consisten…

>I think the reality is that this kind of change can't originate from the in-the-trenches folks at the bottom of totem pole. I'm a manager. Please. PLEASE don't believe this. In-the-trenches folks ARE powerful. Really. I promise. I can't implement change if YOU don't do it. I don't know what sucks if YOU don't tell me. I NEED you to help me make things better.

Hiring Rails devs? I'll work for you!

Seriously, though: I firmly believe that most managers do think and act like you do.

(I've been in lead and/or management-lite roles myself; I don't view management as some weird or evil "other")

But, I think it only works if that sort of change is valued all the way up the org chart and folks at each level are empowered, incentivized, and motivated to address the pain points of the folks below.

If the org chart is more than N levels deep, then I think this becomes practically impossible. Managers feel the pain of their direct reports deeply and acutely and absolutely want to make things better: after all, it is in their best interests as well. But a manager won't feel or even understand the challenges of folks N levels below; it's probably not even practical to expect this.

(I'll let others argue over the exact value of N above)

That's why I don't think the situation can be resolved without some sort of dedicated resources allocated to developer experience. The most obvious answer (for engineering orgs big enough to support it) would be dedicated developer experience teams. For teams that lack the headcount to dedicate engineers to it full time, an alternate solution could be dedicated chunks of time -- "hackathon Fridays", etc.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#114

Post by nickthemagicman »

rmah wrote: post #94
NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #19

Just today, my team had a developer meeting. The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes. He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary. We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issue…

The tech lead started out by complaining about...When he finished complaining... My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project. IOW, your team has no leadership and no management. Your team lead may be called that, but sounds like he doesn't lead at all. Your manager may be called that, but he doesn't manage either. This happens a lot when people are given responsibility without…

This resonated strongly with me.

If you don't want to become a leader, what do you do in a disorganized mob situation? Leave?

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#115

Post by tata71 »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #114
rmah wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech lead started out by complaining about...When he finished complaining... My manager doesn't know anything about the code, my project, or the release project. IOW, your team has no leadership and no management. Your team lead may be called that, but sounds like he doesn't lead at all. Your manager may be called that, but he doesn't manage either. This happens a lot when people are given responsibility without…

This resonated strongly with me. If you don't want to become a leader, what do you do in a disorganized mob situation? Leave?

Find the/a leader, make sure they can secure your interests, empower them?

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#116

Post by travisgriggs »

What I’ve noticed in this cycle is that as the turn over continues, the employee skill level will trend downwards. Essentially in a sort of ironic-Darwinian-gone-wrong, the system selects for those that will stay and/or don’t care or are desperate enough for work (because of geographical allegiance of low hireability, or just low initiative to make a change).

I fear my current workplace that was so cool years ago is showing these signs.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#117

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #19

Just today, my team had a developer meeting. The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes. He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary. We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issue…

>He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary.

Also these deployment tasks are quite repetitive, it's a big strain, I can understand your pain. I have managed to automate myself out of this, at my current job: most deployment tasks involve the following steps: Commit the change, open a pull request, wait for the CI build to complete and download the build log, extract an image id from the CI build log, put it in some other repository and commit the change. It is possible to automate the first three steps with the github api (if your shop is using github), I have an example here: https://github.com/MoserMichael/githubapitools . The rest of it is easily scriptable.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#118

Post by ironman1478 »

travisgriggs wrote: post #116

What I’ve noticed in this cycle is that as the turn over continues, the employee skill level will trend downwards. Essentially in a sort of ironic-Darwinian-gone-wrong, the system selects for those that will stay and/or don’t care or are desperate enough for work (because of geographical allegiance of low hireability, or just low initiative to make a change). I fear my current workplace that was so cool years ago is…

This is definitely happening. A engineer can't really work on anything truly complicated if they hop around every 2-3 years. These types of engineers gain cursory knowledge of topics but never become experts.

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#119

Post by [deleted] »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #104
Kaze404 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand this position. My life are already chaotic enough without factoring in the work-related part of it, it makes no sense to me why someone would actively invite chaos like the one you're describing. I'm much more excited by solving interesting problems or creating useful things than by having my work day interrupted by a production error that needs to be fixed immediately.

You're not necessarily inviting chaos, you're making a cost/benefit analysis of moving faster or safer. I prefer to move faster. Moving safer takes up a lot of, imo, unnecessary time with dubious payoffs. I'd personally rather live on the side of YOLO and ship a lot then hem/haw over getting certain % unit test coverage (and the maintenance costs that come with that in the face of uncertain requirements).

[deleted]

Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams

#120

Post by rnrnrn »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #19

Just today, my team had a developer meeting. The tech lead started out by complaining about how he has to do an untested unplanned release today because another team made some urgent changes. He's the only person who knows how to release it. The other team didn't communicate until today that a release is necessary. We've done two other releases in the past month and both required a day of troubleshooting to fix issue…

This kind of thing needs to have some exec sponsorship or at the very least awareness. Otherwise ICs just risk landing on the sword.

You can try but once there’s resistance is probably a better idea to find something else. Let management figure out why people keep quitting.

I don’t like giving this recommendation out but the other way can make for a career limiting move.

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