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Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

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Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#111

Post by feoren »

iancmceachern wrote: post #109
feoren wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeesh, I don't know. I think we have enough data to decide the shape of the Earth, yet there are still Flat Earthers. Your approach works in an idealized world where everyone is perfectly rational and emotionless and all facts are perfectly knowable. That's really not the world we live in. This is basically a hardline stance at the extreme "endless debate" side: if literally anyone in the room is disagreeing, then yo…

This is reducto ad absurdum. It's not a 100% or 0% thing. Obvious means that there is a 51% chance that decision a is better than decision b. I'm advocating against just guessing when it's 50/50

A lot of decisions come from experience and expertise. There are hundreds of little data points that all come together in my brain when I make an engineering decision, and I can't even necessarily enumerate them all. It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others. Gathering data on 100 approaches that don't work is just too expensive. Sometimes you should just let experts be experts and defer to them, even if they can't exactly say why.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#112

Post by iancmceachern »

feoren wrote: post #111
iancmceachern wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reducto ad absurdum. It's not a 100% or 0% thing. Obvious means that there is a 51% chance that decision a is better than decision b. I'm advocating against just guessing when it's 50/50

A lot of decisions come from experience and expertise. There are hundreds of little data points that all come together in my brain when I make an engineering decision, and I can't even necessarily enumerate them all. It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others. Gathering data on 100 approaches that don't work is just too expensive. Sometimes you should just let experts be experts and defer to them, ev…

>"It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others"

You sound like a real pleasure /s

It's our job to. It's why they teach us to show our work. It's why we have building inspections. It's a necessary "evil". The sooner you accept, and embrace it, the more fun you will have in your day to day life, and more joy you will bring on others.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#113

Post by wting »

ListeningPie wrote: post #64
atoav wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who studied film/arts I always thought the art world was a disorganized mess. That was, until I worked at some corporate places and realized that in the art/film world you have at least the artist/director with a clear stance towards the project. A good film set runs like a well oiled machine with an extremely clear division of responsibilities. Decisions can be made fast, because time is of the essence (t…

How do you evaluate whether someone wants to do a project? If a boss asks, "Do you want to do this project", seems like another way to ask "Do you want to remain employed?"

After the roadmap is finalized, as the manager I ask every one on my team to stack rank at least N preferred projects from the roadmap. I map preferences to projects with some optimizations (e.g. career progression, avoiding knowledge silos), review it with everyone, and then commit for the roadmap.

If there's grunt work that no one wants to do, I distribute it fairly among the team. Fairly can be splitting it up evenly among the team (everyone refactors _n_ files) and sometimes it means we round-robin the responsibility (e.g. quarterly compliance reviews with auditors). Obviously this depends on the team size and role in the company, but I think it's only come up a few times over ~4 years.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#114

Post by Amasuriel »

Both of these extremes to me are both just lack of actual leadership.

A real leader should absolutely value and respect the input of their team, but also know when to just say “of the options, this is what we are going with, here is the trade off we are making and why” and have the mutual respect and trust of their team to make both of those activities successful.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#115

Post by atoav »

ListeningPie wrote: post #64
atoav wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who studied film/arts I always thought the art world was a disorganized mess. That was, until I worked at some corporate places and realized that in the art/film world you have at least the artist/director with a clear stance towards the project. A good film set runs like a well oiled machine with an extremely clear division of responsibilities. Decisions can be made fast, because time is of the essence (t…

How do you evaluate whether someone wants to do a project? If a boss asks, "Do you want to do this project", seems like another way to ask "Do you want to remain employed?"

I mean, there is many ways to do that, but one way is to instead of asking a single person you let people apply. For projects that are not as attractive you up the compensation/bonuses till someone is interested.

Then they made the choice themselves and even if the project sucks in the same way, they made the choice themselves.

An important rule of low/no budget film-making is: no mattee who is in your crew/cast, know why they agreed. For an established actor that might be trying out a new or different acting style, a different role, whatever. For the sound guy it might be learning the tools, or going to a certain landscape or some compensation. Know what motivates your people besides the salary and treat that motivation like the most valuable secret intel tou could have ever aquired.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#116

Post by roenxi »

n0w wrote: post #67
roenxi wrote: post #4

Culturally it is best to train developers to just do something, then provide non-judgemental feedback when what they do isn't what you want. Maybe schedule in some rework time to try again. That way, developers move quickly and sooner or later start building useful things. "Just tell me what to build" is a dangerous attitude to foster. It pushes more work into the management layer which is already a bottleneck for ma…

This sounds a lot like letting the monkeys bang away on typewriters while you sit back waiting for Shakespeare... TFA seems to present reasonable advice. Yet lots of comments here don't seem to agree that "give experts necessary context and trust to build good products" is a decent strategy.

> This sounds a lot like letting the monkeys bang away on typewriters while you sit back waiting for Shakespeare...

Well, humans are primates and I suppose we could draw a parallel between keyboards and typewriters. Although if a dev is trying to write Shakespeare they will get gentle feedback that this is an inappropriate use of their time.

> Yet lots of comments here don't seem to agree that "give experts necessary context and trust to build good products" is a decent strategy.

I expect all the opinions agree that the plan is to give experts necessary context and trust to build good products. There aren't actually that many options here. You have to talk to devs, and then you have to let them dev. The question is how much context can/should be front-loaded and how to deliver feedback.

And those are relatively simple to answer; much as possible and frequently. Beyond that we're relying on monkey-typewriter dynamics.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#117

Post by uoaei »

orangevelcro wrote: post #88
HelloNurse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next level of burnout is the double bind. I am not empowered to make decisions, I have nobody to discuss meaningfully with, and I'm told what to build perentorily but vaguely and often incorrectly. Will I be able to read the mind of my boss? Better to stall, complain, and avoid making mistakes.

This describes the job I recently left to a T. Drained the life out of me.

I suffered through that kind of situation for much longer than I care to admit. I am now behind the curve in terms of skills development because of how stagnant the situation was.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#118

Post by calderwoodra »

iancmceachern wrote: post #101
calderwoodra wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to ask anyone who's worked on present day Instagram/Facebook what the long term effects of data driven decision making is. My understanding is that it's been a toss up. I think PG has a tweet a while back like "some decisions are so bad, no one in their right mind would agree to this if there wasn't data to back it up". More of less saying, you can find data to support any decision, so why even be data drive…

I'd say their experience is an outlier. They are not the norm. I'm speaking from a 20 year background designing medical devices and other critical infrastructure. In my world, like with airliners, it's important to get decisions right or people can be killed. Therefore, data driven decisions.

Yes, if safety and livelihood are on the line, get the data and be sure.

But most companies have to implement purchase flows, marketing sites, software onboarding, etc. Examples like this are where folks are more likely to cherry pick data to justify whatever their biased to believing.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#119

Post by roenxi »

DeathArrow wrote: post #60
Aurornis wrote: post #13

This is the most common failure mode I’ve experienced: > A critical piece of avoiding endless debate is to know who makes the final decision and how it gets made. Consensus-seeking leads to endless debate. Every rapidly growing company I’ve worked for has reached a point where we have product managers and program managers and engineers and engineering managers and stakeholders and suddenly nobody can even identify wh…

So we're better with benevolent dictators.

Yes, undoubtedly. Although once appointed as a dictator the benevolence part normally slides.

So what happens in the happy case is a very complex system of figuring out who should be the dictator and when they need to be moved on. If you look at successful open source projects that process is often visible - a brutal communal negotiation (of global scope!) to work out who in the world is the person with the best motivation to control a project.

Re: Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build

#120

Post by starbugs »

swader999 wrote: post #99
starbugs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we're better with benevolent dictators. Making a decision based on input from relevant coworkers while being competent in the domain you are making the decision in isn't exactly dictatorship?

This and, especially if the decision maker made it to their level based on merrit.

> This and, especially if the decision maker made it to their level based on merrit.

Assuming a competence hierarchy, that should equal competence. Unfortunately, oftentimes it's not a competence hierarchy. In those cases, it may take some time to trust in someone's competence.

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