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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#171

Post by lmm »

efitz wrote: post #116

I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?” Every team I h…

Leaders may need to know some specific dates for some specific purposes. Responding to that need by demanding your methodology deliver a schedule for everything in case you need it is lazy and wasteful.

If your engineers are part of the same team, working on the same business goals, they'll be glad to contribute what you need to the decision about whether to announce at conference Y, and may even be able to suggest relevant aspects you haven't thought of.

Re: Individuals Matter

#172

Post by mobjack »

efitz wrote: post #116

I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?” Every team I h…

A lot of my planning is making sure the most effective engineers are working on the most important things.

It is about making sure resources are most efficiently allocated to meet the business objectives.

Re: Individuals Matter

#173

Post by rStar »

rStar wrote: post #168
rramadass wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the primary jobs of managers at all levels is to plan and then execute in accordance with the plan "Plans" can never be set in stone. They evolve based on the people involved and circumstances. A Manager's job is to understand his people and then Plan accordingly; not the other way around. >If all you can do is complain This is exactly the wrong way to frame the discussion. Pointing out that you are clueless…

>If all you can do is complain This is exactly the wrong way to frame the discussion. Pointing out that you are clueless is not complaining but raising issues which if unadd he’s pointing out that you are clueless ramadass

i would say, everyone acts in their interests, at all times, except for individual actors who may value things like the city the work in or loyalty in themselves that may artificially tie them to a situation. i say, if you identify a problem with your organization that you can’t get over, be a grown up, and find another job. seriously, it’s the best thing you can do for yourself. if you feel an organization is rotten, leave. you will never ever fix the rot. if you’ve got bad hr you’ve unfortunately got bad hr, and that’s not your fault, but that also will never, ever, change.

Re: Individuals Matter

#174

Post by Jensson »

polskibus wrote: post #164
john_moscow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corporate culture serves a very specific purpose of lowering the self-esteem of the 10x folks, keeping them at their place doing 10x work at 1x salary until they burn out. This is scalable, predictable, and serves management's interests well. It's just if you happen to be a 10x guy, for the sake of your own sanity, learn how to run a business and get out of the corporate swamp. Nothing else will bring you happine…

People often forget that the 10x guy is 10x only in the domain he’s been working on, and many chores has been taken away from him by his manager and given to someone else. It is fairly easy to make a 10x someone closer to a 1x just by changing his tasks and giving more chores like CR, bug fixes, more mundane features or GUI etc. Sure it will often be better quality but in areas where it matters less.

Ensuring people work on what they are comparatively best at is a feature. 1x engineers would also get a lot less done if they had to clean the toilets and sweep the floor and many of the other low end tasks others do, instead they assign people who cost less to those tasks.

Re: Individuals Matter

#175

Post by skybrian »

zdragnar wrote: post #51
skybrian wrote: post #35

A team where you have to ask who is going to do the work is one where people can’t get help when they are in trouble. It shouldn’t matter who gets assigned to it first, if they can’t do it, someone with more experience will step in. This is what those stand up meetings were supposed to be for. It’s not supposed to be a meaningless ritual. If people can’t get help, or are afraid to ask for help, something is wrong.

An experienced person will likely take half the time of an inexperienced person who gets help. If the inexperienced person pesters the experienced one much that it doesnt take more time, that would imply that the experienced people aren't (on paper) getting much done, because they are too busy teaching to do much else. The actual balance of course depends on the experience gap between the assignee and assigned work,…

But this also means you can’t assume a more experienced person will get the job done faster. They will be busy helping others, and that’s not a bug.

Re: Individuals Matter

#176

Post by gonzo41 »

Swizec wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

This is pretty much exactly true. Though I must say being a person who comes in and get plonked on the underperforming team. It'd be really progressive if the Alice character had to take on some fresh blood to share around the knowledge and let new people build rep. Nothing sucks more than being on an underperforming team.

Re: Individuals Matter

#177

Post by rStar »

if your org doesn’t work for you in some fundamental way, find a way out, immediately. you can’t change the board, and the board gives hr it’s marching orders, so if you have management you consider to be terrible and a “clueless” hr team, you have to leave. orgs can evolve over time, but they don’t change for you or your feelings, no matter how smart you are or how justified your feelings.

Re: Individuals Matter

#178

Post by xvilka »

aahortwwy wrote: post #130
efitz wrote: post #116

I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?” Every team I h…

> So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully. Commit to a deliverable or a deadline, but never both.

I would say an approach closer to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would make more sense. The more information specified that can't be changed about the expected product the less information is available about the deadline, ans vice versa. Thus, the desired balance could be used depending on the situation, goals, budget, etc.

Re: Individuals Matter

#179

Post by dijit »

dpweb wrote: post #110
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

In my manager days I simply assigned a factor to each team member based on the type of work, so one person may be baseline hrs * 1 and another hrs *.8 This had to be accurate, as it’s consulting, if the hours are wrong we lose money. But only a direct line manager can do this, anyone else won’t have the knowledge of the staffs capabilities.

it's even more complicated by knowledge/experience in certain areas.

Fire me into some unknown terraform and I'll be able to orient myself faster than someone who only does C# every day.

Send me into my own terraform and I'll be faster still. Not all things are equal.

Re: Individuals Matter

#180

Post by lucidbee »

I think there is a structural problem here that we are avoiding. The reason some higher ups don't see the merit of particular individual developers is that their pay does not reflect their contribution. Pay is the simple metric that should reflect worth, but we don't use 10x or 100x pay scales. We are failing to pay stars and superstars in accordance with the value they contribute to company. profits.
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