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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#221

Post by noduerme »

mobjack wrote: post #172
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.

I'd imagine the corollary to this is assigning each of them the task you think they're most suited to. I think that's what used to be called "management".

Re: Individuals Matter

#222

Post by noduerme »

DocTomoe wrote: post #211
dharmab wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A technique I read once (and lost the link) was to track both the estimated time metrics and the error in estimation for every engineer. Over time you could build reasonable error bars around every engineer's estimations, and then sum the estimates _with the confidence intervals_ together and figure out the probability of achieving a certain ship date.

That's what Fog Creek Software's FogBugz tried to do. I liked it a lot, it also allowed for some team structure planning (e.g. giving you a chance to see if your team consists of pessimistic estimaters or positive ones, and mix accordingly). Unfortunately, their marketshare got gobbled up by Jira.

I feel like pessimistic estimators are way more accurate and probably more intelligent than optimistic ones. I'd probably use software like that to fire half the team.

(edit: of course then I'd have to fire half the team again... and again... until only one or two incredibly depressed pessimists remained... tough call)

Re: Individuals Matter

#223

Post by rramadass »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #198
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…

> "Plans" can never be set in stone Setting plans in stone was the entire Waterfall Methodology where contracts had requirements and milestones locked in and any deviation meant heavy penalties.

Absolutely Categorically Wrong!

This has been so endlessly repeated without thought that people assume it is a fact when the Truth is far from it.

Excerpts from wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model ;

* In 1983 the paper was republished with a foreword by Benington explaining that the phases were on purpose organised according to the specialisation of tasks, and pointing out that the process was not in fact performed in a strict top-down fashion, but depended on a prototype.

* Royce's five additional steps (which included writing complete documentation at various stages of development) never took mainstream hold, but his diagram of what he considered a flawed process became the starting point when describing a "waterfall" approach.

* In 1985, the United States Department of Defense captured this approach in DOD-STD-2167A[citation needed], their standards for working with software development contractors, which stated that "the contractor shall implement a software development cycle that includes the following six phases: Software Requirement Analysis, Preliminary Design, Detailed Design, Coding and Unit Testing, Integration, and Testing.

The "Waterfall" is what is imagined as a "Ideal and Rational" process (see D.L.Parnas' paper A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake it for motivation - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6312940). The stages in the model and the issues to be considered in each stage are what is important NOT their order. In practice it was always a iterative spiral model described by Barry Boehm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model

Re: Individuals Matter

#224

Post by bodge5000 »

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'm not all to familiar with this kind of thing so I could be missing something, but what is a deadline without a deliverable? Surely "We will do something (literally "something", not a stand-in for X) and it will take a month" is worth nothing?

Re: Individuals Matter

#225

Post by Jensson »

noduerme wrote: post #222
DocTomoe wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Fog Creek Software's FogBugz tried to do. I liked it a lot, it also allowed for some team structure planning (e.g. giving you a chance to see if your team consists of pessimistic estimaters or positive ones, and mix accordingly). Unfortunately, their marketshare got gobbled up by Jira.

I feel like pessimistic estimators are way more accurate and probably more intelligent than optimistic ones. I'd probably use software like that to fire half the team. (edit: of course then I'd have to fire half the team again... and again... until only one or two incredibly depressed pessimists remained... tough call)

Why would you fire the team? The software shows you how their estimates relates to real world timelines, just adjust their estimate accordingly and the problem is fixed.

I never understood why managers get so upset over consistent time under estimates, just track it and add the relevant factor without telling the team and it should on average be on point.

Re: Individuals Matter

#226

Post by quickthrower2 »

noduerme wrote: post #217
bobm_kite9 wrote: post #213

My takeaway is that danluu is saying that, at the small scale, people understand how individuals contribute to teams. But at the large scale (like the HR department) we don't. At the small scale, we're able to apply systems thinking - a team can be viewed as a system composed of a set of interacting parts. However at larger scales, systems thinking becomes unwieldy - the interactions increase quadratically. There, we…

Oddly, though, most critical moments in history have been shaped by (highly error-prone, but non-fungible) individuals, acting on their own.

Good Job we don’t all work for one company

Re: Individuals Matter

#227

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

I just went through this, like... today.

"Tell me what date task X will occur on." -- where task 'X' takes 5 minutes, but has a long list of pre-requisites that take 1-4 weeks each, sequentially, of which 100% our out of our control.

...

That's not planning, that's fortune-telling. You may as well ask an Ouija board.

Planning is making sure the the pre-requisites happen before you attempt to start the things that depend on them. It is making sure that everyone is unblocked. It is making sure that nobody is wasting time going down a dead end. It is making sure that everyone is rowing in the same direction.

What I see from PMs is that they just want facts from the future, instead of solving problems in the here and now.

Until today, weeks into the project, I could not access the system that I needed. This was the key pre-requisite for 4x FTEs progressing on their own tasks.

The only thing the PM did is repeatedly ask me if he needed to move the date for the completion ETA.

I solved the problem. He did nothing to expedite progress.

Does it really matter which specific date this occurred on? No. It just had to happen as soon as possible. The trick is to make it possible, not to try to pin down exactly when "soon" will occur by repeatedly asking the same question in every daily stand up.

Why do we pay these people, again? Remind me?

Re: Individuals Matter

#228

Post by bobm_kite9 »

noduerme wrote: post #217
bobm_kite9 wrote: post #213

My takeaway is that danluu is saying that, at the small scale, people understand how individuals contribute to teams. But at the large scale (like the HR department) we don't. At the small scale, we're able to apply systems thinking - a team can be viewed as a system composed of a set of interacting parts. However at larger scales, systems thinking becomes unwieldy - the interactions increase quadratically. There, we…

Oddly, though, most critical moments in history have been shaped by (highly error-prone, but non-fungible) individuals, acting on their own.

The law of large number works well for some things (say, shoe sizes) and fails to work for others (e.g. income distributions, which follow a power-law).

So it's not odd at all that it would fail to adequately account for people. It's just sad we don't have anything better. Can't we find something better?

Re: Individuals Matter

#229

Post by nkoren »

I think the worst of all cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. How much faulty thinking, from racism and sexism onwards, stems from this simple category error?

Re: Individuals Matter

#230

Post by rStar »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #65
paxys wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same kind of bullshit as teams being penalized for meeting 100% of their goals because it means that their goals weren't aggressive enough. I can't say whether the strategy is effective or not, but MBA types seem to love it.

MBAs I think see it as an indicator that they are not using g the resource at capacity.

mbas see whatever they see for whatever reasons they do. it’s usually posturing and signaling to other mba types, often with delusions of grandeur and napoleon complex, not height based.
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