241–250 of 313 posts
When people say they work 8 hours they don't mean they are 100% focused on doing revolutionary innovative work for 8 hours. Not all work is like factory work where you can do more or less the same thing all day, and that's fine.
And for what it's worth, plenty of people, including myself, can regularly do 10+ hour days of productive work. It's definitely not impossible.
I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years. One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I…
As a manager, I quickly realized that trying to be a technical contributor was a subtle and insidious form of micromanagement. Also, I could give myself my pick of the coolest tasks, which was unfair.
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As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at doing their work. That means you need to be dealing with poor performers, rewarding with outstanding performers, trying to improve uneven performers, managing expectations from your management and shielding your team from the vicissitudes of your bosses as much as possible, fighting for things your team needs while shielding them from the demoralizing reali…
I agree with all of this. But I can honestly say in my entire career I've only had about two good managers. One of the biggest issues in my experience is knowing who the bad/good performers are. Most managers have no idea. I've seen bad performers just let be, and I've seen great performers fired for seemingly no reason at all. Both kill team morale.
Good management is really rare. One in five or even ten maybe.
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> One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong. Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point wh…
There is always more stuff to do but a smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing. The managers I’ve seen promoted chase metrics only and don’t sweat the other stuff. The good ones also take care of the people. The terrible ones try to do everything and anything that they think might be good for the company and ultimately piss everyone off a…
In other words, only stupid people have a work ethic?
Maybe pair programming doesn't look so bad after all?
I don't see how you can reach this conclusion. You have peer pressure to keep working longer, you get little done and you're wasting your brain power. It makes sense if someone is junior and learning from the other. Otherwise it's just an employers' tool to get people to squeeze in more hours of half-assed work (and then work more alone to actually get something done to have something to show for). Async PRs reviews…
But the startup died due to not paying enough attention to business issues. Programming productivity isn't everything.
Then I went to Google and my productivity got a lot worse, for many reasons but waiting on code reviews was one. To some extent I could compensate by making unrelated changes in parallel, or even working on a stack of patches and fixing up later patches when earlier ones needed to change. It felt like it was fighting a system that wanted to slow me down, though.
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> One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. As a manager-of-managers, when I hear that a manager is doing "a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen", it's usually a sign that something has gone wrong. Don't get me wrong: I don't expect everyone to be productive 100% of the day, but if managers are reaching a point wh…
There is always more stuff to do but a smart person would quickly notice that only things that show up on metrics or are personally fulfilling are worth doing. The managers I’ve seen promoted chase metrics only and don’t sweat the other stuff. The good ones also take care of the people. The terrible ones try to do everything and anything that they think might be good for the company and ultimately piss everyone off a…
From a security standpoint (because that’s my wheelhouse), if you’re not under attack, your metrics suck, if you chase tickets, a lot of them get closed without effective resolution.
We’re not manufacturing widgets, and can’t earn that bonus by making 10% more widgets.
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Some of it is capitalism. Here’s a nice introduction to private equity in radiology. https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-model-i... Now with surgery? Again there’s some capitalism but also surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here’s a link to a common surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table for the patient matters for money and…
I don't think there is any country in the world where doctors work for 40 hours, regardless of the economic model. The world of human disease places some limitations on what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus, vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People develop critical problems at…
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What happens if you have a peer that clocks 14 hours per day and work weekends too, for some reason? At our place they started comparing everyone to him. I work like at half his total speed. He often break things or have to redo things or are late to standup and don't really partake in conversations. We've all asked him to slow down and not burn out but he keeps going.
Speaking as a manager, I’d flag this dev as a concern. Very few people can work at this rate without one (or more) of three scenarios playing out: 1. They burn out and clock out mentally or leave altogether 2. They develop psychological issues and destroy their personal life, leading to an unbalanced and unsustainable situation 3. They expect something from the org in return, which normally the org can’t/won’t match…
It’s a bit odd you’re setting your employees up to maintain their sex lives but I’m sure they appreciate the forced time off after stressful times
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As a manager, your main job is to make your ICs effective at doing their work. That means you need to be dealing with poor performers, rewarding with outstanding performers, trying to improve uneven performers, managing expectations from your management and shielding your team from the vicissitudes of your bosses as much as possible, fighting for things your team needs while shielding them from the demoralizing reali…
"trying to improve uneven performers" How do you do that? Apparently I'm an inconsistent performer now.
When I say uneven, I’m thinking of somebody who either: (a) is excellent at certain key aspects of their jobs but clearly below expectations in others to the point that it’s an issue, or (b) somebody who performs well but doesn’t always put in enough effort. In both cases, it’s subjective and difficult to determine that it’s to the point where intervention is required, because that’s usually an uncomfortable conversation. Often, you’re the first manager ever telling the person that they need to improve—-even if you’re not the first person to think there’s an issue. Typically, the other person will think you’re an asshole. As another commenter said, they may recognize later on that you were right but normally in the near term, you’ll have strained the relationship. (That’s why managers avoid those conversations. Sometimes it’s cowardice, sometimes it’s deciding that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze today.)
As for how to work on improvement, that always has to be case-by-case considering the issue and the personality. Sometimes the “stop doing that” conversation is enough. Sometimes coaching or mentoring or development experiences can help. If those don’t work, can you shift responsibilities around or find a different role that is a better fit?
Normally you try to gently do those things anyway before you have the direct conversation, and then hope the direct conversation provides some motivation/insight to take it more seriously.
If you’re on the receiving end of that conversation, I guess my advice would be to try to critically self-reflect and see if you can understand where your manager is coming from. If you can, then you’ve both got a common place to start from towards improvement. If you can’t, or you think they’re just being unreasonable about expectations, then it is probably time to move on or hope they move on quickly.