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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#271

Post by rramadass »

Agentlien wrote: post #253
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.

It may be a culture thing, but across the three companies I've worked at every estimate has been explicitly assuming a specific person handles it. Sometimes we've even given several estimates for the same task depending on who it gets assigned to. No one has ever found this odd. It's just obvious that different people have different skills and familiarity with different technologies or parts of the project.

This is how planning should be done. Gauge people's expertise, put them on the path they can be most effective and then ask for their estimates. Take that to upper management and negotiate.

Re: Individuals Matter

#273

Post by monkeybutton »

Agentlien wrote: post #253
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.

It may be a culture thing, but across the three companies I've worked at every estimate has been explicitly assuming a specific person handles it. Sometimes we've even given several estimates for the same task depending on who it gets assigned to. No one has ever found this odd. It's just obvious that different people have different skills and familiarity with different technologies or parts of the project.

There's no need to be offended either. I will gladly estimate a task taking longer for me to do when I'm not the original author or would be using languages and frameworks I don't have much experience in. We just give the estimates and let the PO prioritize what they want.

Re: Individuals Matter

#274

Post by alfiedotwtf »

rramadass wrote: post #255
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you've never done big government contracts.

Totally irrelevant and no Ad Hominem please. FYI, D.L.Parnas and Barry Boehm defined the field of Software Engineering. Almost all Govt./DoD standards are based on their research and writings.

TIL: "Winston W. Royce's final model, his intended improvement upon his initial "waterfall model", illustrated that feedback could (should, and often would) lead from code testing to design (as testing of code uncovered flaws in the design) and from design back to requirements specification (as design problems may necessitate the removal of conflicting or otherwise unsatisfiable / undesignable requirements)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model#Modified_water...

Interesting because that's definitely not what's taught in the handful of Software Engineering books I've read, and steps backward are not canon (rather, they're called something besides Waterfall i.e Spiral or Iterative).

Looking at that page again, it looks like what I describe is called "pure waterfall".

Re: Individuals Matter

#275

Post by dspillett »

rramadass wrote: post #271
Agentlien wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a culture thing, but across the three companies I've worked at every estimate has been explicitly assuming a specific person handles it. Sometimes we've even given several estimates for the same task depending on who it gets assigned to. No one has ever found this odd. It's just obvious that different people have different skills and familiarity with different technologies or parts of the project.

This is how planning should be done. Gauge people's expertise, put them on the path they can be most effective and then ask for their estimates. Take that to upper management and negotiate.

One problem with that is sometimes the estimates are done long before the work starts so when that item eventually gets to the top of the priority stack the person estimated for is working on something else instead. At this point things need to be re-estimated which can cause friction if the new estimate is longer (“but last time, you said…” or “when we asked Bob, he said…”).

What I've done in the past is give an estimate based on what a “standard” dev can be expected to do (everyone understands a junior is expected to be slower as they are new, that is why they are currently a junior and when they get up to speed they'll be promoted) with a comment on the ticket that the expected time will reduce by × if a named resource, or one of a group, is available to work on it. That way, medium term planning can be done on the basis of a “reasonable case” scenario and if the right people are available things will go better (and if there are multiple items in that state, short term planning will include deciding which ones being sped up, by using that person's time, confers most extra value).

Re: Individuals Matter

#276

Post by PeterisP »

crispyambulance wrote: post #252
polskibus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think people also don't realize that high-performers weren't always high-performers. They had to hone their skills, usually by doing years of the right kind of challenging work with modest rewards, and sometimes they can be formed by exceptional mentoring. But however they got there it took time, it's something that can be cultivated as long as folks aren't treated as fungible.

I disagree, the few really high-performers that I have worked with were high-performers already from the first week with a new technology, from the first month in their first job, and already as a student during practical work they were more productive than most people who had many years of challenging work behind them.

Experience is important and adds up, honing the skills makes everyone better, but it's orthogonal to this issue; there are people that will very quickly outperform someone who has honed their skills for years, and once they have honed their skills in that domain they might perhaps start outperforming them by the mythical 10x ratio.

Re: Individuals Matter

#277

Post by rramadass »

ozim wrote: post #266

One thing missing is that author is assuming that talented people will like to work in one place indefinitely. With developers skipping boat every ~2 years on average how do you make sure you will keep such person in-house. You can compensate people only up to some level but as they got bored or feel they can do something better with their time they will move. Not to mention family reasons or whatever else can happen…

> if you run your business by relying on people you will be affected by such accidents, if you run your business as if everyone is interchangeable you won't. Even if they are not easily replaceable.

This right here is the problem and a fundamental error.

It is a recipe for guaranteed disaster because you have completely ignored all the knowledge, experience and expertise which one has gathered over a period of time. Unless and until the task is trivial and/or very well defined with all constraints, assumptions and risks clarified people are not interchangeable.

Paraphrasing Isaac Asimov: [Knowledge Work] does not mean my Ignorance is just as good as your Knowledge.

Re: Individuals Matter

#278

Post by PeterisP »

sangnoir wrote: post #96
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't the "10x" label contingent on engineers being functionally indistinguishably, except some are allegedly 10x more productive? Specialization is what I figure has highest impact on turnaround times in a team setting. Just because an engineer is the most familiar with a component/subsystem - which allows them to make changes to that subsystem faster, doesn't make them an all round 10x engineer.

IMHO it's also an useful illustration that being able to replace people is asymmetric.

It may be that Bob can do Joe's specialization at half speed, but it's plausible that Joe can't do Bob's specialization properly at all, even after a year of training; so replaceability only works one way.

And I have worked with engineers that could do improvements to an unfamiliar component/subsystem faster than the current engineer who is the most familiar with it; i.e. their time of learning+adaptation+implementation was faster than the other persons' implementation alone. And it's not that the other engineer was incompetent, they were quite reasonable.

Re: Individuals Matter

#279

Post by ddalex »

kragen wrote: post #201
mostertoaster wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I bet an in progress airplane that weighs a 1000lbs is further along than an airplane that weighs 1.

Not if they have the same wingspan; the "1000lbs" airplane is 0% done because it will never fly.

sure, because they are measuring progress towards completion, rather then the ability to fly

i.e. if a finished plane weights 10,000 lbs all put together, then a in-construction plane currently at 1000 lbs is clearly further along towards completion then one at 1 lbs

Re: Individuals Matter

#280

Post by nkoren »

rStar wrote: post #267
interroboink wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there exists truths on a population level. I don't think the person you replied to was claiming otherwise. The problem is when one takes those population-level truths and blindly applies them to individuals. You might be right 80% of the time (or whatever) with that approach, but that doesn't help when you're wrong _this_ time with the specific person in front of you.

> observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. > You might be right 80% of the time or, as in my example of a collective of oxycontin users, you might be able to predict certain of their actions at a 99% efficiency rate, and that may enable you to make statements that apply to the collective as a whole, and as individuals.

Yep, you're exhibiting precisely that kind of bias. I've known a variety of addicts and there's absolutely no statement one could make about them with 99% certainty that it will apply to a given individual.

I don't mean that one should be naive about things. You might correctly observe that a high percentage of Oxycontin addicts exhibit behaviour X, and therefor you might want to keep a wary eye out for that behaviour when dealing with an individual Oxycontin addict. Of course that way lies confirmation bias, which one must also guard against. But it's still better than saying that because most Oxy addicts exhibit trait X, this individual addict will necessarily exhibit trait X. That's worse than confirmation bias becuause it's pre-confirmation bias. You're treating statistics about a group as evidence about an individual -- and that's wrong.

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