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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#371

Post by ZainRiz »

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.

Whenever I ask an expert how long it'll take someone new to the their code base to add feature Y, I mentally double whatever estimate they give and share _that_ instead.

I haven't overshot the estimate yet.

Re: Individuals Matter

#372

Post by thegrimmest »

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…

> But if you have a practical idea on how to “solve” planning

Seems pretty straightforward to me - just don't use dates in your plans. That means don't announce features which aren't complete. Don't plan marketing campaigns for unlaunched products. Embrace "Now, "Next" and "Later" as headings on your roadmap. There are many successful companies that operate like this, Nintendo being a famous example. It doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line - quite the contrary.

The usual issue that folks have with planning is that business leaders are simply not willing to spend the resources to do it accurately enough to answer the questions they're asking. Think how much time it would take to break 6 months of work for several teams into detailed stories and estimate each one.

It therefore seems they're basically wasting everyone's time, since dartboards and magic-8-balls are just as good as engineering estimates without details.

Re: Individuals Matter

#373

Post by ecnahc515 »

mostertoaster wrote: post #187
fitzn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. - Bill Gates

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

And if I build a paper/balsa wood airplane that's 1 pound and can carry a mouse?

It all depends on what the actual "airplane" (product) that's being built is.

Re: Individuals Matter

#374

Post by notpachet »

notpachet wrote: post #328
jiggawatts wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like the parent poster said, people are on a bell curve. It sounds like you may only have been exposed to mediocre, passable, or plain bad PM's so far in your career. So I'll remind you: the reason we pay PM's is because good PM's can, and do, exist. I've only worked with a few great PM's, but they outshone their competition with just as much brilliance as the 10x among us engineers outshine the 1x. It's ironic that…

Woops -- *homogeneous!

Re: Individuals Matter

#375

Post by spoils19 »

rramadass wrote: post #286
hyperman1 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they underestimate the value of specific knowledge. A builder that can build X meters of wall every day van do that reasonably independent of the building site. X will of course vary when you give a new kind of stones. The problem with programming is every job has its own kind of stones.

>I think they underestimate the value of specific knowledge This is the crux of the issue. When it comes to "Knowledge Work" almost every step sooner or later becomes a specialization. For example, I used to sneer at the role of a "Build Engineer" until i was forced to take up that role in one project. The combination of HW Platforms, OS versions, config switches, build flags, magic incantations etc. quickly gave me…

I don't understand why you would sneer at a role in the first place, without at least taking some sort of look into what they have to do.

Re: Individuals Matter

#376

Post by lifeisstillgood »

subsubzero wrote: post #353
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Practically all the actual work a PM does is communication. Practically all the actual work a PM does can be replaced with a script and dashboard

For small tasks, yes this works. For larger feature work that involves cross-team collaboration, including legal, security etc, a pm is a godsend.

meh. The problem is authority. PM / manager as described above is a co-ordination issue. Often administrative as well.

Either the company is imposing administrative burden a that it can remove with a little effort and scripting, or again it is co-ordination - which software usually excels at.

We can endlessly debate specifics but yes, there are many corporate environments that are almost impossible to navigate without full-time skilled administration - it that is a choice by the company not an inherent law of nature.

I seem to recall a Microsoft anecdote where someone released an internal form for developers to fill out, and billg personally sent round collecting the form telling people that sort of thing was not the Microsoft way. Far be MSFT from an ideal but bureaucracy is a choice.

Edit: my take on hierarchy and decision making is that it is clearly "obvious" that in war and times of stress there is only enough time for one person, the "hero", to review the battlefield and make decisions, which everyone else then follows. The problem with that is throughout human history that idea has literally had no better than 50/50 chance of succeeding.

I am very much short on Project management, administrative management as authority and generally anything that points away from democracy.

Re: Individuals Matter

#377

Post by throwawaygh »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #220
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. Those discounts are why it's easier to poach the employees. If a company has 10 engineers earning $200K/year, why would you buy the company for $667K per person and then pay the employees on top of th…

There are only so many $500k spots available. If every engineer in the world said “I’m moving to SF and applying to Google” and assuming visa allowed that you’d see Google paying a lot less for talent! Which means that while some people earning 200k are underpaid, they can’t all be underpaid.

The larger worry for petite capitalists is not competition with large tech, but rather the possibility that senior engineers at small firms realize that they are the firm and have enough savings to jump ship, build an mvp, and cannibalize the old business.

Re: Individuals Matter

#378

Post by nimish »

nimithryn wrote: post #24
nimish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the a…

> This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model. I’ve never understood these critiques. If you want to study society, what’s the alternative? No matter what, you have to make a model of some kind. Yeah, some models are simplistic, but maybe they can capture the high order bits of the phenomenon they are modeling, and at least you are committing to an idea you can codify, find fa…

"All models are wrong, but some are useful"

A lot of so-called experts don't quite grasp the former and don't care about the latter. They cannot be relied upon for actual decision making, since the low level details are what's hard!

Re: Individuals Matter

#379

Post by ozim »

Jensson wrote: post #269
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…

> That "corporations are doing it wrong" premise is also wrong - somehow those big corporations are chugging along for decades. Once you have market dominance it is really hard to lose it, you have more resources and more experience than any startup. So they can carry a lot of bad practices without failing as a company, they have to be really bad to lose their position. This is actually a common business question, ho…

There is a lot of corporations that are far from market dominance. There is more to the world than Fortune 100. Some companies chug along with ~500 employees for multiple years with a lot of rotation.

Re: Individuals Matter

#380

Post by babelfish »

civilized wrote: post #23
babelfish wrote: post #13

It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490

Maybe his reason for wanting a small box computer was idiosyncratic and weird and he preferred not to discuss it. Maybe it was part of a bizarre prank or a secret project. The dictum "think horses not zebras" has its value - ordinary possibilities are more likely - but it doesn't say that zebras don't exist. To be honest, this comment is a perfect illustration of why Dan had to write that essay. Some people can't see…

It is far more important to be able to explain your line of reasoning to those around you, especially professionally (much of the essay was about school/work), than it is to hope your coworkers are able to "see beyond the obvious".
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