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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#401

Post by lostcolony »

ncmncm wrote: post #398
lostcolony wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he was an amazing engineer 100s of times better than anyone else on the project...or maybe he was a bottleneck for everyone else. The latter I've seen. A lot. The former I have not.

Not having seen it does not mean it does not exist. I have seen it more than twice. I hope to see it more times. I have also seen -10x engineers. Generally the best you can do is stay well clear.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I did say 'maybe' after all.

I am also implying the likelihood of it being that, rather than from a particular perspective an organizational detriment looks like a personal positive (somewhat akin to the 'heroic' team constantly responding to pages in production for their services; not like that lazy team that only works 8 hours a day and never gets paged), seems low. As mentioned, when one person seems to be doing all the work, yeah, it might be they're just amazing, or it might be that the project is badly managed, and so the work can't actually be distributed well. Both can also be true.

I too have seen -10x engineers. Interestingly, others in the company also saw them as +10x. Someone who was the silo for a notoriously difficult part of the system was viewed by management as amazing (after all, he just went and got things done! They could focus their attention elsewhere!). When I then had to dig in, with actual production requirements, I found nothing really worked, nothing was designed well, nothing was documented, and the person was impossible to work with.

Re: Individuals Matter

#403

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

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.

I got around this, specially around 'planning poker' when I got to be lead in these scenarios that forced you to do it. Whenever there is a discussing on how long something should take, whoever says the least amount, is tasked with the job. After 1-2 of these meetings, amazingly, all estimates started to come back quite higher than before.

I still believe that whoever takes the task, should be the one deciding how long it will take, and only after understanding the scope of the work. Planning poker is the most useless piece of shit I ever seen, and still, it is used all around by idiots. If I am asked to estimate something, I will always give the highest possible value and justify with "I don't know enough about it to estimate". If I am managing and I have a top down force pushing for this, I will always make sure that the stupid process is obvious how fucking broken it is.

Re: Individuals Matter

#404

Post by Viliam1234 »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #403
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.

I got around this, specially around 'planning poker' when I got to be lead in these scenarios that forced you to do it. Whenever there is a discussing on how long something should take, whoever says the least amount, is tasked with the job. After 1-2 of these meetings, amazingly, all estimates started to come back quite higher than before. I still believe that whoever takes the task, should be the one deciding how lo…

The original idea was that "planning poker" should estimate the tasks in "story points", which are absolutely NOT supposed to correspond to days. It is just a way of saying "it seems like the task X will require twice as much work as task Y". Some teams do not use numbers at all, and estimate stories in "t-shirt sizes": S, M, L, XL, XXL.

But of course, most companies want to have their Scrum and micromanage it too. So they estimate in days, and call them "story points". Or sometimes they don't even bother to pretend, and estimate directly in days.

(So, how can you estimate how much gets done during the sprint, when all you have is the "story points"? You keep the records from previous sprints, and see how many "story points" got done back then. Adjust the number if someone takes a vacation, etc. This is self-correcting in long term: if someone starts pushing developers to estimate low story points, you will see that fewer story points get done per sprint, so your estimates of how much work gets done will remain correct.)

Re: Individuals Matter

#405

Post by Viliam1234 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #358
dspillett wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 est…

> things need to be re-estimated which can cause friction But, but ... isn't every estimate supposed to be provisional? Aren't you supposed to be re-estimating regularly?

> But, but ... isn't every estimate supposed to be provisional?

Heh, no. It is an estimate when you are making it, but ten minutes later it magically becomes a commitment.

"Tasks like this usually take two days, sometimes one or three, very rarely more... so, two days on average."

"Okay, I am writing down: two days."

...two weeks later...

"How it is possible that the task took three days when it was estimated at two? You made the estimate! And you all were there at the planning, and no one said anything! As senior developers, you should make better estimates, this is unprofessional."

Re: Individuals Matter

#406

Post by babelfish »

civilized wrote: post #389
babelfish wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Or maybe it's far more important to be okay with looking stupid than to assume that lack of understanding from others always means something negative about your communication abilities or choices. If someone can't imagine any other reason someone would look stupid in the eyes of others than because they explained something poorly, I wonder how much experience of life have they had?

> If someone can't imagine any other reason someone would look stupid in the eyes of others than because they explained something poorly, I wonder how much experience of life have they had?

This is not what I'm saying - of course I can personally relate to the experience of looking stupid due to a poor explanation, and I'd imagine most people here have too. My issue with the article is that the author doubled down that looking stupid was correct. When I feel like I look stupid because I can't explain my line of reasoning, or because I didn't have enough prerequisite knowledge for the conversation, I will typically apologize and immediately start explaining my line of thought and asking questions around the unknowns. However, the author's attitude is that when they look stupid it must be an issue with the other party, and they have zero obligation to try and make themself look better. This is a MASSIVE red flag (especially in terms of hiring)! If the author doesn't have the empathy or emotional intellect to understand why being able to explain what you're trying to communicate is a /good thing/, it's difficult for me to take them seriously.

Re: Individuals Matter

#407

Post by Viliam1234 »

jseban wrote: post #301
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.

The best teams I've ever worked with, that were the most productive and also had the best team work and team spirit, was when we assigned tasks in planning. And gave the tasks to whoever was most suitable to work on it. Unfortunately we were never allowed to do that, because of Scrum, and were only able to do it on the low down for a short time until management cracked down on it and enforced "anyone who happens to b…

> Unfortunately we were never allowed to do that, because of Scrum, and were only able to do it on the low down for a short time until management cracked down on it and enforced "anyone who happens to be free works on whatever is on top of the backlog".

Ironically, this (what the management did) is completely against the rules of Scrum... in theory.

But it is what management typically does when they are doing "Scrum".

Re: Individuals Matter

#408

Post by civilized »

babelfish wrote: post #406
civilized wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's far more important to be okay with looking stupid than to assume that lack of understanding from others always means something negative about your communication abilities or choices. If someone can't imagine any other reason someone would look stupid in the eyes of others than because they explained something poorly, I wonder how much experience of life have they had?

> If someone can't imagine any other reason someone would look stupid in the eyes of others than because they explained something poorly, I wonder how much experience of life have they had? This is not what I'm saying - of course I can personally relate to the experience of looking stupid due to a poor explanation, and I'd imagine most people here have too. My issue with the article is that the author doubled down th…

I think you misread my post. There are other reasons people can look stupid than they did something wrong. It is neither accurate nor virtuous to blame yourself for every negative outcome.

Re: Individuals Matter

#409

Post by spopejoy »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #85
wffurr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a great book about this called "Seeing Like a State".

On that subject - I have read the original yet but I did enjoy this take https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

Weirdly I find "legibility" a little ... reductionist.

It's super-easy to identify the problems with e.g. Stalinism or modern China along these lines. The problem is that humanity is constantly failing in far more chaotic ways too, and what a surprise those are more associated with anarchist capitalism or imperialism, but since they don't reduce to a nice formula you get this somewhat smug analysis of human behavior. Where is the "legibility" problem of the US invasion of Vietnam for instance? There is none because the interests (contain China, destabilize the region) were quite clear, and were achieved, despite the US "losing" the war.

(I'm also really sick of the "Gervais Principle" blather so that may be biasing me against the ribbonfarm blog though)

Re: Individuals Matter

#410

Post by kragen »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #399
kragen wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person is about 2 meters tall, weighs about 100 kg, can run about 10 kilometers per hour, lives about 70 years, and can shovel about 60 tons of coal in a day (without power tools). If you took a sample of a few million people, it should very definitely come as a surprise to find that it included "10x" people: people who were 20 meters tall, people who weighed 1000 kg, people who could run 100 kilometers p…

What made you think I think physics or programming is analogue to easily quantifiable manual labour? >It should come as even more of a surprise to find "Jeff Dean" To find them, yes. To point out that they exist and the likely that you'll work with them is statistically insignificant? No. The thing with intellectual labour is that some insights have immeasurable value. Some statistical outliers have such humongous in…

None of that makes any sense.
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