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Why are you so busy?

tomlingham.com

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Re: Why are you so busy?

#51

Post by Mikeb85 »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #6

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than…

Or you maximise your income during good times, accept layoffs (vacation) during bad times, ride out the difference by being smart with money and making good investments, and in the end you've made the same money but had far more free time.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#52

Post by scruple »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #5

A while back I took a couple years off from working. Sometimes I'd still find myself saying "I've just been too busy" when asking myself why I didn't get something done. Didn't take long to realize that "I'm too busy" had been an excuse I had been using to justify poorly thought out priorities. I still haven't fully broken the "I'm too busy" pattern but at least now I know there's a decent chance that I haven't actua…

My brother retired in his mid-40s. He has the same problem. He was a chef and had spent 2 decades working himself to the bone, genuinely being too busy to get things done. In retirement, he became "the busiest unemployed person I know" and hearing that a few times helped to snap him out of it.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#53

Post by MattGaiser »

PcChip wrote: post #9
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #5

A while back I took a couple years off from working. Sometimes I'd still find myself saying "I've just been too busy" when asking myself why I didn't get something done. Didn't take long to realize that "I'm too busy" had been an excuse I had been using to justify poorly thought out priorities. I still haven't fully broken the "I'm too busy" pattern but at least now I know there's a decent chance that I haven't actua…

Agreed, sometimes you can literally replace the phrase with "it's not important to me" and shock yourself

Yep. A lot of the times I don't care about something, I use the time excuse.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#54

Post by euroderf »

bena wrote: post #46
jiggawatts wrote: post #39

Please note the important caveat in the article: If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps). This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy". I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in t…

I feel both sides of this one. Yes, creating automated processes would make things easier, but the time it would take to automate the process would take too much time before you have to deliver. So everyone knows what needs to be done, everyone recognizes that it would help things, but no one can put down what they're juggling to handle it. Sometimes it takes bringing on a person just to take on that project as its o…

The strategic use of interns. With obvious ROI that makes subsequent interns easier to acquire.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#55

Post by wnolens »

TideAd wrote: post #49
christophilus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started at Microsoft, this exact scenario happened. I was told I couldn’t automate things because there was no time. I did it anyway, and a 3 person job suddenly became an extremely part time job for one person. It blew my mind that anyone at Microsoft, of all places would have this mindset.

When I was at Microsoft circa 2018, our team had a senior engineer whose primary job was doing manual validation of releases. That and keeping a single custom legacy build server running.

I would love to share my experience of release management at MSFT but it would out me.

In the ballpark of 20ish engineers chasing build errors and test failures for a month to bump a version number (one line change).

Re: Why are you so busy?

#56

Post by nstart »

jiggawatts wrote: post #39

Please note the important caveat in the article: If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps). This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy". I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in t…

While this example feels pretty obvious, I think in practice, these conversations conflict with the third caveat mentioned:

"Your team is always working on the next most important thing (as prioritised by the business)"

When the business functionality and marketing needs compete with technical advances, there's a decent amount of negotiation that needs to be done and that negotiation varies wildly from company to company.

Early on in my career I felt angry at these kinds of negotiations. As I've become more mild and open to business needs across the board I realise that most people will agree with the goodness of the idea but it becomes the duty of the proposer to sell it in terms that the business unit can agree to.

Overall, this is a great thought provoking article. Concise. Yet nuanced.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#57

Post by wnolens »

grensley wrote: post #37

I was thinking to myself as I read this: "this man has never worked somewhere long enough to be the guy who has to fix things when it breaks", and lo-and-behold, he's had 7 jobs in 8 years.

Aha.. like an engineer who's never supported the product they shipped. Lotta talk.

I agree in spirit with everything he wrote. Except that it's just not real life, even when I've worked for businesses FLUSH with cash to "do the right thing". Even after saying almost his exact words to an otherwise intelligent boss, quantifying my point, and being proven right when I predicted his optimistic plan didn't work. Reality is messy when you peel back the first layer.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#58

Post by bfung »

In the tech engineering manager role, the busy comes from constant re-evaluation of the next important things from "the business", aka, the non-tech managers that don't care to understand nor keep the current priorities nor work with a software development process. The explanation/deep dive of that reevaluation with non-tech people take a LOT of time.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#59

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

unethical_ban wrote: post #23
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for you, but this is rarely, if ever, logical for the employee. This is very much a "you should be happy with your stable, lower wage job because it's stable" argument that is frequently used to suppress wage increases. As an employee, the only thing that really matters is the dollars flowing out of your account into mine on a regular basis. Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance...…

>Trust, job security, growth opportunities, work life balance... they're all just words Or not, if you have been at a good company where people got treated well, with good bonuses, great healthcare, tons of time off and job security during recessions and times when an unscrupulous company could have fired people. A lot of people are asserting that companies and business owners are physically and psychologically incap…

> Or not, if you have been at a good company where people got treated well, with good bonuses, great healthcare, tons of time off and job security during recessions and times when an unscrupulous company could have fired people.

Unless you have this in ink or blood it's not guaranteed any more so than at a bad company where people get treated horribly.

Don't ever delude yourself into believing that the paradise of today will survive to see tomorrow. All the best companies even include this in their financial statements:

> Past performance is not indicative of future results.

We've been living in the very good times.

Re: Why are you so busy?

#60

Post by kqr »

jiggawatts wrote: post #39

Please note the important caveat in the article: If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps). This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy". I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in t…

There's also the more insidious version of this where instead they go, "That sounds nice, but we really don't need it."

"May I ask why you don't need it?"

"Oh, we found that we spent so much time on deployments that we decided to do only one planned deployment per year now."

In this case, the people you're talking to have obviously only swept the dirt under the rug, but sometimes they honestly think they've solved the problem this way!

(And then they ask everyone to "work harder" because the competition is running circles around them. This usually means cramming more things into already big deployments and failing even harder than before.)

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