The crazy thing about this is that it can be purely mental. My most productive coding session this year happened when I had to quarantine and I knew my employer wouldn't mind if I just did nothing. There was no pressure, but I still wanted to move on a little bit with the project. Just a few hours a day. I mai ly did this because I like the project and I would get into a lot stress later if it was not done.
I got more done in two half-days at home than in a week of full days at the office. No distractions, no meetings, no obligation to answer mails and phone calls. Paradise.
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…
As a business owner myself this is total nonsense. I proudly pay my staff well and I don't overwork them. Anything else is a choice and it's a choice that nearly always benefits you not your employees.
Yes.
Sounds like an unprofitable business where the owner refuses to accept reality that the work conditions are marginal because the business is marginal.
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…
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.
It's amazing how many people you can hire (and how many bugs you can ship with) when you sell something that's free to distribute and has no true competition.
Being busy is more about power struggle between someone paying the money and someone doing the job. It's similar in other jobs. The most important part is that the one paying, usually have no idea how to do the thing. If she trust you that you do your job well or is scared that you leave - you wont be busy, but if she doesn't trust you or thinks she knows better, and you can't stand up to this, the only thing left is being absurdly too busy.
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.
Thanks for pointing out. Someone who can’t hold a job for more than a year on average in almost a decade isn’t someone i would take team/engineering advice from.
> can’t hold
That's a bit presumptuous. He could have left for better opportunities.
While I love this quote: > as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable. I feel like this is missing an acknowledgement that "what a team is capable of" actually depends on the manager! Managing people and priorities takes skills that require practic…
I couldn't agree more. This is written from the perspective of a manager so I am likely asking a bit too much from the reader to make the connection. Thank you for the feedback! My experience tends to be that managers will rarely get help to manage the teams WIP and it's often left to that same manager to provide that mechanism of back-pressure. But if they then don't, for whatever reason, then it can be bad news for…
As a manager, my long term goals are perfectly aligned with my teams. I want them to be (mentally) healthy, motivated and happy. This is what makes the team (and me!) loyal and productive, and it will prevent sickness/absence. I never get the manager vs team perspective, it feels like whenever there is a “versus” in perspectives, something is wrong and will lead to problems over time.
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…
Regarding a dedicated person to handle the CI, here is my experience. In the small company I am working now, I had setup a adhoc deployment script that was working fine, took less than 5min (with no user interaction) on my dev PC. Since it is not a SaaS, our release cycle was a bit slower than wanted, 1 or 2 times per month, depending on circumstances. A guy was hired and he wanted to speed this up. I explained clear…
Your problem is not the CI. It's that the CI does not test the custom hardware.
You need a hardware testing engineer who can automate the tests that you're currently running manually.
I love how far removed from reality these idealistic blog posts are from "technology thinkers". You're busy? You shouldn't be so let me give you some cookie cutter advice filled with: "you need", "you should", "you could". More in my book.
I don't think this is removed from reality. I think people who are in perma-crunch believing that just over the next hump they'll find level ground are the ones who are removed from reality.