Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?

I've found that you have to pick results (output) OR time. You can't manage both and trying to do so sends the wrong message to your team. They'll question your motives and start to assume they can substitute output for time or vice versa.

Pick one and stop thinking about the other. Worried people aren't working enough? Is one guy only working a day a week? If you have team members like that they don't have enough work and you need to set better goals with/for them.

So save yourself the eternal headache and pick your poison, people will respect you a lot more for doing so.

Thanks for comment, it makes sense. Do you do anything to increase people productivity? for example: I hate to see people playing games in the office, but I know at the same time that it might be healthy to have this kind of freedom.

When I'm working contracts and my managers/team leads/whatever are inept at management, I establish the following.

1. I ask you for the high level roadmap. The "birds eye view". Then we talk about what my responsibilities are and how you want things to be prioritised. At that point im practically walking the manager through managing me but w/e.

2. Once I know what he wants from me, I appreciate it to be left alone. I send update e-mails that highlight the discussed priorities and my progress on them with a request to contact me if anything has changed.

That's it. This is on top of any team meetings. You can talk to me whenever you feel like it, but if its about something technical, what you want to tell me better make sense. Or you'll just look ridiculous.

Addressing your "issues":

The only thing that matters is whether your team members are productive. If you don't know how to measure that, you need to figure it out. Assuming you have metrics in place to measure the productivity of your employees:

a. You see me playing a game. Its none of your business. Is my productivity where you want it? If its not, tell me about it. If it is, let me play my game, I'm working on a task that requires some white noise.

b. I only put in 8 visible hours. Is my productivity where you want it? If not, tell me about it. If it is, how I spend my time is none of your business. If you're going to dictate my hours in spite of me doing my job, I'm going to adhere to your bullshit while suddenly being less productive. In the meantime, your competitor is receiving a job application.

c. I only put in 7.5 hours instead of 9. See b.

d. somehow, d. doesn't exist. my bad.

e. See b.

^ Maybe, in some world, you could actually get more work out of me if I spent that one more hour in the office. But that's not how motivation works. You can't ask me to deliver X and then say "but I wanted X+1". Decide what you want. Hours or output. You don't get both. Do you want me to do the work or look like I do the work?

Now, let's discuss how you are measuring productivity. If you manage 15 people and can't figure out how to measure productivity, that's on you, not your employees.

Practically all of the managers I've worked with so far do not really understand how to do this job. Its your job to delegate tasks that you need to deliver on. Not much else. Your employees deliver on the things you measure. If you measure time spent in the office, people will optimize for that. If you measure time spent looking busy, people will look busy. There are an infinite amount of ways for me to look busy doing no fucking work. The only thing you should measure is output.

Again you have to pick one. If they get results, why does it matter if they play games? I have a guy who plays Warcraft on breaks, he says it pissed all his old bosses off, but this guy writes incredible code. He'll spend half his time not coding, but doing mindless tasks as he thinks. Then he writes code without running it for an hour right before leaving and hits run at the end and it all works. Never seen anything like it.

Everyone's different. I only intervene if they aren't getting results and a lot of the time when they are having issues it's never because of the surface things you'd notice if you were managing time.

Thanks for your honest feedback, much appreciated. Usually each team member knows the plan, and what should be finished and when. We have the right tools to generate reports and KPIs but the issue in software development is that things change easily, for example:

a. on a specific day, the expectation is to finish task A, but then, the engineer discovered that it depends on unplanned task B and now we need to finish B before being able to complete A and deploy it.

b. an engineer is working on a specific task, and he's investing a lot of time and effort but it was not finished on time because the actual plan didn't work out and needed additional time.

That's why it's kind of hard to manage output alone.

your example at the beginning was excellent, can you give me more details to how you like to be managed in terms of output? if you have a place where I can read from would be awesome.

Thanks again.