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The art of interrupting software engineers

• rch 7y ago
  > This was mostly me passing by and asking how things were going Hello Peter whaaaat's happening?
  • p1necone 7y ago
    Yeah I cringed when I read this bit. If any managers are reading don't fucking do this. Your intentions may be benign (this person apparently thought they were) but most devs are going to read this as veiled micromanaging and get just as stressed out as the earlier approaches in the article. Just use scrum as intended, maybe push for more detailed updates if devs are just saying stuff like "still working on x". Or just trust them and don't try to babysit.
  • pmarreck 7y ago
    Obligatory link to video (I can't help it, my name is Peter, I love this movie and I work in tech lol) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w
• raptorfactor 7y ago
  If I had a PM come by my office twice a day to "check-in" I think I'd quit.
  • ilikehurdles 7y ago
    Pivotal also has thing where everyone is expected to pair program all the time. I think I would despise the environment but it’s clearly not for everyone, myself included.
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      I was skeptical too, before I joined Pivotal Labs, but I love it. It's worth noting that it's a skill, or rather a collection of skills, that are much easier to learn from an experienced pair. At the moment I have been on a solo allocation for about 6 months. It has let me go down a lot of rabbit holes, which can be educational. But I miss pairing pretty badly on days when I am working on straight regular development.
    • BurningFrog 7y ago
      I thought I would hate pair programming, but it turned out to be, BY FAR, the best thing that ever happened to me professionally. That said, it really isn't for everybody. But you may want to give it a chance.
      • Ididntdothis 7y ago
        You also need somebody good to pair with. It can be really infuriating to have to deal with someone who can't keep up but on the other hand if you work with someone you respect, it's great.
        • BurningFrog 7y ago
          Yeah, pairing is a learned skill! If you put two random programmers together and ask them to "pair program", you'll very likely end up with two annoyed people at the end of the day. I was lucky in being mentored into it by some very seasoned pros, and I learned the tricks of the trade that way.
      • nfrbc 7y ago
        IME anyone is able to pair, given the right conditions and being paired with the right person. However, it's like therapy: being forced to do it instead of doing it by yourself will result in a terrible experience.
    • gramakri 7y ago
      OK, all the time is a bit extreme but pair programming is actually a lot of fun and a great way to pass on knowledge when done right.
    • systemtest 7y ago
      Don't forget the 9:06AM company breakfast. I'd rather have breakfast with my family and bring the kids to school.
      • cornicecream 7y ago
        Breakfast is gone by 9:06AM actually.. you have to be there before billing hours for the free food.
  • squirrelicus 7y ago
    So true. Not only is it annoying micromanagement, it kills the problem focus, so there goes 15 minutes of reengagement with the problem. Oh but there's a meeting in 30 minutes? Might as well get a snack and read a tech article now instead of finishing the microtask I was working on.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    Same. I'd be pissed. I mean, if they have time to come by everyone's desk a couple times a day, WTAF are they doing and why are they getting paid for it?
    • godelski 7y ago
      > WTAF are they doing Harassing engineers > why are they getting paid for it? Engineers got their work done despite the micromanage (to be clear, I mean despite and not because. Just in case any PM or manager is reading this and thinks micromanaging is why tasks get done)
  • nfrbc 7y ago
    Funny thing is, asking twice a day doesn't even make sense for the manager... Of course, it relieves stress and stuff, but if you're THAT stressed because of the project and need constant reassurance from the engineers, you're clearly in the wrong job. I had to lead a few engineering teams (wasn't a PM, though) and the only approach that ever worked for me was to check things out in much larger intervals, a week, sometimes even more. Actually treat engineers like adults and be an adult yourself. Let them come to you if they have a problem. Sample the progress in much larger intervals in order to reduce noise. Micromanagement doesn't do any good for anyone.
• opportune 7y ago
  Thank you for reminding me how much I dislike working with PMs I especially can't imagine working with this one. Imagine constantly having to revise estimates and getting micromanaged by someone who isn't your manager. The "role responsibilities" conversation would happen very quickly I find it especially ridiculous that this person is interrupting people two times a day for fresh updates on top of a daily standup. And they even admit their technical knowledge is not good enough to actually be able to help much if there is an issue. If you are bothering and interrupting every single person on your team multiple times a day just in case you need to increment a number in a JIRA board now instead of tomorrow morning, you are wasting people's time. Leave it to the standup. Your job as a PM is not to micromanage engineers. If that is anybody's job, that is the engineers' managers. Your job is to make the engineers more productive and make sure they're working on the right things - but not at an hourly granularity.
  • dilyevsky 7y ago
    I mean this is from a company that forces pair programming down everyone’s throat (so that you don’t space out on hn as one of stated reasons) so what did you expect? =)
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      I don't know how you get the idea that it's forced. We're known for it, it's part of the interviewing process for Labs and most of R&D. Folks who don't want to pair generally don't apply. Of those who apply, some try it during the interview process and decide it's not for them. That is a good thing. Besides which, solo work is common too. Most of the field org works solo, Spring folks mostly work solo, I love pairing but currently I'm working solo. If a pair decides they should work solo, they do. Lots of pairs have a rotating arrangement where somebody different works solo for a day or two. I know of teams where they are solo in the morning to review PRs and pair in the afternoon to work on new contributions. None of this is enforced. There is no manual, no rulebook for The One True Way. Nobody tells you how to work. The way works is: the people are nice and smart and want to do the right thing. The rest is largely details.
• kdazzle 7y ago
  > I would let time pass and, on occasion, stories that I imagined would take a few hours would turn into a day or more. ...or even more...
• 40acres 7y ago
  I've found the best way to avoid interrupting engineers is to have a daily sync (a.k.a stand up meeting). My team meets for 30 minutes each morning to give an update, have Q&A, and discuss priorities and issues. We're a small team (3 developers) but it works perfectly because folks either had their inquiry answered earlier in the day or can execute good judgement to try to figure it out and if not ask about it tomorrow. We all receive tickets and if it's critical enough we'll meet to devise a plan. Under this scheme we are rarely interrupted and have been grinding through features all summer.
  • dfischer 7y ago
    A daily sync is way too often on teams that know what they're doing. It feels like busy work and is a waste in throughput and stress. Once a week, with committed items with a true definition of done is all that is needed. Anything in-between should be facilitated by the team members to unblock each other. Anything else is just stakeholder over management and or inexperienced teams. edit: at the most, I think async are passable via slack or something similar. Otherwise all data on this can be easily done via a Kanban board.
    • opportune 7y ago
      I like daily syncs if they are done quickly (<15m), and if people are working on different-enough things that they don't really know what their teammates are working on. Because that way you can unblock each other and actually use agile the way it was meant to be done in the face of underestimated tasks or changing requirements
      • jacques_chester 7y ago
        In my experience anything more than 10 minutes is a smell. It typically means you've got stories that are too big, have unaired problems, that you dive into implementation instead of just syncing briefly, or the team has too many people.
        • opportune 7y ago
• jacques_chester 7y ago
  I work for Pivotal. Product managers vary in how they work with a team, so this approach is new to me. As an anchor (approximately a tech lead) I made it my business to work closely with PMs on the product: giving feedback on how the technical direction was shaping up, asking for stories to be updated or broken apart, giving options for technical seams and so on. Frequently we embed product designers as well, so discussing design options and asking for modifications was common. But when I was pairing with another engineer we did whatever was on the top of the backlog according to our best judgement and with attention to quality. If it needed refactoring, we refactored. If we felt that would be better to wait, it would wait. The most important discussion, I found, was about chores -- work that engineers view as paying dividends in future velocity. Our view is that engineering is the ultimate owner of chores and can schedule them according to its considered discretion. The system works because of trust. I trust that product managers and product designers will be diligent in identifying user values and priorities. They can trust us to do what needs to be done to make the software to a sustainable high quality. I remember once I was rotated in as anchor for a product that had begun to struggle a bit. In particular we had a particular giant tech debt: we had fallen behind on React versions. Worse, there were three parts of the codebase using React, in three different ways. With my peers I decided that we were going to fix it. "I think it will take one pair week", I remember saying. It took five weeks. But nobody ever said: stop, you work for me, my way or the highway. We talked about the reasons. This tech debt would only grow as time passed. There was no good time to repay it, so sooner was better than later. We were trusted to do the right thing, so we did the right thing.
  • whycombagator 7y ago
    > In particular we had a particular giant tech debt: we had fallen behind on React versions. Worse, I don't want to read any further. Surely it doesn't get worse than that! /s
    • jacques_chester 7y ago
      It's a dependency for our main visual library, PivotalUI, which is meant to give a uniform brand across all our products. When you get a flagship site falling behind the products that customers have installed, it looks dumb. But more to the point: it slowed development. I could deal with a bit of visual glitchiness, but my job as an engineer is to create software to solve problems. Piling hacks on top of hacks doesn't do that and it's shitty to the next engineer who joins the team.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jbarciauskas 7y ago
  Software engineers aren't special. Literally any job that requires a modicum of concentration, whether it's writing marketing copy or doing complex financial forecasts, means that interruptions are costly.
  • elliekelly 7y ago
    I once had a boss (legal - so lots of drafting/reviewing) who had a rule: no meetings & no drivebys before lunch. For anyone on the team. Calendars were expected to be clear from 9-1. He'd say "If you aren't sprinting down the hall to talk about it then it can wait until after lunch." Of course there were "emergencies" and things so it was more like a team standard than a rule but it was phenomenal. When I got to my desk in the morning I always knew I'd have a solid block of time to get through the important work before I had to go to a bunch of meetings and take on more.
• philliphaydon 7y ago
  I only read the first paragraph and couldn’t read anymore. I’m unsure why he cannot Know when a story will be delivered. A story should fit into a sprint and so he should reasonablely expect that it’s delivered at the end of that sprint. If it’s not going to be delivered then this information should be relayed back to the pm. Going and pestering the team is only going to slow down development process and increase the likelihood of the team not delivering for the sprint.
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    Pivotal doesn't use sprints. Stories are pointed by engineers and ordered by the PM, but they're done when they are done, to the satisfaction of both. Tracker is able to give short-term forecasts of what will be done by when by averaging the last 3 weeks of deliveries (ie, velocity). Personally I think the idea of sprints is a menace. It creates an artificial deadline that leads to either waste or stress. Deadlines should be reserved for actual meaningful deadlines.
    • philliphaydon 7y ago
      I think that artificial deadlines and stress exist because the team and management allow it to exist. A story should fit into a sprint, but it may spill into the following sprint, but you shouldn't sacrifice quality just because you tried to finish it within the sprint. And a team should stand up for themselves in this regard, as a team, because a team succeeds and fails together. If you sacrifice quality because of some artificial deadline you put in place then you're only going to suffer maintaining that later on.
      • jacques_chester 7y ago
        I agree with you on these points. Especially the importance of being a team that doesn't sacrifice quality for calendar sparkles. It's just that I've seen the evil twin version of sprints far more than the official version.
      • pflenker 7y ago
• whycombagator 7y ago
  > I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with. This is monumentally bad advice. > I try to find a time when a pair does not seem to be heavily focused. Some of the cues might be they are having a casual non-work related conversation or are just returning from a break So surveill and/or eavesdrop and/or ambush. Nice. > Hadrien Raffalli is a Product Lead at Pivotal. Here's me thinking it's probably a more junior PM doing this. Nope, it's a Product Lead. PMs/TPMs can be great, if they are good. I've worked with some that made my life easier. I've worked with others who really didn't. Based on this article alone, Pivotal's PMs would make me quit.
  • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    Pivotal is well known for having a particularly extreme point of view, bordering on forthright religious fervor, when it comes to pair programming and taking highly bureaucratic versions of Agile development to an extreme. Pivotal can deliver things to customers in spite of all this (given that it’s surely not because of all this), which sort of makes any advice published out of there fundamentally irrelevant for people working pretty much anywhere else.
    • jdlshore 7y ago
      As far as I know, Pivotal's process is based on Extreme Programming (XP), a process which deliberately takes an extreme point of view. (It's in the name.) It's not bureaucratic, but it is demanding. I have a lot of experience with XP. In my experience, XP succeeds because of its extremeness, not despite it. It's not for everybody, but for organizations and teams such as Pivotal who are willing to understand and embrace it, it works very very well. So I challenge your "given that it's surely not because of all this" comment. Do you have any evidence? Or are you just saying, "I don't like this, so it can't possibly work?"
      • jasim 7y ago
        Taylorism worked -- it decreased costs for companies, but people suffered -- they couldn't find meaning in what they do, their every move was monitored and choreographed, and they were squeezed for the last bit of efficiency possible. The kind of "pairing all the time" kind of XP that is being preached is similar for programmers. It also works for repetitive work - building yet another web application - at scale, not at scale, not much of a difference. But programmers often get into the job because it is an inherently creative field. There is nothing like this kind of XP to suck it all away and leave them disillusioned about the craft until they escape and find a product role or even a consulting company with more empathy and kindness.
• isoskeles 7y ago
  I don't see the point in getting updates more than once a day. If something could change that you needed to know before tomorrow, isn't something else potentially wrong with the process? The only case where I want such frequent updates are when (1) there's some P0 bug on production and it needs to be fixed / tested / deployed yesterday or (2) we're trying to pressure the person to want to quit their job or magically improve (more the former than the latter).
• Terr_ 7y ago
  From the title I expected to see something a bit more, well, tactical about how to arrange communication by changing "real" interruptions into queued requests. For example, e-mails, or (varying by workplace-cultures) instant-messages that nobody expects immediate answers to.
• DevKoala 7y ago
  Why would any talented engineer work with this guy?
• catmanjan 7y ago
  Judging by all the negative responses do most people see themselves as some sort of vigilante programmer in their company? I'm not a PM but I sympathize with how difficult it is to discern where a project is up to when it comes to software, especially when you can't come up with short enough milestones...
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    I think lots of people have just had genuinely shitty experiences where they were slowed down in their work by interruptions or made to feel that they were not trusted as professionals. They see this and it fits a pattern and so they are fairly skeptical.
    • catmanjan 7y ago
      Yeah fair enough, I've been lucky and haven't been made to feel that way
      • jacques_chester 7y ago
        I have had a mix of experiences in my professional life, Pivotal is by far my favourite, even when I've gotten super frustrated about particular problems (and I have). I've learned that lots of folks on HN or reddit hear about our common practices and suspect that it's at best chicanery and at worse a deception (all for the fiendish end of working fixed hours with enormous autonomy, dun dun duhhh!). Those responses usually upset me, because I feel that my experiences are being devalued. I read the comments and I compare them to my life of the past five and half years and they just aren't the same. It can be hurtful to have casual snide remarks made when you know that the people you work with are kind, thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working humans through and through. But I also know that other people have had bad experiences and what they hear sounds like other things they've heard from shitty managers and colleagues, so they're cynical. If I talk down to them then I am devaluing their experiences. So I try not to, even though my personal nature is to be an arrogant wanker.
  • hermitdev 7y ago
• 6thaccount2 7y ago
  Is it really common for software engineers to work under these conditions? As an electrical Engineers I have plenty of deadlines and do plenty of work with PMs, but none of this daily standup and thankfully Jira was recently dropped as it was considered more trouble than it is worth (management just wanted to know the big things going on and not all things). Of course it's better than plenty of other jobs, but the constant treatment of employees like they're on an assembly line sounds rough. I know software development is tough and respect those that do it. I have critical time sensitive tasks and I'm expected to have them completed on time. My manager might check in once a month on a year long 1/4 million dollar project among all the other work I do. I know that's peanuts compared to a large software project, but still.
  • finder83 7y ago
    It depends a lot on the company. I've been fortunate enough to avoid companies like the one posted, but there really are two (maybe three) views of developers: 1.) Treat them as engineers who are capable, able to communicate problems or expected delays, and professionals who want to grow. 2.) Treat them as assembly line workers who constantly want to screw around and need to be whipped back into shape. I'd argue maybe a third is the startup mentality where you need to sell your life to the company, but maybe that's a mutually exclusive thing. In my experience, the second comes from the same mentality as the old waterfall companies. Spec everything, trust no developer, micromanage, etc. Developers are a risk, not an asset, and never trust them at a management level. I would never work for a company like that, and avoid them like the plague. Regardless, both of the views above seem to be a self fulfilling prophecy. Professional shops who treat developers as engineers produce some quality stuff and usually on time. Sweat shops have a lot of failed and over-budget projects and a high turnover.
    • 6thaccount2 7y ago
      Thanks for the insight. I like programming and read and write plenty of code, but it is a part of my job (tool in the belt) and not the focus. In my opinion, there are always so many unknowns for any project that scoping something out entirely beforehand seems entirely useless. I'd much rather sketch some diagrams on paper and try to implement something that works but is a little ugly and then make a second pass to clean it up and properly architect it. I can't do that to start without a better understanding of the problem. I suppose if you write a lot of the same kinds of software you can estimate up front pretty accurately though.
• tschwimmer 7y ago
  I'm a PM and this does not resonate with me. If you're getting status twice a day... I think something is very wrong. The brutal truth of software development is that the quality of your output is going to vary with the quality of the engineers you work with. Good engineers don't need daily standups to build great products, and bad engineers aren't going to be helped by doing twice-daily checkins.
  • parasubvert 7y ago
    I think you'd need to experience the flow of a place like Pivotal before passing judgement. I find it interesting that you've immediately jumped to "good vs. bad engineers". The mindset at Pivotal tends to be that all engineers are equal. There is no good or bad. This is why they rotate pairs. Checking in with a pair isn't a status update, it's really about collaboration and visibility. Estimates are often wrong, assumptions get tested, the team dynamic is "let's ensure we all understand this". Stories in tracker tend to be <1 day, so checking in occasionally isn't exactly a wrong thing (every half day to me is excessive), so priorities can be shifted, or big stories can be broken up.
  • srean 7y ago
    Can you please clone as many copies of yourself sir. That would be task 1154162 on the dashboard.
  • abc_lisper 7y ago
    I think you jumped the shark here. The point of doing multiple checkins a day is to make good engineers feel like they are barely good enough, and make them hungry to please the bosses! Pavlov at work here, I think.
    • targonca 7y ago
      I'm not sure you're using "jumped the shark" correctly.
      • abc_lisper 7y ago
• edgarvaldes 7y ago
  My manager expects a formal report once a month, but he is always open to conversation about the products we build. We end up talking daily, but it is never forced.
• yowlingcat 7y ago
  Wow, where do we start here? First of all, it is much more effective to team with a tech lead or engineering manager to remain semi-realtime up to date with the status of where things are in engineering rather than asking status update questions directly. To not understand that is a level of naivete that prevents a product manager from operating at the basic level of competence to be considered a senior IC. Second of all, I've seen two kinds of product managers. One kind looks at software development estimates as commitments to be contractually adhered to. The other treats software development estimates as assets/investments with risks to be managed. Which kind is more effective? Well, which computation accomplishes more results, the one that doesn't halt and logs the same line over and over, or the one that does halt and additionally does the thing it set out to do?
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I honestly can't tell if this is a terrible practice or just the worst possible way to describe it for the HN crowd. People who end up in manager roles tend to be people persons and some use very touchy-feely language. I'm personally put off by all the references to his own anxiety as just one example. That doesn't necessarily mean he's actually a terrible manager. Part of his job is to make sure things get delivered in a timely fashion. If that's not happening, then feeling stressed by it isn't unreasonable, but the article sounds like he's just trying to manage his emotions rather than get deliverables from his people in a timely fashion. I'm not posting this to dog the author. I'm posting this to suggest that his framing may reflect the fact that his job involves managing people rather than things. If it were framed differently, the exact same practices might sound much more reasonable and palatable to people here on HN who are overall reacting fairly negatively to this.
  • jasim 7y ago
    I've also seen that programmers who're not really good at the job, but don't have qualms about playing politics often end up managing the teams they were unfit to work in in the first place. They were not necessarily better at people than others. The idea that programmers are not good with people is, in my observation, a self-perpetuating stereotype. Mostly because if you're writing code, you are on a maker's schedule and you don't have much time or bandwidth to think about anything else. Managers on the other hand have more control over their time and can for example spend an hour to decide exactly how a conversation should go before they speak to someone. They can reflect on it, and deliberately improve over time. The programmer on the other hand would be figuring out why a particular technical decision was wrong and how they can identify it next time etc.
    • rramadass 7y ago
      Spot on! >The idea that programmers are not good with people is, in my observation, a self-perpetuating stereotype It was never true. It is a TV/movie stereotype just like the term "Hacker".
    • DoreenMichele 7y ago
      More to the point, spending an hour thinking about how to have that conversation so it gets the desired result is literally the manager's job. Dealing with people is exactly what they are getting paid to think about and do. It's not really about innate social skills per se. A lot of social stuff is learned behavior anyway.
• ndynan 7y ago
  There are some nuggets of wisdom in this article, but I think it's very clouded by a certain perspective. I normally don't comment, but feel that it's important to slice what I feel is useful and what can be detrimental behavior as a PM. As a PM of about 4-years of experience, I understand the author's concerns and at the same time believe that he has solved for the wrong problem; his own anxiety rather than team cohesiveness and trust. The issues he solves for can be solved in different ways without such a negative impact on the team, actually in a very positive manner that increases trust, cohesiveness, and user context. I'd first like to point out that I've made the mistakes of micromanagement that he mentions in the first section. I also quickly learned how detrimental that behavior is to team relationships, productivity, and outcomes. I'm certainly not perfect! The way the author solves the problem of pace is by creating regular check-ins every half day. He then goes on to identify, how these check-ins can be used as open to monitor common slow-downs: engineering struggle and product context (he calls is product debt). I'd first like to make the point that some other engineers have commented here, estimates are estimates, we are agile, you learn things along the way and need to adapt. I believe your job as a PM is not to hold the team to estimates, it is to come up with creative solution and serve as a master facilitator on your team. So when the author says the following I can't help but notice the irony. I'd explore us all to practice what we preach. Instead care about iterations (sprints) not task micromanagement: "As a product manager (PM), I often make assumptions as to when a particular user story will be delivered. This is painful because I don’t believe in time estimates and don’t think I should be involved in estimating the relative complexity of a story since I don’t own its implementation. I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help doing it anyway…" So how do you solve the problems that the author points to "struggle" and "context" without adding interruptions? • For struggle, that is what standup is for. Not only standup, but if you create a culture of trust engineers will naturally reach out if they hit road blocks, make a slack channel for your team. It's even better if you can teach your team about red flags, things that the article says which are true to look out for: complexity is rapidly increasing, not feeling confident in the stack/codebase. For any of this to work you MUST create a culture of questions and answers. Yes, all want to look competent, but what's also great is being able to depend on your team. • Adding to the previous point, this is why small tasks are soo important, [read this book on product flow](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007TKU0O0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007TKU0O0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...) if complexity is small to begin with you can avoid that issue AND you get the added benefit of smaller iterations, meaning faster red flags. The author points this out too, this is critically important. • For context, context is king. Want to avoid "Product debt", get your team/tech lead involved from Day 0 of your quarterly/yearly roadmap, they should know everything about the user that the PM does minus the RAW research effort. Run a Kickoff/Inception/IPM that truly integrates your entire team, every engineer should have product context. Devs will then see tricky edge cases, radiate them up to the PM and you can make a call together if the work is necessary. All of this is to say that there are some good parts of this article, but I think that adding one more check-in is not necessary when there are other ways to solve the problems identified.
• ravenstine 7y ago
  You know what I don't get about status updates? We're all using tools like Jira, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, GitHub issues, etc., where you can see what everyone's working on and the status of each of those tasks. Why do we need frequent status updates like standups and PMs looking over our shoulders if you can just go to the project board and look for yourself? If I'm going to be asked about the status of what I'm doing every day, then don't make me use these systems. It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer pretends to be Moviefone. "To update the status of your ticket, press 1 now. .......... Why don't you just tell me the status of your ticket?"
  • tbrock 7y ago
    Your team needs excellent JIRA hygiene for that to actually work. I’ve been on and managed teams where it’s expected and demanded and others where it was an afterthought.
    • hrktb 7y ago
      I think parent’s point stands: if JIRA is hard and requires excellent discipline, why bother in the firth place, and why not go with a rougher board and the micro status checks only ?
    • skgoa 7y ago
      And if you don't use the tools the way they are meant to, you are just wasting massive amounts of time.
    • systemtest 7y ago
      Our JIRA board is being gamed for management. Our sprint burndown chart always looked terrible because management changed things around mid-sprint by adding issues or swapping them around. So we have a fake JIRA board that has a perfect linear downwards progression because we keep changing the story points. For actually tracking the progression of the sprint we have a secret Slack channel that management can't see. This way we don't have to explain to a spreadsheet monkey why the burndown chart looks like a skyline.
• Iv 7y ago
  Here is a missing advice in the art of interrupting software engineers: don't. Use asynchronous messaging, not alert-based messaging. Send emails. Make sure they read emails once a day and only interrupt if your question is really more urgent than that. Thanks. Daily meetings are not good. They waste people time and constitute an interruption. If you can sync the whole team so that the meeting happens on the morning before people start working, that's better, but still not good as you are imposing a schedule on a team that may know better. I just finished a deadline at 2 am yesterday. My team is sane and did not expect me in the morning today (joined the slack around 11 am). Would not have done that if I had a daily at 9:30 am. I would not only have missed the deadline but the daily would have even further delayed it. What's more, I would have spent some time preparing it because I would feel I need excuses ready in case someone starts a blame-game. If developers time is precious, don't waste one hour per day on dailies/daily preparation.
  • GoToRO 7y ago
    16 people in the daily, 1 hour every day (because we are 16). That means 16 man hours a day are for the daily. 2 people work full time to have the daily. Crazy.
• crehn 7y ago
  This reads like a satirical article. Gives a really bad impression of Pivotal.
• Ididntdothis 7y ago
  One trick a lot of PMs and other managers don't seem to understand is to listen and really understand what people are dealing with. If people are complaining about something then listen and see if you can improve the situation. It doesn't help to constantly ask "When is it done?" but you should ask "How can I help?". And then really help and don't just set up more meetings that don't result in anything. Also, learn how to use JIRA or whatever tracking is being used. In my company managers doesn't bother to look at the JIRA board so you end up reporting the same thing five times to different management levels. In short, be less controlling but try to help and treat people like professionals who know what they are doing.
• jdlshore 7y ago
  There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about this article. First, you have to understand the context. This person is talking about an Extreme Programming team. Speaking as someone who wrote a book about XP, here are some things that are true about by-the-book XP teams: 1) All production programming is done in pairs, all the time. 2) Everybody sits in a shared team room at dedicated "pairing stations." 3) The atmosphere is highly collaborative and friendly, and there's always a low buzz of conversation in the room. Interruptions are normal and expected, as the team's overall performance is valued more highly than individual performance. Due to pairing, interruptions tend not to interrupt flow. 4) Requirements are conveyed verbally, not through written documents. Stories are short "reminders to hold a conversation," not fully-fleshed out. 5) The team values feedback and wants frequent conversations with their on-site customers (including the product manager) to confirm that they're on the right track, particularly about nitpicky details that are difficult to anticipate in advance. Given this context, the author is talking about how he, as a product manager, does his job of providing business context and customers' points of view. This material is not meant for people who aren't on an XP team. It's good advice for product managers who are.
  • taneq 7y ago
    I didn't even get halfway through that description of an XP workplace before the little voice in the back of my head started screaming and it still hasn't stopped.
    • lioeters 7y ago
      Haha, me too, the voice in the back of my head pleaded, "Make it stop..!" Already from the article title I started to have this reaction. As a software engineer, nothing kills focus and productivity faster than interruptions. From the perspective of a manager, I can understand - and really appreciated the respect and consideration that went into the article and the recommended approach. However, every point in the description of an XP workplace sounds like torture. Paired programming, in a shared room, always a "low buzz of conversation", requirements not written but verbal only.. To be fully engaged and productive, I need the exact opposite.
• mnm1 7y ago
  This should be called the art of micromanagement. It's complete bullshit. I've worked under such conditions for a few months and I came very close to quitting. I didn't quit because it eventually stopped but I was considering some offers. This is one way to get your top engineers to quit. Why even hire product managers if this is what they think the job is? Save money. All they will do is slow down your team. Measuring time estimates in hours is also ridiculous especially when one has multiple things to work on. If this guy was a product manager in my company he'd be looking for a job in the morning.
• deleted 7y ago
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• pmarreck 7y ago
  I have started to have a simple rule for being a productive developer regardless of client or boss pressure: Get 1 tangible thing done a day. Ideally it has a visible effect (but don't make this religion- I had to rip out a cache infrastructure last week and replace it with a home-grown one and there was no visible effect other than things not breaking!) Now, some days, this means you either don't work the full 8 or you go over 8 because the particular piece you're building just won't get built sooner (or you didn't break it up enough). But on average, just having this goal seems to be working. If interruption would be costly, I take it to a quiet place for a few hours such as a library.
• tawy12345 7y ago
  It sounds like a low trust environment. If you actually need to know whether something is falling behind schedule every few hours (which seems unusual), of course not everybody is going to provide updates that frequently of their own volition. But most good engineers, under the right circumstances, will have a sense for when something is not on track and can raise their concerns. If you actually had a good level of trust on the team, you would work to get people to buy into it. Of course, it's probably hard to convince most engineers that you actually need an update twice a day, for good reason.
• jasim 7y ago
  The Art of Micromanaging Software Engineers! Here's the thing: as programmers we sometimes have a bad day. Sometimes a bad week or two. Sometimes there is unresolved ambiguity in how something needs to be done that we tend to procrastinate on it until it becomes clear. When you're working through an agile/XP backlog - a never-ending backlog mind you - you're expected to produce at a consistent cadence, not much different from laying brick after brick, but unlike construction, this one is an infinite pool of uninteresting work. This is common in consulting work. Agile and XP were created by consultants to create predictability in delivery. It makes sense for that context - clients are often far removed from the consultants, there is no intrinsic alignment between their incentives, and being external people there is always an information gap in what is best for the company and whether the contractors are making actual progress. So you need a way to smoothen this out. Transparency, constant communication, a structured process, consistent cadence, measurable metrics, and most importantly number of hours with your bum on the seat. When consulting companies start out, there is a distinct messaging on their websites: "we don't want to be just consultants, we want to be an integral part of your team" or suchlike. See, we also want meaningful work, we want to truly participate in your business. But as consulting companies mature they realize this is not a feasible approach at scale. While external messaging might not change, internally they realize the business is about selling X number of hours in a year per consultant, with a percentage of their earnings as your profit margin. To make this work, you need Agile/XP. You need to bring Taylorism back into the world of programming. That is just the systemic incentive of this sort of business. Companies that fail to realize this and change accordingly (the idealists) go out of business very fast. Others thrive. Within this system it is still possible to have meaningful work for developers (I've worked in such companies, and I've enjoyed it). But if you have a micro-managing PM like in this article, then better run for the hills or you'll find out hating IT and fully burnt out in a few years.
  • rramadass 7y ago
    Amen, Brother! Do us all a favour and send this write-up to every XP/Agile/Scrum/Whatever acolyte that you come across :-)
• trabant00 7y ago
  > The engineers would give me highly technical explanation I couldn’t understand. That's the problem right there. How do you expect to manage a project you don't understand? I don't think I will ever agree with handing the project to a non technical person instead of the team lead.
  • verinus 7y ago
    the opposite is dangerous too: having somebody who is so full of himself that he thinks he knows everything is rarely a good idea. Knowing your limits and being honest about thinks you know and understand is a requirement for a leader, imho.
    • trabant00 7y ago
      I'm sorry but technical knowledge and feelings are just two completely different aspects. BOTH are required, you can't just simply get stuff done by being a nice guy.
  • repolfx 7y ago
    It's worth observing that successful tech firms like Google insist that PMs have computer science degrees and are former developers. Exactly to avoid this issue.
• zimbatm 7y ago
  I see a lot of anxiety in the article. This sentiment is going to permeate through the team! As a developer, all I need from management is clear priorities. Let me know what the business needs, and keep reminding me what those are in case I get lost into code. Create chunks of time where the priorities don't change so I can focus. The bigger the chunks the better. Then let me do my job please! I need to be able to trust that management is picking the right priorities, and management needs to trust that I am able to convert those into code. Trust is paramount. If you can do that, I will be 10x more productive than any of these pseudo management techniques. It doesn't matter if we do scrumm, agile, daily standup, use Trello or some other tool. These are just implementation details. Let the developers pick whatever they are comfortable with.
• jillesvangurp 7y ago
  I've worked with quite a few POs over the years; good and bad. We used to call them project managers and it's more or less the same thing. As soon as you are asking when questions instead of what questions, you are managing a project. One thing that I've learned over the years is that product management is often effectively a junior management position and actually should not be a management role at all. That puts things in perspective in terms of their authority. I've ended up coaching PMs on my team more than once in terms of helping them understand what the product was (often non trivial for new PMs joining an existing team), what kinds of things are easy technically and what kinds of things are not. Even just understanding that there is low hanging fruit to pick (i.e. opportunities for them to look good) is non trivial, etc. All the good ones I've worked with were quick on their feet in learning who to talk to and who to take advice from. A good project manager does not need to be a domain expert to be effective. They just need to learn to ask the right questions. Ultimately, knowledge-sharing between all the stakeholders in a project (including the customer) is key. PMs acting as bottlenecks can actually be a problem when they are inexperienced. I've more than once had situations where a PM asked me "can you estimate building X please because customer Foo needs this ASAP" where we ended up having a discussion about why building X was actually important, what customer Foo was asking for vs. what they actually needed and us both deciding that actually building something else is a much better way of helping customer Foo. Asking the why questions is always important for both engineers and PMs. That's why it's important for them to be free to do that and why the proper job title is Product Owner, not Product Manager. In the organizational hierarchy this sits at the same level as the tech leads he's working with in the same team. As soon as you have engineers reporting to PMs, it's a problem and if they have no-one reporting to them, they are not managers.
• rv-de 7y ago
  First I hoped for a parody but now I'm left unsure whether this is meant serious or not. Especially this (joke?) is hilarious: "I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with." But I suspect he is not at all trying to be funny and, I'd say, it is utterly terrible advice from some PM fitting right into what seems to me a work environment turned buzzword hell.
• Falkon1313 7y ago
  #2, 3, and 4 indicate that you actually have some idea what you're doing, and an understanding of developers, and are _trying_ to do the right thing, which is all really good. But #1 might be sabotaging all of that. I don't know how many product people you have, but if everyone followed your suggestion at some companies, then the developers would spend all day chit-chatting with product managers and nothing would ever get done. Even with only 1 product manager, I can't imagine that spending ~40% of the day on status updates is worthwhile. (Literally have had meetings where the answer was "status is the same as it was an hour ago because we've been in this meeting giving repetitive status updates the whole time.") What you need to do is get to know the developers themselves - how they work, how they communicate, what their domain knowledge is, etc. Then you'll know when you need to message them. And hopefully they'll know when to message you, but you'll also learn which ones might not under which circumstances. Some will spend a lot of time planning, achieving nothing, but then produce something well-planned. Others take a quick stab, learn from it, iterate, and refine. And there are other styles. Some try to understand things better before talking about them, others want to talk first. Some have enough domain knowledge that they can 'be the user', while others see the user as the one who keeps screwing things up and making things difficult. All will occasionally get stuck in that cycle of "ok, it's _almost_ done" without realizing what they don't know until they take the next step. Interrupting to ask in that case isn't going to change anything. It's just something that is always going to happen and is (or should be) factored into the long-term planning averages. The best PMs know their developers and know when to ping and I'm happy to talk to them when they do, even if (especially if) I'm not doing well. They don't pester me several times a day, so I don't need to spam filter them. If you're really having anxiety attacks and paranoia several times a day when you're not monitoring your developers' every move, you should consider a therapist and possibly a more easygoing laid-back job. Software is stressful, but it shouldn't be that stressful, and inflicting stress on your coworkers isn't a great solution.
• silveroriole 7y ago
  This guy went wrong as soon as he thought it was appropriate to measure ticket timings in hours rather than days or sprints. The pressure in this workplace must be unbearable.
• edem 7y ago
  This whole method is rubbish. I worked for a company who forced this method on us. The fluctuation was astronomical. Pair programming is only useful in specific cases (like getting a junior up to speed or solving super-complex problems) but in other cases it is a colossal waste of time and an extreme demotivator. Fixing bugs in pairs is the most boring thing that ever happened. Not writing down anything is a surefire way to forget what was the supposed solution for problem X or why did we put workaround Y in the code... A horrible, horrible method, I'd suggest steering clear of any company which adopts it.
  • detaro 7y ago
    IMHO it can work quite well, but everyone needs to know what they're getting into. A company that not clearly advertises that this is how they work beforehand is a recipe for failure.
• eowiror 7y ago
  "I was a bit paranoid and would sometimes err on the side of conspiracy theories" This smacks of high stress environment with a bunch of people who don't really know what they're doing, maybe all the way to the top. Good developers don't work in these places. And if they do get caught here they don't stay long.
• supratims 7y ago
  The problem with checking in so frequently is that it is still intrusive and causes distraction. Many engineers would feel the need to do just make up stuff just to show something has happened since the last update.
• GhostVII 7y ago
  Seems like engineers are not trusted to do their job. I mean if you hire lots of inexperienced engineers, fair enough, but I certainly wouldn't work at Pivotal. If my PM was constantly worrying about whether I was distracted, or working on something outside of the backlog, I wouldn't be too happy about that. As an engineer, part of my job is to prioritize my daily and weekly tasks, and to avoid getting distracted throughout the day. Unless their is a hard deadline coming up soon (in which case it is helpful to check in with the PM so you know what to cut), requesting status updates on stories on a daily basis seems like way too much. If you want a window into what I am doing, come to standup (which should be async most of the time anyways, IMO). I've worked at a company founded by people from Pivotal, with a very similar culture, and I'm not very surprised by this post. There were a lot of new bootcamp grads and more inexperienced developers, so the company didn't really give them the same freedom that developers are used to. Everyone pair programmed all the time, even when doing basic UI work (super exhausting), working hours were fairly strict, and work was broken down fairly finely. For better or worse, developers were treated more like just people who can write code, for the most part, rather than people who are able to intelligently prioritise tasks and take initiative on things that need to be done.
  • parasubvert 7y ago
    The point at Pivotal is that stories tend to be less than a day to implement. If they take longer than a day (or two), something is very wrong with the estimate, and the PM might be able to help shift priorities.
• GoToRO 7y ago
  If you don't understand technical details you should not manage anything technical. Ever.
• whatever_dude 7y ago
  > 1. Check-in regularly > I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with Uuuuhhh... If a PM did that with me when I have a lot of work to do it'd send me off the rails. This article seems more to be about "what I have done as a non-technical PM to reduce my own anxiety at the detriment of my team". It's hard to say without a lot of detail, but I think there's something disfunctional about the team or about how the project is structured in this example. How big are the tickets? It's common for a "user story" to take days or weeks; it can say something simple like "user can submit a form" but have a lot of big system dependencies that were not well thought out (a form system, a state system, a server component, etc). Instead, tasks must follow a technical logic (a form system first, state management after, etc) and engineers should be left to do their own thing, with minimal "checking". Something like BaseCamp's "Shape Up" [1] comes into mind, with a few bets every cycle. 1: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/ https://basecamp.com/shapeup/
  • nojvek 7y ago
    I would pretty much quit if someone came and interrupted me in person twice a day to ask me how things are going? In my decade of experience i’ve usually seen new PMs be extremely anxious and paranoid about timelines. As they get more experience and they see more projects that go off the rails they understand the tech speak a bit and have laxer expectations. Sure we’ll be 2 weeks late, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Don’t burn your engineers for a dumb deadline that makes little difference to the customer. There’s a reason we have kanban boards and sprint boards. How are things going? Look at the board. The tickets are updated. Any blockers? Read the slack channel. Only interrupt in person when shit is really on fire. But even for that, the monitoring software will page the opslead.
• JJMcJ 7y ago
  Saw a project where the PM would come around like clockwork twice a day. This was not a sprint project, it was a two year long push for a new product. What happened that every four hours a status update was needed? People laughed behind his back.
• bpyne 7y ago
  There are two times of the day to catch software engineers: the start and end of the day. Usually at the start of the day we haven't gotten our minds into "programming mode" yet. By the end of the day, mental fatigue is setting in. The team I joined - 4 developers and 1 manager - goes for a coffee walk in the morning. The manager waits for us to go through email and other communication that came in overnight. Then we walk to a nearby coffee shop. On the walk, we discuss issues and what we intend to accomplish for the day. It takes about 20 minutes. Occasionally, we take a walk at the end of the day as well to discuss issues. When the manager calls for an end of day walk he senses our energy is low. As I get older, I like routines in the morning. They help me get my mind in gear. We go for the coffee walk. When we get back I might read a short technical article. Then it's time to get stuff done.
  • mieseratte 7y ago
    > Usually at the start of the day we haven't gotten our minds into "programming mode" yet. By the end of the day, mental fatigue is setting in. See, to me, neither of those is a great idea. In the morning I'm coming in early before most folks so I can get a few hours of real work done without distraction. In the afternoon I'm mentally fried and ready to do anything other than office work. The best time to get me? Schedule an effing meeting so I can plan my day appropriate, and can make sure I'm apprised of any information I need so I'm not walking uselessly into an ambush. Doesn't have to be a big, formal affair in a conference room. I think the moral of this whole discussion is that managers manage people, and people are all precious little unique snowflakes with differences. You either create your organization around a certain class of personality with everyone on board and the non-conforming out in the cold, or you create an environment that recognizes people aren't robots and work around those vagaries. Of course this is more a continuum than a binary. Lazy managers treat everyone the same. Lazy managers also avoid setting some semblance of professional standard, leaving the mob to sort it out.
    • bpyne 7y ago
      The idea behind early and/or late walks is to not interrupt developer flow in peak cognitive hours. My current manager is one of few in my career who recognizes the reduction in productivity that comes from interrupting the flow. Software engineers have largely been nocturnal, favoring later arrival times at work, in my experience. In my team's case, all the developers are late arrivals so our manager simply works with that tendency.
• JTbane 7y ago
  > I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with Yeeeeah... did you get the memo about those TPS reports?
• fit2rule 7y ago
  I think there's an elephant in the room here, being overlooked: >The engineers would give me highly technical explanation I couldn’t understand. This would frustrate me because I did not add much value and distracted them. I have a rule which avoids this situation happening, ever, and its a controversial one, but bear with me: * NEVER accept management from someone who cannot do your job. This rule, hard and fast, has saved my ass so many times - and every single time I've broken it, things have been more painful than they should be. Seriously, think about it. How can someone who isn't qualified to do your job, actually manage you? Only if 'management' is an administrative-only task - i.e. "report your hours worked - I don't care about anything else". But if you put this rule into action and insist that your managers are able to do your job, you have a very strong, very stable organizational structure. This doesn't mean the manager has to do your job - just that they can, if they need to. You can't manage things you don't understand. So never accept management from people who don't understand the job. And if that is not happening in the organization, you've got another problem: HR are just chair-stuffing. INSIST that this not be how your org is run.
  • stlHusker 7y ago
    > Seriously, think about it. How can someone who isn't qualified to do your job, actually manage you? When put in a leadership position, above all "resist the urge to manage". I don't want a manager, I want someone who serves the team, insulates them from unnecessary distractions, removes obstacles, etc. Someone that supports a culture of humility, respect and trust while helping to care and feed for each individual's autonomy, mastery and purpose. I've worked on some great teams and less than 1/2 of the time these leaders could not do my job yet it did not matter (of course it was a bit "easier" when they did) because they understood the above.
  • JJMcJ 7y ago
    > NEVER accept management from someone who cannot do your job. Advice to college students and recent grads: Q: Help, I just discovered I hate programming and aren't any good at it. What do I do? A: Go in to project management. So programmers are run by people who are self-selected for mediocre skills or even outright hostility toward programming.
• perlgeek 7y ago
  > It masks the fact that I have expectations as to when something should be delivered and does not communicate urgency to the team. But why mask the expectations? IMHO the best thing you can do is it to communicate priorities (which is your job as product owner / manager), and then if you do need time-based estimations, work them out with the team -- with the clear expectation that they are provisional. Setting up expectations yourself, and possibly communicating them, but not down, is just a recipe for stress and desaster.
• brianzelip 7y ago
  Interesting to read about the term "user stories" as narrative documents product managers hand off to devs so devs know what to build. (See also[0], found following links from OP.) Is anyone able to share such "user stories"? I'd love to see how these business needs get transmitted in the real world. Also - they're usually way longer than the one sentence referred to in these articles, right? [0] https://www.producttalk.org/2012/04/user-stories-are-better-than-prds/ https://www.producttalk.org/2012/04/user-stories-are-better-...
  • misthop 7y ago
    User stories are used (often in scrum) as a measurable deliverable and definition if done for a feature. They are usually 1 or 2 lines, such as `As a user I want to be able to log in to the system` That is the user story for the login feature
• deleted 7y ago
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• Mobilunity 7y ago
  I got some more ideas on his topic, especially on how much does it cost to hire a programmer: https://mobilunity.com/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-to-hire-developers-in-ukraine-in-2018-and-2020/ https://mobilunity.com/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-to-hire-d...
• techguru99 7y ago
  Ah, if you require better visibility into the progress of a sprint why don't you just attend the daily standup where the developers talk about what they have accomplished, what they will be trying to accomplish and if they have any impediments? There is no need to shoulder tap each and every individual on the development team for a status update. If you are doing that then you don't understand scrum or agile. Maybe a few more years in the industry (myself 20years vs your 3?) and you can write a more feasible blog post.
• transreal 7y ago
  What I don't like about agile is its an awful approach for building large complicated products. The focus should not be on time management, that's not why software fails, it fails due to bad design. The "ongoing conversation" developers should have should be about modules, objects, interfaces and algorithms, not about user stories. And refactoring the system to better handle new features should be encouraged, not thought of in terms of "how does this advance a user story". User stories should be input into the exhaustive design process, and then the design should drive the development tasks. I'm expecting push back on this, I'd probably go as far to say that for a large team on a large project 1/3 to 1/2 of a Sprint should be spent designing, and the remainder of the time coding. Writing tests fits in this "designing" bucket for me. TDD is a great way to flesh out how the system should be structured.