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This all seems like an incompetent manager complaining about their IC working on quality-of-life things instead of 100% focusing on getting tasks done for the m

This all seems like an incompetent manager complaining about their IC working on quality-of-life things instead of 100% focusing on getting tasks done for the manager. Should be titled "How IC's avoid being commoditized task monkeys." This isn't to say at all that these points don't have a lot of merit when working within a "task monkey" org structure...

NikolaNovak 7y ago
Hmm, nothing in the article indicates that people worked on these items more than [40|45|x] number of hours a week, or that quality-of-life / outside-of-work items were the root cause. At the end of the day, "getting tasks done for the lead/client" is the reason, goal and background for majority of people getting paid a salary in the IT and other industries. From a real-life perspective, effective focus on satisfying client's needs / executing manager's tasks is the purpose and what one is being paid for. If manager tasks are not productive, if client's needs and wants diverge, or there's a disagreement with priorities, that's certainly an important discussion to have and where persuasion skills and ability to understand bigger picture comes in handy; but ignoring them and doing your own thing; let alone doing your own thing poorly; is not the way to go.
- Benjammer 7y ago
  I meant quality of life at work, not work-life balance. >If manager tasks are not productive, if client's needs and wants diverge, or there's a disagreement with priorities, ... ignoring them and doing your own thing; let alone doing your own thing poorly; is not the way to go. How exactly did you get "do my own thing, probably poorly," from what I said initially? I even said the list is good advice for working in that type of structure where only executing tasks is prioritized. The article even seems to be suggesting that one should ignore all those important discussions and just focus on getting tasks done. It's just so obviously an article for "how to suck up to your manager and do only the things they care about and notice," I'm pretty confused that I'm getting criticized so harshly here. I'm not even denying that these things will materially improve performance reviews of a large percentage of "ICs" out there in the working world. I just don't like the idea that an engineer who chooses to spend a quarter focused more on helping teammates instead of crushing sprint tasks should suddenly be thought of as "stuck." Why must it be thought of as wasted time if an engineer wants to dig around in the architecture or clean up random parts of the code? Are we saying there's no way to make any of these activities pay off for the engineering org and/or the company as a whole? Like pay off directly in the "product value" sense to the same level as any explicitly assigned work. Is anything that doesn't have its value explicitly predicted in advance considered wasted work?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Because at the end of the day, most of us go to work to get money deposited into our account. Why wouldn’t you optimize your time at work to achieving that goal?
    - kragen 7y ago
      That's a good way to prioritize if you're desperately poor, if you have a chance of a quick life-changing payoff, or if you urgently need money for a family member’s medical treatment. Most of the rest of us will do better if we prioritize other things over getting money. If you're old, you should probably prioritize making your time enjoyable, and finishing up whatever projects you want to finish before you die. Time is shorter than you think, and an unexpected heart attack can take productive years from you even if you don't die from it. Money is worthless to you if you don't spend it before you die. This doesn't align particularly, or sometimes at all, with employment. If you're young, most of your earnings are in the future. To the extent that you can trade off $1000 now for $100 every year of your working life, you should. Your future earnings depend on your skills, on your reputation, and on your relationships with your coworkers, not on your manager, unless you're working at Google and don't plan to leave. Your workplace is much more valuable as a source of learning opportunities, mentorship, and connections, than as a source of money. It's worth putting up with bad working conditions in exchange for learning opportunities, but not for mere money.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Why would “prioritizing my projects” include working for less than market wage for a for profit company? And how much career growth and future financial returns do you expect to get from doing PHP for WordPress? Also looking at their salaries after their “trial” they still pay much less than a bog standard Enterprise Developer in Atlanta with 5-7 years of experience. You can do that without having to do a “trial” I’ve already paid my dues. Why would I spend 3 months of my life making less in 2019 than I did in 1999?
        7y ago
ska 7y ago
It really doesn't. At this point I've mentored a lot of junior engineers and scientist, and a fair number of mid-career and senior ones. One of the most common things they bring up is "I'm getting stuck", or "I don't feel as productive as I want to be", or "Sometimes I can't seem to finish anything", "I'm not sure I'm working on the right things", etc. The article isn't bad at outlining some of the common failure modes that nearly everyone falls into from time to time. There is nothing in there specifically about quality of life, etc. and most of it applies very well in any type of organization.
- Benjammer 7y ago
  But the article isn't talking about individuals and their anxiety as it relates to work process. It's literally saying that an IC who is too fixated on the architecture might spend too much time digging into tech debt and "get stuck" on assigned task work. Do you find that this type of person in the one who comes out and says that they don't feel productive? It just seems like the opposite of "I feel stuck how can I not feel stuck anymore." It's more like "these are ways where ICs might lose track of the bigger picture and get off task in a way that hurts team productivity." Are you really saying that an IC who spends enough time on mentoring/tech debt/on-call fires that it's impacting their task completion is going to throw their hands up in the air and say "I can't figure out why I'm not getting more tasks done"?
  - ska 7y ago
    I guess partially I am, particularly with junior people. Although often they don't really track their time precisely enough to see where it is going. I say partially because much of the time it isn't "I'm not getting assigned tasks done". With junior people it's often "I don't know why /my estimates are off/i am slow/i get stuck/". With more senior people it often boils down to "How can I have more impact".
yowlingcat 7y ago
I don't like appealing to authority, but I'll make a note for you that Camille Fournier is conventionally a pretty accomplished engineering manager and leader, and her blog Elided Branches is full of tons of what I find to be really well thought out advice from both sides of the coin. It might make more sense to consider this post not in isolation, but in context of her previous posts. Certainly, this could be understood to be building on her previous thoughts there. But, you know what? As I've written this comment, I've realized that I do agree with some part of the spirit of your comment. I'll take a stab at addressing what you're pointing out: While I think that this post is meant to be a map for managers or tech leads, I find its conclusion to be unfortunately lacking: > Noticing how people get stuck is a super power, and one that many great tech leads (and yes, managers) rely on to get big things done. When you know how people get stuck, you can plan your projects to rely on people for their strengths and provide them help or even completely side-step their weaknesses. You know who is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do. > The secret is that all of us get stuck and sidetracked sometimes. There’s actually nothing particularly “bad” about this. Knowing the ways that you get hung up is good because you can choose to either a) get over the fears that are sticking you (lack of knowledge, skills, or confidence), b) avoid such tasks as much as possible, and/or c) be aware of your habits and use extra diligence when faced with tackling these areas. To a manager that is actively interested in mentoring and growing their engineers, this is horrible advice, frankly. It's horrible because it's essentialist, and it's not going to help you as a manager. The obvious first answer is "it depends" and "get more detail" -- rather than resigning yourself to the current state of who "is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do" it is better to figure out why things are a certain way for a certain individual getting stuck. Is it specific to them? Are there team to team dynamics getting in the way? Is a particular manager not integrating well into the rest of the org, and so their team takes the heat? Is another individual contributor within the org or team stonewalling them, perhaps unintentionally? Are the requirements unclear, changing, or in need to refinement? Without understanding this underlying context, it's impossible to get a sense for the institutional foundation your report or colleague is develeoping, evolving in, being rewarded and punished in. It's perhaps the most important part about developing an effective response as a leader -- you need to figure out the extrinsics that are shared before you can untangle that from the intrinsics, or you'll probably risk conflating the former with the latter. Perhaps, though, these kinds of utopian organizations exist where every problem an IC encounters is due to a lack of development or intrinsic ability that they must either work past or accept, and these other kinds of things I've pointed out never occur. I've certainly worked at smaller organizations where, due to sheer lack of complexity, these things aren't as big of a problem. But, at larger orgs, these things have always become an issue. As such, a huge amount of this blog post could be distilled into the values and skills of prioritization, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and communication. If you notice your teammates or reports having these issues, you should figure out which of one of these things you can help them with. This is mentorship work and coaching work -- it's high effort, high nurturing, high reward work. Once people feel supported and safe, they become orders of magnitude more effective at self-debugging any of these lower level issues she points out.

NikolaNovak 7y ago

Hmm, nothing in the article indicates that people worked on these items more than [40|45|x] number of hours a week, or that quality-of-life / outside-of-work items were the root cause. At the end of the day, "getting tasks done for the lead/client" is the reason, goal and background for majority of people getting paid a salary in the IT and other industries. From a real-life perspective, effective focus on satisfying client's needs / executing manager's tasks is the purpose and what one is being paid for. If manager tasks are not productive, if client's needs and wants diverge, or there's a disagreement with priorities, that's certainly an important discussion to have and where persuasion skills and ability to understand bigger picture comes in handy; but ignoring them and doing your own thing; let alone doing your own thing poorly; is not the way to go.

Benjammer 7y ago
I meant quality of life at work, not work-life balance. >If manager tasks are not productive, if client's needs and wants diverge, or there's a disagreement with priorities, ... ignoring them and doing your own thing; let alone doing your own thing poorly; is not the way to go. How exactly did you get "do my own thing, probably poorly," from what I said initially? I even said the list is good advice for working in that type of structure where only executing tasks is prioritized. The article even seems to be suggesting that one should ignore all those important discussions and just focus on getting tasks done. It's just so obviously an article for "how to suck up to your manager and do only the things they care about and notice," I'm pretty confused that I'm getting criticized so harshly here. I'm not even denying that these things will materially improve performance reviews of a large percentage of "ICs" out there in the working world. I just don't like the idea that an engineer who chooses to spend a quarter focused more on helping teammates instead of crushing sprint tasks should suddenly be thought of as "stuck." Why must it be thought of as wasted time if an engineer wants to dig around in the architecture or clean up random parts of the code? Are we saying there's no way to make any of these activities pay off for the engineering org and/or the company as a whole? Like pay off directly in the "product value" sense to the same level as any explicitly assigned work. Is anything that doesn't have its value explicitly predicted in advance considered wasted work?
- scarface74 7y ago
  Because at the end of the day, most of us go to work to get money deposited into our account. Why wouldn’t you optimize your time at work to achieving that goal?
  - kragen 7y ago
    That's a good way to prioritize if you're desperately poor, if you have a chance of a quick life-changing payoff, or if you urgently need money for a family member’s medical treatment. Most of the rest of us will do better if we prioritize other things over getting money. If you're old, you should probably prioritize making your time enjoyable, and finishing up whatever projects you want to finish before you die. Time is shorter than you think, and an unexpected heart attack can take productive years from you even if you don't die from it. Money is worthless to you if you don't spend it before you die. This doesn't align particularly, or sometimes at all, with employment. If you're young, most of your earnings are in the future. To the extent that you can trade off $1000 now for $100 every year of your working life, you should. Your future earnings depend on your skills, on your reputation, and on your relationships with your coworkers, not on your manager, unless you're working at Google and don't plan to leave. Your workplace is much more valuable as a source of learning opportunities, mentorship, and connections, than as a source of money. It's worth putting up with bad working conditions in exchange for learning opportunities, but not for mere money.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Why would “prioritizing my projects” include working for less than market wage for a for profit company? And how much career growth and future financial returns do you expect to get from doing PHP for WordPress? Also looking at their salaries after their “trial” they still pay much less than a bog standard Enterprise Developer in Atlanta with 5-7 years of experience. You can do that without having to do a “trial” I’ve already paid my dues. Why would I spend 3 months of my life making less in 2019 than I did in 1999?
      - 7y ago

ska 7y ago

It really doesn't. At this point I've mentored a lot of junior engineers and scientist, and a fair number of mid-career and senior ones. One of the most common things they bring up is "I'm getting stuck", or "I don't feel as productive as I want to be", or "Sometimes I can't seem to finish anything", "I'm not sure I'm working on the right things", etc. The article isn't bad at outlining some of the common failure modes that nearly everyone falls into from time to time. There is nothing in there specifically about quality of life, etc. and most of it applies very well in any type of organization.

Benjammer 7y ago
But the article isn't talking about individuals and their anxiety as it relates to work process. It's literally saying that an IC who is too fixated on the architecture might spend too much time digging into tech debt and "get stuck" on assigned task work. Do you find that this type of person in the one who comes out and says that they don't feel productive? It just seems like the opposite of "I feel stuck how can I not feel stuck anymore." It's more like "these are ways where ICs might lose track of the bigger picture and get off task in a way that hurts team productivity." Are you really saying that an IC who spends enough time on mentoring/tech debt/on-call fires that it's impacting their task completion is going to throw their hands up in the air and say "I can't figure out why I'm not getting more tasks done"?
- ska 7y ago
  I guess partially I am, particularly with junior people. Although often they don't really track their time precisely enough to see where it is going. I say partially because much of the time it isn't "I'm not getting assigned tasks done". With junior people it's often "I don't know why /my estimates are off/i am slow/i get stuck/". With more senior people it often boils down to "How can I have more impact".

yowlingcat 7y ago

I don't like appealing to authority, but I'll make a note for you that Camille Fournier is conventionally a pretty accomplished engineering manager and leader, and her blog Elided Branches is full of tons of what I find to be really well thought out advice from both sides of the coin. It might make more sense to consider this post not in isolation, but in context of her previous posts. Certainly, this could be understood to be building on her previous thoughts there. But, you know what? As I've written this comment, I've realized that I do agree with some part of the spirit of your comment. I'll take a stab at addressing what you're pointing out: While I think that this post is meant to be a map for managers or tech leads, I find its conclusion to be unfortunately lacking: > Noticing how people get stuck is a super power, and one that many great tech leads (and yes, managers) rely on to get big things done. When you know how people get stuck, you can plan your projects to rely on people for their strengths and provide them help or even completely side-step their weaknesses. You know who is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do. > The secret is that all of us get stuck and sidetracked sometimes. There’s actually nothing particularly “bad” about this. Knowing the ways that you get hung up is good because you can choose to either a) get over the fears that are sticking you (lack of knowledge, skills, or confidence), b) avoid such tasks as much as possible, and/or c) be aware of your habits and use extra diligence when faced with tackling these areas. To a manager that is actively interested in mentoring and growing their engineers, this is horrible advice, frankly. It's horrible because it's essentialist, and it's not going to help you as a manager. The obvious first answer is "it depends" and "get more detail" -- rather than resigning yourself to the current state of who "is good to ask for which kinds of help, and who hates that particular challenge just as much as you do" it is better to figure out why things are a certain way for a certain individual getting stuck. Is it specific to them? Are there team to team dynamics getting in the way? Is a particular manager not integrating well into the rest of the org, and so their team takes the heat? Is another individual contributor within the org or team stonewalling them, perhaps unintentionally? Are the requirements unclear, changing, or in need to refinement? Without understanding this underlying context, it's impossible to get a sense for the institutional foundation your report or colleague is develeoping, evolving in, being rewarded and punished in. It's perhaps the most important part about developing an effective response as a leader -- you need to figure out the extrinsics that are shared before you can untangle that from the intrinsics, or you'll probably risk conflating the former with the latter. Perhaps, though, these kinds of utopian organizations exist where every problem an IC encounters is due to a lack of development or intrinsic ability that they must either work past or accept, and these other kinds of things I've pointed out never occur. I've certainly worked at smaller organizations where, due to sheer lack of complexity, these things aren't as big of a problem. But, at larger orgs, these things have always become an issue. As such, a huge amount of this blog post could be distilled into the values and skills of prioritization, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and communication. If you notice your teammates or reports having these issues, you should figure out which of one of these things you can help them with. This is mentorship work and coaching work -- it's high effort, high nurturing, high reward work. Once people feel supported and safe, they become orders of magnitude more effective at self-debugging any of these lower level issues she points out.