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Those are the same problems. Managers flailing when there is too much work and not enough time means that there is not enough management capacity. Not often ca

Those are the same problems. Managers flailing when there is too much work and not enough time means that there is not enough management capacity. Not often called out because the short term effects of managers not existing are minimal, where as without engineers work stops. Long term without managers work continues but the value tends toward zero.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
Frankly, personal anecdotes disagree. I don't need managers breathing down my neck because they aren't capable of resolving the issue, and end up overcommunicating with the customers, reinforcing behavior in customers to continuously ask for information instead of realizing the harm they are doing. "Two days" means "two days", no matter how many times you ask for a progress update or try to push it to one day. Quality managers doing more than shoving boxes, that's a different story. We are definitely lacking high quality management capacity actually capable of preventing these situations from happening in the first place. I'd argue an overcapacity of managers actually actively prevents healthy relationships and usage of developers. People who aren't capable of doing anything useful in the moment, get antsy. It is a lot easier to get antsy as a manager than it is as a developer with an endless backlog. That's also one of my arguments against full time managers. Management work is actually pretty rare, and full time managers tend to inflate it as to not twiddle their thumbs. As we move towards more "self-managing" practices (actual self-managing), total FTE of managers required drops significantly. It makes more sense to hybridize the role, so they keep an affinity with technology, than to put them on the "people manager" path which makes them rapidly lose their connection with technology and will quickly makes them stub their toe against Dunbar's Number. That's before considering tech will rapidly take away most of management's routine work. Their most important responsibilities don't take the majority of their time.
- pracer 6y ago
  This is, in my opinion and experience, the main gist of the problem. Management work doesn't take full time and people get bored or scared they can lose their jobs if someone finds they didn't do much. So you end up with a lot of synch meetings, one-on-one's, backlog refinement meetings, weekly reviews etc. And now most of the managers have a calendar full of meetings to coordinate projects with other managers that after that they meet with their teams to get feedback/answers they need to go back to the project meeting and tell other managers that tell their teams... If they were not managers but developers or engineers with technical knowledge, they would save a ton of time (and team's time) and solve most of the issues in a couple of sessions. But most managers will disagree because they cannot see how the "difficult technical problems they helped solving" were not so complex in the first place... when you put together the people who knows about the code/projects/systems.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago

Frankly, personal anecdotes disagree. I don't need managers breathing down my neck because they aren't capable of resolving the issue, and end up overcommunicating with the customers, reinforcing behavior in customers to continuously ask for information instead of realizing the harm they are doing. "Two days" means "two days", no matter how many times you ask for a progress update or try to push it to one day. Quality managers doing more than shoving boxes, that's a different story. We are definitely lacking high quality management capacity actually capable of preventing these situations from happening in the first place. I'd argue an overcapacity of managers actually actively prevents healthy relationships and usage of developers. People who aren't capable of doing anything useful in the moment, get antsy. It is a lot easier to get antsy as a manager than it is as a developer with an endless backlog. That's also one of my arguments against full time managers. Management work is actually pretty rare, and full time managers tend to inflate it as to not twiddle their thumbs. As we move towards more "self-managing" practices (actual self-managing), total FTE of managers required drops significantly. It makes more sense to hybridize the role, so they keep an affinity with technology, than to put them on the "people manager" path which makes them rapidly lose their connection with technology and will quickly makes them stub their toe against Dunbar's Number. That's before considering tech will rapidly take away most of management's routine work. Their most important responsibilities don't take the majority of their time.

pracer 6y ago
This is, in my opinion and experience, the main gist of the problem. Management work doesn't take full time and people get bored or scared they can lose their jobs if someone finds they didn't do much. So you end up with a lot of synch meetings, one-on-one's, backlog refinement meetings, weekly reviews etc. And now most of the managers have a calendar full of meetings to coordinate projects with other managers that after that they meet with their teams to get feedback/answers they need to go back to the project meeting and tell other managers that tell their teams... If they were not managers but developers or engineers with technical knowledge, they would save a ton of time (and team's time) and solve most of the issues in a couple of sessions. But most managers will disagree because they cannot see how the "difficult technical problems they helped solving" were not so complex in the first place... when you put together the people who knows about the code/projects/systems.