5 ms·

Real question: do you actually believe this to be positive more so than negative most of the time? Many people will feel resentment over what is essentially co

Real question: do you actually believe this to be positive more so than negative most of the time? Many people will feel resentment over what is essentially continuous doubt and having to spend time to push back that could be spent thinking about the problem, diving in and making a better idea later. Additionally, your way of presenting the argument seems harmless and emotionless, yet reality is often far away from this. A slew of social dynamics take place which make developers say things to get managers out of their hair more than truly having a discussion on how long it takes. The far majority of managers also impose these deadlines without clear rime or reason ("because the customer wants it"/"because sales said so", at best). What's really going to happen if we estimate higher and end up overdelivering at the end? Are you truly going to lose customers, or are you just trying to pressure people in "being accurate", which often devolves more into having one's subordinates take the blame and the fall for underdelivering? With all due respect, it feels like we are normalizing things for the sake of manager's security without much reciprocation (only make-believe that it is being reciprocated).

KSteffensen 6y ago
It's the managers duty to create the trust needed for having a constructive discussion of task breakdowns and timelines. If the engineer is "just saying things to get the managers out of their hair" the manager has failed at this. You seem to dismiss entirely that doing a proper task breakdown is a way to think about the problem, revealing unknowns, clarifying requirements and making sure as many steps along the way as possible are clear and actionable. In an ASIC project, if you miss your tape-out deadline, your time to market will be delayed by several months until the fab can find a new slot to fit you in. This can cost many millions of dollars. Accurate development estimates are important.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  I'm not dismissing a work breakdown. I'm dismissing the idea that pushing a quick 30 minutes to make people defend themselves is really as fruitful as a lot of people, non-technical managers especially, like to claim. When reality is, we hardly have any data to back this up, and there are many counterarguments against this idea. A proper work breakdown may cost a lot more than 30 minutes. In any ticketing system, this can be inserted as subtasks which immediately grants an, admittedly superficial, level of transparency into how far the entire thing is done. If you truly want thinking to be done, surely you would agree talking it over for 30 minutes doesn't imply a whole lot of thinking, as much as it implies a whole lot of talking. At that point, just take a step back, chill, tell the developer they need a strong defense and teach them to provide that defense in whatever way suits them best that still makes the point come across. Software development as a field has made such a knee-jerk reaction against failed projects, it now overemphasizes "security" and "correctness", and tons of red tape, on top of methodologies which inherently should already fix most of the problem. Aren't we supposed to work iteratively so managers can make a proper forecast? Let the actual data speak for itself and don't bind too strongly to the words of the individual. The far majority of people do not work on projects that truly require tight deadlines, yet almost every software company out there is trying to emulate this high-pressure environment without clear insight as to why people join a low-pressure environment to begin with.
Dylan16807 6y ago
While having the discussion could definitely be unpleasant and cause problems depending on how it goes, "having to spend time to push back that could be spent thinking about the problem" is a bit much. Half an hour isn't going to affect the deadline. The odds of "making a better idea later" aren't going to change significantly, either.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  It isn't just half an hour. It's half an hour of being almost forcefully yanked out of the zone, which may lead to hours of lost efficiency. The idea that we just measure by the time it takes to talk to people plus a minor overhead, is part of why this is being normalized so often. Yet that idea has never been proven, and there is more suggestive evidence of the opposite. Nor has the value of such a "more accurate" estimate ever been shown, beyond a few actually critical deadlines (extremely rare in the field of software dev). Especially considering so many projects even under harsh estimation rules go overbudget and overtime anyway. That's before going into the long-lasting effects of such a dynamic, and potential escalations. The most obvious one: dragging in part of, if not the entire team, for every little thing.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    This discussion is part of planning that is already happening as part of the pre-work. There is absolutely zero need to take someone out of the zone to do it.
vishnugupta 6y ago
As a manager it's my duty to create a safe space and frame the challenge in a manner that doesn't create friction in the team. When an engineer says it takes 4 weeks I well and truly trust them, all that I seek is why. Because whey they then get down to one or two level deeper details they typically uncover more unknowns and for all you know it may in fact end up as 6 weeks. Also, none of this happens on the spot; as in "tell me right know why it takes 4 weeks, let's do a 30 mins white board session". Having been an engineer I totally understand interruptions and, as a manager, interrupting my team is like shooting myself in the foot. When I say "conversation" it happens asynchronously over several days. I encourage them to spend a day or half a day to work out task break downs and dependencies because it takes a different frame of mind to "plan" a task as opposed to "working" on them. > Are you truly going to lose customers, or are you just trying to pressure people in "being accurate", It's a combination of both though I wouldn't phrase the latter as "pressure" or "being accurate". It's a way to discover information that will increase my team's confidence in delivering the project. As we all know most of the project failures are not because people slack but because they uncover a dependency too late down the line or they don't validate an assumption or a new constraint is discovered. Most of which could be accounted for with a simple planning process. I do recognise though that most engineers don't like planning or task breakdown and so I spend quite a bit of time to take much of the heavy lifting so that they don't spend more than 10% of their time on it. As a manager I am held accountable for my team's delivery and I absolutely want engineers to be spending most of their time on writing/delivering software. One example is I don't ask for plans/task-breakdowns for anything less than a week. In fact there's not even a debate; on the contrary if an engineer says 3 days I ask them to round it up to 5 days (a week). Only for tasks that are longer than a week I may get into the details and for more than 2 weeks it's almost mandatory. > developers say things to get managers out of their hair This seems like a well and truly dysfunctional team. Engineers and managers are partners and only when they work together can they deliver something meaningful. I would address this mis-trust or friction first because if there's no transparency within a team then all bets are off. We'll end up with a series of failed projects, burnt out engineers, operational nightmare and what not. What I've noticed is these social frictions end up manifesting as "estimation problems" and people try to address the symptom by trying out different project management processes each of which fail spectacularly.

KSteffensen 6y ago

It's the managers duty to create the trust needed for having a constructive discussion of task breakdowns and timelines. If the engineer is "just saying things to get the managers out of their hair" the manager has failed at this. You seem to dismiss entirely that doing a proper task breakdown is a way to think about the problem, revealing unknowns, clarifying requirements and making sure as many steps along the way as possible are clear and actionable. In an ASIC project, if you miss your tape-out deadline, your time to market will be delayed by several months until the fab can find a new slot to fit you in. This can cost many millions of dollars. Accurate development estimates are important.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
I'm not dismissing a work breakdown. I'm dismissing the idea that pushing a quick 30 minutes to make people defend themselves is really as fruitful as a lot of people, non-technical managers especially, like to claim. When reality is, we hardly have any data to back this up, and there are many counterarguments against this idea. A proper work breakdown may cost a lot more than 30 minutes. In any ticketing system, this can be inserted as subtasks which immediately grants an, admittedly superficial, level of transparency into how far the entire thing is done. If you truly want thinking to be done, surely you would agree talking it over for 30 minutes doesn't imply a whole lot of thinking, as much as it implies a whole lot of talking. At that point, just take a step back, chill, tell the developer they need a strong defense and teach them to provide that defense in whatever way suits them best that still makes the point come across. Software development as a field has made such a knee-jerk reaction against failed projects, it now overemphasizes "security" and "correctness", and tons of red tape, on top of methodologies which inherently should already fix most of the problem. Aren't we supposed to work iteratively so managers can make a proper forecast? Let the actual data speak for itself and don't bind too strongly to the words of the individual. The far majority of people do not work on projects that truly require tight deadlines, yet almost every software company out there is trying to emulate this high-pressure environment without clear insight as to why people join a low-pressure environment to begin with.

Dylan16807 6y ago

While having the discussion could definitely be unpleasant and cause problems depending on how it goes, "having to spend time to push back that could be spent thinking about the problem" is a bit much. Half an hour isn't going to affect the deadline. The odds of "making a better idea later" aren't going to change significantly, either.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
It isn't just half an hour. It's half an hour of being almost forcefully yanked out of the zone, which may lead to hours of lost efficiency. The idea that we just measure by the time it takes to talk to people plus a minor overhead, is part of why this is being normalized so often. Yet that idea has never been proven, and there is more suggestive evidence of the opposite. Nor has the value of such a "more accurate" estimate ever been shown, beyond a few actually critical deadlines (extremely rare in the field of software dev). Especially considering so many projects even under harsh estimation rules go overbudget and overtime anyway. That's before going into the long-lasting effects of such a dynamic, and potential escalations. The most obvious one: dragging in part of, if not the entire team, for every little thing.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  This discussion is part of planning that is already happening as part of the pre-work. There is absolutely zero need to take someone out of the zone to do it.

vishnugupta 6y ago

As a manager it's my duty to create a safe space and frame the challenge in a manner that doesn't create friction in the team. When an engineer says it takes 4 weeks I well and truly trust them, all that I seek is why. Because whey they then get down to one or two level deeper details they typically uncover more unknowns and for all you know it may in fact end up as 6 weeks. Also, none of this happens on the spot; as in "tell me right know why it takes 4 weeks, let's do a 30 mins white board session". Having been an engineer I totally understand interruptions and, as a manager, interrupting my team is like shooting myself in the foot. When I say "conversation" it happens asynchronously over several days. I encourage them to spend a day or half a day to work out task break downs and dependencies because it takes a different frame of mind to "plan" a task as opposed to "working" on them. > Are you truly going to lose customers, or are you just trying to pressure people in "being accurate", It's a combination of both though I wouldn't phrase the latter as "pressure" or "being accurate". It's a way to discover information that will increase my team's confidence in delivering the project. As we all know most of the project failures are not because people slack but because they uncover a dependency too late down the line or they don't validate an assumption or a new constraint is discovered. Most of which could be accounted for with a simple planning process. I do recognise though that most engineers don't like planning or task breakdown and so I spend quite a bit of time to take much of the heavy lifting so that they don't spend more than 10% of their time on it. As a manager I am held accountable for my team's delivery and I absolutely want engineers to be spending most of their time on writing/delivering software. One example is I don't ask for plans/task-breakdowns for anything less than a week. In fact there's not even a debate; on the contrary if an engineer says 3 days I ask them to round it up to 5 days (a week). Only for tasks that are longer than a week I may get into the details and for more than 2 weeks it's almost mandatory. > developers say things to get managers out of their hair This seems like a well and truly dysfunctional team. Engineers and managers are partners and only when they work together can they deliver something meaningful. I would address this mis-trust or friction first because if there's no transparency within a team then all bets are off. We'll end up with a series of failed projects, burnt out engineers, operational nightmare and what not. What I've noticed is these social frictions end up manifesting as "estimation problems" and people try to address the symptom by trying out different project management processes each of which fail spectacularly.