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I am sure that what you say is very true for not a small amount of businesses. My issue is mostly with my profession -- programming. Sometimes we are so microm

I am sure that what you say is very true for not a small amount of businesses. My issue is mostly with my profession -- programming. Sometimes we are so micromanaged and our time is so sliced and diced that all of this short-term thinking easily gets 5x more expensive on a short time frame anywhere from 3 to 6 months. This has been observed numerous times yet IT managers seem to want to never learn. It's OK to try and save money. But saving money short-term in order to have a huge expense down the line is just being irresponsible from those managers.

hallway_monitor 6y ago
Having led a team for about a year now let me tell you it's not easy. You are always trying to balance many priorities and even with over a decade of coding experience, it's not always obvious which refactorings or tech debt stories or architectural changes are worth prioritizing now, which can wait till later, and which are engineer pipe dreams that I need to gently but firmly kill as quickly as possible. I have had similar managers to what was described above, in those types of organizations. It may be a lost cause but it may be an opportunity to work on your influence skills; being able to explain and sell your solution is perhaps even more important than coming up with it in the first place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tacitusarc 6y ago
  This is really difficult. Perhaps the best thing is to track the proposed technical debt stories, and do not discard them when they are rejected. Instead, also keep track of how much pain is hit that can be associated back to that particular technical debt. 3 years into major project, my team finally got prioritized to work on and improvement that will take us a couple weeks, that we were not able to work on previously because we could not justify its value. But for the past 3 years the organization has lived with pain that this would have resolved. So now we can justify it. And the thing is, it's not like we didn't know 3 years ago when we said we wanted to make this happen but things are going to be terrible if we were not able to prioritize it but in many organizations it's not good enough to just say how bad things will be. People need to actually have felt the pain. Honestly, I think that's okay on its face. My bigger issue is that frequently there is no or very little trust around engineers who predict what the major problems will be an advocate for them and then it's not like when they're proven right management now listens to them the next time. I think that's the real problem.
  - kclay 6y ago
    In these cases wouldn't it have been to work on it slowly as a "side project" outside of the team normal priorities? I always tell my team if they can fit it in and not hinder the current sprint by all means go ahead and do it on the side. I know this goes against the normal and people want to attach "right now " value (hours it took reflected on check) but going beyond the call can also give you leverage when your yearly review comes up for example.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      That's exactly what I am doing and aside from a few wrist slaps people have been okay with such an approach. I always tell them I did this for a few hours during the weekend or while I was waiting our DevOps to resolve an outage these particular 2 hours the last Friday. Seems to work really well.
    - hpoe 6y ago
      I'll also add I only have so much energy in the day, and after a couple of years of fighting against problems I coudn't do anything about and managers who couldn't make the changes, and customers that wanted it now, I burnt out, and instead of spending a useless zoom meeting to work on an improvement I use it instead to make maps for the D&D campaign I am running.
    - Too 6y ago
      While I've seen several examples of this being the only way to get out of never prioritized debt-cleanup that the team can't bother explaining to management in non-technical business-value terms. The reality is a sprint is always over-packed with stuff to do with zero room for side-projects and expecting people to work weekends on side-projects to solve company business needs is not exactly a sound strategy. What one can do is is deliberately allot time to the team to work on any side-project as long as they are somehow attached to the business. There are ways to do this more organized, for example innovation-weeks or the famous Google-fridays.
    - tacitusarc 6y ago
      That can work assuming the team isn't already overloaded. But when people are being asked to work 60h a week or more to accomplish their tasks, it becomes untenable.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree that we the engineers must work on our non-tech talking skills! I've been working on it for a few years now and it's REALLY difficult but even the small wins feel very rewarding and are motivating me to refine my comm skills further.

hallway_monitor 6y ago

Having led a team for about a year now let me tell you it's not easy. You are always trying to balance many priorities and even with over a decade of coding experience, it's not always obvious which refactorings or tech debt stories or architectural changes are worth prioritizing now, which can wait till later, and which are engineer pipe dreams that I need to gently but firmly kill as quickly as possible. I have had similar managers to what was described above, in those types of organizations. It may be a lost cause but it may be an opportunity to work on your influence skills; being able to explain and sell your solution is perhaps even more important than coming up with it in the first place.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tacitusarc 6y ago
This is really difficult. Perhaps the best thing is to track the proposed technical debt stories, and do not discard them when they are rejected. Instead, also keep track of how much pain is hit that can be associated back to that particular technical debt. 3 years into major project, my team finally got prioritized to work on and improvement that will take us a couple weeks, that we were not able to work on previously because we could not justify its value. But for the past 3 years the organization has lived with pain that this would have resolved. So now we can justify it. And the thing is, it's not like we didn't know 3 years ago when we said we wanted to make this happen but things are going to be terrible if we were not able to prioritize it but in many organizations it's not good enough to just say how bad things will be. People need to actually have felt the pain. Honestly, I think that's okay on its face. My bigger issue is that frequently there is no or very little trust around engineers who predict what the major problems will be an advocate for them and then it's not like when they're proven right management now listens to them the next time. I think that's the real problem.
- kclay 6y ago
  In these cases wouldn't it have been to work on it slowly as a "side project" outside of the team normal priorities? I always tell my team if they can fit it in and not hinder the current sprint by all means go ahead and do it on the side. I know this goes against the normal and people want to attach "right now " value (hours it took reflected on check) but going beyond the call can also give you leverage when your yearly review comes up for example.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    That's exactly what I am doing and aside from a few wrist slaps people have been okay with such an approach. I always tell them I did this for a few hours during the weekend or while I was waiting our DevOps to resolve an outage these particular 2 hours the last Friday. Seems to work really well.
  - hpoe 6y ago
    I'll also add I only have so much energy in the day, and after a couple of years of fighting against problems I coudn't do anything about and managers who couldn't make the changes, and customers that wanted it now, I burnt out, and instead of spending a useless zoom meeting to work on an improvement I use it instead to make maps for the D&D campaign I am running.
  - Too 6y ago
    While I've seen several examples of this being the only way to get out of never prioritized debt-cleanup that the team can't bother explaining to management in non-technical business-value terms. The reality is a sprint is always over-packed with stuff to do with zero room for side-projects and expecting people to work weekends on side-projects to solve company business needs is not exactly a sound strategy. What one can do is is deliberately allot time to the team to work on any side-project as long as they are somehow attached to the business. There are ways to do this more organized, for example innovation-weeks or the famous Google-fridays.
  - tacitusarc 6y ago
    That can work assuming the team isn't already overloaded. But when people are being asked to work 60h a week or more to accomplish their tasks, it becomes untenable.
pdimitar 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree that we the engineers must work on our non-tech talking skills! I've been working on it for a few years now and it's REALLY difficult but even the small wins feel very rewarding and are motivating me to refine my comm skills further.