8 ms·

I wholeheartedly agree, if you need daily feedback you're a bad manager (unless you're in some exotic situation like a rocket launch or something). This issue

• TameAntelope 5y ago
  I'd actually flip that, and say if you can't give daily feedback you're a "bad" developer (I'd probably use "inexperienced" or "new" rather than "bad", because it's a hard mindset shift and it takes time). In fact, not only should you be able to give daily updates, you should be able to ship functionality on the daily. From first line of code into production and in front of customers should only ever take about 2 to 16 hours of work. If you can't work at that cadence, you're probably not being as effective as you could be, as a developer. A "good" manager enables you to work like this.
  • dogleash 5y ago
    I used to work at an R&D company. While that cadence is possible in a website mill, it’s a laughable blanket statement.
    • diggs 5y ago
      Agreed - I’ve spent months working on a deep tech problem before I could even show a functional core, let alone putting it into production. Some problems take time, experience and foresight to solve and the solution only dovetails at the end.
    • gffrd 5y ago
      Just wanted to say thank you for "website mill" … I'm reminded of this stark difference when talking with a friend who builds ultrasonic hardware.
    • ngc248 5y ago
      Exactly .... Agile works pretty well in the "execution" phase when all of the requirements are known upfront. For any kind of R&D agile is not a good fit at all. R&D fits the waterfall model better. Ideally it should be like you do your R&D with waterfall and the agile for execution.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        "Waterfall works best in well-understood domains without a lot of uncertainty."[0] Agile is, by far, a more effective way to run an R&D shop. By far. "Agile teams show progress with working software, not documents. Right from the beginning. And that's huge." [1] [0] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 35 [1] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 8
        • trelane 5y ago
          This presumes that software is the entirety of the problem being researched, which is not always the case. Especially as you get more physical. That said, I don't think waterfall works any better there either. Sometimes there's no way past the "muck about and find things out" work.
        • dogleash 5y ago
          In my aforementioned example, the set of development practices most often called "agile" was neither the right approach nor what we did. Agile as defined as the ideas in the agile manifesto might have been what we did. It would depend on who you asked and whatever their particular axe to grind was. So I don't know, and quite frankly we didn't really care if we were "agile." All we found was that "agile" is simply too lossy of a descriptor for meaningful conversations about development process. People writing books and blogs about what they mean when they say "agile" hasn't caused the industry to coalesce on a concise definition. That horse is out of the barn, and I don't expect we're getting it back.
          • 5y ago
    • nitrogen 5y ago
      Keeping a daily log of progress helps prove your research is original.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • Trasmatta 5y ago
    I strongly disagree with this. This is an approach to development that encourages an extremely limited and short term view on development that leads to low quality software and unhappy developers. It's also only remotely possible with a certain type of software.
    • TameAntelope 5y ago
      If this approach results in you taking limited and short term views of development, or low quality software with unhappy developers, you're doing it wrong. Breaking down work into small, day-or-two chunks is a team effort that the developers are doing together, alongside the customer (representative, usually).
      • Trasmatta 5y ago
        Not all development fits nicely into day-or-two chunks. Forcing all your work to fit nicely into this type of mold is an arbitrary restriction that serves no real purpose except to check all the necessary scrum boxes, give the illusion of extra productivity, and allow for micro-management. It ends up being completely antithetical to thinking deeply and long term about the the code you're writing. I've worked on teams that run the full gamut here. Those that did scrum and enforced "an every task should be one or two days" did not ship more or higher quality software than those that didn't, and the development teams were consistently more stressed and less satisfied with their work.
        • TameAntelope 5y ago
          What do you think of the idea that providing finished work on an every-day-or-two cadence allows you to collect feedback from your customers in a way that keeps your work focused and relevant to their needs?
          • Trasmatta 5y ago
            You can gather plenty of useful feedback to keep your work focused and relevant on cadences other than one or two days. What kind of customer even wants to provide feedback that often? That sounds awful, not to mention being a poor user experience, where users are treated like beta testers, with half baked features constantly pushed out the door. This also ignores the fact that there is a huge amount of important work that is effectively invisible to the end user, but is absolutely crucial. The workflow you're suggesting disincentives the team from working on those things, and may even punish them for it (as they are not shipping customer visible features).
  • beefield 5y ago
    Thanks for this comment. It pretty much confirms my hunch that I would not be happy in a "developer" role. I have done quite a lot work that requires writing code. But often it has been projects with literally months before there has been anything that anyone might call functionality.
    • mh- 5y ago
      Please don't over-index on this comment. It's pretty out of touch with how the majority of the field works.
      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        It's not, though, if you also believe the majority of the field attempts to be "agile", which is far and away the case in 2022. I didn't make up any of this, it comes directly from Joel Spolsky in his article titled, "Evidence Based Scheduling". [0] [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
  • yibg 5y ago
    For larger pieces of work, some times it takes me more than a day to just figure out what's where and where I can even get started. I guess I can still give updates daily, but it'll just be "still investigating". Hell, I've fixed 1 liner bugs that have taken me a week to figure out.
    • TameAntelope 5y ago
      You shouldn't be figuring any of those things out on your own, is the whole point of both the article and my comment.
      • yibg 5y ago
        Possibly in an ideal environment. But expecting the same someone to work with me for an entire week to either debug or design usually hasn't been realistic. Keep talking with different people, or the same person on and off has a huge context cost. What I've found to be a good middle ground is take some time to think things through myself first, at least in rough strokes. Then have someone else come in and review the work. There is a balance of doing too much vs too little yourself of course, but I don't think there is a hard and fast rule (e.g. 1 day worth) for it.
        • TameAntelope 5y ago
          I'm confused about why you're suggesting the only options are "work together for an entire week" or "don't keep anyone updated about what you're working on for a week". There are a lot of ways to keep your team updated, but more importantly, it's frankly arrogant to think you can or even should tackle any problem on your own.
          • yibg 5y ago
            In general I agree, where possible and where it makes sense getting others involved early is a good thing. Somethings are more solo work however, at least for a while to get things oriented. Some times it takes time to gather enough context to even start to express a problem space to others. Not everything is just adding a button to a web page.
  • the_gipsy 5y ago
    The problem is not giving the update. The problem is this update turning into an invitation to being micromanaged.
  • political12345 5y ago
    I think most people are salty about your comment because they fail to see the subtle difference between: 1) "Everyday you should ship something" 2) "At the end of each day you should be able to tell your line manager in a clear and concise way exactly what you did; if you can't you've done nothing." 2) does not mean ship code: you could have spent 12 hours thinking and reading code. But if you can explain i.e provide a daily update, then you have actually done something, and not spent a day on slack sending memes. i've had days where I did nothing but read code trying to understand a bug, and then my whole contribution was 1 line of config or 2 lines of code. But I have a clear achievement: I understood an area of the code much better and i have a fix. Having daily updates to your manager also forces you to not slack and work on the most important problems: otherwise you might be tempted to work on sth fun but not mission critical. At the end of the day, people should do as they wish.
    • TameAntelope 5y ago
      Yeah, I think it's telling that folks here assumed I meant "give daily feedback" as in "tell your boss what you're up to". It's probably a lot more effective to keep your team up to date on what you're doing, than it is to keep your boss up to date on what you're doing, and that's where I was focusing. And yeah, while I did say "ship functionality", you're right, the real value is producing something you can show users. I prefer that ends up being code, because otherwise users are hard to pin down, but it doesn't have to be. Finally yes, people should do as they wish, but with the understanding that if the thing they'd prefer to work on isn't the thing the team they're working on needs, that the team should be able to go find someone who does want to do the thing the team needs. It's not really fair to drag a team down because one person isn't having fun.
    • Trasmatta 5y ago
      Or you can hire good developers who value their work and want to ship high quality software, and get out of their way so they can get things done. Your method seems to be treating your developers like children who will refuse to get work done if somebody isn't watching over their shoulder. If that's happening, then I think you have a hiring problem.
  • nine_zeros 5y ago
    I hope this is comment is made in irony.
  • heurist 5y ago
    There are engineers who can produce on a constance cadence, and there are engineers who need to let the pressure build until a dam breaks and the code comes rushing out. The latter engineers can still be good engineers. It all depends on how your brain works. The systems supporting shipping daily should exist either way, though.
  • maze-le 5y ago
    > ship functionality on the daily This creates unnecessary exaggerated expectations. There is only so much you can accomplish in one day, some functionality take way loger than that. We don't want to ship half baked solutions, but we are expected to do so... In order to accomplish that sacrifices have to be made on everything else that is important in software development: proper testing, documentation, refactoring and a clean codebase. Its perfectly valid for a developer to give the update "I am still working on ..." / "I am still trying to figure out:..." / "I am in the process of preparing the codebase for this update" for a certain period of time.