6 ms·
Dealing with exactly 1 & 2 right now. #3 doesn't really apply in my case because 80% of the devs are budget staffing agency hires. But on that note, I'd add a
by cjonas 4y ago
Dealing with exactly 1 & 2 right now. #3 doesn't really apply in my case because 80% of the devs are budget staffing agency hires. But on that note, I'd add a 4th point:
Management panics when they realize they won't make the self imposed deadline and start throwing bodies at the problem.
In our case, we went from 2 teams to 8 over night. The very few engineers who actually were capable of shipping features became swamped dealing with the fallout.
To make things worse, they keep scheduling multi-day, 8hr "planning" sessions that all key devs must attend so they can better "understand the remaining work"
- illuminati1911 4y agoClassic. And when you tell incompetent management that 9 women can't deliver a baby in a month, they'll proceed to try with 10 women.
- ratww 4y agoThis is so common it hurts. I wonder where this comes from. Is it just hubris mixed with incompetence?
- WalterSear 4y agoMixed with desperation and ignorance. Managers only have so many levers they can push to course correct a situation. But, it take hubris and incompetence to get there.
- numpad0 4y agoThis happens when managers think of themselves as the engineering division and the sole isolated source of value while viewing engineers as cost associated with delivery. The proposal PowerPoint is the product and the actual product is a Proof-of-Work that could retroactively nullify pre-realized values.
- epicureanideal 4y agoWow! This is truly the best explanation of this I’ve ever heard. It explains a lot that I’ve seen.
- spaetzleesser 4y agoJust take 30 in another country, ideally with 12 hours timezone difference.
- vasco 4y agoSo explain it properly.
- ls15 4y ago"9 WOMEN CAN'T DELIVER A BABY IN A MONTH"
- labster 4y agoSo how many women do we need, like 15? Maybe a Scrum master who knows the Lamaze method?
- glogla 4y agoWe should setup three day workshop about it. And of course invite no women to it.
- smegsicle 4y agoonly pregnant men, we are dedicated to diversity at this company
- thaumasiotes 4y agoIf you hire enough women, one of them will produce a baby within a month.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoSee, we just need that 9x dev. Once they've shown they can do it once it's perfectly reasonable to bet the entire business on them doing it the next month. Oh, and also, the diversity team have noticed we have hired a lot of young people so we're only hiring over-50s this year.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Once they've shown they can do it once it's perfectly reasonable to bet the entire business on them doing it the next month. That's true. A team of 20 women can easily produce one baby a month. Nine women can't, but the people who like to say "nine women can't produce a baby in a month" are almost never trying to tell you that you can fix your problem by expanding your team to the appropriate size.
- quickthrower2 4y agoThat analogy understates it. Starting a big fresh project with an idling “team” is really inefficient because the TL needs to figure out how to keep everyone busy. The better way is to have a smaller number of people work on requirements and figuring stuff out before a whole team lets rip. Some tasks just don’t parallelise well so a 9 person team isn’t good for everything.
- EtienneK 4y agoI like this idea of a smaller team feeding work to the bigger team. What does such a smaller team look like? What kind of roles, etc?
- Ologn 4y agoFred Brooks encountered a similar problem as a project manager at IBM in the early 1960s, working on the software for the System/360. In 1975 he wrote The Mythical Man Month about the experience. He said "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". The increased communication needed was one reason. About half a century later, most businesses have still not learned these lessons.
- ratww 4y agoI once on a company where a CEO did that 3 times in a row to an engineering team, and mentioned wanting that team to be 4x its current size in two years. In an interview, he mentioned The Mythical Man Month as one of his favourite books.
- popcube 4y agoso they just hope company suffer
- Spooky23 4y agoEveryone perceives things through their perspective. Dopey CEO guy sees himself as the surgeon leading the software “surgical” team described by Brooks.
- varjag 4y agoJust like there's a bunch of politicians complaining about 1984 who clearly have never opened "1984" too.
- hef19898 4y agoThose hundreds of millions of VC money have to be put to use. So it either advertising or more head count.
- cjonas 4y agoI find myself quoting the mythical man month to various poeple at least 2-3 times a week. Unfortunately no one is familiar with it (obviously) or seems to understand the point. The other day I had PM complaining how they were going to keep their team (which has somehow grown to 10 devs!) busy after the highly sequential work was blocked by a dependency on another team...
- spaetzleesser 4y ago"start throwing bodies at the problem." and to save money they hire some newbies instead of experienced people. I have had it multiple times where the project got looded with people who had no experience or they were in India 12 hours away so onboarding was really hard. the result was always that the added people slowed the project down.
- pixl97 4y agoIt's funny how the Mythical Man-Month is nearly 50 years old and yet its lessons go unlearned so often.
- usrn 4y ago>8hr "planning" sessions One place I was at had quarterly 3 day planning sessions. That was something else.
- the_lonely_road 4y agoWait that actually sounds awesome. What we’re your issues with this practice? A 3 day code freeze while everyone works to solidify a “meeting of the minds” followed by 87 days of heads down progress sounds like fucking heaven to me compared to the weekly planning meetings on top of daily stands up I live with now.
- saimiam 4y agoThis 87/3 split sounds suspiciously like what Agile with frequent checkpoints was supposed to mitigate.
- HWR_14 4y agoBut if you prefer the 87/3 split to Agile with frequent checkpoints is it really a mitigation?
- notimetorelax 4y ago… and it mostly failed by burning out everyone with the daily routine.
- hectormalot 4y agopros and cons, will depend on the type of thing a team/company is working on. I've been on the receiving end of this with some negative experiences as well. Team1: "Hey, we've launched a new initiative a few weeks back. Important for us to be able to add one field to the response of your internal billing API. Can we discuss what that would take?" Team2: "Hey, probably a few hours of work. But, we just had our quarterly planning last week. In 12 weeks you can submit for Q2, and _maybe_ we will plan it somewhere in May or June."
- verve_rat 4y ago