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Managers have become obsessed with being "agile" and "data driven" and yet never seem to notice how much useful engineering time and attention is being lost to

Managers have become obsessed with being "agile" and "data driven" and yet never seem to notice how much useful engineering time and attention is being lost to all of those finely detailed breakdowns and regular meetings and tracking and monitoring processes. A common failure mode now seems to be that managers focus on metrics that don't really represent any useful reality to begin with but persist in trying to optimise those metrics even when their engineering team is telling them plainly that they're looking at garbage in and garbage out. The one metric no-one in management ever seems to consider is how much all of the management overheads themselves cost.

andyjsong 4y ago
There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC. We can estimate when the PR will be pushed to prod or the contract gets signed. Generally, the more experience you have, the better you’re at setting expectations on when a PR/opp will close. The PR or opp can stall, but it’s up to the person responsible for the PR or opp to notify the rest of the team that there will be a delay or figure out a way to unblock. The big difference is the lack of accountability. AFAIK if a developer misses shipping during a sprint, they’ll just add it to the next sprint. If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. I think this is because sales have very clear metrics that everyone can agree upon: revenue, number of demos, cold outreach, etc. We’ve been tracking these types of metrics in cuneiform. Comp sci wasn’t a thing until the 1960s. It’s still too new and everyone has an opinion on what metrics to focus on without angering a developer for micromanaging them. This is where the friction lies; until that’s fixed, you will not have a cohesive team. I hope that AI takes over and we don’t need devs or salespeople anymore. context: I’m a sales guy that sold software that tracks “engineering performance” to VPs of Eng and CTOs depending on the size of your company. It was shocking to see the level of variance in measuring performance metrics for eng teams.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.
  - kqr 4y ago
    To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
    - jordanbeiber 4y ago
      Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
      - andyjsong 4y ago
        you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.
mrcartmeneses 4y ago
This is in some ways deliberate from management. They’re often not really needed and are making busy work for themselves at the expense of the company’s goals
valenterry 4y ago
Right. First question should be: what does your data say about how much it cost to have an agile / data driven process compared to not having one? :)

andyjsong 4y ago

There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC. We can estimate when the PR will be pushed to prod or the contract gets signed. Generally, the more experience you have, the better you’re at setting expectations on when a PR/opp will close. The PR or opp can stall, but it’s up to the person responsible for the PR or opp to notify the rest of the team that there will be a delay or figure out a way to unblock. The big difference is the lack of accountability. AFAIK if a developer misses shipping during a sprint, they’ll just add it to the next sprint. If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. I think this is because sales have very clear metrics that everyone can agree upon: revenue, number of demos, cold outreach, etc. We’ve been tracking these types of metrics in cuneiform. Comp sci wasn’t a thing until the 1960s. It’s still too new and everyone has an opinion on what metrics to focus on without angering a developer for micromanaging them. This is where the friction lies; until that’s fixed, you will not have a cohesive team. I hope that AI takes over and we don’t need devs or salespeople anymore. context: I’m a sales guy that sold software that tracks “engineering performance” to VPs of Eng and CTOs depending on the size of your company. It was shocking to see the level of variance in measuring performance metrics for eng teams.

jordanbeiber 4y ago
I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.
- kqr 4y ago
  To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
  - jordanbeiber 4y ago
    Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
    - andyjsong 4y ago
      you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.

mrcartmeneses 4y ago

This is in some ways deliberate from management. They’re often not really needed and are making busy work for themselves at the expense of the company’s goals

valenterry 4y ago

Right. First question should be: what does your data say about how much it cost to have an agile / data driven process compared to not having one? :)