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> It’s perfectly possible for someone who still performs surgery to play a decisive role in how a hospital is run. Or for someone who still represents clients i

by atoav 4y ago

> It’s perfectly possible for someone who still performs surgery to play a decisive role in how a hospital is run. Or for someone who still represents clients in court to be a big cheese in a law practice. It is, but it has to be on their terms. I am currently doing more than one job, not on my own terms and I am ... not happy. I cannot do either job with the level of quality I expect from myself. And I would be good at either of those jobs alone. The context switches cost energy. The timetables are in fight with each other. One job demands from me to be free for whatever comes the other demands to plan ahead for years. How can I be free for what coems through my door if I have crumbling infrastructure I should be maintaining at any given point in time? I have to essentially either do it on a day by day basis, or I have to sacrifice something. Sure go ahead give your employees two jobs. Hell give them three. But please spend 10 minutes figuring out if these jobs are actually compatible with each other and if you can live with the friction losses between them. You expect to get the results of 1/n employees on each job, but you might end up getting less than that for real, unsolveable reasons. And for some reason managers always pull shit like that, when what would actually be needed is n seperate people doing the job and then they go all [surprised_pikachu.jpg] when that one employee quits and everything goes to shit, because they had no time documenting what they did. Just treat your good people well and let them do good work. If you have their good will and you treat them well, they will produce better work than if you threaten them into accepting terms that save you a bit in the short term but destroy you in the long term.

btschaegg 4y ago
While I can't speak from first hand experience of juggling programming and management jobs, I've observed the same problem in my part-time team leads to believe what you say is true. I'd like to add yet another aspect you didn't mention: I've had a couple of experiences in very dynamic work situations where every developer is juggling multiple development jobs at once. If those aren't very well managed (which I've never seen done), the individual jobs/projects will immediately cannibalize each other: The thing that's the most critical right now gets way more attention than anything else, which causes those other things to go unattended for too long, which increases the risk of them becoming critical in turn (either through errors because of rush jobs or because of arbitrary deadlines coming up). The result is constant firefighting. The thing is that juggling management and development jobs basically looks like asking for that to happen (at least to me). Most important "management issues" are more impactful than the development job (especially when done as a rush job) and in my opinion even less likely to be plannable/mechanical in nature. This means that it's even likelier that some tasks will cannibalize the amount of attention others get by themselves and it's never going to be a simple 1/n calculation. And if you maintain that you could reach that kind of multitasking nirvana anyway with enough iron discipline, I'd argue that this discipline should be considered a large multiplying factor of the context switching costs involved.
usrusr 4y ago
Yeah, the last thing you want as a patient is ending up under the knife of one of those “still performs surgery" managers. They often do so not because they are actually still good at it, but because they see it as a status thing and nobody can stop them.
hbrn 4y ago
This is very true. I've been in the same position and eventually I just burned out. If you think a programmer can become a manager, you can guide them, but can't force them to become your vision of a manager. The reason they can be a good manager is because they know more than you. This, of course, requires a certain level of humility from the upper management, which they usually don't have.
sublinear 4y ago
> It is, but it has to be on their terms. It's exactly this. Everyone wants the long term productivity and quality boost of combining roles, but not all necessarily understand or want to pay the cost. Improving efficiency is just another way to grow a business beyond mere sales. Any organizational change would incur some initial failures, missed deadlines, etc. The friction you're describing doesn't last forever. Certainly some roles are easier to combine than others. It shouldn't be a huge risk in the grand scheme of things, but more places really should try to give the devs the bigger picture and loosen the reins a bit instead of being afraid of scaring them off. I personally think having the "unsolvable" in your hands is exactly where you always want to be in a career.

by atoav 4y ago

btschaegg 4y ago

While I can't speak from first hand experience of juggling programming and management jobs, I've observed the same problem in my part-time team leads to believe what you say is true. I'd like to add yet another aspect you didn't mention: I've had a couple of experiences in very dynamic work situations where every developer is juggling multiple development jobs at once. If those aren't very well managed (which I've never seen done), the individual jobs/projects will immediately cannibalize each other: The thing that's the most critical right now gets way more attention than anything else, which causes those other things to go unattended for too long, which increases the risk of them becoming critical in turn (either through errors because of rush jobs or because of arbitrary deadlines coming up). The result is constant firefighting. The thing is that juggling management and development jobs basically looks like asking for that to happen (at least to me). Most important "management issues" are more impactful than the development job (especially when done as a rush job) and in my opinion even less likely to be plannable/mechanical in nature. This means that it's even likelier that some tasks will cannibalize the amount of attention others get by themselves and it's never going to be a simple 1/n calculation. And if you maintain that you could reach that kind of multitasking nirvana anyway with enough iron discipline, I'd argue that this discipline should be considered a large multiplying factor of the context switching costs involved.

usrusr 4y ago

Yeah, the last thing you want as a patient is ending up under the knife of one of those “still performs surgery" managers. They often do so not because they are actually still good at it, but because they see it as a status thing and nobody can stop them.

hbrn 4y ago

This is very true. I've been in the same position and eventually I just burned out. If you think a programmer can become a manager, you can guide them, but can't force them to become your vision of a manager. The reason they can be a good manager is because they know more than you. This, of course, requires a certain level of humility from the upper management, which they usually don't have.

sublinear 4y ago

> It is, but it has to be on their terms. It's exactly this. Everyone wants the long term productivity and quality boost of combining roles, but not all necessarily understand or want to pay the cost. Improving efficiency is just another way to grow a business beyond mere sales. Any organizational change would incur some initial failures, missed deadlines, etc. The friction you're describing doesn't last forever. Certainly some roles are easier to combine than others. It shouldn't be a huge risk in the grand scheme of things, but more places really should try to give the devs the bigger picture and loosen the reins a bit instead of being afraid of scaring them off. I personally think having the "unsolvable" in your hands is exactly where you always want to be in a career.