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What's really great about this system if you're consistently seeing more support work than the designated support person can handle it's a highly legible signal

What's really great about this system if you're consistently seeing more support work than the designated support person can handle it's a highly legible signal to management that support work for your team requires >1 full time engineer. This makes it significantly easier to advocate for paying down tech debt or creating self-work workflows for people filing tickets. As an added bonus, this incentivizes better documentation of your system via runbooks (I'd rather point someone at a doc than walk them through a problem when it's not my week).

atomicnumber3 4y ago
The breakdown of this though is that sometimes management thinks "oh all (internal, I assume?) support is solved with the cost of only 1 headcount" and then they just let that rotating week become more and more hellish. Then never prioritize anything to make it better because the maximum "impact" of that work is taking the footprint from "1 eng per week" to "1 eng per week" (zero perceived "real" impact. And if you provide alternate metrics to correctly show the load, they'll just say, well clearly it still fits into 1 eng week, good job, keep it up). And eventually employees burn out and start mailing in that week and now suddenly nobody cares except the other teams having trouble getting support, but apparently that is a diffuse enough complaint that nothing ever came of it. Not that I speak from experience...
- kqr 4y ago
  The problem here is bad management. If it wasn't for this failure mode they would find another way to mess people up. No process works well under bad management, except perhaps some variant of anarchy/direct democracy.
- IanCal 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand - you'd have a constantly growing backlog of support tickets and the time for things to be resolved would grow dramatically. More and more people internally would be complaining nothing was getting sorted.
  - kqr 4y ago
    Under bad management the growing backlog is translated into ever more overtime and hurried low-quality band-aids.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  All systems fail in the face of sufficiently bad management, at which point your only recourse it to convince someone higher up the chain that there's a problem. Legibility can make convincing people easier, but nothing is fool proof.

atomicnumber3 4y ago

The breakdown of this though is that sometimes management thinks "oh all (internal, I assume?) support is solved with the cost of only 1 headcount" and then they just let that rotating week become more and more hellish. Then never prioritize anything to make it better because the maximum "impact" of that work is taking the footprint from "1 eng per week" to "1 eng per week" (zero perceived "real" impact. And if you provide alternate metrics to correctly show the load, they'll just say, well clearly it still fits into 1 eng week, good job, keep it up). And eventually employees burn out and start mailing in that week and now suddenly nobody cares except the other teams having trouble getting support, but apparently that is a diffuse enough complaint that nothing ever came of it. Not that I speak from experience...

kqr 4y ago
The problem here is bad management. If it wasn't for this failure mode they would find another way to mess people up. No process works well under bad management, except perhaps some variant of anarchy/direct democracy.
IanCal 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand - you'd have a constantly growing backlog of support tickets and the time for things to be resolved would grow dramatically. More and more people internally would be complaining nothing was getting sorted.
- kqr 4y ago
  Under bad management the growing backlog is translated into ever more overtime and hurried low-quality band-aids.
Hermitian909 4y ago
All systems fail in the face of sufficiently bad management, at which point your only recourse it to convince someone higher up the chain that there's a problem. Legibility can make convincing people easier, but nothing is fool proof.