5 ms·

I don't want to put too much of a point on it but if engineers are 'loafing and surfing' for most of the working week and you're not embellishing the story, the

by ljm 4y ago

I don't want to put too much of a point on it but if engineers are 'loafing and surfing' for most of the working week and you're not embellishing the story, then I don't think it's an engineering problem you got but a management or prioritisation one. Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?

zmmmmm 4y ago
engineering manager here ... I think it's stated in a bit of an extreme way but I definitely encounter this as a challenge. Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge. It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
- oofta-boofta 4y ago
  You could just not have the expectation that people are robots who are the corporate definition of productive, 24/7.
chrisfrantz 4y ago
Yeah, ironically the problem here isn't a lazy engineer, it's the management or poor systems.
joshlemer 4y ago
I think online software development discussions tend to lean slightly towards blaming management rather than engineers, probably because we're most of us engineers and can empathize with them better, but in this case I think it's reasonable to blame the engineer. A manager's job isn't to micro-manage every single task and to make sure that an engineer is highly engaged at every hour of the day. If the engineer is blocked on everything, above a certain level of seniority which is not so high, it's incumbent on them to find ways to contribute or find things to do, and if need be convey their situation to their manager.
- 8note 4y ago
  A managers job is to set prioritization, and see trends. A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that. The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I don't know about that particular company, of course, but over my decades in this industry, here's how the average engineer I've worked with would react to being blocked for three days per week. They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things. I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.

by ljm 4y ago

zmmmmm 4y ago

engineering manager here ... I think it's stated in a bit of an extreme way but I definitely encounter this as a challenge. Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge. It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.

oofta-boofta 4y ago
You could just not have the expectation that people are robots who are the corporate definition of productive, 24/7.

chrisfrantz 4y ago

Yeah, ironically the problem here isn't a lazy engineer, it's the management or poor systems.

joshlemer 4y ago

I think online software development discussions tend to lean slightly towards blaming management rather than engineers, probably because we're most of us engineers and can empathize with them better, but in this case I think it's reasonable to blame the engineer. A manager's job isn't to micro-manage every single task and to make sure that an engineer is highly engaged at every hour of the day. If the engineer is blocked on everything, above a certain level of seniority which is not so high, it's incumbent on them to find ways to contribute or find things to do, and if need be convey their situation to their manager.

8note 4y ago
A managers job is to set prioritization, and see trends. A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that. The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
JohnFen 4y ago
I don't know about that particular company, of course, but over my decades in this industry, here's how the average engineer I've worked with would react to being blocked for three days per week. They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things. I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.