6 ms·

The Radiating Programmer

51 points by kiriakosv 3y ago

neverrroot 3y ago
Radiating as in “radiate information”.
simonbarker87 3y ago
99% of the problems Scrum/Agile/Whatever try to solve boil down to “communicate more, more often”. I personally have no issue with a daily stand up, but then it’s always been basically the only meeting in my day and 9 times out of 10 people have stuck to a structure and always shared something interesting and useful about their day. If you just say “no blockers” you’re doing it wrong in my opinion. If writing and sharing works best for a team then do it that way however we, as devs, need to realise we work in service of a broader business so if we don’t do a good job communicating what we do then that business will force something on us.
- mcny 3y ago
  > If you just say “no blockers” you’re doing it wrong in my opinion. This only works when you trust your team members. This means absolutely nobody who can fire me on the spot, not my supervisor, not my skip, not the CEO/CTO/VP should be on the call. No non-technical staff from the above list should have a right to challenge estimates. No product owner can belong to the above list. There should be openness when technical decisions made by a team get overriden from people on the above list. Especially when something painful like a terse edict to the effect of "allow x and y from security and audit team full, direct, read-write-execute permission to the backing data store of your micro service in production". If there is no communication from the top, or there are negative consequences for speaking up, expect people to mentally check out.
  - fire 3y ago
    > This only works when you trust your team members. This means absolutely nobody who can fire me on the spot, not my supervisor, not my skip, not the CEO/CTO/VP should be on the call. not sure how I'd've ever justified suggesting engineering standup without our engineering manager present
    - mathgorges 3y ago
      It sounds like your dev team isn't very empowered. In the companies I work at we can create whatever ceremony our team deems nessesary as long as we're meeting our metrics.
      - mcny 3y ago
        Not just the dev team but even the "product owner" gets blind sided in "small" and "agile" companies. The CEO or someone high up the food chain sees a defect and now zomg the sky is falling. It has to be fixed nao, prioritization be damned. That's what I meant by nobody from the above list can be a product owner. The whole point of having sprints is so things can't be added to a sprint mid-sprint. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances but they should a. really be extenuating circumstances and b. should come through the (clearly nominal) product owner.
      - stakhanov 3y ago
        > ...isn't very empowered. ...as long as we're meeting our metrics. "Empowered to meet metrics" still doesn't sound like a very enlightened philosophy to me.
    - mrwizrd 3y ago
      The other side of this is when the EM's presence is actually a negative, so them not turning up means people can relax. If "no blockers" isn't enough, then it's my job to get the information I need without it feeling like a chore. If I have no choice but to run a meeting called "standup" every day, and we're all on the same page already, I'll take "no blockers" and then have a chat for ten minutes over a coffee. Taking it easy once in a while helps everyone feel a little less "cog in the machine".
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      What’s… the EM there to do?
Rapzid 3y ago
I'd rather have a 5-10 minute standup than have to write such an oddly detailed report twice a week on what I "weighted" in on.
- andygeorge 3y ago
  Same. I don't want to have to write OR read those reports, and a quick daily stand-up is far better, IMO, for effective communication.
  - jgoodhcg 3y ago
    I think there is an argument here with no right answer. Writing can have such a better signal to noise ratio but it’s harder to write well. Talking is easy but it’s also easy to forget something in the spot or ramble on too much without editing.
    - andygeorge 3y ago
      > Writing can have such a better signal to noise ratio It can, but in my experience with employers who push async as primary communication, the noise is MUCH higher than regularly scheduled stand-ups.
- jacknews 3y ago
  RIght, this is just way too much information and detail, and seems designed to look good in front of management rather than to inform team-mates, who presumably know a lot of the details anyway.
- verisimilidude 3y ago
  I would probably spend an hour or two just writing something like that. On the surface, I'd agree. With that said, in my experience, many stand-up formats devolve into some version of "the two most talkative people have a conversation for 30 minutes while everyone else listens". I'd probably get more value out of doing a write-up than sitting through a meeting like that. It really depends on the health of the stand-ups on the team.
sdwr 3y ago
LOVE IT. MAYBE IM JUST HIGH
wnolens 3y ago
How about the person who needs the info to do their job should go get it.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Both are useful. But radiating is useful. “I am done on my task anyone need help” is useful. People may not desperately need help that they would go ask, but might appreciate an extra hand.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
That's a great way of putting it. I have found that communication strengths and weaknesses can vary, from person to person, and it's usually a tough sell to come up with "one size fits all" solutions. One example, is that I had an employee who is probably the best engineer that I've ever met, and I've worked with top-shelf people. But he is "on the spectrum," so his verbal communication tends to be in monosyllables, and can sometimes be a bit inscrutable. His emails and specs, on the other hand, were absolute marvels of communication. I had another engineer on the same team, who wasn't quite as brilliant, but he is an awesome "people person." It was always a good idea for me to make the time to chat. His emails tended to sometimes be abrupt, and the information density wasn't that great. Put him in front of a whiteboard, however, with an audience, and it was amazing. As their manager, it was incumbent upon me to deal with each as an individual. They would sometimes have clashes, and I was often the peacemaker.
- 01100011 3y ago
  Not saying this is you, but I'm surprised how many managers seem unaware of the prevalence of social deficiencies among the highest performing engineers. 20 years ago this was just sort of a given. I have to regularly defend a few highly productive but socially caustic engineers who are absolutely essential to our products. Management would love to get rid of them and the problems they cause without realizing no one else would dedicate the mental resources to the sort of complex, deep problems we're trying to solve.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    There’s always a balance to be kept, between high-performing engineers, and team dynamics. Great products are created by great teams. It’s almost impossible to create anything of any meaningful scope, these days, without a team. There are “superman” engineers, like Linus Torvalds, that can create entire shipping architectures, but those are incredibly rare. That said, the myth of the “cookie cutter” engineer is just that: a myth. Some cultures do better at it than others. I worked for a Japanese company, and they came very close to it, but at a cost that most folks here, would find prohibitive. High-performing teams can be difficult to manage. There’s often significant differences in personalities, egos can be high, and everyone has an opinion that is the only “right” one. Great teams require good management. It’s always fun to dis managers, but good ones are force multipliers, like nothing else.
mrwizrd 3y ago
Up to a point, I don't care how people communicate, as long as they do. Not everyone will like this (nor like doing it) - so don't force it - but let each person play to their strengths as much as possible. The good thing about this is it lasts. It's great evidence for your work, thought process, developing communication skills. It's easy to share, reproduce, reuse. I've been in places where this would be a great deterrent for the endless meetings where slightly different groups of people need reassurance about the same things over and over again. Not that they're completely useless, but they're slow, low bandwidth and fatiguing. I wish some of those could have been replaced with a document like this.
01100011 3y ago
Pushing is fine if people can consume it asynchronously, and if you actually stick with it and don't forget to publish frequent updates. In my decades as a SWE, there is one way that worked better than all others: having a competent project manager who individually polls team members with weekly, short(5-10min) 1:1s and then takes care of handling schedule updates, resource assignment and unblocking the dev. This allows devs to focus on what they do best with minimal cognitive load. It requires hiring PMs though, and established managers will bristle at the thought of giving up responsibilities and power to another person. I'm seeing that within my org now. We're slowly learning all the lessons that big companies learned years ago from 70+ years of project management theory, but we're half-assing it because we refuse to accept that PMs and Gantt charts are about the only way for a large org to deliver efficiently and accurately in a mixed hw/sw, multi-team environment.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Which is frustrating, because on the tech side, "use boring technology" has a couple essays written about it, but when it comes to project management, everyone things they can do better. Unless project management better is your core competency, like if you're Monday.com, (it isn't) you have more important things to burn energy on than reinventing project management from first principles.
teeray 3y ago
You can radiate information and still be told “Cool, I’m so glad you keep everyone in the loop. You still need to attend the standups / retros / IPMs / etc.”
zubairq 3y ago
Totally agree with this although some companies “insist” on the ceremony
Izkata 3y ago
We do standups a couple times a week as a text chat, one person pings everyone as a reminder then we all put in just a couple sentences on what's going on before we go to lunch. Most days someone's message starts a thread where two or more of us chat about something in their update.
Terr_ 3y ago
*squints* However when Javascript is disabled, the font/lettering displayed on this page is, uh... one nobody should ever radiate information in, ever. (A mix of capital letters and enlarged lower-case letters.)

51 points by kiriakosv 3y ago

Radiating as in “radiate information”.

99% of the problems Scrum/Agile/Whatever try to solve boil down to “communicate more, more often”. I personally have no issue with a daily stand up, but then it’s always been basically the only meeting in my day and 9 times out of 10 people have stuck to a structure and always shared something interesting and useful about their day. If you just say “no blockers” you’re doing it wrong in my opinion. If writing and sharing works best for a team then do it that way however we, as devs, need to realise we work in service of a broader business so if we don’t do a good job communicating what we do then that business will force something on us.

mcny 3y ago
> If you just say “no blockers” you’re doing it wrong in my opinion. This only works when you trust your team members. This means absolutely nobody who can fire me on the spot, not my supervisor, not my skip, not the CEO/CTO/VP should be on the call. No non-technical staff from the above list should have a right to challenge estimates. No product owner can belong to the above list. There should be openness when technical decisions made by a team get overriden from people on the above list. Especially when something painful like a terse edict to the effect of "allow x and y from security and audit team full, direct, read-write-execute permission to the backing data store of your micro service in production". If there is no communication from the top, or there are negative consequences for speaking up, expect people to mentally check out.
- fire 3y ago
  > This only works when you trust your team members. This means absolutely nobody who can fire me on the spot, not my supervisor, not my skip, not the CEO/CTO/VP should be on the call. not sure how I'd've ever justified suggesting engineering standup without our engineering manager present
  - mathgorges 3y ago
    It sounds like your dev team isn't very empowered. In the companies I work at we can create whatever ceremony our team deems nessesary as long as we're meeting our metrics.
    - mcny 3y ago
      Not just the dev team but even the "product owner" gets blind sided in "small" and "agile" companies. The CEO or someone high up the food chain sees a defect and now zomg the sky is falling. It has to be fixed nao, prioritization be damned. That's what I meant by nobody from the above list can be a product owner. The whole point of having sprints is so things can't be added to a sprint mid-sprint. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances but they should a. really be extenuating circumstances and b. should come through the (clearly nominal) product owner.
    - stakhanov 3y ago
      > ...isn't very empowered. ...as long as we're meeting our metrics. "Empowered to meet metrics" still doesn't sound like a very enlightened philosophy to me.
  - mrwizrd 3y ago
    The other side of this is when the EM's presence is actually a negative, so them not turning up means people can relax. If "no blockers" isn't enough, then it's my job to get the information I need without it feeling like a chore. If I have no choice but to run a meeting called "standup" every day, and we're all on the same page already, I'll take "no blockers" and then have a chat for ten minutes over a coffee. Taking it easy once in a while helps everyone feel a little less "cog in the machine".
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    What’s… the EM there to do?

Rapzid 3y ago

I'd rather have a 5-10 minute standup than have to write such an oddly detailed report twice a week on what I "weighted" in on.

andygeorge 3y ago
Same. I don't want to have to write OR read those reports, and a quick daily stand-up is far better, IMO, for effective communication.
- jgoodhcg 3y ago
  I think there is an argument here with no right answer. Writing can have such a better signal to noise ratio but it’s harder to write well. Talking is easy but it’s also easy to forget something in the spot or ramble on too much without editing.
  - andygeorge 3y ago
    > Writing can have such a better signal to noise ratio It can, but in my experience with employers who push async as primary communication, the noise is MUCH higher than regularly scheduled stand-ups.
jacknews 3y ago
RIght, this is just way too much information and detail, and seems designed to look good in front of management rather than to inform team-mates, who presumably know a lot of the details anyway.
verisimilidude 3y ago
I would probably spend an hour or two just writing something like that. On the surface, I'd agree. With that said, in my experience, many stand-up formats devolve into some version of "the two most talkative people have a conversation for 30 minutes while everyone else listens". I'd probably get more value out of doing a write-up than sitting through a meeting like that. It really depends on the health of the stand-ups on the team.

sdwr 3y ago

LOVE IT. MAYBE IM JUST HIGH

wnolens 3y ago

How about the person who needs the info to do their job should go get it.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Both are useful. But radiating is useful. “I am done on my task anyone need help” is useful. People may not desperately need help that they would go ask, but might appreciate an extra hand.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

That's a great way of putting it. I have found that communication strengths and weaknesses can vary, from person to person, and it's usually a tough sell to come up with "one size fits all" solutions. One example, is that I had an employee who is probably the best engineer that I've ever met, and I've worked with top-shelf people. But he is "on the spectrum," so his verbal communication tends to be in monosyllables, and can sometimes be a bit inscrutable. His emails and specs, on the other hand, were absolute marvels of communication. I had another engineer on the same team, who wasn't quite as brilliant, but he is an awesome "people person." It was always a good idea for me to make the time to chat. His emails tended to sometimes be abrupt, and the information density wasn't that great. Put him in front of a whiteboard, however, with an audience, and it was amazing. As their manager, it was incumbent upon me to deal with each as an individual. They would sometimes have clashes, and I was often the peacemaker.

01100011 3y ago
Not saying this is you, but I'm surprised how many managers seem unaware of the prevalence of social deficiencies among the highest performing engineers. 20 years ago this was just sort of a given. I have to regularly defend a few highly productive but socially caustic engineers who are absolutely essential to our products. Management would love to get rid of them and the problems they cause without realizing no one else would dedicate the mental resources to the sort of complex, deep problems we're trying to solve.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  There’s always a balance to be kept, between high-performing engineers, and team dynamics. Great products are created by great teams. It’s almost impossible to create anything of any meaningful scope, these days, without a team. There are “superman” engineers, like Linus Torvalds, that can create entire shipping architectures, but those are incredibly rare. That said, the myth of the “cookie cutter” engineer is just that: a myth. Some cultures do better at it than others. I worked for a Japanese company, and they came very close to it, but at a cost that most folks here, would find prohibitive. High-performing teams can be difficult to manage. There’s often significant differences in personalities, egos can be high, and everyone has an opinion that is the only “right” one. Great teams require good management. It’s always fun to dis managers, but good ones are force multipliers, like nothing else.

mrwizrd 3y ago

Up to a point, I don't care how people communicate, as long as they do. Not everyone will like this (nor like doing it) - so don't force it - but let each person play to their strengths as much as possible. The good thing about this is it lasts. It's great evidence for your work, thought process, developing communication skills. It's easy to share, reproduce, reuse. I've been in places where this would be a great deterrent for the endless meetings where slightly different groups of people need reassurance about the same things over and over again. Not that they're completely useless, but they're slow, low bandwidth and fatiguing. I wish some of those could have been replaced with a document like this.

01100011 3y ago

Pushing is fine if people can consume it asynchronously, and if you actually stick with it and don't forget to publish frequent updates. In my decades as a SWE, there is one way that worked better than all others: having a competent project manager who individually polls team members with weekly, short(5-10min) 1:1s and then takes care of handling schedule updates, resource assignment and unblocking the dev. This allows devs to focus on what they do best with minimal cognitive load. It requires hiring PMs though, and established managers will bristle at the thought of giving up responsibilities and power to another person. I'm seeing that within my org now. We're slowly learning all the lessons that big companies learned years ago from 70+ years of project management theory, but we're half-assing it because we refuse to accept that PMs and Gantt charts are about the only way for a large org to deliver efficiently and accurately in a mixed hw/sw, multi-team environment.

fragmede 3y ago
Which is frustrating, because on the tech side, "use boring technology" has a couple essays written about it, but when it comes to project management, everyone things they can do better. Unless project management better is your core competency, like if you're Monday.com, (it isn't) you have more important things to burn energy on than reinventing project management from first principles.

teeray 3y ago

You can radiate information and still be told “Cool, I’m so glad you keep everyone in the loop. You still need to attend the standups / retros / IPMs / etc.”

zubairq 3y ago

Totally agree with this although some companies “insist” on the ceremony

Izkata 3y ago

We do standups a couple times a week as a text chat, one person pings everyone as a reminder then we all put in just a couple sentences on what's going on before we go to lunch. Most days someone's message starts a thread where two or more of us chat about something in their update.

Terr_ 3y ago

*squints* However when Javascript is disabled, the font/lettering displayed on this page is, uh... one nobody should ever radiate information in, ever. (A mix of capital letters and enlarged lower-case letters.)