I'm good at working on a team and looping in others. I also find it to be one of the most exhausting parts of software development. It's so difficult to constantly need to get feedback and buy-in from other people, and takes away a lot of the creativity and joy in programming (for me).
Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, just that it's one of the things that makes me dislike working on a team. I actually think this may be one of the factors in burnout for a lot of developers. Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about. It's hard to feel the joy in creating something when you're only a small cog in the development machine, and every decision needs a dozen voices of input.
It's disempowering to feel like you're never able to make a decision yourself, despite supposedly being hired for your expertise in the field.
> Always encourage engineers to show their work as quickly as possible – an engineer on a project should never go more than a week without showing something, and usually it should be more like a day.
"usually it should be more like a day" is bad advice in my opinion, and a likely source of micro management. Let professionals do their work.
> Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about. It's hard to feel the joy in creating something when you're only a small cog in the development machine, and every decision needs a dozen voices of input.
This resonates with me. I think we do our best work when we have the autonomy to apply our expertise.
But at the end of the day, you're not the only one writing that novel. If you have an idea of where the plot is going but your teammates think it's heading somewhere else, it's going to be very problematic.
The other problem is that you _will_ make mistakes. Some could be avoided by leveraging the experience of your teammates. You also won't always strictly have the best ideas. Brainstorming as a group can be a lot more effective than sitting alone for a long time thinking hard about a problem (but also sometimes hard problems need a lot of individual thought).
I suppose my point is that I'm not sure where the happy medium is? I've been on both sides of the "engineer working too long alone before sharing" problem and I think it sucks.
How do we enable engineers to do their best work but also allow our teams to be successful?
The idea that people will better learn from spending several weeks doing something useless (i.e. unnecessary design) instead of having that headed off at the pass is silly, when the specific thing they should be learning is to _not spend several weeks working on something without feedback_.
What if more could be learned / gained from several days or weeks of mistakes in the grander scheme?
I can't tell you how many times I've had to throw out code or designs from longer explorations, but the things I learned in getting there, for the sake of technical purposes, or heck, new ideas I could apply elsewhere in the future, were entirely worth the trouble. This is a pretty fundamental part of increasing skill — to be forced to struggle on one's own, especially if that person's personality is suited to the solitude needed to solve a problem.
Obviously it's smart to avoid larger mistakes or going in the wrong direction for the sake of the product and delivery timelines, but I think it's more realistic to expect these longer adventures to happen, and that an element of trust is necessary to allow that person to not only solve the problem, but grow in that journey.
I don't think that's what GP was suggesting at all.. everyone in the thread agrees that feedback is good.
However, the opposite extreme, spending time in meetings where lot of good ideas get proposed but most of them get killed, because somebody doesn't like a detail, or nobody champions them strongly enough, is not a good learning experience either.
> It's disempowering to feel like you're never able to make a decision yourself, despite supposedly being hired for your expertise in the field.
I'm going through exactly this at the moment. For reasons HN will probably consider fiction, my superiors have started treating me as a toddler that needs oversight on every single decision that needs to be made.
It's something I've been dealing with in therapy, and the way I was able to explain it to her was by saying that I feel like the monkey in the infinite monkey theorem. Never thinking about what you're producing (if you can call it producing at all), just pressing buttons.
It makes me wonder what the point of having me even is, considering they spend so much time solving all my problems for me. I've come really close to saying "ok, go ahead and let me know when it's done" during 40 minute meetings where every minute detail of what I'm supposed to do is discussed by 3 people.
I hate being treated as "just the nerd who pushes the nerd-buttons to make the thing we want work", as if the important part of the work was having the idea and not the execution.
One reason they do this is usually around control. A lot of people feel like they have to be in control of everything in order to be safe. There may be ways you can make them feel safe without needing them to be in control.
Another reason is that until the thing is built, there's nothing to do, so everyone gets involved in that. This happens a lot in startups where they have a "build it and they will come" attitude. It's not true; building a sales/marketing channel doesn't actually need a product at the start, and there's a ton of stuff that needs doing while the product is being built. But it can be difficult explaining this to new founders.
The technique of building the funnel to point to a "sign up for our mailing list and we'll let you know when the product is ready!" link. You get valuable customer insight from the funnel, and if your marketing funnel is working right then you'll get interested customers in your mailing list. If it's not then you can iterate on it, and find something that works (or fail fast if you can't find anything that works).
I'm curious if you still see this working well these days, or what techniques you use to make it work well. I've historically found those types of pages quite useless when we're in a time that anyone can throw up a page to try to validate vaporware and no one wants to give out emails.
I have a feeling that advice was great 10 years ago, and not so great now.
I think I'm in a similar situation and try to find out how to cope with it. The strategy I'm thinking about is - realizing what's happening (as you have articulated wonderfully), anchoring my self-worth else where (writing code / designing original solutions -> pushing what ever that's being discussed by those 3 people to an executable conclusion), finishing and delivering this project asap.
I guess the next step for me is to figure out how to avoid going into such situations (I entered the situation because I was joining a team in an area that I wasn't familiar with and decided to work on an existing project whose owner has a very strong presence and I didn't clarify the specific work item / boundaries clearly in the beginning).
Seems like you got a plan! How to avoid this situation in the future is also something I've talked about in therapy, and while I haven't reached a conclusion on that, a major takeaway from my session is that it's sometimes beneficial to not rationalize uncommon situations, as that can lead to self doubt and unnecessary guilt.
Even if we do get into a similar situation in the future, we'll be much better prepared to not only deal with it, but to identify it before it necessarily becomes a problem. To me that's the important bit.
I usually wouldn't mind, but my theory involves personal information that would make me very easily identifiable. I'm not hiding my online identity by any means, but when it comes to work related things I'd rather not give the impression like I'm throwing dirt on any specific person. What I talked about in my comment is much more of a systemic issue from my perspective, and I feel like a coworker reading it knowing it was written by me could take it personally.
Edit: you're right though, it's definitely nothing like that. 1 job is more than enough for me :D
I'd actually flip that, and say if you can't give daily feedback you're a "bad" developer (I'd probably use "inexperienced" or "new" rather than "bad", because it's a hard mindset shift and it takes time).
In fact, not only should you be able to give daily updates, you should be able to ship functionality on the daily. From first line of code into production and in front of customers should only ever take about 2 to 16 hours of work.
If you can't work at that cadence, you're probably not being as effective as you could be, as a developer. A "good" manager enables you to work like this.
Agreed - I’ve spent months working on a deep tech problem before I could even show a functional core, let alone putting it into production. Some problems take time, experience and foresight to solve and the solution only dovetails at the end.
Exactly .... Agile works pretty well in the "execution" phase when all of the requirements are known upfront. For any kind of R&D agile is not a good fit at all. R&D fits the waterfall model better. Ideally it should be like you do your R&D with waterfall and the agile for execution.
In my aforementioned example, the set of development practices most often called "agile" was neither the right approach nor what we did. Agile as defined as the ideas in the agile manifesto might have been what we did. It would depend on who you asked and whatever their particular axe to grind was.
So I don't know, and quite frankly we didn't really care if we were "agile." All we found was that "agile" is simply too lossy of a descriptor for meaningful conversations about development process.
People writing books and blogs about what they mean when they say "agile" hasn't caused the industry to coalesce on a concise definition. That horse is out of the barn, and I don't expect we're getting it back.
You can be as cynical as you like, the general idea of (very) quickly iterating to stay focused on what your customer wants is a proven and effective way of build software.
It's not as effective if you're not working in software, or at least I don't know how effective it is, but that's not what this submission is about.
This may be true if you have no aspirations for your software beyond what your customer can imagine in the present. Almost seems like a methodology that has internalized learned helplessness.
If you think the process I'm describing here is, "Ask customer what they want, do exactly what they say." then I'm not being very clear.
"Don't assume that your team should build what it's told to build. Instead assume the opposite: nobody really knows what you should build, not even the people asking for it. Your team's job is to take those ideas, test them, and learn what you should really build." [0]
That's your team's job. Not to make guesses by assuming you know what's best, not to do what they're told by customers, but to run tests and use results to inform next steps. That's the entire purpose of a development team, and you simply cannot do this without a quick iterative cycle.
Actually, "my" team's job is 1/2 asking the customer, and 1/2 not asking the customer so we can invent stuff they haven't thought of and ideally can't/won't think of.
I think the reason people aren't fully agreeing with you is that there's a lot of important stuff where a quick iterative cycle in front of a customer eliminates the possibility of high-value outcomes.
That's only true if you're interacting with your customer in some weird, subservient way that has nothing to do with anything I've said at all.
The point you're trying to make isn't the novel insight I think you're trying to present it as. Of course you don't just build what your customer asks for blindly, of course you design with the future in mind, none of that is precluded whatsoever by iterating quickly to provide value and test what your customer needs.
The point I'm trying to make is a corollary to “A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain". It's an acknowledgement that sometimes the customer is bikeshedding from start to finish. It's the recognition that rapid iteration can mean a short planning horizon that traps an architecture in a local maximum that won't deliver on business aspirations.
In a past life I had developed 3 generations of tooling to support a certain complex and information-dense task that was essential to the business. Generational change was not incremental and required months/years exploring the problem domain and prototyping and backtracking and intentionally not consulting anyone. If I came out of stealth too early I'd be directed back to a gen 1 approach that was functionally and architecturally exhausted and could not meet the business needs at a reasonable cost. By the time I was done I understood the problem domain better than the business did. (I will stipulate that most of the time this is a bad approach--but sometimes it's absolutely necessary.)
My (aspirational) purpose at work is to surprise my customer with valuable and insightful solutions that they could not have arrived at incrementally, or with their methods, or with their team. Surely you can see how this is in direct conflict with rapid iteration in collaboration with them?
Except you're not inventing things, you're discovering things. That's a big difference. The best way to discover if something works, is to put it into the hands of customers as fast as possible while minimizing your expense at doing so.
I didn't know I was coming across as cynical? Just saying that I have no idea if we were "agile" because the term is so damn malleable. I do know we weren't a cookie-cutter copy of the popular SCRUM inspired workflow that's commonly just called "agile" regardless of whether the team is being "Agile."
Ah okay. SCRUM is the square to Agile's rectangle.
You're "lowercase a" agile if you operate under the prioritization outlined in the Agile Manifesto. I think most of the people who've found consistent success with agile would say that's what matters is more about that than about XP or SCRUM or Kanban or whatever.
Those systems can help, but to be agile is to focus more on individuals, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness and less on processes, documentation, contracts, and plans.
I hesitate even to reword the items in the manifesto, just because I know it took a lot of very smart people a good while to agree to the specific wording, and it's seemingly stood the test of time.
I strongly disagree with this. This is an approach to development that encourages an extremely limited and short term view on development that leads to low quality software and unhappy developers. It's also only remotely possible with a certain type of software.
If this approach results in you taking limited and short term views of development, or low quality software with unhappy developers, you're doing it wrong.
Breaking down work into small, day-or-two chunks is a team effort that the developers are doing together, alongside the customer (representative, usually).
Not all development fits nicely into day-or-two chunks. Forcing all your work to fit nicely into this type of mold is an arbitrary restriction that serves no real purpose except to check all the necessary scrum boxes, give the illusion of extra productivity, and allow for micro-management. It ends up being completely antithetical to thinking deeply and long term about the the code you're writing.
I've worked on teams that run the full gamut here. Those that did scrum and enforced "an every task should be one or two days" did not ship more or higher quality software than those that didn't, and the development teams were consistently more stressed and less satisfied with their work.
What do you think of the idea that providing finished work on an every-day-or-two cadence allows you to collect feedback from your customers in a way that keeps your work focused and relevant to their needs?
You can gather plenty of useful feedback to keep your work focused and relevant on cadences other than one or two days. What kind of customer even wants to provide feedback that often? That sounds awful, not to mention being a poor user experience, where users are treated like beta testers, with half baked features constantly pushed out the door.
This also ignores the fact that there is a huge amount of important work that is effectively invisible to the end user, but is absolutely crucial. The workflow you're suggesting disincentives the team from working on those things, and may even punish them for it (as they are not shipping customer visible features).
There is no such thing as work that's absolutely crucial and not customer facing, so it makes perfect sense to disincentivize work that's shaped as you describe.
And before you try to list off work you think fits this category, I urge you to think about how that work could affect a customer's experience.
I didn't say "not costumer facing", I said "invisible". A lot of important work is something a customer will have no idea exists until it goes wrong. If you've done your job right, it will remain invisible forever.
Because it's invisible, what's the point of arbitrarily shipping it in one-to-two day chunks to "gather user feedback"? Be willing to take the time to do hard things right. I'm not proposing you spin your wheels for ages on something, and I'm generally in favor of shipping early and often, it's just trying to fit every different shaped problem into the same process that doesn't work for me.
If it impacts a user negatively if it's done wrong, that sounds pretty damn visible to me. I can think of plenty of ways to show a customer how we fail gracefully or not at all despite certain negative events. Some customers may even value that very highly, depending on the use case.
And I get that this idea may not work for you, but it works for a lot of very successful people, the luminaries of our field. You're arguing against Ward Cunningham, Robert C. Martin, James Shore, Martin Fowler, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Bill Wake, Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas, et. al.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. [0]
> If it impacts a user negatively if it's done wrong, that sounds pretty damn visible to me.
Solve the problem at hand in the way that suits that particular problem best. Don't be a slave to a rigid process. Don't burn out your developers with a dysfunctional system.
Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
What do you think an "interaction" is? I'm literally saying you need to have more user interactions, and you're saying you need to have fewer.
Delivering software to your customer is an interaction. You need more of those, not less of those.
"Stories are "just right" when the whole team can finish four to ten per week, or about six on average." [0]
"For stories that are too big, work with your customers to split them into smaller stories." [0]
If you think it's just "Everything gets shipped every day or two and no other changes get made to how the team functions." then I have not been clear. It's a massive mindset shift, and it comes with a number of other important changes, all of which are best read from the experts themselves, rather than interpreted through me in an HN comment.
Suffice it to say, it's all been accounted for. Agile works.
I'll just reiterate what I said above, because I feel there's more to the problem at hand than "number of customer interactions":
> Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
I don't plan to continue the conversation at this point, because it's not productive.
Why not just say "Agile Works Sometimes"? Or "Agile Can Work"? Because when "Agile Works" is touted, and then things go wrong, people get blamed, vs the actual processes and concepts. If "Agile Works", but we're not getting the results, then someone must be doing something wrong - can't be "Agile" that's wrong (for this scenario).
"Agile" software development doesn't work when there's 5 non-technical stakeholders and 1 software developer.
>There is no such thing as work that's absolutely crucial and not customer facing, so it makes perfect sense to disincentivize work that's shaped as you describe
I took a week to refactor some nasty crap a few months ago. No customer noticed it.
I was rather happy to lower the estimated time for a bunch of other tasks from weeks to days/hours after doing it.
Now you can argue that was not "absolutely crucial", but then we'll just disagree on what that means.
We asked our customer to include a small piece of information for every request they made to us to better serve them. It took five years for our customer to make the change. A one-or-two day cadence didn't make sense for us, nor apparently, for our customer.
Oh, our customer? It's the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company. They don't move fast. And as a result, neither do we.
let's have a meeting about how to break down our investigation of the unexplained segfaults in nginx that occasionally happen in our cdn into chunks that deliver value daily!
And then let's have daily progress meetings to report on the status of each chunk of the investigation! Please update Jira at least once a day!
This is a great example of the perverse incentives built into the "everything should be done in one day chunks that you report on daily". The team is incentivized to ignore highly important but challenging / hidden work, and instead only focus on things that are highly visible to management.
I think the point is that the only work that matters is work that will improve the customer experience in some way. That could be infrastructure/stability work, or that could be visible front-end work. Not sure how you're using the word "hidden", but that's my reading from this discussion. Either of those things are important/valued by management probably. But none of that should imply or require micromanagement in a high-trust engineering org.
This is really not that hard: "Yesterday I looked for correlations between segfaults and hardware vendors. I did not find a correlation, and my deliverable for the day is narrowing the search space. Today I will set up a micro cluster of random traffic to try to reproduce the crash. Tomorrow I will look for patterns in request bodies and stack traces."
Seriously, I feel you should write a blog post about this types of reporting strategies that describe the work that are both accurate and palatable to management (and perhaps most importantly avoid despise from other developers).
For larger pieces of work, some times it takes me more than a day to just figure out what's where and where I can even get started. I guess I can still give updates daily, but it'll just be "still investigating".
Hell, I've fixed 1 liner bugs that have taken me a week to figure out.
...
- ask for help
- try to explain how it's supposed to work
- try to explain how it's not working
- Listen to them come up with all the ideas that I've already ruled out
- Try to explain why their preferred idea has already been
ruled out or is not actually relevant to the problem
- conclude they still don't understand the problem or even
how this part of the system works
- go ahead and just solve the problem myself
...
before it's OK to stop "asking for help", and just fix the damn thing?
I could see this the other way, where the reason this path happens is because of a problem with how the team operates so others are not in the loop on the problem or , even worse, the entire system. I think what the parent is proposing is trying to combat that entire issue
Possibly in an ideal environment. But expecting the same someone to work with me for an entire week to either debug or design usually hasn't been realistic. Keep talking with different people, or the same person on and off has a huge context cost.
What I've found to be a good middle ground is take some time to think things through myself first, at least in rough strokes. Then have someone else come in and review the work. There is a balance of doing too much vs too little yourself of course, but I don't think there is a hard and fast rule (e.g. 1 day worth) for it.
I'm confused about why you're suggesting the only options are "work together for an entire week" or "don't keep anyone updated about what you're working on for a week".
There are a lot of ways to keep your team updated, but more importantly, it's frankly arrogant to think you can or even should tackle any problem on your own.
I've been in this situation many times too, but I have to say it feels like a weakness. When a single person works on a problem I see improvements being left on the table compared to when two people effectively collaborate. I've experienced this in a wide range of skill/experience levels so I don't think that is the problem.
That said, I don't know how to change the situation if you have devs with skillsets that don't seem to overlap much, which seems inevitable for some companies
In general I agree, where possible and where it makes sense getting others involved early is a good thing. Somethings are more solo work however, at least for a while to get things oriented. Some times it takes time to gather enough context to even start to express a problem space to others. Not everything is just adding a button to a web page.
Thanks for this comment. It pretty much confirms my hunch that I would not be happy in a "developer" role. I have done quite a lot work that requires writing code. But often it has been projects with literally months before there has been anything that anyone might call functionality.
This creates unnecessary exaggerated expectations. There is only so much you can accomplish in one day, some functionality take way loger than that. We don't want to ship half baked solutions, but we are expected to do so... In order to accomplish that sacrifices have to be made on everything else that is important in software development: proper testing, documentation, refactoring and a clean codebase. Its perfectly valid for a developer to give the update "I am still working on ..." / "I am still trying to figure out:..." / "I am in the process of preparing the codebase for this update" for a certain period of time.
I think most people are salty about your comment because they fail to see the subtle difference between:
1) "Everyday you should ship something"
2) "At the end of each day you should be able to tell your line manager in a clear and concise way exactly what you did; if you can't you've done nothing."
2) does not mean ship code: you could have spent 12 hours thinking and reading code. But if you can explain i.e provide a daily update, then you have actually done something, and not spent a day on slack sending memes.
i've had days where I did nothing but read code trying to understand a bug, and then my whole contribution was 1 line of config or 2 lines of code. But I have a clear achievement: I understood an area of the code much better and i have a fix.
Having daily updates to your manager also forces you to not slack and work on the most important problems: otherwise you might be tempted to work on sth fun but not mission critical.
At the end of the day, people should do as they wish.
Or you can hire good developers who value their work and want to ship high quality software, and get out of their way so they can get things done. Your method seems to be treating your developers like children who will refuse to get work done if somebody isn't watching over their shoulder. If that's happening, then I think you have a hiring problem.
Many software developers are not that effective at making rapid progress (for whatever reasons), so if you are actually highly skilled and highly motivated you can produce multiple of the progress of some coworkers. But generally management doesn't deliver high performers who deliver multiples of progress multiples of salary, instead they fight to keep it to small percentage rises and don't even fire the deadwood!
This (mis)management destroys intrinsic motivation of high performers and the manager is left with deadwood and skilled but unmotivated people and some average performers, which try to micromanage to get results out of.
Yeah, I think it's telling that folks here assumed I meant "give daily feedback" as in "tell your boss what you're up to".
It's probably a lot more effective to keep your team up to date on what you're doing, than it is to keep your boss up to date on what you're doing, and that's where I was focusing.
And yeah, while I did say "ship functionality", you're right, the real value is producing something you can show users. I prefer that ends up being code, because otherwise users are hard to pin down, but it doesn't have to be.
Finally yes, people should do as they wish, but with the understanding that if the thing they'd prefer to work on isn't the thing the team they're working on needs, that the team should be able to go find someone who does want to do the thing the team needs. It's not really fair to drag a team down because one person isn't having fun.
There are engineers who can produce on a constance cadence, and there are engineers who need to let the pressure build until a dam breaks and the code comes rushing out. The latter engineers can still be good engineers. It all depends on how your brain works.
The systems supporting shipping daily should exist either way, though.
Due to some turnover I ended up working mostly independently for about a year at a previous job. Nobody cared one bit about the code I wrote, just the end result. Overall it was great! I was surprised at how productive I was in that time. I'm not a partiularly amazing developer, but I managed to ship a ton of work that held up quite well.
Obviously there are limits to this approach and it wouldn't work well for solving really difficult problems, but really, 99% of day-to-day development work isn't that special. A motivated and conscientious developer with average skills can get an awful lot done with minimal distractions.
Sounds like high bus-factor. Were you also expected to pick up "alien" code dumps as other programmers left? Were you happy/efficient working with these unseen code bases?
I had a few coworkers working on very related areas that I coordinated with, plus we did have some contingency plans so one of us could step into the others place in a pinch. But that was a weakness and things could have been rough if I had been hit by a bus.
An alien code dump is basically how I ended up in the situation. My boss left abruptly and a bunch of work he had been handling himself suddenly fell to me. At first it was really stressful trying to get a handle on everything, but once I got over the hump it was quite nice.
The trick is to make the "right" decision yourself while helping people feel like they were heard and had a chance to give their input.
From my experience, people don't actually want to control the output of everything, they just want the opportunity to be heard. What you do with it from there doesn't matter as much, so long as the desired outcome is "correct". If the desired outcome is not correct however... then you have to justify all of the input that you didn't act on.
The tricky part for me is that sometimes I did actually need that input from others on the team. Sometimes it's all just bikeshedding and a waste of time, but sometimes it does help me from going down a rabbit hole that might have wasted weeks of development.
But regardless, I find that whole process exhausting and disempowering, even if there is sometimes a benefit from it.
As much as I love the feeling of writing something clever or that feels really well done, I hate the feeling of realizing it's the wrong thing even more.
Agreed, and that's why I mentioned I think you shouldn't just silo yourself. That doesn't seem to work either. I don't really have a good answer or alternative, more just pointing out how the dynamics of team based software development seem to be optimized towards burning out programmers. I don't know how to fix it, but it seems to be a problem.
A first step is probably treating your developers skilled specialists (hopefully you've hired a good team, of course), and not just code monkeys who have to show their manager a progress report every single day.
You do know how to fix it - you don't loop in others until you want to.
The problem is our industry, forcing developers to exhaust their energy on pair programming in open offices. May as well be in a daycare center with children all around.
Ugh, my worst development job ever was one that had mandatory full time pair programming. Full time pairing is one of the worst ideas ever conceived in the software world.
Pair programming should be optional and for whoever wants to get team members (especially juniors) up to speed and on the same page. It could be very productive but like all methods/tools that are shoved down everyone's throat and forced to apply them, I could see them being a disaster.
I actually found it quite helpful, not just for getting up to speed. After moving to another division of that company that didn't employ full-time pair programming, I saw code of noticeably lower quality being produced. That said, it was emotionally exhausting for me to do full-time pairing and I'm not sure I'd go back to it.
In good teams I've been able to bounce ideas off my teammates without pressure. They'd come back with things I hadn't thought of, I'd iterate and they'd respond, etc. After this I left the discussion with a better understanding of the problem, still ultimately in the driver's seat for solving the problem. Getting feedback in these situations is empowering.
In bad teams I end up defending myself from people who want to leave their mark on what I'm doing, or just have different taste than me. Getting feedback in these situations is frustrating and demoralizing.
Completely agree with this, and this is why I simply don't loop in others.
I wrote a program the way I think it should be. Clean code, super easy to understand, super low complexity. Anyone can understand what it does.
Thats fun for me, when the code is very simple, reads like English and there are no complex functions.
I don't do real software engineering however (just business intelligence and python programs to extract and load data). But when it comes to looping in colleagues, I avoid it for the same reasons as above.
> Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about. It's hard to feel the joy in creating something when you're only a small cog in the development machine, and every decision needs a dozen voices of input.
I believe this is why books most often have a single author. A solution to this, is to agree on the global design, and then have different developers own different "modules" of the design. These modules should be treated like third-party libraries (and should act like third-party libraries vis-a-vis of their documentation and API).
Basically, microservices can exist within your code if you know how to modularize well.
I don't like the analogy to writing a novel because in a novel you do want suspense, drama, surprises and generally a non-ordinary flow of the story. With source-code, you want none of that. The whole process is geared to remove it. And we should not deplore that but embrace it. Maybe there will be non-conventional things, because you have non-conventional requirements, or you're trying something new, but that should be the exception.
> Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about.
I use this exact description when discussing balancing creative side of the value creation project processes, design and development over the value extraction side of products. Small empowered teams with an almost startup mindset is key, but even more is time to play to find solutions that can make products that are more like friends than enemies to people.
Engineering/development, creative and product design/development are creative fields, a value creation action and activity.
Business, finance, marketing do not see many parts of this as a creative action but a production line, a value extraction action and activity.
A large problem is the misunderstanding that new projects are value creation not just value extraction, and rely on creativity at inception. Once they are established they can be more patterned and predictable and ramped up, but initially the creative phase is the key to making good products. Smaller teams, more empowering of the people that can create products that get the early points right. Taking long enough in the "open" mode before the "closed" mode is key, essentially prototyping and play is needed, but rarely available in the modern processes and project management systems where engineering is simply "production". There is a pre-production and post-production that is usually left out.
For instance in game development, pushing through a project process before the main game mechanic is "fun" is a problem. You can't get creative on a forced schedule just as you couldn't write a book that way or come up with a novel new concept in some software app that should be a friend to users. The prototype of the project or product must have some time to simmer and iterate on. The first thing managers do is cut that time and sometimes throw too many people at it resulting in Mythical Man Month level mistakes leading to too many cooks. When a prototype or early product has value mostly figured out, then it can go into a more robust process to create variations or iterations. The initial value creation will always be wildly hard to estimate.
Good examples of this in software are programming languages, usually it is one person for a long time then others join in to ramp up when the vibe of the language is set. Same with books, movies, games, anything really. You can't have 10 people drawing the same illustration or writing the same book, the parallel part can be multiple people doing their own to see which is best, but you can't have them all in on one creative project without it being confused.
I have seen companies turn into faction based wars when varying groups don't clearly respect the value creation and value extraction balance, the value creation MUST come before the value extraction. The open mode before the closed mode.
A great talk by John Cleese on the "open" and "closed" mode [1] helps describe this, which I recommend and hope everyone I work with watches. Value creators need time and creativity to create value both in the "open" mode to explore/prototype/build and the "closed" mode when things are decided to ship. The value extractors always want people in the controlled "closed" mode only, the "open" mode is non quantifiable and seen as almost an enemy to the value extractors but is key to creating products that are so good they are like friends to value creators and the people using the products.
The value extractors are who Fred Brooks talked about in the Mythical Man month [2], they think things are a factory with already figured out steps, when you are in a field that uses originality, creativity, the mind over the physical, it isn't like a factory or supply line. Every single project manager needs to know about the Mythical Man month.
Here's a great point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [3] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge. This point is more about larger companies than new projects but the same forces that stop innovation at large companies also kill it in any sized companies when there is no value creation / value extraction balance.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Modern project management processes promote shallow change over deeper dives. They create a risk profile for anyone looking to bring new innovations that might be hard to estimate because it will be a perceptual hit. These rigid tightly wound processes are horrible for creativity. Agile itself has been captured with tightly wound controlling mechanisms like the daily standup, and so much weight around trying new things as well as perceptual hits for that. Anyone truly trying to make new value will be seen as an enemy to these systems. Agile was created to give product people more margin to build, but it has been coopted into being used to control creativity which cannot be controlled, it simply disappears when there is no open mode and only a closed mode or nothing but value extraction.
All of this is spelled out in "How Software Companies Die" as well [4]. I wonder when if these realities will make it into the business education curriculum.
I don't have a lot to add except to say I loved this reply. I think a lot of people might miss it since it's down in the replies, maybe you could expand on it, and make it a blog post at some point?
Thanks, your post also resonated when you mentioned exactly the way I see it. I will be writing up more on this as it is a theme of mine and have quite a bit here at HN, and other areas where value creators are.
Good news is there are lots of us like it, the problem is since the value creators rarely control the funding and sometimes lose the power to implement these the right way before internal faction wars start. However at all good product and all good companies, you'll see the respect of value creation and the open mode. One day maybe business/finance will see it with the same value.
A couple of points as well, there is an internal and external view of a product. The external view is really all that matters, the market perception. The internal perceptions and processes if they are made too tight or the main focus, the external product suffers. This is one reason I think remote companies that are smaller, or having small teams, do better. They focus on their external view over the internal. Most remote work is virtual just like most communication today and especially the communication with the people that use products. The external view needs to be the main focus as well as simplicity, but also the "friend" aspect of a product. Using a product should be a simple joy, a friendly part of your day. External focused setups work the best to achieve that.
> "usually it should be more like a day" is bad advice in my opinion, and a likely source of micro management. Let professionals do their work.
In my team we always publish some form of status report at the end of the day. This could be a pull request or a list of open questions on the task. For us that is less about micro management and more about bus factor: If a person calls in sick the next day the rest of the team wouldn't be able to continue that persons tasks without this process.
I understand that this can be detrimental when it feels like micro management. But I believe it is more a question of framing.
> "usually it should be more like a day" is bad advice in my opinion, and a likely source of micro management.
Depends what "showing" means - on the other end is doing all prototyping/exploration as pair programming - thus immediately "showing" work to at least one other engineer.
> "the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others"
> "For more senior engineers, it can happen because they like to work on their own and may be overconfident in finding solutions. It can also happen if the team culture is toxic and engineers fear getting criticism early in the design process."
Not saying the above statement is incorrect but here is an alternative explanation that is also viable: Senior Engineers are often hired into large large projects so that the company has the capability to address emergencies or modify the existing system accurately as it is often more difficult to work on a large complex code base than to build a new one from scratch. Those engineers sometimes never get to work on greenfield projects and "doing too much work on their own before looping in others" is a way to scratch this itch without the opportunity being taken away prematurely. It also offers chance to produce memorable work as nobody remembers the set of 3 point tasks you completed ten sprints ago.
You are not wrong. I generally sell as a mercenary, and prefer it that way - I've been doing this longer than some of my managers have been alive. I'm paid just as well if they want to "pair program" or jira the whole process, but yeah, you hired me to fix a problem - if you are the problem, I get paid just the same.
Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer
> Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun.
Ha! Yeah, I worked on a really cool project for a charity a few years ago: "How many hours is this going to cost us this week, you were working like a warrior?" "35"
A friend of mine is a criminal defence lawyer. I get the impression he really enjoys his work – he gets to meet a lot of people he never normally would (bikie gang members, terrorists, murderers, drug dealers, drug addicts, etc) – and he feels safe in doing so (he tells me that defendants trying to harm their own lawyers is quite rare, rare enough that he isn't worried about it).
Once, at a work function (previous employer), I met one of the lawyers from the contracts department. He was telling me how he used to live in a rural area doing agricultural real estate transactions, now he had moved to the big city to do in-house contracts review for a multinational software company. He was a "top performer" (indeed, this was a function to reward people who'd been nominated as "top performers" by their management)–but he didn't give me the impression he really loved what he did, more that he was just doing it to support his family.
I think criminal defense is a great service to humanity. It's hard to estimate how many are wrongfully accused, but surely there are many. Further, things like the plea bargain system or parole regularly lead innocent people to proclaim their guilt. It's very messed up and must be a terrible trauma for some. Lastly, I think even guilty people deserve humane treatment and perhaps forgiveness.
I would agree here, on the condition of rehabilitation.
Obviously our "justice system", isn't.
Edit: Speaking of the US above, no experience or knowledge about other countries systems. It appears I've found a new gap in my knowledge, anyone have a good intro to how courts work in their country?
In Germany, they use the inquisitorial system. There is no jury, only judges. In smaller matters, it's one professional judge and two lay judges. In bigger matters it's 3 professional judges and five lay judges. The professional judges hold the ultimate decision, and the lay judges advise (but they do have a lot of influence). And of course one can appeal.
There is no such thing as plea bargaining (which is considered a perversion of justice) or bail (which is considered to be jailing the poor). People are rarely jailed pending trial (unless their place of residence cannot be established, or they're considered a flight risk - a very high bar to pass). There's no "perp walk" or handcuffs or any of that humiliation stuff (unless you actually ARE being a pain). After the verdict, you're usually given a month or two to tie up your affairs outside before being ordered by mail to report to prison.
The relationship between lawyers is one of cooperation (albeit with the agenda of pushing towards their point of view). The purpose of the court proceedings is to get to the truth of the matter. There are no theatrics, no grand speeches, no "chewbacca" defense. Withholding evidence or deliberately hampering the other side is severely frowned upon. "Winning" the case is not the point; representing your side well is. Lawyers have no election aspirations, and thus no public to impress with their prosecutorial prowess. One cannot become a judge without years of training and a degree (there's no such thing as elected judges).
The result is a very calm, organized court proceeding, because everyone involved knows the law and is committed to it. You can't bamboozle with doublespeak, shady arguments or unproven methods because there's no "man on the street" juror to deceive; only the judges, who are trained to know better.
Anyone can sit in on a proceeding (I've done so). There's very little ceremony, and often it's just a bunch of people sitting around conference tables in a small room.
My lawyer friend and I are both Australians, and he works as a criminal lawyer in the Australian legal system.
The US inherited the basics of its legal system from that of England. Australia did too, along with many other countries. So at a very high level, the basics are the same. But, there has been a lot of divergent evolution, so as we drill down into the details lots of differences come up.
I think one huge difference is not really legal but social – Australia has always been a less violent society, with less violent crime and less social conflict than the US has, which reduces political pressure for punitiveness in the legal system. On a per capita basis, the US homicide rate is 5 times that of Australia, and while these numbers go up and down, I think it has been consistently significantly higher than Australia's, for many decades.
I don’t really know. My uneducated impression is that Australia’s prisons are harsher than those of many Western/Northern European countries but not as bad as those of the US-but I don’t know of any hard data on the issue. Rehabilitation is officially an objective and of course the prison system makes some attempts but we can always question if they do enough.
I have a theory that lawyers in many ways are not unlike a security engineer:
you get the satisfaction of exploiting the system, bending the rules to your advantage, making the impossible work. and when you’re good at your job, you get paid well ( lawyer by many more times of course )
I believe it has one of the lowest job satisfaction of any white collar jobs. I've wondered that is folks didnt have the massive student loans to pay off early on if they would stick with it.
I can't speak to the general case, but I know that my brother didn't. As an ADA (living in an expensive US city) his salary is less than a first-year public school teacher with a bachelor's degree.
Lawyers aren't tracking & billing in 6 or 10 minute increments to punish their clients, they do it so you only pay for the time they actually spent on your account. It's beneficial that, if they get a 5 minute phone call while preparing a document for you, you don't get billed for the time they were on the phone.
Yeah, it's wicked beneficial that you're paying $40 or even $80 just to say hello and ask how their weekend was. I understand that from the other side, talking to you is working and they wouldn't be doing it if they weren't getting paid. But when one's rate is in consultant territory (as opposed to lower contractor rates based on bulk time) then that type of overhead should already be built in. And sure billing increments are theoretically orthogonal to billing for overhead, but it's galling to see "1.1 hours" knowing that 6 minutes of that was overhead that didn't get rounded down.
OK... so don't call someone who bills you for their time and make smalltalk. That seems pretty self-evident.
If I start a meeting with a consulting software engineer and spend the first 5 minutes making small talk, that's fine, but my company is gonna pay for that time. The same thing is true for lawyers.
Yes, that's the obvious conclusion. But surely you can see how clients needing to deliberately refrain from standard pleasantries doesn't contribute to lawyers having a good reputation.
Haha I like everything you said except the "pair program" bit.
From my point of view as both a programmer and an employer, this is the cleanest way to make sure knowledge transfers between short-term and long-term team members.
I vocalize a lot (in my head) during the development process, and I've noticed that when I have to engage with another person during this time I start vocalizing audibly, which is where the problems start. The other person gets confused because I'm speaking the snippets and half-ideas that are passing through my mind at the moment (and the internal jargon I've developed over the decades), and it degenerates into long sequences of explaining my every move, most of which would have been quickly dismissed internally had I not had to stop to explain them.
Or they misunderstand the path I'm taking for something else that won't work and interrupt me, and then I have to stop to explain first that it's not what they think (which is hard), and then explain the path I'm actually going down (harder), and why I think it's a good idea (hardest). It's like having a backseat driver, and just as infuriating.
Every interruption shatters parts of the intricate glass tendrils that comprise the complex model in my mind, and then I have to rebuild them again before I can continue thinking. The creative process gets completely disrupted and there's zero chance of flow. This is fine if I'm teaching someone since the material is well known and there's no creativity required. But during actual work it's a productivity black hole. Death by a thousand cuts.
> But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe.
This is true. I have been on both sides of the pairing equation. I am currently on a team that pairs too often and I am annoyed on a daily basis because I could have been utilizing that same time for actual work.
So yes, it's going to be difficult to convince me but feel free to take a stab.
Okay, there are three other common scenarios where I have observed pairing to be immensely valuable:
1. You are in the middle of a death march and pairing with a team mate gives both of you the moral fortitude to keep going (and keep your programs relatively correct and relatively secure).
2. You are working on a tedious but difficult task and working with a team mate makes it so that you are less likely to make mistakes despite the tedium (as well as gives you the moral fortitude to continue with the task).
3. You are working on a difficult problem and you have a team mate that you can truly collaborate with to find solutions neither of you would have found on your own. (The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.)
In any of these cases, it is important to pair with someone compatible with you. And you can build compatibility over time.
All the above examples do not describe my day-to-day experience. Are you literally on a death march 5 days a week, every week? Are you literally on a tedious but difficult task 5 days a week, every week? Are you literally working on such a difficult problem that it needs true collaborators 5 days a week, every week?
I specifically want to talk about - The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.
Do you think they really produced all they did by pairing together? In my experience, the best things were produced by independent thinking, collaborating on experiments and trusting each others decisions. Not by actual pairing on the screen together.
Who said you have to pair five days a week every week? That doesn't sound reasonable. Very few things should be taken to an extreme like that.
For Dean-Ghemawat, I think they produced many great things by pairing on the same screen together. They also obviously did good work independently of each other.
My first job out of university, I was promoted to manager in my mid 20s. One of the senior engineers reporting to me had kids older than me.
Now, they were PAID a lot more than me ...
The first thing they taught me was that it wasn't my job to do the work, because it didn't matter how smart I was, I didn't have almost 30 years experience.
Anecdote, but this was the approximate case on the team I worked on at Google (Manager in his mid 30s, team mostly in their 20s with one in his 50s). It happens. Actually, it was nice to see, as some evidence of non-ageism.
I hope to no longer need to work by the time I'm 50, but nobody knows what the future will bring, so I'd certainly like to have the option just in case!
Not as extreme, but not far off. I believe I'm the youngest person on the team I manage.
I've spent a lot of time in startups - including way too many hours in my 20's working on side-hustles (wife was in med school, so it was kind of my thing to do). I've ended up in a situation where my technical skills are strong (but not the best on my team), but my business/startup knowledge is much better so I can help to ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful/valuable outcomes.
I used to work for a company in which employees in some departments would do 2 or 3 year "shifts" as managers. When your shift was up, you went back to a regular employee in the same department, and someone you had been managing took over. It was not uncommon to have a young manager, but not everyone was eligible, obviously.
I think it prevented the "us vs. them" mentality from creeping in, and I got the impression that most managers were eager to return to production work. There were dedicated managers higher up the ladder, of course.
They're still doing exceedingly well, so it must not have hurt them. I think it takes a small but stable company to pull it off. Maybe they have stopped doing it by now, I don't know.
These people cared about their work a lot, and they enjoyed doing it. Not sure which way the causation goes though...
Edit to add: the rotating managers I'm referring to were doing budgets and performance reviews, not creating business strategies.
I’m also intrigued. I’ve seen this happen several times but always de facto: someone would become a manager as an experiment, try it for a few years, and then (usually) decide to stop.
No mil. experience myself, but I'd say that while the officers may technically 'manage' the NCO's, that with few exceptions it is the NCO's that actually get things done.
It is better if the managers of technical people are technical themselves. Otherwise you wind up with the Dilbert "pointy-haired-boss" syndrome. The non-technical manager is extremely easy to bullshit, so it's better for the company in almost all ways.
An experienced manager is not easy to bullshit regardless. Sometimes a non-technical manager is better for many reasons. Having business domain experience can be just as valuable
Yep; though enough time working for companies tends to instill some knowledge and understanding of the business side of things, and as long as understanding of the business correlates with their own influence it tends to work out okay.
Management is weird in that understanding of the tech side of things doesn't correlate with influence.
When you think you're fooling someone, you're really only fooling yourself.
It doesn't take a genius to know who is doing the work and who is looking for every excuse to be 'blocked'.
Managers simply know that they can't hire or fire and that calling someone on their bullshit would accomplish nothing, so they say nothing.
Managers are masters of soft power. Soft power is very hard for engineering/techie types to understand, which is why it works so well on them, because they don't even understand the game they're a part of :)
It is rather unusual for someone to be called out on their bullshit. I’ve been working for 25 years and only seen it happen a couple times. Most people are conflict avoidant, so the perpetually “blocked” individuals are allowed to stay that way. I know people who’ve essentially done no real work for years. Who’s the fool here? Those of us picking up all the slack.
I have a decorated history of calling people on their bullshit. I have the 'you have been let go' and negative resume references to prove it.
The fool is the person not understanding the game they're playing.
Techies who do other people's work are perpetuating the game they despise - they are indeed fools.
Middle managers who perpetuate the game are smart, because it is their job to perpetuate the game. It is not their job to change the rules of the game - that's the job of the techies who can refuse to 'pick up the slack', let targets fail repeatedly and signal to upper management that the game isn't working, forcing them to change the game, which the middle managers will once again perpetuate, because that is their job.
I called someone out, and pushed back on someone who wanted me to do their work. This was a useless "scrum master" type who couldn't even update a spreadsheet for one of his weekly reports. I explained to him that that updating those spreadsheets was not an engineering responsibility, but I would be happy to provide him with input. I also complained about him to my manager. He was one of those guys who couldn't even copy-and-paste.
They just harassed some other person into doing it. He was a bit passive aggressive about it on some future calls: "Bob doesn't want to update the spreadsheet, so I will have Alice do it!" Anyway, nice guy, but didn't do any work at all, and he's gone now.
I prefer fairly non-technical engineering managers who stick to their lane. Their job should be to help manage the project schedule (in coordination with and guided by technical leads and product leadership), coordinate with other teams, coordinate with middle and upper management, and help their reports with whatever career development they need.
They should not be making technology decisions or specifying how the work gets done. They should trust their reports to not bullshit (and if that trust is broken, those reports should be fired). I think having a technical background can be helpful for these managers, but I don't think it's strictly necessary, and they should be doing essentially zero technical work as a part of their management job.
I've found managers who are like this to be incredibly useful and productive, and a pleasure to work with. Managers who want to get involved in technical decisions just get in the way and cause problems. Unfortunately a lot of newly-promoted former engineers can't let go of the technical work.
The problem with the "non-technical manager = easy to bullshit" idea is that it's basically the engineer's equivalent of the "engineer = assembly line cog who shouldn't be exposed to anything but their JIRA tickets" idea for bad management. It's what you find in poorly-run or excessively cheap organizations, but it's hardly an upper bound.
A few years ago, I was a "team lead" at the age of 27 managing a team that included one developer over 50 at a big TV network company.
We're both at different companies nowadays, but I've been trying to get him started at my current company's team (which I am senior on, but not a lead) for a while now and he's considering it!
I'm ... late 40s. Have been paid for working on software development in some capacity for... 28 years (first paid contract was 1993), and did hobby/amateur for several years before that.
I'm contracting with a couple different companies, and one of them... the others on the team range from ... 27-32. So... I've been doing professional/paid development work longer than most of them have been alive, certainly longer than any of them have been adults. The manager(s) I interact with - one just turned 31, and one is... I think 29 or 30.
The older you get the more common this may become.
I worked at a start up where the founders were 25 & 26 and most of their first 25 employees were their friends who were similar aged. In less than two years, there were almost 100 employees, plenty of which were in the 50s.
The company's last valuation has it worth over a billion dollars now and they have a few hundred employees. A good chunk of the C suite and VPs are still those same early employees who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are managing former FAANG employees in their 50s.
I'm a 25 year old managing a global team of 8 people. I'm self-conscious about my age both in my 1:1s with my reports and when talking with customers. That being said, it seems like things are going well. My team is doing great metrics and achievements wise and the company we work for tripled in size in under a year.
In a previous job I was team lead of a team that had a person in they're 40s and one in their 50s, I started as lead as a 23 year old and moved on when I was 30. There are many things I'd do differently now, but it was an effective and impactful mostly high functioning team. It does happen.
I've known people who submitted working patches to the Linux kernel at 13, which I'd say is a reasonable start for "doing this". A 30 year old managing a 43 year old would not be strange at all.
Exactly, I started programming in AppleSoft BASIC when I was 11, picked up 6502 Assembly and Pascal before high school and added C, Rexx. 370 assembler and FORTRAN before I started college. I was 28 the first time I had a manager younger than me. I think the last time I had a manager older than me was when I had a job where my direct report was to the CTO.
> It also offers chance to produce memorable work as nobody remembers the set of 3 point tasks you completed ten sprints ago.
This is one of the more toxic ones. To get past senior, you often need to be seen to do Big Memorable Things. It sometimes leads to perverse incentives.
I think it's management and their "agile" philosophy that's toxic here, intentionally depriving engineers of any sense of ownership, autonomy, or vision-fulfillment over their work by constantly bouncing them around across small disjoint tasks.
I am incredibly fortunate to work in a place that values ownership, both explicitly and in practice. Given how widespread the opposing value system is, I'm afraid to ever leave.
We have plenty of turnover and it works out fine. In fact turnover of the senior engineers who are service/project owners usually creates the opening for one of the more junior contributors to demonstrate L+1 competency by taking over.
* assisting management and product with scoping and prioritizing work
* the ability to put your head down and crank out a solution to something in code simply because it needs done and you can do it better and/or faster than others
* laying the framework of a greenfield project, maybe sketching out the codebase or POC for juniors to take and run with
* ...and so on and so forth.
A single person may be able to contribute all these things to a team over a time frame of multiple years, but in a 3 or 6 month time frame, most mortal engineers could only contribute two or three.
"Write great code to build stuff" is still a core part of the job.
But it doesn't really enable anyone else on the team, other than providing a model of well-structured code to follow - and most people's code is really not as great as they think it is.
I'd rather have a team of average coders who do things to enable and better each other and the team over a team reliant on a great coder or two who can't or refuses to enable anyone else.
I mean it's not that toxic, if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance. Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc.
I think a lot of people have weaker communication skills than execution skills. So they could loop in everyone early on, but their idea might get killed off because they failed to justify it properly. If instead they leverage their execution skills and make an MVP that will speak for itself, then they bypass that issue.
>"if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance"
And other than some bonus never promote you. If you have capability to be anything above that "worker bee" say / ask exactly what you want. If not look for another job. While this SCRUM / Agile bullshit is wide spread and even works in some specific circumstances there are enough companies that are not hung up on moving pins on dashboard and where one can really grow.
Work for yourself. Work with the manager, not for manager.
Maybe toxic is the wrong word. Perverse maybe. But I don’t think that being a good worker bee often gets people past the senior level, at least from what I’ve seen. But also getting past senior is rarer, so maybe what I’ve seen isn’t representative.
Exeactly. There is too much emphasis put on rewarding those who make big, disruptive change and large, solo wins. Someone making a lot of little wins are just as valuable yet usually don't any great accolates for it. Not to mention, putting one person on a large-ish project is a great way to create silos.
It is not even toxic. Modern development is cooperative to absurd level all too often. You don't have any ability to make independent decisions or autonomy pretty much any time. Literally everything is result of negotiation and compromise and what not.
Taking chance to do a bit of focused work and actually do it in that environment is not toxic. It is not like you have run of for months and refused to communicate. It is just ... getting slight bit of rest.
Yes, I think this is undoubtedly true. I didn't really learn until I advanced my career that, in some respects, being a junior or mid-level developer is actually better. Being a senior can be a slog, and while I got paid little in earlier positions, I actually got to do more interesting things, screw up more, and build things from scratch.
The other thing that can encourage doing too much work before looping in others is the culture of the team. You are lucky if you can amass a team of people who all have the same attitude of talking to each other frequently and handling a certain level of interruption. I've worked on such teams and miss them. Although pretty much everyone at any company you work at will say "ask questions, don't hesitate, blah blah blah", there are teams where people go weeks not talking or sharing work, and everyone is always too busy to get interrupted. If work gets assigned in large chunks, as can happen for seniors in particular, it can also just not make sense to loop in someone temporarily if more time needs to be taken for the other person to catch up.
In my case, I'm the senior engineer and the rest of the team are juniors. There's generally not much I can ask them that they'd know the answer for. On the other hand, looping them in is a good learning experience for them even if they can't help me solve the issue. But due to time constraints that isn't always possible.
You nailed it. Senior engineers build things on their own because their company can’t afford to hire enough advanced enough people who can learn the system and take over the work without being trained for 6-12 months, and often there is no budget for this kind of ”distraction” from the core moneymaking path.
Or, you work at an organization which gates promotion on leading projects, so everyone has to lead things.
Or your organization relies on "consensus" or "influence" to get any project done, and one of the groups (which don't share managers back to the ceo) doesn't want to do the project even though the others think it is important. So do you spend months trying to convince them while doing nothing promotion-worthy in your own?
i do think giving space for hard work is important. i still more often see the opposite problem of too much silo'd work leads to wasted effort, but for some really hard problems, having a bunch of space to think them through is beneficial.
I was more often than not 'guilty' of what the author describes. And I actually love being the lone detective on the hunt for a cool solution.
I am not a dev by trade (data analyst) but still love to work on problems solved in code.
A lot of the advice hit home, but what struck me was this part:
> Encourage engineers to get something end to end launched internally as quickly as possible.
This is something my boss never ceases to tell us. When we build something we shall strive to have some first small thing end 2 end done as soon as possible. Rough around the edges, not refactored, code being repeated - all fine. But it has to work end to end.
Because we can brush it up and make it stable later. Because when starting we only have a vague feeling for the problem space and we need to learn the lay of the land by navigating it.
I find when this happens, it never gets refactored. The edges can be smoothed, but the architecture is dried and hardens into something that needs to be worked around by everybody else touching the code. The easiest way to solve the issue becomes the only way.
Depends on a team, of course. But happens often with business solutions. Done, whichever way. Next. It broke down in prod? Well, go fix it, it's yours now...
The frustrating thing is when only the first half of this philosophy (ship now, fix/polish later) is adhered to, where things get shipped frequently but seldom followed up on. The incentive to finish things needs to be strong for not only the engineers but also for the product teams and managers directing them, but as far as I can observe this is exceptionally rare — in fact it almost seems like the norm for non-engineers to push for shipping new features over polishing older ones. A lot of the engineers I know would love nothing more than the opportunity to polish the project they’re responsible for to perfection, but are never given the chance.
I agree. I know that the freedom to create sensible architecture is a privilege.
Even if other things may not be perfect (but what job is perfect in all areas), my boss knows the value of refactoring towards a stable and maintainable architecture while keeping a reasonable schedule for shipping.
If you can present a metric which shows that said thing is bad on some dimension, and explain why it's bad for the customer (/business) and why what you will fix will improve it, and how much work is involved, you'll have a better chance of moving it through.
I agree, but I've also tried to polish things without a strong need and it's difficult. The work can feel burdensome, useless, undirected, and sometimes requires major changes that can't be done (without inflating the scope of the work).
I always phrased this as "You don't know how to build something until you've built it."
It's very easy to get stuck in design hell and write yourself into a corner. It's much better to get something that does what you want, then you change it to do it how you want it to.
Though like others have mentioned, this requires an engineering culture that values the second part.
I still find it amazing how many "first small thing end to end" wind up being the last major version for years. That's not a bad thing, I've grown to love it, and I think it's a tenet I should make a more conscious effort towards.
Lol, you think physical engineers don't throw together prototypes that they know won't be good enough for the final design just to get everything working together?
They do a preliminary design. They don't throw up some 2x4s and corrugated aluminum to use as a building in the meantime while doing a real design.
Or they iterate designs and prototype manufactured products.
They do not stamp and accept professional liability for thrown-together designs that bosses want to prematurely push out the door into production.
They tell the boss to budget them what's needed, or go find some other sucker to stamp it.
I'm mixed on the pros and cons of professional licensing, but it does give PE's a great amount of personal authority in refusing to be a part of substandard work. Even to clients and bosses.
I would add that not all physical engineers have to get licensed to do their work.
So what's the difference then between that type of iteration and the type of iteration you see commonly in software? It sounds like the main differentiator for you is "doneness" or something similar to that?
But the difference between preliminary design and final product is much smaller in software than in building, so the cost of making an actual working prototype during the early phases is much less.
I am stuck with a delicate balancing act around this one.
Our organization arguably would not exist today if it were not for developers doing "too much" work on things before bothering others. Our product would certainly be worthless trash today if we had to design by committee for every feature. We took extraordinary risks that simply could not have been planned into reality. Most of those risks were taken by individual contributors without anyone being explicitly aware of the magnitude of those risks.
There is a price to be paid for asking permission. Especially if your team members lack the same vision/ambition and are unable to conceptualize the path you laid out. Clearly, this is a problem for both parties, but it is a big reason to sometimes go off on your own, build a whole goddamn thing in peace, and then show it to the team. When others see a complete solution, even if its not 100% what the business wanted, it makes the conversation substantially more productive. It's the fear of the unknown/unseen that makes project managers nervous in my experience. Why start a hard thing at all if the conclusion is ambiguous at best?
On the other hand, we lost ~4 major customers to technical iterations over time. This was something we could have avoided by polishing what we had at the time. Problem is, that thing we would have polished was an abject failure in terms of strategic sustainability for the organization and our customers at scale.
I think it's telling when you call this "asking permission". You should never need to "ask permission" to give customers some small amount of value with a short turnaround.
The longer I work in this industry the more I reflect on the value of all this accretion of process: Agile, Scrum, PI planning, daily stand-ups are counterproductive to real work. So much of it, the sprints, the retroactives, the sprint planning, feel like taking place in the stead of real work. (I reached for the common "instead" of here but wanted to emphasize the work being removed or substituted by not-work).
Real, deep work, is largely a solo affair. Teamwork is trusting your team that they will do their work.
I can think of only two processes which truly requires communicating over real, smell-that-earth honest work. That is: seeking counsel and asking for help because you are well and truly blocked. For the latter, the process of learning enough to become unblocked, even if it takes a long time, can make the practitioner a better software developer forever vs the shortcut of a quick, "do you have a minute" disruption to another developer's time.
Gumroad's philosophy and practice of work [1] struck a chord with me. No meetings, no deadlines. Just a commitment to production, whatever the method, whatever the schedule.
There's also the flip side to this, "doing too little work before looping in others". Management brings overhead. Meetings bring overhead. Not every (sub)project needs multiple ICs.
That said, I think the E2E MVP/"tracer bullet" approach is a good compromise. It sets a clear milestone, which could be achieved by a single IC, but which provides something tangible for a team effort to build on (or meets intractable obstacles and and dies prematurely, saving everyone time before the PM engine is spun up).
I’ve faced worse issue. So you are thinking about problem solution, you created a design and you ask ppl for their opinionated view about the problem and your solution.
Issue is - they cannot even give you a good feedback because they are not that advanced.
The issue of being a great engineer is that there are not many great engineers you can have a constructive discussion with.
You are sometimes even “expected” to deliver solution alone, because there is noone who even grasps the concept.
One could say its simply an incorrect team composition in this case but well.. what can you do about it when you are also asked to in the same time train ppl who clearly dont have the capacity to match your level - and better - they are supposed to reach that level soonTM.
Amen to this. In a similar vein, in a heavily resourced constrained environment, the rest of the team may be really competent but be struggling to meet their own deadlines so just don't have the mental bandwidth or time to provide any feedback.
I've had this issue at a few jobs in the past, and I know I've come off as the lone developer who ventured too far... but at every step along the way I stopped, sent in a PR, scheduled a meeting, etc but got virtually no engagement. And I was still getting pressure from stakeholders to deliver, so had to keep moving :-/
I think OP brings up an interesting problem, but I don't think the solution is often as easy as sending in earlier PRs. It might actually be a structural or cultural problem in the organization.
This reminds me of a coworker that I've had bad experiences with. He fancies himself an architect, but he consistently refuses to accept any feedback on his designs. If we give feedback early in the process, he complains that we're nitpicking an incomplete design. If we give feedback when he deigns it completely ready for our review, he complains that he'll have to throw away so much work. All throughout, his refrain is that we "just don't understand his design".
I agree that it's harder when there's an absence of peers at the same experience level, and for problems that can be completed by one person, it's probably not necessary to seek validation. But if it's a problem that requires a team effort, building shared understanding of the design is at least as important as creating the design in the first place. Yes, it's more work if it doesn't click immediately for everyone else, but it's essential.
And sometimes in the process of explaining it so that even a "not great" engineer can get it, we can better understand it ourselves. And sometimes even a layperson can bring valuable insights once they get the gist of it.
It only sounds good in theory. Reality is that in most cases this discussion is pointless and you are much better just explaining.
Example. You discuss different ways of data replication and have to decide which suits the project the best.
Issue is only you have experience with multi-region data replication and people you discuss the issue with dont even understand how replication works.
From manager point of view -> you were hired to guide those ppl.
Thats what happens in consulting like 99% of the time. You are the part of the team but you are often expected to provide the solution.
You can “explain” how it will work, but 9/10 times you wont get any feedback because ppl that you are supposed to deliver that project with simply dont have the knowledge required to have a good level of discussion.
Its like saying “PHD Doctors should have even field discussion with anti-vaccers, because both of them have something to say”..
Everyone has something to say, whether its something valuable, its a different matter.
I've been guilty of this at times but what I would add is a certain type of environment encourages this behavior. If the business or teammates are very reluctant to let engineers work on what they want or give harsh feedback it encourages people to retreat into their safe space and try to create something they feel is worthy of feedback.
I think there's a new phenomenon that needs to be addressed: poor WFH communication channels. By encouraging radio silence, so as to not "interrupt anyone", things get missed.
Also some people feel the need to tightly control group chat. Either content (no "offtopic"), membership, or # of rooms. Some chat platforms encourage this by restricting who can create/manage rooms or how rooms are linked together (discoverability).
It's an unexplored area of knowledge for most people in the new WFH life everyone's leading.
Or if teams are uncommunicative you can end up with not getting a usable response on concerns raised, need to march at some point and without feedback you decide to march in the direction that seems most reasonable to you. Later on it turns out that was right into the swamp.
Can confirm. My lead is pretty picky with everything and expects 110% correctness. Even if my solutions works, is maintainable and extensible it is not how they would've implemented it, so it's no good. Argumentation is sometimes pretty artificial where some made up rules are the gold standard. That plus comments like "that is bad style" (for something that I've seen in all my past jobs + in a lot of OS code) make me not really want to loop them in.
But the job pays well and has interesting problems to solve, so I guess I will put up with it for some time more.
Yes. I do this because interactions with others are a net negative at my place of work. In terms of quantifiable rewards, 99% of interactions are +5 or +10, etc, mixed in with the occasional -15000. In the end the expected value of interactions is negative. All because of one or two very bad interactions a year; the rest being positive, but close to neutral.
Most recent was learning we weren't implementing something in the way that was expected, which required a lot of rework and sparked conversations among management that our team was incompetent. We were completely blindsided by it all, leading to a feeling that any interaction might randomly turn into a similar debacle.
But, when things go well they say "good job", so that's nice.
I'll be honest - half the time it's trying to keep it from other engineers who are overly eager to have an opinion because a) they're low-output and looking to posture, and/or b) or want things to be done a different way.
At least the business side of the house appreciates the spec'd work being accomplished.
Intentionally not communicating things in order to prevent bikeshedding is a dangerous game to play and a symptom of a broken environment, but that doesn't mean it's not sometimes a valid approach.
Agree - and it 100% comes from broken teams/environments/people. In engineering, I find most teams are more invested in tearing each other down more-so than building each other up - that's admittedly very anecdotal and personal to me.
This whole post strikes me as somebody making up a world as he believes it ought to be and then suggesting advice for navigating that world, rather than the real one. For example:
> Always encourage engineers to show their work as quickly as possible
Yep, that sounds like great advice. On "paper", anyway. I tried to do that when I first started out, too. What I found was that communicating "this is just an early draft, it'll be better when I'm finished" was well-near impossible, no matter how hard I tried.
Generally the higher up the food chain the less likely that people will 'get it' if it is not an extremely polished Proof-of-Concept (there are exceptions of course).
If I am going to play amateur psychology, I would say that people who are generally more perfectionist types and are likely get caught up in details are less likely to give a healthy review on work-in-progress.
They missed one reason why it can happen: Because doing things "the right way" is too slow, and the engineer is trying to skirt around process because the company moves way too slowly. Not out of malice or negligence, but out of a fear of the megacorp killing agility. I've seen entire teams at megacorps or governments try to keep others in the dark with projects that would be crushed under strict corporate rules.
It doesn't have to be a megacorp. Looping new people into a deep problem takes time, and can kill momentum if not done in a strategic way. Your personal time on any problem is finite, and you can exhaust that time-budget on bringing the wrong people up to speed. This is doubly true when the other person isn't on your team or in your organization: e.g., bringing in vendor support. (Maybe your experience is different; in mine, bringing in remote experts doesn't guarantee a faster resolution.)
Insightful article but surprised at the recommendations. Teamwork is important, yes... but smaller task sizes should have been mentioned too.
>Finally, after several weeks, the engineer shares an update, and one (or many) of the following bad things transpire:
Several weeks? If you are giving developers open-ended tasks that take weeks or more to complete, imo it's asking for things to go off the rails.
The most effective way I've found to avoid this situation is to ensure that worked assigned is broken down into tasks that are as small as possible.
When assigned work is limited to small deliverables you get smaller PRs, limited business logic changes to get lost in, fewer integration changes, etc.
I'm currently realizing that laying out a moderately complex PCB can take more than a week, but there's not much to be gained from breaking it up into smaller pieces. You kind of just have to do it.
Some problems are impossible to subdivide in a practical way. Having a team that can respond dynamically is really the only general solution I've ever seen.
1. Merging often and early might be viable, but it might also expose your colleagues and the codebase to your exploratory process, which might or might not be desired/possible. If you're making semi-permanent changes like API modifications or database table updates, going this route will mean a lot of extra work.
2. Too many chefs. If you open up for too many questions at the start, you will get a gazillion conflicting opinions thrown at you. You'll need to limit the audience somehow, or bring forward a clear idea or opinion. This leads to developers working a bit on the side. I don't mind this, I think it's good to give autonomy to working groups and let them make mistakes, as long as there is coaching or feedback in place in the long run.
3. If you go the route of designing a bit on the side first, to save time compared to 1), you might suddenly find yourself in the situation that the major parts feel quite done. Adding polish is now just a minor addition to what you're already accomplished, so you might do that before putting up the PR. This means that a complete solution showing up as a PR doesn't necessarily mean that it was over-engineered or overly polished on the side.
4. Not "syncing" too often saves time; less context switching, distracting information, and time to reflect on decisions and design.
It's usually a mistake to build a large scale solution without consulting with others in your organization or team. Other engineers often have good feedback that will make your solution better and you are likely missing some core premise or context.
It's also a mistake to seek too much approval from others before proceeding. In any group of X people, Y% won't agree with you, and of those, Z% will be uncivil. By uncivil, I mean harsh criticism or otherwise toxic behavior that is not constructive.
If the organization is healthy that Z% is small and troublemakers will be handled by management if they do act up. If not that Z% will basically become like bridge trolls and you will be opposed by a confederacy of dunces every time you try to do something of consequence.
I've experienced both of these scenarios, and striking the right balance is an art and a science that boils down to reading the politics of the place and getting buy in from some key people so that your project at least has a fair shot. Sometimes the place has gone toxic and it simply can't be helped.
If you're in a situation where there is a high percentage of Z, you should ask yourself if the work you are doing is worth playing the politics necessary in order to get the job done. If yes, get smart, read books like the The Prince and Art of War and figure out how to play the game. If not, get outta there as expeditiously as possible, and put your time and effort to something more worthwhile. If you want to be kind, let management know in a professional way exactly why you are leaving so that they can have an opportunity to try to make life better for your colleagues.
Spending a few weeks on exploratory or speculative work is not really a huge time commitment. If it was going to drag on for months I would question it.
I also challenge the “deliver in small PRs” idea. Yes in practice that would be ideal. But often when you are doing something completely off the map there is no point to submitting the PRs for the 5 things that didn’t work. The author is falling into the same trap that scrum advocates and agilists fall into. Anything can be broken down into teeny tiny bit size deliverables and managed that way. Again, it would be ideal if that were the case, but sometimes you just need to give your best engineers some time and space to swing for the fences.
I work at Warp (https://www.warp.dev/) where Zach, the author of the post, is the founder.
One practice we’ve gotten into the habit of is demoing projects at standup as soon as possible. I’ve found this has been useful to force myself to get to an end-to-end version of a project sooner. This is useful not just in derisking the technical implementation but also in getting product feedback sooner. By playing around a live demo earlier, we often find that the product experience needs to be refined in ways we couldn’t validate from Figma mocks alone.
I'm of the opinion that if the problems outlined in the article happen, it was because of poorly defined work. A senior engineer should be able to work on something with no communication for a week and it be correct. If it isn't correct, the work was not defined correctly prior to starting the work. Daily updates and frequent collaboration are not the solution; they are a stopgap masking unclear requirements.
That's basically true, but I don't think anyone has a good general solution to unclear requirements besides constant communication and fine-tuning, a la XP/Agile.
I like working on a module with interfaces and behaviors which are set in stone, but I find most of my work is a lot more exploratory than that, so the "clear requirements" can only come after it's about 90% done.
I have two big rules for developers that report to me:
1. The 5 minute rule. If you are stuck for more than 5 minutes reach out. Once the developer is on the team for a while, this becomes 15 or 30 minutes.
Caveat ... truly stuck ... tried a couple of things, googled, tried some more ... wondering what to try next.
One thing I try to do with a new start is go ask them for help in the same way, "Hey, 5 minute rule, I'm think I'm missing something simple here."
2. Project Initiation Memo
The is NOT a PRD, it is a high level "I think this is what I'm supposed to be doing on this project and why". It might turn into a PRD if one is warranted. It's really just a "did you understand the problem correctly"
I've avoided so many massive f'ups or developers drifting into silent frustration for hours with these two rules.
Love the five-minute rule, by the way. I tried to apply that a lot especially when I was just starting at my job. So many things that I would spend two hours trying to fix, only to be told the next day that we had a super simple internal process to fix that thing.
> Caveat ... truly stuck ... tried a couple of things, googled, tried some more ... wondering what to try next.
That is not even possible within 5 minutes.
I would not want to work there honestly. Just being unable to solve problems demotivates me. It sounds like I will get off everytime I am slightly slower to pick something. This would be too stressful for me.
Yeah, you missed the point. You don't need to solve the problem in 5 minutes. You need to be 5 minutes in a state where you have no idea what to do next.
Why would you want to be sitting there spinning your wheels? Most people find that feeling of helplessness demotivating and stressful which is why I created the rule.
Because, when I don't know what to do for 5 minutes, there is super high chance I will figure it out within reasonable time still.
Giving up after 5 minutes of not knowing what to do is absurd.
> Most people find that feeling of helplessness demotivating and stressful which is why I created the rule.
Your rule is making people helpless, it makes them think slight stuck means they can't do it. So they will forget how to solve problems and will end up limited to do only simple straightforward tasks.
I think I do this because it is more fun. Involving lots of other people, especially non-engineers, really can suck the fun out of programming for me. I'm not antisocial - I love to discuss what I'm doing and bounce ideas around with other IC engineers. But PM/management incentives are generally aligned towards viewing exploratory work as a waste of time; it might be, but it's what makes programming fun, so if I don't get to do it, I will kind of just consider quitting. Of course, there are times for exploration and times for execution, but to be happy at work, I think most people need to have (and deserve) a mix.
I'm sure the PM and engineering lead and the company in general would prefer that I produce small deliverables on a frequent cadence, for a variety of reasons: (1) to make sure I'm doing work and not goofing off, (2) to provide better visibility to higher-ups about progress towards an ultimate goal, (3) to encourage me to prioritize delivering finished products over say personal learning, work-life balance, etc.
I hope I don't sound too rabidly anti-work, but when I look for jobs, I pretty much prioritize the autonomy that management will give me over most other factors; nothing really sucks the joy out of programming quite like being told to break your work into "smaller tasks" so the burndown chart is prettier.
Knowing when to loop in others is one of the skills that makes a senior engineer. Too early and you end up wasting other people's time. Too late and you end up wasting everyone's time. Finding the sweet spot is important, but it's also important to learn which questions to ask. It's one of those skills that I wish could be taught, but it seems something you have to get a feel for over time.
"Looping in others" is an opportunity for others to say NO, or to try and redirect you, or to jump (unwanted and unneeded) onto your band wagon. If I'm working with true peers (not age or title peers, but truly similar in talent and ability), then their early involvement or collaboration is great.
Generally, however, I prefer to get solutions developed to the point where they are their own proof. It's much harder to argue against something that's (near or entirely) completed and which proves to work. It's fine for me to then involve others to get their feedback, etc.
Proof to whoever the stakeholders are, presumably the customers in your model.
Proof that it satisfies what the customer needs or wants - something which can't be demonstrated until the would-be solution reaches some level of demonstrable maturity.
For many engineering solutions, you can talk about them earlier, handwave, present, but nothing conveys that it actually works, or sometimes even makes sense, short of a working demonstration.
Why so quick to assume it's a "pet" project? If the developer is doing it right, they are making exactly what the customer needs, but the customer does not have the developer's expertise to recognise what will work at an early stage.
We are not talking about things everyone understands and could have an opinion on, like say the colour and layout of the login window.
Take something that requires deeper work and hired expertise. For example suppose you've started to design a new kind of GPU technique that will double the customer's calculation throughput for the same power consumption. They hired you for your expertise to solve that sort of problem. They have no idea how it works though, and for the first month you have only an outline of a new algorithm, that only peers at your own level could understand well - and you don't have any peers in that area. And most of figuring out the details is on paper and whiteboards, math and logic along with throwaway experiments to measure. The first line of code in a working demo is not possible to figure out until 3 weeks in, and it takes only 1 day of coding and 2 days of polish after that to finish.
That sort of thing isn't a pet project. It might not even be fun; it might be quite stressful, after all it's a higher risk to the developer to pursue such paths. It doesn't fit into daily PRs and isn't even a coding problem at first. Yet it's exactly what the customer needs, what they said they hired you to accomplish, and what they will appreciate if it has reached the point of "proof" when shown.
It will be incorrectly assumed to be the developer's pet project if it's demonstrated before it works, though. Thus the reason to build it up to "proof" level, if you're sure the customer needs it.
So... how do you know what those people want? How do you know what you're building in 3 weeks isn't something totally different from what the users now want?
The answer is that you, alone, don't. By spending more than a small amount of time building out the simplest possible version of what the customer wants, you get their feedback along the way.
It's generally not true that you need many weeks, or even a full week, to build something you can show a user. Usually you're not being creative enough to figure out what to show your customer if you can't think of a way to provide value in a few days.
There are rare exceptions, but in the vast majority of cases you can build something for the user quickly, even when you initially think you can't.
This isn't even my opinion, it's the observed practice of a whole generation of developers. Read "The Art of Agile Development" if you want to know more, it's extremely helpful if you're trying to understand how to achieve the delivery I'm talking about.
You know what they want because they told you, up front, when they hired you.
In the example, let's say the customer has said they would find it really useful if the GPU could calculate twice as much on the same power, but they don't know how that could be done. Perhaps it's in a self-driving car and these are hard specifications. And then they crank up some agile "creative" process, encouraging devs including you to work on whatever areas of the system make sense to improve it. As long as you ship code PRs daily and a little report.
You talk to them about your idea, and they don't understand it. It's not convincing to them, but it is to you - and you're the expert on this. You are hired for your expertise and the customer doesn't have anyone else with it in the GPU algorithm design area. Your team peers are either busy or don't understand the area well enough. They can't recognise what will solve their stated problem, and you can't convince anyone that your method will work until you have reached the "proof" stage after 3 weeks of not producing any PRs, which is against what the customer or your managers incorrectly believe a competent developer would invariably produce almost daily.
I'm not saying you should do that as a dev. I'm saying it's an example of what "proof" refers to, while being something that gives a customer what they said they need, and is not a dev's pet project. Addressing the incorrect assumptions implied in "Proof to whom? Shouldn't you be developing things your customers need, not some pet project you enjoy working on for its own sake?"
There is no pet project, and you don't actually enjoy workng on it all that much. You're just trying to solve the customer's stated problem in an environment where they openly say what they'd really want and have set up a process which prevents it - a very common combination.
> You know what they want because they told you, up front, when they hired you.
This is, very often, a fatal mistake, and what they hired you to do is not what they need, nor what they want you to do in three weeks, let alone three days.
Sure but now that's just arguing in circles. Whatever I'd say about what they've shown they need in a simplified example for discussion, you can find a matching argument that it's not what they really need, but that argument doesn't address anything. It's a "no true scotsman".
Assume for the sake of the point, that you are a competent and experienced dev, and somehow you have correctly ascertained something that the customer needs, most likely by talking with them.
The point of this discussion is to ask, are there circumstances where someone needs to "work on one's own" for a while before others will recognise a solution is in progress to the clear need of their customer. And are there circumstances where not doing that will result in the solution being blocked, without any other useful replacement taking its place. There are countless anecdotes, and in all walks of life not just software development, pointing to the answers to both of those questions being a strong yes.
That's your mistake; it's not a matter of competency and experience. You are not a solo venture, you are a member of a team, and part of that team needs to be a customer representative who can tell you, in real time, what the customer wants.
There is no room for a hero engineer in modern software development. That's not how it works anymore, and it may never have worked that way.
Your countless anecdotes of this working stack only a fraction as high as the countless anecdotes of what you're describing completely failing.
This battle was fought in the 00s and won in the early 2010s. Agile produces results, waterfall generally does not.
Solid advice. Everything is such a difficult balancing act
when you work with other engineers. I say this because at the other end of the spectrum its really easy to land yourself and those around you in needless drama by asking too publicly for feedback on ideas. Hey everyone, just wondering what our thoughts as a team are on auto formatting the codebase / switching tabs to spaces / repainting the bike shed?
Some wise advice I once got from an engineer who has gone on to be a stellar engineering leader: utilise the power of managers. Good managers are drama fire breaks. They can tell you — without raising the emotional stakes with anyone else — why a particular bit of tech debt exists, whether anyone on their team is going to be amenable to you fiddling with it, and who to work with directly on anything likely to cause drama would it have been more widely shared.
Managers aren’t immune to drama but the good ones can help keep it minimised.
A late comment I know but one I just realised is important.
This whole article bothered me. And the realisation is that it expects upfront design to work as something distinct from coding.
"The code is the design" (Jack Reeves) is a fundamental point - until you write the code, you are just dealing with "artist's impressions" - vague ideas that might not hang together. The code has to be written (to be thrown away) so that things can be really worked out.
Other points:
* everyone does not have time to be always commenting on everyone elses iterations. Yes there is time for the big architectural design. But every day? If I am commenting on some other engineers work daily and not actually working with them something is off.
* going off and coming back with a big PR. YEs thats bad. Going off and coming back with a Proof Of Concept that will inform the discussion. Thats good.
With a Big System, the right way to do it is to do one (at least) to throw away.
To be honest, I don't think this is any of the engineer's fault. I think we're an open creature by nature; we like to share and explore ideas with others.
In the corporate field, what I've observed is that deliveries are most important. Not just any deliveries, but the project has to be big and "impactful" (as in, other teams use it too), and you personally have to own it. Like your name has to be attached to it. No one is going to remember your tiny fixes here and there, or tiny feature implementations in the larger system, even if it's tracked in sprint. All that stuff gets looked down upon as just 'doing your job'.
To get any kind of recognition and ultimately, a promotion (or better raise, better rating, better bonus, etc), we absolutely have to clam up and take entire ownership of the work. If that's not done, other people can swoop in and steal the work. Things become need-to-know basis for your other fellow devs, design meetings is just you leading them and asking if this is fine, etc. Everyone has to know you're leading the project, and you have to constantly enforce that knowledge to put down any attempt at a takeover.
I've personally witnessed this happening to an older and more senior dev when a college graduate tried to assert himself on the team until the senior dev fought back with office politics.
In the end, office politics is what matters, along with your work to back up your office political agenda. Another senior dev could come in and take your project, claim your code is terrible and needs a rewrite, etc. You can only win if the boss is on your side, and that requires you to take on more than you can chew (and of course, deliver it all) to get on the boss's good side.
Imagine if we didn't have that kind of pressure of delivery in the workplace just to get recognition. The first example that comes to mind is Open source work. People just contribute, we share and deliver openly, and as a result community projects grew so big our entire corporate infrastructure became dependent on it.
> Imagine if we didn't have that kind of pressure of delivery in the workplace just to get recognition.
While the places I have worked might have a tiny element of this your situation sounds extreme.
What I have seen is yes you do have to do “perception” management to keep a pulse on “how am i rated”.
Having a few long time trusted people vouch “this person is good” helps
and all you need to do is work with them and show that you are good, both in attitude and capability.
However your description sounds like a dystopian “house of cards” scenario that I would be looking for another job asap. If the programmers are more like politicians that is very odd and a bad sign.
I should clarify this behavior is mostly at larger companies... and although it's my anecdotal piece, it is what I've consistently seen at different companies and what my friends tell me they've experienced at other large companies. I've also worked at smaller places and this behavior was not as prevalent since everyone knows everyone on the dev team.
Also, at larger companies your manager tends to reorg. I've gone through 5 managers in a single year before. And with them goes all the goodwill you built up during that time. New manager comes in, and it basically resets your 'perception' factor. The old manager might tell the new manager that some people are good, but you have to get lucky to get the new manager to care, because they haven't seen the results with their own eyes yet. That small time window is when it's ripe for someone to swoop in and claim ownerships of projects, while smooching up to the new manager. That's what happened with the senior dev I saw, but he had aces up his sleeves. What an epic showdown.
Yea, I should leave probably, but it's just one burning ship to another. That's our fundamental reality.
What you are describing is mostly related to practice of building organizational units focused purely on implementation, and nothing else. Your personal success in such a unit depends heavily on a number of successful implementations under your belt.
The more organization separates project implementation from the goal-setting and strategic work, the less reasons are there for people responsible for implementation to focus on something different than just getting another green checkmark on that project milestone (and getting recognized as the one who was most impactful in getting there).
Sustainability, recognition of actual business value, meaningful team work — all of these quickly go out the window as people focus on gaming the only metric they’ve been assigned.
The author obviously draws on own experience, thus the conclusions. However, an important aspect is the team and the process, not just the dev and their behavioral patterns.
If a "loosely-spec'ed" feature is assigned to a single dev for implementation, then there must be either reasonable expectation that it could be delivered solo or that the blanks are not critical for the result.
Either way, such "pattern" of a supposed dev-vs-team antagonism may be pointing rather at process deficiencies or disbalanced expectations from management.
When team management believes that all is clear as day and could be done in a week-span, the devs may have a hard time affording themselves a prototype just to figure out what is there to do, so delaying the feature delivery is a simple hedge.
While this may be true there is real long term benefit gained by me trying hard for just a little longer: It takes time to truly understand the context and form an own point of view. I take time to find quality reference documents. I take time to do a few experiments. I take time to write down and order my thoughts. Asking someone if required when I have done my homework then yields faster and more effective responses. I get higher level responses that complement and extend my groundwork. Even if I believe I know the answer I find asking can help if only to establish and deepen relationships. Ultimately it moves me in a position where others come to me.
Of course doing a submarine dive for weeks is never good except to serve as a straw-man for a blog post .
I've never known any serious work to actually get done without people "going dark" to actually accomplish it.
The constant statusing that doesn't allow one four hours of uninterrupted concentration is demoralizing and grinds progress to a halt. There's a reason more code is authored between 9pm and 5am than between 9am and 5pm, but that wears engineers out badly.
The description of the "problem" is that the requirements specified in the beginning were wrong, and then the developer is blamed for solving exactly what was specified, and not constantly asking management every day "have you changed your mind?". I don't understand at all, how this is the fault of the developer, talk about expecting the developer to bend over backwards for any product manager. How is it not reasonable for management/PO to be responsible for 1. sending devs off in the wrong direction, and 2. not notifying them as requirements change?
This is just another way of saying "management is right, even when they're wrong, and you need to accept that".
Non-trivial problems often require exploration of the solution space. You're not expected to ask management if they've changed their mind, you're meant to present your finding so far, and ask if they have any feedback.
Simply stating that you did as instructed is not a viable excuse for a human, that's not what they're paying you for. Computers can get away with it.
> Simply stating that you did as instructed is not a viable excuse for a human, that's not what they're paying you for.
Getting paid for doing what someone tells you to do, is literally the definition of a job. What you're saying actually, is that it's not your job to do your job, it's your job to also do the managers/PO's job.
It's great to see "I'm still exploring X" called out as a standup antipattern. I've heard and (hi Zach!) said this many times.
... But I've generally heard it most frequently from the tech lead and/or manager at the standup. It's easy to justify: "as the TL/M, my work is ill-defined, meeting-heavy, complex, externally-focused, and long-term! I'm not just building a feature! It's hard to describe!"
In my experience, this culture percolates with lightning speed: more junior folks immediately understand that to be senior and high-status is to give vague updates (often with a dramatic sigh and a self-deprecating joke about getting nothing done).
So it's good to exhort feature-building ICs to show incremental progress on that feature, but I think this article should have a heavier focus on the most senior folks at the standup.
I am an older software engineer and have noted that a lot of introverted engineers love to work in their own silos. Some of the smartest engineers are introverted and do not want to be bothered; worse yet, because of pride they often do not "suffer fools" well and avoid working with others. Working with a group of smart and humble engineers that are constantly "borrowing each other's" brain is very effective and enjoyable experience. And everyone has a good sense of what everyone else is working on -- sunk cost is more frequently avoided.
I feel the same way. Lot's of experienced engineers don't like to be bothered too much, have the feeling they know best and just design and implement the way they have it in mind. Juniors on the other hand don't like to bring their beginners mistakes too much in the open, hence they work hard and long to avoid that. Both of these situation are largely sub-optimal. A good manager knows this and asks for feedback in time, in an interested way, without being too pushy.
Please write the insight into the title of the post, rather than hiding it under a click-bait. Your site is down now due to traffic and the original HN title (reflecting the title of your writing) provides no value.
Frequent checkins with detailed commit messages including markdown and graphviz diagrams which state intentions.
Switching the flow from a status meeting low detail reponse of "still working on X issue" to a regular feed of detailed information which serves not only as a development log, documentation, but it crystallizes the developer's planning and thought process because they have to describe what they are doing rather than just "fixing the issue" , or "building the thing".
Persistent chat has made daily stand up status calls redundant. Stakeholders can subscribe to channels which have rich detailed information about what is happening at any given moment. For larger groups a resource can curate the channels and provide a thoughtful summary in a higher level channel of different teams progress. Tools like Azure Dev Ops provide meaningful charts, tracking, and velocity, and the deeper conversations on chat linked to work items, wikis, and repo level filea serve to provide an accurate picture for anyone looking into the effort. Leads, and managers can identify trouble spots and adjust priorities or provide valuable insights. Regular demos can also be linked and serve as a historical record of the development direction.
Individual contributor, in other words a worker as opposed to management. The author's using engineer to mean software developer; they're the workers in this context.
That's the natural way languages develop, offensive terms replaces with euphemisms, given some time every euphemistic term become loaded with the same negative connotations of its origin and new euphemism get introduced.
I can’t load the page due to a redirect loop: it does a 301 redirect to the same URL. Observed from Australia, in Firefox, curl and Chromium, all under Linux, talking to 66.235.200.155.
In this industry we use "developer" and "engineer" interchangeably, but one is not like the other. They don’t hand out brass rats at the end of a bootcamp…
> For early career engineers, it often happens because they lack practice working on teams. They train in school environments where they do classroom projects on their own, or work on long-term intern projects in a silo.
Serious engineering school would have student work together to ship projects.
Yes, MIT’s university culture does genuinely encourage a collaborative project-based approach. However, some grads will believe that the business world expects them to be as brilliant as Tony Stark and able to “carry a message to garcia”[1]. If a course-VI grad wearing brass rat thinks a request for help/feedback will be rebuffed as impostor syndrome (it happens), they can make the same mistake. Ego is the enemy. The blog post’s advice still applies.
Why wasn’t this caught by a million different processes that most teams have? Scrum, team lead, n different managers, etc. This is on the process, not the engineer.
That’s understandable. The nuance here is senior engineers going off and doing things they know need to be done vs juniors getting lost in the weeds. If you’re the former, and you’re always shutdown from doing things you know are important, you probably need to find new employment.
This is a bit of a nuanced topic with lots of shades of truth or context, and overall I agree with the article, but that said:
Sometimes you know your team is going to do the stupid shortcut if you let them and you save them from themselves by solving the robust solution before they have a chance to "be pragmatic" and pointlessly bikeshed about things that don't matter to waste your time. Sometimes you know it will take you a week to do it right or a week with input to do it half right and you just bite the bullet and do it right the first time and, to the articles point, suffer the consequences if or when you get it wrong or partially wrong.
Realpolitik is part of being a senior engineer. Sometimes you make the call to take the shortcut without mentioning it, sometimes you force the full solution with the big PR (or, even worse, a series of staged small PRs to make it look like you're taking feedback); but most of the time, if you're working somewhere good, you get to be completely transparent about what you're working on and the feedback you get is corrective and flexible.
I have found that the attitude of "just silently do the robust and proper thing immediately and push it, instead of letting the entire team discuss this important infrastructure topic forever in order to ultimately come up with an abomination of design-by-committee-architecture, just to then find out that the remaining time now is way too short to implement it, which is why they then take all the stupid shortcuts to get it done in time, ending up with something barely holding together with duct tape that somehow works for the moment, but immediately tumbles down as soon as the next guy tries to build the next layer on top of it" is a very important senior dev skill, especially at the beginning of new projects when a lot of basic building blocks on which the more complex features have to rest later are still being created.
The reality is that it's not your call, it's the customer's call, and you need to stop trying to make a decision for the customer. Let them tell you what they want.
When you are doing idea creation and getting your head around an idea, I don't know about other people, but in addition to not being well quantifiable and structured (which standups and their tickets need), but looping in other people in the IT industry exposes you when you most look like an idiot.
It's the same reason IT interviews are this big cockpuff show. Everyone is insecure due to a combination of impostor syndrome, constant tech churn undermining your expertise, stack ranking culture, our industry archetype of socially unskilled/introverts, projection of bullying from schooling, etc.
So it comes down to functioning social dynamics in your group: people not trying to elbow other people in stack ranking, helping out, being eval'd fairly, etc.
Things, you know, that IT companies and manager generally aren't good at because technical understanding and achievement is paramount.
The challenging part of this is that knowledge work is intangible and uncertain. Showing progress is difficult, especially with low context. So we want things to be perfect or finished or at least to scope. There's a lot more that goes into our work than commits, PRs, and completed tasks.
Second, "showing your work/progress" should be async. Otherwise, it's taxing for both parties as it requires a request and then some sort of feedback.
People though are generally curious and want to know what others are working on, if they can help, how it aligns, etc. Having that ongoing visibility into each other's progress makes it way easier to build off each other.
What we need is a simple, async way to share progress--outside the scope of tasks or timelines.
I can’t imagine anyone on my dev team or the others at my company being able to spend multiple weeks consecutively on vaguely defined unplanned work. We collaboratively make a plan with product management covering many weeks of work (PI planning) with some date commitments on milestones we expect to achieve. Anyone spending a more than a few days on unplanned work risks making us need to revise the plan that we all made together, so we don’t want to do that because the opportunity cost is obvious.
We see this with engineers of all ages, but especially with new grads. All have just spent 16 to 22 years working under a model where: you get an assignment, you come up with a solution, you are marked on your result, and then you move on…
Our education has trained us that involving others is something done at the end.
A lot of our new hires need help shifting their approach (and getting over insecurities) to consider that all their products need iterative review well before the work is complete.
My experience has been "Get stuck, avoid the senior engineer because they have no bloody clue what's going on and talking to them actively makes things worse for months afterwards".
I'm not a new dev (but I am a new data scientist) and can definitely relate to what you said. I'm so used to "if you get stuck, just figure it out" as the norm for things I'm assigned to do, and getting used to "I'm stuck, I should reach out to someone who's more experienced than me" has been difficult. I'm always afraid of inconveniencing or interrupting my higher-ups, even though they never seem to be bothered by it. I guess it's just an irrational social fear.
I chronically suffer from this problem. For example I started working on my chess software in 2008 and just yesterday someone raised an issue on GitHub asking me about pertft(). Gulp. Fortunately it turned out my chess logic does pass that very specific, very easy to check correct/not correct test. But it would have been much better to have checked I was building on solid ground 13 years ago!
My experience is different in that large patch sets usually get a “looks good” while smaller sets get a lot of varied feedback.
Depending on what your personal goals are (and your tolerance for accountability should things go wrong) doing the work up front can be a good approach.
It's about career growth. Most programmers (hope to) peak there.
You know those folks who peaked in high school? You look at them and feel sorry because that was as good as it got for them but tinged with a hefty dose of jealousy because you never had it that good then.
This is like that but in software terms. An individual contributor mostly works up to the point where they take on more than they can handle alone and are sometimes heroic. And some people, some really good ones, peak there.
The crazy debugging live on production servers in the middle of the night that saved millions of dollars or the championship-winning touchdown. Same same. We love to tell those stories.
I'm amazed that the author doesn't recommend Pair-programming as one of the techniques to avoid "Doing too much before looping in others"
He mentions:
> an engineer on a project should never go more than a week without showing something, and usually it should be more like a day
But in my experience by pairing you can shorten this feedback loop to seconds.
A few other people have commented about pairing: It's clear people have different preferences and that it's wise to use pairing at the right moments, but it still seems a glaring omission from the article to me.
One way to address is for the manager to make sure the work is chunked down.
Where I see the mentioned problem the most is when teams are too busy. The manager (as in team leader) is putting out fires and does not have the time and/or will to mentor and direct the team members that go off track.
I think it is everyones job to make sure they are not too busy. Being too busy for basic processes is an antipattern and flag that things need to be reprioritised. Someone needs to walk away from the screen (or in covid times towards it) and talk to their boss!
I've got the opposite issue, and if I'm being frank - maybe it's not such a great look for me as a senior.
But also at the same time... why should we suffer alone? Sometimes something that might take you a day by yourself might take you an hour with another person with a fresh perspective. Isn't it more efficient? Let's loop each other in, often. I'm always down to share screen.
Unless of course I'm the only one oh God I've outed myself as useless on HN...
Don’t worry you’re not alone! Sometimes I worry about the same thing too. But ultimately I think it’s dumb to struggle along with something for days or working on something that no one actually wants or is going in the wrong direction for days.
Much better to just loop others in early and often so things are done right the first time, and in the most effective way possible.
We have a saying on our team, "don't go down the rabbit hole alone".
Honestly I think the reasons mentioned in the article for why this happens are valid, but more frequently, people are a little insecure about their work or a little too much of a perfectionist, and that creates slightly enough friction to deter them from sharing progress or asking for help early on.
Interestingly, I just realized another sphere where this occurs: management. A manager sees some perceived problem, comes up with a policy to "solve" it, and then requires their employees to follow the new policy.
Wonder what this sort of approach would look like for management. It seems like the employees are the "customers" in this arrangement.
Not a developer, like, at all. But, I see this in myself when I work in groups all the time. I get excited about the project, forge ahead on my own, come back with so much stuff, into which everyone else now needs to "fit". At which point the entirety of the collaborative intention is missed.
I absolutely hate hate hate having to do rework at the end of a feature or other project, so I loop others in with design discussions early and often. I don’t want to get to the end of something only for someone to say “Oh wait I think it should be done this way.” Communication is key.
I dont like working with others or rather when I sought out others help I was seen as an impediment to the 10 percent performer. Most organizations reward and the individual scale not group when you tried to work communally you were chastised or all the way punished.
I've gotten in trouble too, particularly in open source projects, showing off a half-baked prototype that doesn't really prove the concept. If you need to win people over and it's a tough fight you need to be in a strong position.
In some orgs, if you don’t step around the problem carefully so as to not be “done” immediately with a proof of concept, it might get shipped to the customer from underneath you.
> Throughout this initial period there are standup updates of the form “I’m exploring X, or working through problem Y, but should have something for others to take a look at soon”
What is really going on is the developer has basically been given permission to not turn anything in. They are spending maybe an hour a day actually exploring/working on the issue and the rest of the day they are working on their own pet projects, playing games, watching netflix, whaterver. Heck, they might even spend just one day doing all their "exploring" and then see how long after that they can just show up for standup and extend out the "exploring" phase while doing whatever they want the rest of the day.
I think that's an overly harsh take. I've fallen prey to the pattern the author describes many times, and I inevitably end up making updates like that because I feel bad that work isn't getting done, which fuels a procrastination doom loop of anxiety and avoidance until I rip the bandaid off and hustle to make up the missing work.
It sounds like you've never experienced this, and that's great for you, but don't discount what the author is saying. It rings uncannily true to me, and it sucks when it happens.
Exactly. It is very easy to fall into the trap the author describes, for junior as well as senior engineers. Managers should ask for feedback early on in the process. This could be a first draft of the architecture or even a simple bullet list of assumptions and considerations. A look at that info by a fellow engineer or a product owner can highly impact the set of requirements, the design or the way of implementing.
i do this on occasion while experimenting and thinking through an architectural design. what matters is whether the end result is representative of the time spent on iteration and writing thrown-away prototypes. i will often not start writing code until a reasonable path is formed in my head, and then i may write a prototype that doesnt work out and have to loop back and rethink various aspects. it may take a week with nothing but vague updates in daily standups, but then something awesome to show that has gone through a bunch of private "pre-alphas".
> For more senior engineers, it can happen because they like to work on their own and may be overconfident in finding solutions.
this really only applies if you:
A) dont have a history of delivering quality solutions to non-trivial problems
B) refuse to ask for help/feedback when you actually need it
typically, the rest of the team is working on other things. there would be little value in me pushing various crappy prototypes just for the sake of providing updates that only serve to distract people with information that will be out of date in 24hrs. "too many cooks in the kitchen" is a real thing, too.
Going dark alone does not very often yield results - even if the right solution comes out getting others up to speed will remove any time gained before easily.
yeah. i agree it is a mistake. but I got many times sidelined or robbed of an idea or a project after starting it and involving other people too early. it happened for instance that I started developing a GDPR tool mentioned it to my manager, he then told me a few days later that there was a manager working on this and it was in the making. the manager in question never had anything on the topic, did not start anything as well. two weeks later he had a power point and hired an intern « to work on this topic » he presented the deck to VPs, every one clapped said it was amazing. I had the full mvp working - demo-able and he was supposed to be the one leading this after this presentation.
so I guess id rather do too much work before looping in others
Thank you... frustrating we do not help by putting the statement into the title and write "bait-like" wording to get clicks and traffic. Now also the server is down so I get no value and no insight.
It's sort of a reproductive strategy thing, only about attention. As I say about headline writers in media, it's their job to sex up the title and our job to knock it back down to size.
I guess that makes sense. But it is more work for me. And for those who don’t want to or can’t put the time into it (outside of HN) they eat what they are fed.
I feel like one of the biggest antidotes to this is just a simple daily standup. My team does this, a daily 30 minute meeting, and everyone says what they're working on as well as any blockers. Seems to work very well in terms of course correction at an early point.
I think because most people give very short descriptions in their standups i.e. "Working on x today, with a bit of y, no blockers". Perhaps due to things mentioned in the article, people don't want to or feel the need to invite feedback
Where I work everyone will do their check-in but the important part is that everyone has a different personality. Like some people can be more confused and have a hard time explaining or even remembering what they did before so it's helpful to ask questions during their check-in to see if they need help. Some people might work on the same task for weeks. People are often afraid to ask for help. Or, maybe their task needs to be broken into something smaller given new information. The daily check-in is also a way for them to connect with someone else in the team who can actually help them. I'll tell them to either hang out at the end of standup or schedule a meeting with each other.
Having someone leading the standup, if done correctly, can help hold people more accountable for what their progress is toward the sprint goal and remove obstacles. This is one of the responsibilities of a scrum master although you don't need to be a scrum master at all to do this.
Right, we do a standup, but if you're not careful the updates can be generic enough like "making progress on X" where you still end up working too long without feedback
I'm curious, what about that semantic differentiation is confusing for you?
At least in my experience, "Software Engineer" is a standard title for the kind of work the author is describing in the article and is often used interchangeably with "Developer".
Maybe in your experience that conflation makes sense, but a developer is not necessarily a software engineer.
There are distinct educational programs that differ between "computer science" and "software engineering", and a number of professional organizations are lobbying for software engineering licensure, similar to other engineering professions.
Even Dijkstra knew of the differentation:
'"A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."'
I'm glad you brought up Dijkstra. He's famous (amongst many other things) for coining the phrase/concept "separation of concerns". He considered this to be a fundamental principle in software engineering, giving the field of programming more structure as you allude to in your comment.
But that SoC concept is fairly endemic in a field of folks who self-identify as "developers". The MVC/MVVM craze of the late 2000s and early 2010s had this plastered on every blog. You can call the self-identification mismatch a taxonomy issue, but my original comment is trying to deduce why that distinction matters at all in practice if developers are embracing concepts that we would consider "proper" software engineering.
I suspect the distinction is just noise at this point.
I think they mean generally. And I tend to agree. I had suspicions while reading it but wasn't completely sure till I checked the Author's bio on the right. Some, if not a lot, of it doesn't apply well if at all the the "classic" fields of engineering, where engineers tend to be much more focused and trained in their skills.
This seems, at best, an anecdotal and/or an arbitrary distinction about what qualifies as "Engineering". Software engineering, as an applied discipline both in name and in practice, has existed since at least the mid-to-late 1960's. And many of the orgs in those days which adopted that title normatively, employed many folks who were "focused and trained in their skills" (e.g. NASA) and worked alongside of those in the more classical engineering domains.
Speaking in my own experience, working closely with hardware/mechanical/electrical folks on a novel product line, they are exposed to a lot of the same subject matter covered in the article. Many of the tradeoffs explored there are absolutely relevant to the older engineering disciplines.
there's no classical software development engineering so depending where you were trained (web startup vs. software company vs. deep in the bowls of a huge corporation etc.) you could have very different ideas of normal - see eg: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
