<story><title>All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people</title><url>https://medium.com/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I know exactly how it happens.  Engineering projects take a long time.  90% of the effort lives in the basement where nobody can see it; getting data from some other system, optimizing queries, spinning up the servers... nothing at all user-facing.  So to the untrained eye, 90% of the time, programmers are doing nothing.  And that 90% can be weeks, months, even years.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any of this is unique to software engineering, either.  You don&amp;#x27;t just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow.  To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project.  Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough.  (Because there is always &amp;quot;that one guy&amp;quot; who actually isn&amp;#x27;t doing anything.  And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)&lt;p&gt;As for why we spend money hiring people that don&amp;#x27;t actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people&amp;#x27;s work... I think it&amp;#x27;s just loss aversion in action.  If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money&amp;#x27;s going.  But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they&amp;#x27;re stealing from you and must be punished!  It is human nature.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what we did in the past that&amp;#x27;s different from today.  Somehow we got to the moon.  But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees.  I don&amp;#x27;t have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects.  And, you know, we&amp;#x27;re not really doing them anymore.  I wonder what changed.  Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.</text></item><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>&lt;i&gt;they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute &amp;quot;project accountability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lr4444lr</author><text>Well for one, this whole &amp;quot;agile&amp;quot; concept of changing things midstream can&amp;#x27;t be helping. No one says once a bridge is 20% built. Hmm... You know what, more height to avoid noise and smog problems in fact seems to be a better focus than high vehicular weight. Let&amp;#x27;s start making those adjustments and expect to stick to our time, cost, and quality estimates.&lt;p&gt;Outside of a few niche areas, calling what&amp;#x27;s going on in software &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot; seems laughable to me, and I never refer to myself with that term.</text></comment>
<story><title>All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people</title><url>https://medium.com/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I know exactly how it happens.  Engineering projects take a long time.  90% of the effort lives in the basement where nobody can see it; getting data from some other system, optimizing queries, spinning up the servers... nothing at all user-facing.  So to the untrained eye, 90% of the time, programmers are doing nothing.  And that 90% can be weeks, months, even years.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any of this is unique to software engineering, either.  You don&amp;#x27;t just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow.  To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project.  Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough.  (Because there is always &amp;quot;that one guy&amp;quot; who actually isn&amp;#x27;t doing anything.  And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)&lt;p&gt;As for why we spend money hiring people that don&amp;#x27;t actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people&amp;#x27;s work... I think it&amp;#x27;s just loss aversion in action.  If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money&amp;#x27;s going.  But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they&amp;#x27;re stealing from you and must be punished!  It is human nature.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what we did in the past that&amp;#x27;s different from today.  Somehow we got to the moon.  But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees.  I don&amp;#x27;t have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects.  And, you know, we&amp;#x27;re not really doing them anymore.  I wonder what changed.  Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.</text></item><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>&lt;i&gt;they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute &amp;quot;project accountability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>radiospiel</author><text>A manager must be able to answer the question &amp;quot;Are we on time? Do we need additional resources?&amp;quot;. This happens to help a project, not to delay it. If a good team of developers estimates the effort needed for anyone task with a 20% accuracy (which would be very good indeed), that can make a 9 month project being 2 months late, which might or might not be acceptable.&lt;p&gt;If developer teams would be treated like the blackbox they apparently want to be treated as would mean that whoever is managing procuesses would fly blind just hoping for the best - but the organization as a whole needs to be understanding what is going on right now.&lt;p&gt;Time tracking can be a surveilling tool, but it can also be a tool to improve things - someone could find out that a team is running over capacity, and consequently assign more resources to the task at hand or redefine the task.&lt;p&gt;And, well, for morning standups: when done right they are a valuable tool for efficient communication, and probably better than having people chasing each other for hours on end. IMHO an organisation should agree on a communication strategy that is the most efficient and helpful for it. It is not a religious belief that a standup meeting must be done first thing in the morning, I think that tends to conflict w&amp;#x2F;the teams personal schedules the least.</text></comment>