I suspect many task deadlines are designed to force engineers to work for free
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
If this describes your workplace, please find a better managed workplace if you can. They are out there
The correct way to do things here would be to:
1. Do a probe project to evaluate complexity and/or look at similar projects
2. Trade time (deadlines) for scope and resources. Yes, we can deliver in a month, but only if we cut scope and get 2 more QA folks, etc.
EDIT 2a: You can also negotiate to trade time for quality and/or take on technical debt knowing it reduces future velocity.
3. If neither of the above happen, you should trade absurdity for more salary/growth. I've seen this at places such as hedge funds and consultancies and they compensate and "pay" for it with better comp and growth.
Examples: if I didn't happen to have an accurate-enough figure for the diameter of the Earth in miles, plus a formula for the surface area of a sphere, plus roughly the proportion of the Earth's surface that's land, all in my head, there's no chance at all I could produce a useful-for-any-purpose-whatsoever estimate of "area of the Asian continent" without researching it (at which point I could just look up a fairly exact figure, without knowing any of that). Year of Alexander the Great's birth, well I happen to know roughly when Aristotle was active and that they were alive at the same time. Otherwise, again, I'd produce a useless-for-most-any-purpose guess. Total US currency, I bet knowing something like the current annual GDP of the US would at least narrow that down, and is something someone might plausibly have at hand (I don't, my guessed range on that would be hilariously bad). If you have a sense of blockbuster movie budgets and/or returns, which one can acquire from paying attention to entertainment headlines, it's easy to come up with a reasonable range for Titanic's box office receipts. And so on.
Is the point that trivia's highly valuable, actually, if you have to estimate a bunch of arbitrary stuff purely from memory?
For my part I definitely tend to squeeze my "90%"s down to more like "30-40%" when asked for a "90%", for that reason. I might try out an honest and accurate estimate on someone I kinda know, and suspect won't quietly re-evaluate me as a useless moron or "one of those asshole 'programmer' types who doesn't get business" in response, though.
The point of the test -- as shown by the response graph after it -- is to show that when someone asks us for a 90%-confidence estimate, we don't really understand what that means, and end up giving 30%-confidence estimates. The point is that people need to understand what they do and don't know, and reflect their level of uncertainty with the width of the range.
If I have a trivial task that I've done a hundred times before, I might say that it'll take me 45-60 minutes to complete, and 90% of the time I'd be right. But if it's something I've never done before, and I don't understand the steps or complexity, I might say that it'll take me between 30 minutes and 8 hours.
This scales up, too. For a larger project that I understand well, I might say 6-8 weeks, while for something I don't understand, I might say 4-12 weeks.
Over time, I can determine if I make good-enough estimates by checking to see if 90% of the time the actual time to delivery fell within the stated range. It doesn't matter if it's at the beginning of the range, end of the range, or right in the middle. I just need to hit somewhere in the range, 90% of the time.
For example, for the Alexander the Great question, I don't have a clue. Your mention that he was a contemporary of Aristotle actually made me realize I believed he was much more modern-day than he is. So I might give a range of like 1000BC to 0AD, because I recall that Aristotle was definitely BC, but I don't really have much confidence as to when. Looks like the right answer is 356BC. So my estimate was correct, even though it had a wide range. Giving people (like your manager) a wider range also communicates your uncertainty, which is a useful piece of information for them to have. The issue is that I think many engineering managers simply won't accept a true 90% estimate if it's wider than they know what to do with from a planning perspective.
For that matter they tend to be pretty bad at anything even adjacent to experimental design, but god help you if you point out that the data they're so proud to present to the C-suite next week is, actually, meaningless (rare is the C-suite that'll catch it and call them on it, anyway, so from the perspective of the presenter it's almost beside the point; a disturbing amount of "data driven" leadership is pure fairy dust).
For a good proportion of programmers I'd expect education and professional work experience to have them comfortable with wide estimate ranges being typical and honest for many "90%" estimates, but business-social experience having convinced them, correctly, that honest estimates aren't what a hell of a lot of people actually want and do, "make us appear ignorant or incompetent" (from the book), in actual fact from the perspectives of people who control our budgets and wages.
Personally I tend to try to narrow the range as much as possible while keeping my upper bound as fixed as possible, but that doesn't always work either, and I think I still unconsciously try to go too far toward making everyone happy, and underestimate.
I think part of it is just our collective feelings of powerlessness that keeps us in this uncomfortable position. If a significant number of developers were to put their foot down and give real estimates that actually express uncertainty properly, and stick with them, management would start to understand, or at least accept, what's going on. But "getting a bunch of random people to change their behavior all at once" isn't a reliable strategy, so here we are, and here we'll continue to be.
Applies to non-dev work as well.
This industry is like any (every?) other: a minefield of incompetence and laziness interwoven with an unhealthy dose of unjustifiable arrogance.
If they are freezing time and resources and scope, and you dont have much room to move except with quality and debt. But those catch up. If that is the consistent trade-off, i'd go with my original recommendations: trade this stupidity for more salary or find a new employer with better management. Or seek the managerial position yourself and do a better job at it.
As a plus this also gives you the ability to more effectively gauge the difficulty of the rest of the project. The things you thought were simple might be much worse. And then as long as you get concrete feedback, you'll be able to much better predict the amount of time and effort required going forward.
It looks like they're assuming we're all lazy. They think the job isn't that hard. A fundamental lack of respect.
No offence to Geordi La Forge.
https://youtu.be/latWmQtm8fw?t=22
In your estimating, remember to always add buffer time.
It is by trading quality pretty often, but that often is exactly trade off managers want. It is often by trading future productivity - engineers burning out or at least having drop after deadline.
Future productivity? If engineers are burning out in an attempt to meet otherwise impossible deadlines, it means they're being placed under enough stress that it's threatening their mental and possibly physical health. Is employee health really something that can be traded away?
In theory? No. In practice? Very much yes.
Health (particularly mental well-being) isn't readily and reliably quantifiable. As a manager, you may think your subordinate is happy and productive all the way up to the point they hand you their resignation letter. Meanwhile, employees have every reason to pretend everything is OK up to the very moment they secure a new job elsewhere. And to the extent they're becoming less productive due to burnout, most software jobs has a lot of slack in it - between high variance in problem solving and plenty of bullshit tasks to juggle, someone working at 10% of their normal capacity can stay unnoticed for a while.
With no good feedback being available, it's hard to see you're putting too much pressure on your employees, particularly if you don't look for it (whether because you're too busy or just don't care).
There are resources which may help. Here's an article that's specific to stress:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6345505/
> As a manager, you may think your subordinate is happy and productive all the way up to the point they hand you their resignation letter.
This is the same problem we have with depression and suicide. The answer is to actively look for it.
> Meanwhile, employees have every reason to pretend everything is OK up to the very moment they secure a new job elsewhere.
An evaluation of a person's mental health produces medical information which should of course be confidential. People will not open up if they think this information will be shared with others, especially their bosses or colleagues.
> And to the extent they're becoming less productive due to burnout, most software jobs has a lot of slack in it - between high variance in problem solving and plenty of bullshit tasks to juggle, someone working at 10% of their normal capacity can stay unnoticed for a while.
Many diseases also have a subclinical phase where they show few or no symptoms. This is actually a good thing since it allows you to intervene before a complication manifests itself. The answer is to actively look for them.
> it's hard to see you're putting too much pressure on your employees, particularly if you don't look for it (whether because you're too busy or just don't care).
Hard, but not impossible. The answers won't be found if the people responsible aren't looking for them. If managers are too busy, maybe they should make the time. If they don't care, they should straight up be fired for gross negligence.
How would this information be useful if it's not shared with the boss?
Regardless, I don't think the biggest issue is people are afraid that the information will be shared, but that there's a stigma around being associated with a mental health issue that causes lower productivity in the workplace. Employees are more likely to keep that kind of thing a secret because they likely believe knowledge of it will make it harder to get raises and promotions.
Indirection and anonymization. The details of each individual aren't supposed to be shared but a healthcare professional can recommend changes to the manager that if implemented would promote a healthier workplace. They can point out that the whole workplace is stressful and talk to the managers about how they can improve that. Hopefully deadlines will be addressed.
There's an entire medical specialty devoted to this: occupational medicine.
> Employees are more likely to keep that kind of thing a secret because they likely believe knowledge of it will make it harder to get raises and promotions.
Unreasonable deadlines are likely to stress entire groups of people, not single individuals. It's worth addressing as an issue affecting the collective workforce.
Practically yes. Not necessary because management are all sociopaths and narcissists (some are). What management see is well performing motivated employee that does not complain. People are expected to not talk about about them being tired, about their mental issues and put themselves at disadvantage if they show weakness.
Employees in order to look good and for the sake of own ego, dont admit they are at limit. The ego thing is big co-reason, that is what prevents employee from taking action. (And yes employee often has that option.)
When employee breaks and stops performing, he is kept around for the sake of old glory for a while. Then he is either replaced or hidden in one of those sleepy corporate departments full of considered loosers. The employee is then blamed for consequences of break down.
Any remotely healthy team will perform estimation and scoping as a discussion with the developers involved. The author of this post sounds like he has worked at an extremely dysfunctional company, not a company that understands how to develop software.
This idea that managers are universally incompetent just isn't true. The best thing you can do is refuse to support incompetent managers. Change teams or change jobs if you must. There are many, many great managers out there who won't try to pull nonsense like this.
They can. I've had a time where a project manager came by no less than 3 times asking me to re-estimate the same project, tweaked ever so slightly each time. Turned out that they had made an impossible promise to the client. Upon learning that, I just said, listen that can't be done within that budget, end of story. You have to go reduce the scope. In the end, they had to go back, loop in the account manager and have the awkward conversation with the client.
I traded stupidity for money. Don't do it.
My recommendation: try to evaluate your employer on the above.
I've traded stupidity for money for money earlier in my life, and it made sense. But people underestimate the break-even. You deserve a lot of money (50% or 75% premium) for some of the stupidity I've seen.
On the flip side, i've also traded a salary discount for a well-run org -- a job where i have 90min max meetings a day with lots of good ASYNC communications, good project planning, estimation, and good sprint cadences. I work a lot, but only when I want to (often late nights), bike outside when I want to, work heads-down w/o disturbances, etc.
Just be careful when headhunters come offering a 10 or 15% increase in comp except w/ a very different culture. You have to compare like to like.
And better do it in a nuanced way, not the yes/no checkmarks that Stackoverflow Jobs is using for those points. I've worked for companies that were a mess and would get 11/12, as they _technically_ were using source control and tracking bugs etc., just in the most unproductive/useless way.
ie: Security Auditing Style...
The direct eng manager (or PM sometimes) should be in a position to fight against this sort of absurdity, give the IC a few days to scope the project, etc. One of the eng managers at a previous employer wasnt a great technical mind but was stellar at playing defense against managament. We all had great respect for him repeatedly taking it on the chin for his team.
The power the engineers have is to exit. In some organizations, the engineers can exit to another part of the organization. In others, they exit the organization entirely. This does actually work in aggregate if you just look at it on a longer timescale.
There's no such thing as a hard deadline. Everything is made up. What your manager is saying is: "To be successful in the market, I think I need to have X thing in Y days."
It's the engineer's responsibility to provide information and estimates that will shape the business's direction. If you don't clarify or negotiate requirements based on your technical knowledge and experience and just take requirements as law written in stone you are not providing the true value of an engineer.
If you are doing that - pushing back and grounding requirements in reality - and the business plows ahead with unrealistic goals anyway, then that simply means the people you work with are unreasonable and you should seek employment elsewhere. If they're not even willing to listen to people they're paying to have expertise then they're probably reading the market wrong too and I wouldn't trust them to be around long anyway.
"This video processing software needs to be ready by the Superbowl" or "This electronic voting software needs to be done by election day" don't strike you as hard deadlines?
You don’t get sacked, you just get to work on the next death-march project. And for your two examples, it might be punted to the next Superbowl or election.
Hard deadlines are not often deadly.
I mean, honestly, yes. That's kinda the point of "dead"lines, isn't it?
Finishing your term paper the night before it’s due was a thing we were supposed to outgrow in college.
I just said, I'll need to work Saturdays to make this happen, and will need at least 2 others in on Saturdays (in office - full day work). I asked for +50% and got it.
It helped I'd been clear that my schedule was 8:30-5:00 M-F to start and was younger at the time.
Ironically - these days I just wish I had free time and curse myself fairly often for being over-committed. So rarely worth it even for more $ especially if you have kids and are a stranger to them. While I'm paid extremely well QOL is WAY down and stress is very high.
Deadlines exist because software doesn't exist in a vacuum, but other people depend on it being delivered. Whether so it can be sold to make money before someone goes out of business or a partnership fails, or its features arrive on time as promised for the start of the school year which can't be moved, or as the foundation for another project that has its own equally valid deadline later on.
Deadlines exist because people need to make plans and be able to rely on them, which is how our entire society and economy function.
People work overtime in every industry to meet deadlines, it's not just engineers. The only question is whether or it's good for you financially.
Whenever you take a job, it's up to you to do your due diligence in talking to other employees to find out what the working hours and flexibility are like in practice, and judge that against the salary, and decide if it makes sense for you.
Fortunately, there is huge variation in both salaries and expectations of hours per week, and the best thing you can do about places that pay little and work you long is to not take their job offer, or leave. Then supply and demand can do its thing and they'll be forced to adjust or go out of business.
Exactly, even without external deliverables there are likely other internal initiatives that depend on the project or tie into it. Might even be something as simple as the QA team being booked on another project in a month that does have a hard deadline. So as long as something in the org has a hard external deadline there are going to be ripples that touch all projects in the org.
Also, my experience is that if you communicate early that features need to be cut to meet the deadlines most managers will be happy.
That's all the evidence that I need to take the view that this phenomenon is wide-spread and pervasive in engineering and does not usually reach the same level of pathology in other professions -- a level where people are forced into 'playing a game' with regard to estimates and deadlines.
In short this is really UNHEALTHY behavior and whether it occurs in all industries or just engineering seems beside the point.
Talk to consultants, investment bankers, doctors, lawyers -- you know, other high-intellect jobs like engineers.
Lawyers are playing the game of billable hours. Consultants are playing the game of working day and night to produce the report by the promised deadline, to move on to their next scheduled client the following Monday. Doctors complete grueling residencies with "artificially" insane requirements, then follow insane schedules juggling hospitals and private practice. And the investment bankers I know haven't had a full weekend off in years.
I fail to see what's different about engineering, or what makes it inherently any more of a "game" than what billable hours or hospital residences or consulting deadlines are.
> Deadlines exist because people need to make plans and be able to rely on them, which is how our entire society and economy function.
This is the core of it. When we're heads down working through code, it's easy to forget that the end product is part of a much bigger business. In most companies, operating without deadlines or target dates is equivalent to expecting the rest of the business to revolve around you. Doesn't work.
That's not to say that deadlines can or should be arbitrary. Healthy teams will sit down and discuss realistic deadlines with engineers, not hide the tasks from engineers and give them unreasonable deadlines without a hint of communication like this blog post suggests.
If you find yourself working for a manager or company that resembles this blog post in any way: Get out! There are many great companies and managers out there who would be more than happy to add good talent to their teams. Mutual respect is the norm at any halfway functional company.
Any company operating like this is doomed to suffer massive turnover, exodus of good employees, and slow descent into failure. Don't let bad managers like this drag you down with them, and don't let bad experiences make you permanently cynical of the industry as a whole.
Strip down everything to its bare essentials (i.e. just beyond the vacuum) and you have: a Programmer, a Software and (maybe) a User. The sentence above is a common trope that people believe justifies all the friction added between the Programmer and the Software, while attempting to optimize the process of putting it in the hand of the User. But I contend that deadlines are an unfortunate and provably unnecessary byproduct (see many open source projects) of that often wasteful process.
> Deadlines exist because people need to make plans and be able to rely on them
To make a plan you need a list of priorities and some time estimates. Some people just have a knack for turning these into artificial emergencies. The decision to build a new software feature can be taken in an organization by establishing how needed it is and vaguely describing the time it would take to build in terms of days, weeks, months or years. It's enough to know whether you want to spend some resources on it or not. Regardless of deadlines, people will work toward those time frames.
> which is how our entire society and economy function.
Only the parts of our society where such engagements actually matter function like this. In many other parts it's useless to follow such a model. Unfortunately some people observe it in one context and believe that it's a driver that can be blindly transposed onto another. So they start fabricating urgency where it doesn't belong. Meanwhile, it'll be ready when it's ready remains a successful model for many, even in our society and economy.
The article did not speak of "overtime", it was said that the engineer was asked to complete a task that would take a month, in 3 days (regardless of whether the author was exaggerating or not). What in "every" industry is called "labor exploitation" and is not something normal.
As I've mentioned before, there's something called a "completion bond" in the film industry.[1] A completion bond guarantees third party investors that a completed, releasable film results, or your money back. Completion bond companies will take a shooting script and cost it out, then quote on what the bond will cost. It's usually 3-5% of production cost.
Completion bond companies are thus very good at cost estimation. They keep records on what and who has overrun budgets in the past, and by how much, and adjust their estimates accordingly.
The completion bond company has several options when a film is in trouble. They can put people on set to watch where the money is going. They can put in more money, which is the first thing to be paid back when the film releases. As a last resort, they can fire the director and producer and put their own people in, to get something finished. That's seldom done. "Bad Girls" (1994) is a film where that happened. It's a terrible movie, but they got half the production cost back, which beats zero.
The threat of that happening keeps management in line. Big career setback for a director and producer when that happens.
If every software project ever made was just a CRUD app, with the only variations being the number of fields and the amount of data validation, and we'd been doing it for 100 years, I'm sure our ability to finish on time and on budget would be much less maligned.
But I also think people are really quick to imagine managers / bosses to be Snidely Whiplash or something when really it's more ignorance and bad choices and etc.
I wonder if the introverted engineering culture has something to do with it too?
I used to work in other fields until I started coding later in life. I've found a huge % of engineers asking about what to do about situations and my first question is:
"Wait ... have you talked to your manager about this yet?"
And the answer very often is "no" and they're talking about really strong feelings of pressure and rage quitting is pretty shocking to me. This was very rare in other fields that I was in, but in engineering it seems surprisingly common.... Let alone the stories where it seems like the manager and the employee only talk during quarterly meetings and that's it.
I think without any kind of relationship with your manager, team or employer can make a given situation seem like it is menacing, manipulative.... but you really don't know.
Granted, there are bad managers who do such things intentionally, but if you talk to them you'll probably figure that out too. If you don't, you don't know.
I've worked with plenty of folks who were very sure / felt strongly about some management manipulation and yet I saw no reason to think it was occurring at all.
"So, the engineer makes a wild guess and his boss responds with, "That's too long."" -> You have a dysfunctional relationship with your boss. They don't trust your estimates - whether based on their hubris, or your past results, or something else. You need to either find a way to reset that trust or leave the company and start anew with a new manager. Otherwise you'd going to have this same problem forever and neither of you will be happy.
"Very often, if he chooses to do a lousy job, everyone seems happy that something was produced, even though what was produced may have been total garbage that was good for absolutely nothing." Reading between the lines here, this sounds like an engineer who wants to satisfy requirements that the project doesn't actually have. In my experience, this often looks like an engineer who wants to add more adjectives (modifiability, robustness, scalability, etc) than is actually needed. If you delivered a result that the stakeholders are happy with, that's a good outcome as an engineer. If you want to overengineer something, consider either doing it on your own time or switching to a job where, for example, more scalability, is actually a requirement.
"In other words, if a boss is not totally clueless (which some seem to be), he knows an engineer can't complete a job in three days that will take a month" -> the author clearly assumes their boss has a ton more insight into the engineering work than most do. Actual engineers working on a given project are usually pretty bad at estimating how long tasks will take - a manager (even a non-"clueless", technical one) generally has very little idea how long something will actually take. Assuming that their manager knows and is intentionally screwing you over is just another sign that the author has a completely broken relationship with their boss and is incredibly bitter about it. They would probably benefit from a reset (eg at a new job).
In my experience, this is one of the least understood aspects of the engineer's job, often by engineers themselves. An engineer's job is not to create the absolute highest quality solution every time. The engineer's job is to match solutions with requirements. Often that means not implementing something that, from a purely technical perspective, would be an improvement, because it's not needed to meet the actual requirement, and would take time and effort from something that is needed.
I have no problem with developing solutions on my own with the right accommodations and compensation - but stop handing me sprints based on things where the greatest extent of planning is a single sentence fragment of a Jira issue title.
Yes, another (often frustrating) part of the engineer's job is to try to get the client (or a manager or someone else who is supposed to be communicating the client's requirements to you) to understand what "requirements" actually means and what does and doesn't count as actually specifying a requirement so it can be met, or at least so that a reasonable estimate of the time and resources required can be given.
As others in this thread have said, sometimes the only real cure for this problem is to find a new job where you have different, and more reasonable, clients and/or managers.
On the flip side, that sounds like a fast track to making shitty products that cause financial losses to the users (or, depending on industry, loss of life and limb). There are always implicit requirements to balance that stakeholders don't think of (or sometimes can't even conceptualize). Like, "satisfy the obvious safety constraints despite them not being mentioned in the spec", or "don't ship kludges that will slow everyone else down later on". Sometimes, part of being an engineer is saving stakeholders from themselves.
Might depend on the company culture, but personally I do not want to work in the place where the engineering culture is "ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die".
-Hanlon's razor
So developers must suffer because managers routinely make promises they can't keep?
Even developers themselves are often unable to produce good estimates. In fact, most developers tend to systematically underestimate how much time they will need for this or that task.
I have seen management to even add padding to estimate and it is still not enough in the end.
If the problem is that your manager isn't listening to your estimates, then find a new manager. Plenty of fish in the sea.
That's why I often 3x my estimates. It works great for me.
It's never a problem that I finish a project early. But when external launch plans are on the line, it can definitely be a problem to finish a project late.
Finishing a project on time is one of the things you get evaluated on in performance reviews as a software engineer. It's also up to the software engineer to provide reasonable estimates and to push back on requirements or incorrect estimates coming from higher up.
When I managed my own teams, the most I would ask folks to do is to very rarely work a bit more for a day or two (there are sometimes legitimate reasons why things need to be done by a certain date, or crises to resolve ASAP), giving them days off later to compensate. This was entirely voluntary, with NO repercussions, career or otherwise, if they don't want to do it. There always were 3-4 folks who were happy to oblige. I'm also proud to say, that not once have I made anyone work over a weekend.
If you're a great engineer, it behooves you to see yourself as an investor in the company you end up choosing to work for.
This means learning about things like the disruptive growth era we're in, how monetary policy affects growth, etc. You should know what an inverted yield curve is, and where to look to keep up with those charts (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y).
It's important to read Clayton Christensen "The Innovator's Dilemma". I also highly recommend reading ARK Invest's research reports. They cost nothing but an email address, and I have found these all to be enormously valuable in my own research on this. If you just want to sit and watch some stuff on YouTube that can help, give "Chicken Genius Singapore", "Dave Lee on Investing", and "Solving the Money Problem" a whirl.
Great management is incredibly rare. But it's on you to learn how to identify it. If you want to be paid the most, you have to know more than just the field you specialize in! There is little value in putting your head in the sand.
> The slacker / incompetent
Are organizations that are prone to dramatic underestimations and overworking people also prone to keeping slackers or incompetent developers on staff? But, also, is there a scenario in which the work takes longer _because_ of the incompetence? Meaning the competent developers are working reasonable hours?
> overworking genius.
I'd again wager a guess that most of those struggling with overworking at companies are not geniuses, as a legitimate genius might be more inclined to just find a new job
As nice as equity compensation plans are, they definitely don't make up for the gains.
The divisional VP gets the lions share of the gains in stock for properly managing/motivating the engineering talent (the engineer is lucky to get a raise above inflation).
That's great for Apple engineers but what if you work for HP/Intel/IBM and just see a steady declining stock?
What to do? Take your skills and put them into your own startup. I rolled with the times, hedged my bets and invested my life savings, as documented here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810
(The only thing I'd amend my 4-month old comments with, is, chill out! The daily ups and downs are not important compared to the Fed Put. And, long-term, watch out for the ultimate decline of the dollar, the shift from fiat to bitcoin. Palihapitiya has sage advice in keeping at least 1% of your net worth in bitcoin.)
Investing well is a mindset, and the essential thing to do is focus on your methodology, and your connection to the world around you. There is no substitute for critical, rational, non-cynical thinking.
I'm still amazed that there is so much migration into the US at this point. (But I also do get it.)
(I'm internally sort-of answering "Why wouldn't you move to Germany?" since that is where I was born)
* English is easy. It's probably already required to become an engineer. So you move to an English-speaking country.
* Everything is cheap. Labor is cheap, bureaucracy is low. If you dream about starting your own company/idea/dream some time, the US seems like the place to do it.
* The people have a reputation of being easy-going (if superficial) and the country is already culturally mixed. You're not going to stand out.
* It is culturally dominating. Name any piece of popular media that was made in the last 50 years and chances are 95% that it's American. That's not a good reason, but I would say it's a strong biasing factor.
That is enough for an entire family to rent a house and live a very comfortable life pretty much everywhere in Germany, except maybe Munich city center.
There are strong overtime protections, I've heard from people who were paid 4x their regular salary because they were called in on a Sunday.
I'm sure the FAANG pay better, but maybe house + family + free time is nicer than high numbers in your online banking?
Seattle salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Greater-Se...
Switzerland salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Switzerlan...
Cost-of-living Seattle vs. Zurich: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Income tax burden in Seattle @200k p.a. was 26.28% in 2019: https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#qWHU75h5ug
Income tax burden in Zurich @200k p.a. was 20.41% in 2019: https://swisstaxcalculator.estv.admin.ch/#/taxburden/income-...
So you "pay" 8% of purchasing power to get everything I mentioned (plus socialized health care but let's not go there).
I would also say that "highly-valuable" is not what a country should strive for its companies to be. I would argue that the good of its citizens should be - and rather than $10b of company valuation, the citizens would profit more from that $10b going into labor regulations and social security.
Mind you, I also think there's an element of developers lowballing estimates and then putting in extra time to make themselves much more productive than they actually are. I've worked with a few people who management believed were fantastic but who actually just worked 50% longer hours. I fight hard against those kinds of people being on my team because it destroys morale and absolutely ruins my burndown charts any time they're not available.
This is the one point where I'm very happy that my work committed to the (legally already obligatory) time tracking.
If you do 20h overtime, that just means you spent 20h extra on this sprint, and SP/h should be unaffected (thus also the burndown chart).
In my experience time isn't recorded, or isn't recorded very accurately, especially when it's unsanctioned and unpaid overtime. Burndown charts report the daily change rather than the hourly change. Consequently it looks like stories are moving quickly but really it's just that more effort is being put in every day, but the chart doesn't reflect that.
Our Scrum Master did use a factor of "actual hours worked vs. planned hours worked" to determine how accurate our SP totals per sprint were. I.e. if we did 100SP in Sprint 1 with no overtime, then 100SP in Sprint 2 with 20h of overtime, we underestimate the SP in Sprint 2.
I am generally not a fan of time tracking (especially not down to minute accuracy or per-story), but I see sth. like "8.7 hours worked on Tuesday" as a useful but not misleading measure.
If you were selling someone watermelons, yet your client wants to pay you 50%, should you give it away for free? There are other people that like watermelons. And if he's the only guy out there that likes watermelons, it's time to start selling oranges.
Start cooperating. If your stakeholders won't, find ones that do.
(tongue-in-cheek...I just feel like every day there's a new law I learn that applies perfectly to a situation. I can't keep track of them all!)
-- Yours Truly's Razor ;) (though I still prefer "Hanlon's Handgun")
"Never attribute stupidity what can be explain as sheer corruption, aka malice"
That thin concrete that doesn't meet requirements, was put there not b/c of stupidity, but because someone lined up their pockets down the line, and the quality assurance people were paid to look the other way.
Mafia 101
I removed an anecdote, here, to protect the guilty.
Let's say that you talk to a marketing/sales person, and they give an absurdly optimistic estimate for a significant project.
So either they would deliver a steaming heap of garbage, at their estimate, or (more likely), the project would take a lot longer than the estimate. Since it is often a "cost plus" contract, we are unlikely to be happy with the outcome.
It would probably still be a steaming heap of garbage, but at a much higher price and months late.
The thing about late projects, is that there's this huge rush to deliver all the features by the ridiculous date, and, when it gets there, you have this horrendous Rube Goldberg device that is a creaking, barely-usable bug farm.
All the rest of the time is spent trying to get it working properly[0]. It would consist of slapping kludge on top of kludge, until the result is 90% cruft.
Good estimation is a black art that no one I know has ever gotten right. That includes Yours Truly.
I have a friend that wants to do a fairly ambitious NPO project. I was unsatisfied with the interactions he's been having with potential contractors, and just started to do the project myself, which includes adapting the backend (which I already wrote, taking seven months), and writing one of the frontends (which looks to be on track for a couple of months, at least).
As usual, it's going about 50% slower than I had planned, but it's definitely coming along. It will be really, really good, but quality takes time. One of the things that I do, is have a very loose project plan that solidifies as the project progresses. It really requires me working alone. Doesn't scale well to teams.
Since I'm working on it for free, I guess that I'm a chump, eh?
It's hilarious how when there is a general article about developer productivity, the comments section is full of people claiming how programming is not like manual labor that you can do for eight hours straight, and that most work in bursts of a few hours of intense intellectual activity surrounded by taking time off.
How many software engineers can, hand to heart, claim honestly that they put in 8 full productive working hours day after day the way a cashier or warehouse worker does?
I don't think 8 hours of cognitively demanding, yet physically sedentary work, is part of our human nature.
If you frame it in the sense that we are just monkeys in shoes, it wouldn't be at all reasonable to expect someone to crouch in the grass and be highly alert for hours at a time.
The corollary would be a job that's physically engaging (read, not demanding) but cognitively basic, e.g. moving boxes in a warehouse, gardening.
The difference is one form of labor has leveraged output (writing code), vs linear output (moving boxes).
Counting hours for a job like programming is pointless. If you also agree that it's not reasonable to expect 8 continuous hours of intellectual labor, it should also not be reasonable on part of employees to be wedded to their 8-hour-workday. No one seems to have a problem chit-chatting at work, or engaging in other forms of recreation, but everyone seems to love counting hours when it comes to reasonable work expected from them.
I notice this in my job working with a team in Europe that my company has acqui-hired (this is relevant because until then they were a purely European company in terms of composition and culture). We are a pretty standard SV startup in terms of culture, we are in the office for ~9 hours a day (that includes lunch etc.) but we trust our employees to manage their work, which includes the self-awareness of knowing when you have not done enough during the day and compensating by working a bit more whenever you see fit.
In contrast, the European team does strict 8 hours a day (including lunch), does NOT have better average productivity than ours, but gets very upset at the occasional expectation that they meet deadlines with similar 'vigor' as their SV counterparts. I'm sure the same people would complain about pay disparity between the bay area and Europe and find it unfair.
Every dev that I have ever worked with that was worth a professional recommendation meets the criteria that you are laying out.
That's over more than 30 years in the industry so I talking about at least a 150-200 devs over the years that I have had the pleasure of working with.
Are you actually in software? I am serious in that question because your skepticism strikes me as out-of-touch in some way.
It's especially prevalent in agencies, because the are two or more layers of this crap happening simultaneously.
First, the client does it to the agency, then the big boss does it to the managers, then the managers do it to the programmers.
I think it is also [connected with|the primary reason for] ageism in the industry:
As you gain experience, you learn to not fall for this kind of crap anymore.
When I was new and insecure, clinging to my job thinking no one else will hire me, I put up with all sorts of crap I wouldn't put up with later in my career.
At my last job, this was definitely the case.
I'd come in with a realistic estimate, and everyone would be shocked. This is too much time, they'd say. How can we cut this down? There would be a discussion. We'd play a little game where we'd pretend we could cut corners over here and find efficiencies over there, and hey presto, we'd get it done in half the time. Now everyone is happy. Except nothing has changed. The job ends up taking as long, or longer, than the original estimate, but everyone has to work overtime to reach the deadline.
I suspect the same thing as the author; everyone knew we weren't actually cutting the time down. We were just promising to get it done faster for free.
I've only been at well run tech companies, and have a very different experience.
I would never refer to my manager as "boss". Lol, I've rarely been told what to do next..
My current manager describes his job as "herding cats" :)
This is actually not easy. Real work, and real productivity is nonlinear. You have times of serious crunch, and times where there really is not much to do.
Entrepreneurs do this better, but in startups there is almost never a time where there is not much to do (there is always something to do). Or flat hierarchies, especially one where the boss is also an ex-engineer, also do relatively better.
This really gets worse in the case of org-chart hierarchies in established/blue-chippy companies, where middle management, especially one that has no clue of tech work, solves this problem by creating pipelines of tasks that can safely be described as "bullshit jobs".
Some middle managers decide to use up the pipeline in a way so as to keep the engineers occupied 60-70 hours a week, others 40-50 hours a week, something that varies from team to team.
I'm curious to know how common this employment situation is in engineering. Perhaps only in the large consulting firms? But... aren't annual bonuses supposed to compensate for the "extra" time?
1) estimating dev time is a hard (as in NP-hard) problem. Nobody in the world can do it well. Ultimately, deadlines are meaningless in terms of actual dev time.
2) being an engineer myself, I know full well that if I'm given a fair or comfortable deadline, I'll code the thing quickly and enjoy some free time until the deadline. When the deadline comes, we'll find out there was lots of bugs. We're lazy/efficient animals.
3) if I'm given a short deadline, I'll complain but will work much harder under pressure. I'll still deliver something with bugs, but they will be fixed quickly, still under pressure.
And so we give deadlines that are far off the mark, sometimes knowingly, in order to make sure the actual finished, *debugged* product is ready by the time we make the announcement/presentation/sale.With engineering things are radically different. In engineering, and particularly in software engineering, everything is easy once you know how, otherwise it is borderline impossible. Most of the effort involved in engineering work is not in the actual work, but in the figuring-out-how. As a result, there can be multi-order-of-magnitude differences between the effort required by someone who already knows how to do something and someone who still needs to figure it out for the first time. This difference is most pronounced at the bleeding edge of theoretical research, where it can literally take decades to figure out something for the first time, after which the same problem (or variations on the theme) can be solved in minutes or seconds.
So the problem becomes: do you pay someone for their efforts or do you pay them for the results? Historically we've paid people for their effort because that was correlated with results, but that is no longer the case. But people tend to bristle at paying for results, particularly if they see that very little (apparent) effort was involved in producing it. There's the old chestnut about the plumber who charged $100 for banging on a pipe. When challenged, the plumber produced an itemized invoice: $5 for banging on the pipe and $95 for knowing where to bang.
Engineering problems are often solved by taking a shower. But Harvard MBAs don't like to pay people to take showers. We really need a radical re-thinking of the whole compensation model for this kind of work.
- the tasks are not scoped and thus arbitrary dates are given
- the tasks are not scoped and thus no trade-off discussions are had
Every time I had to work crazy hrs it was for a good reason in decent companies. Examples being: We literally don't have the money to operate if xyz doesn't get delivered by a specific date. Cut what you can, but not what is critical.
With good managers / execs you always debate between what they want build, and what can be built given current realities.
If your company just throws arbitrary dates and wants the perfect product expecting you to work like mad... there is a problem in that company.
My manager only gives me a few tasks per year, mostly administrative things like peer reviews that everyone at the company needs to do. All my real work comes from my team's product owner (not in my reporting chain, aka a product manager), who defines objectives and sets priorities for my team. My fellow developer teammates and I collaborate to give an estimate for the objective, architect a plan for it, break it down into smaller 'stories' that ideally take less than a week each to complete, and then actually implement those stories with programming. If we don't know enough to estimate something, we'll make a task devoting some time to researching just enough for an estimate. It's always collegial, often fun, and very efficient at producing high quality software on a predictable timeline.
But my employer's product is basically a SaaS and the author works at a consulting company that rents our engineers by the hour. Is this kind of dysfunction the norm at consulting companies?
So really these aggressive deadlines are more about project stakeholder's desire to have more control over the design process. Of course a creator might not want to share control, but that is a different issue to 'being forced to work for free'.
But I also think the author gives too much credit to management. There's no conspiracy to tighten deadlines to get free work, at least not in a vast majority of places. Hanlon's Razor comes in to play here: don't attribute it to malice if it can also be attributed to stupidity.
I keep saying this because it's relevant to so many topics and so many problems that people talk about these days...
The way all newly 'printed' money enters into our economy is through big financial institutions - This means that the financial institutions are in the position of choosing who will get a share of that new money (which the Fed printed out of thin air). Once you understand that the global monetary system is a scam, you'll understand why psychopaths rise to the top; because the psychopaths who run the world can't rely on altruists to keep their mouths shut.
If you don't believe me, just watch Hidden Secrets of Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyV0OfU3-FU&t=2s
The good news is that this is likely a sign that the system is on the brink of failure.
- One is as you say. Absent a deadline, a lot of projects will meander along forever iterating endlessly to refine and improve or even just dither around. A deadline serves as a forcing function to decide what's actually important and ship it.
- Another is that projects often don't exist in isolation. Even if they are somewhat standalone, like a game, they certainly don't exist outside of revenue targets, big retail selling seasons, advertising plans, etc. It often isn't practical to say "It will be done when it's done and you'll be the first to know."
I've been a PM for long enough to have dealt with lots of situations like this, and never once have I had the slightest inkling that there was any plan to overwork engineers in order to get them to work for free.
The good companies I've dealt with understood that engineers are vital to their success and try to make them happy. The short term benefits of getting free work by bullying them with deadlines doesn't outweigh the downside of them leaving.
The bad companies just don't think like this - they want cheap labor so they outsource engineering to the cheapest possible places.
Based on this post, I would strongly recommend the author get a new job.
Who wants a product that was rushed? If there’s not enough time, cut scope.
As a Project/product/eng manager, it’s my job to buy time, hit the dates I set, and make my boss more $$$. If I’m saying stuff like “a month is too long; you have until Friday,” I screwed something up or got screwed by someone else. Regardless, the engineers should leave because it’ll keep happening.
We as engineers are horrible at guessing how long something things. I've yet to meet anyone who has been able to accurately guess how long a certain task takes. Rightly so, because engineering wouldn't be engineering if all the problems were already solved.
If you're in a workplace that imposes arbitrary dates on you, you should probably look elsewhere. There are better companies out there.
I am fine doing (justified) overtime, but there's no way I will do this from the goodness of my heart. Some additional work is required for the upcoming release? No problem, but make sure to plan some overtime reduction for me next month.
Parkinson’s Principle is real.
If you give yourself a long time to complete a project, it will take that long. Also many projects are a total waste of time. It’s often a good strategy to get the smallest possible experiment (to test your hypothesis) in front of customers ASAP and get the feedback loop rolling before you sink months into something untested.
You are quite direct in your message and do not sugar-coat any of your points but still avoid sounding 'bitter'.
It has been my direct experience that the phenomenon you describe seems to be widely in practice at this point, across many organization of different size and disciplines.
I have never worked in such an environment and don’t see how one could.
You can demand someone jump off the building but not onto it.
If there isn’t enough time, then there isn’t enough time.
i'd lobbyists for employees are called unions. you can afford to hire lobbyists by paying union dues.
- For many teams and personalities, it is very hard to ship anything without a deadline. (as a solo founder, I actually use this psychology on myself to stay on track.)
- Short chunks and deadlines work better than longer ones.
- Peer pressure is a powerful stimulant.
- Your time is not of equal value. You don't really have seventy hours of quality work in a week. You've got maybe 15 "truly inspired" hours, 25 "grind it out" hours, and a lot of filler, face time, and paper shuffling after that. If you're smart, you slip in some employer funded personal growth & education time into that mix.
The classic mistake is to screw up the mix. I actually run into this as a freelancer. My rate for "truly inspired" time (real thinking about theory, architecture, influencing others, lecturing, or consulting on high level topics - eg. I must be fully present and prepared) is between $150 - $500 per hour (depending on the degree to which I'm inspired by the topic in question; $500 if I couldn't give a crap, $150 if I'm truly interested), "grind time" is $75 - $90 (you're paying for work without face time or deep insights, done at my convenience), and I'm unsure how to sell people filler, face-time, and paper shuffling. My typical solution is to go take a nap.
By the way... once you deduct pitching and running the business (10 hours, mix of inspired & grind), that means a freelancer REALLY has only 20 - 25 hours of useful time to sell in the course of a week. Past that, you're either working much harder than an employee or trying sub in filler and hoping your client doesn't notice it...
The typical employee is selling 15 - 25 hours of grind, perhaps 5 of inspired time (if you're lucky) and as much filler and self-directed time as you can get away with. From an employee satisfaction perspective, inspired is a win, filler / self-directed time is neutral to a win (depending on how well you entertain yourself), grind is a negative. Grind time is less onerous if you feel like you are accomplishing something in the process.
My goal as a boss is to get as much grind / inspired time for my buck as possible, since that's what generates output. (employee development matters but is a complex payback balancing future productivity / retention / motivation; filler doesn't really help me at all) The essential management challenge is spotting people slipping filler into a day and telling them to get back to grind. Good bosses protect your inspired time. Someday I'll hopefully get to work for one again.... (LOL)
There's nothing REALLY wrong with doing an 80 hour sprint one week if you can engineer some paid downtime later. I have weeks where I'm exploited and - to be fair - others where I'm massively overcharging my employer. It evens out.
You owe it to society to let a deadline slide by a large margin.
Now to figure out how to set boundaries in the abusive relationship.
2 years later, only two deadlines have ever been set in stone: the GDPR one and one we sent an email from Marketing about. I think he was right.
Managers do this because engineers can rarely be trusted to estimate timelines properly, or at least communicate them. Or it's a rare engineer who does this well.
Either they don't even think about timelines, or they grossly underestimate the amount of time that something will take, find dependencies that add a week of unexplained time to fix, or handwave off the parts with least clarity, assuming it will be straightforward. And then you find out it actually takes double the time to do it properly, or the original timeline produced an output that was fully of bugs in the edge cases.
So, what happens, managers start to not trust when engineers give estimates, make up their own more "believable" estimates, and also start to expect that if they compress the timeline, it won't be a major issue because the engineering team is putzing around with non-essential work anyway.
So, if you want managers to respect and work with realistic timelines, you'd better give them a solid track record of delivering what you said you would in the past.
There's blame to go around.