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Comment by hallway_monitor | Hacker News Reader

Having led a team for about a year now let me tell you it's not easy. You are always trying to balance many priorities and even with over a decade of coding experience, it's not always obvious which refactorings or tech debt stories or architectural changes are worth prioritizing now, which can wait till later, and which are engineer pipe dreams that I need to gently but firmly kill as quickly as possible.

I have had similar managers to what was described above, in those types of organizations. It may be a lost cause but it may be an opportunity to work on your influence skills; being able to explain and sell your solution is perhaps even more important than coming up with it in the first place.

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This is really difficult. Perhaps the best thing is to track the proposed technical debt stories, and do not discard them when they are rejected. Instead, also keep track of how much pain is hit that can be associated back to that particular technical debt.

3 years into major project, my team finally got prioritized to work on and improvement that will take us a couple weeks, that we were not able to work on previously because we could not justify its value. But for the past 3 years the organization has lived with pain that this would have resolved. So now we can justify it. And the thing is, it's not like we didn't know 3 years ago when we said we wanted to make this happen but things are going to be terrible if we were not able to prioritize it but in many organizations it's not good enough to just say how bad things will be. People need to actually have felt the pain.

Honestly, I think that's okay on its face. My bigger issue is that frequently there is no or very little trust around engineers who predict what the major problems will be an advocate for them and then it's not like when they're proven right management now listens to them the next time. I think that's the real problem.

> My bigger issue is that frequently there is no or very little trust around engineers

This is a problem. But at any given time management hears programmers arguing for both sides - the "if you're not using Kubernetes you're a moron" and the "learn how to sysadmin and you'll realize you don't need Kubernetes in the first place" (quotes from the top of the thread). In many cases folks in senior management do not have any idea of these things, and they rely on one of these two opinions, resulting in the other half claiming here on HN that management is all bull.

What the profession lacks is a code of practices - like a Joel Test accepted by every accredited engineer.

I am not sure that is net positive for such a rapidly evolving space. Even now people are debating if unit tests are needed and other basic topics. The only "settled" thing about the profession seems to be that gotos are bad.

I find that the best senior engineers don't say "if you're not using Kubernetes you're a moron" and "learn how to sysadmin and you'll realize you don't need Kubernetes in the first place", but instead say "Kubernetes is fantastic for this use case because of these reasons..." and "sysadmin would be easier to use than Kubernetes for this problem because of these reasons..."

I'm not sure how one gets software engineers to justify and back up their decisions like this on a regular basis, but I suspect it would help management trust their engineers more.

> I'm not sure how one gets software engineers to justify and back up their decisions like this on a regular basis, but I suspect it would help management trust their engineers more.

More balanced senior engineers (I know anecdotally that there are lots of them) speaking up and challenging their fellow-engineers to justify their extreme positions will be a good start IMO.

(Bad) Management chooses to listen to engineers that say agreeable things, not true things.

If your manager listens to the engineer who says "Kubernetes is awesome and does all the things!" and doesn't listen to the engineer who says "I think Kubernetes is a bad idea for this project because x, y, and z", then yeah, it's time to find a new manager. Good managers listen to good advisors.

Anecdotally, we had the opportunity to get better gear for developers than an outdated single 24” 1080p screen and slow computer. Higher management invited a few engineers to share Ygritte ultimate setup. These varied widely between one large ultra widescreen and three small screens. The developers in the meeting started arguing vehemently in the meeting and in the end they couldn’t agree and all developers were left with the same stuff. If you were enterprising enough you could gather two of those 1080p screens until someone from workplace it saw that and installed to desk to spec.

It was a mistake to give an option to discuss this to start with. It's always if not this than that, x brand is better than y,etc. What matters: is it a Windows/Linux/Mac shop?

No matter what brand,the base unit comes with enough RAM, processing power and spacious SSD.

Everybody gets the same brand,as it's easier to support from the IT perspective.

Keyboard,mouse,monitors should be an individual choice. Some want to ruin their vertebrae by staring at a tiny 13" screen and be happy about it,while some need 3 monitors and 2 keyboards to feel the power,why not.

Not sure why some companies are so tight when it comes to the equipment for developers,as it's always a small fraction of the overall cost of the position.

That is copy-book Sayre's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

This is definitely a very difficult spaghetti to untangle, agreed. But IMO a very good start would be to never accept such polar statements in the first place.

"If you use extremist and simplistic generalizations you are not worth listening to in a discussion" would be the first policy I'd put into a team.

Balanced arguments with pro/con analysis is what makes an engineer senior and a contributor to an argument. Everybody else shouldn't participate the next time around.

Agreed. But the balanced people are the least vocal. As Bertrand Russel noted:

  "The whole problem with the world is that fools and 
  fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and 
  wiser people so full of doubts."

I am someone who moved from a programer role into management. My appeal to the balanced senior engineers is to speak up more. We don't have to swing as much as economists, enough to frustrate President Truman to say:

  "Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists 
  say 'on hand...', then 'but on the other..."

But we can bring more nuance into discussions - especially calling out those among us with polar positions.

As a manager, you need to find a way to pull information from people: with some it's a team meeting,with others it's over a meal during the lunch,etc. I even do this sometimes during the management meetings,when I see people clearly not quite happy about something but reluctant to speak,so I ask them directly what's on their mind and that's often enough for them to tell way more than you could have gotten by just expecting for them to speak up.

All of that is sadly true and it's a fundamental problem with humanity. I'd say that the only solution I am seeing is that the managers must proactively shut down the extremists early and hard.

If you demonstrate that you will not submit to extremists, I've found that a good chunk of the more balanced people are then encouraged to speak up.

---

TL;DR: Silence the bad and loud voices, and the wiser and quieter voices will start speaking.

> at any given time management hears programmers arguing for both sides

I think it was Andrew Grove (of Intel / High Output Management) who boiled this down to the following algorithm:

(1) Invite all sides to a meeting. (2) Ask them what their decision is. (3a) If they agree, implement the decision. (3b) If they disagree, tell them to discuss it, then give you their decision at the next meeting. GOTO (1)

His point being that managers are the least informed (by virtual of organizational pyramids), and therefore the least effective at picking solutions. Build a team that can arrive at consensus, then trust the team.

In these cases wouldn't it have been to work on it slowly as a "side project" outside of the team normal priorities? I always tell my team if they can fit it in and not hinder the current sprint by all means go ahead and do it on the side.

I know this goes against the normal and people want to attach "right now " value (hours it took reflected on check) but going beyond the call can also give you leverage when your yearly review comes up for example.

I'll also add I only have so much energy in the day, and after a couple of years of fighting against problems I coudn't do anything about and managers who couldn't make the changes, and customers that wanted it now, I burnt out, and instead of spending a useless zoom meeting to work on an improvement I use it instead to make maps for the D&D campaign I am running.

While I've seen several examples of this being the only way to get out of never prioritized debt-cleanup that the team can't bother explaining to management in non-technical business-value terms. The reality is a sprint is always over-packed with stuff to do with zero room for side-projects and expecting people to work weekends on side-projects to solve company business needs is not exactly a sound strategy.

What one can do is is deliberately allot time to the team to work on any side-project as long as they are somehow attached to the business. There are ways to do this more organized, for example innovation-weeks or the famous Google-fridays.

That can work assuming the team isn't already overloaded. But when people are being asked to work 60h a week or more to accomplish their tasks, it becomes untenable.

That's exactly what I am doing and aside from a few wrist slaps people have been okay with such an approach. I always tell them I did this for a few hours during the weekend or while I was waiting our DevOps to resolve an outage these particular 2 hours the last Friday. Seems to work really well.

> People need to actually have felt the pain.

Just like those that never have been hacked dont care about security. Or those that have never lost data dont care about backups. Or those who has never had more then 10 simultaneous users dont care about performance. Basically we do stuff in order to avoid pain.

I wholeheartedly agree that we the engineers must work on our non-tech talking skills!

I've been working on it for a few years now and it's REALLY difficult but even the small wins feel very rewarding and are motivating me to refine my comm skills further.

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