Comment by craftinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by craftinator | Hacker News Reader

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If you provide a tool that let's managers easily and arbitrarily increase the requirements on their employees, over time they'll continue to do so, because it's a management tool and their job is to manage.

I experienced this phenomenon when I was a designer / CNC programmer. We had a form for requesting a part to be designed and machined. It had a box for tolerance allowance, where the person requesting a part could specify how tight all the tolerances should be, and we had recently added in 0.0005 inches to the options, at the request of a customer. I left for a month to do training at another location and came back to find a ridiculously long backlog of work. The manager who'd stepped in for me had decided that tighter tolerances would make better products, so was selecting 0.0005" tolerance for every feature on every part.

To make up for how ridiculously slow that made the machining process, he tried to micro-optimize work flows, readjust hours, push machine operators to "work harder". He wasn't a bad person, was an okay manager, we'd just given him the option of doing something stupid, and he'd done it then tried to use his managing skills to make it work.

If you give someone the tool to do their job, make sure that misusing it feels hard.

He obviously did not understand what his job as a manager is about.

Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?

It makes no sense and is first and foremost a management and cultural issue. Second a work process issue. Solid third, one of competency. Probably ways below numerous other problems lies the tool.

You obviously needed to be able to set tight tolerances for some work, so… you seem to need the setting on occasion.

These stories just blow wind in my sails!

If you have management like this (american?) you must be measured like crazy - set goals based on metrics that will push things in a direction you see effective.

> Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?

Because the tool allowed it. What you’re failing to grasp is that UI has a massive influence on how humans behave.

People see empty fields and think they should fill them out.

Jira very frequently encourages over-specifying things by the ticket filer (it doesn’t hide fields by default and “helpful” human behavior is to provide as much info as possible).

The second order effect is that the project managers realize they can add fields and people start filling them with data. This is great for visibility without having to poll all of the employees! Except now it’s garbage data because the wrong people are filling in the data or they are bad guesses and inevitably that rolls up into a report that causes problems later.

Jira is a bad tool because it misleads both people and product managers into thinking they can get data from it that they realistically can’t.

> He obviously did not understand what his job as a manager is about.

> Why on earth would a manager be allowed to set tolerances like how you describe, tool or no tool?

He's not the expert in the field, I am. Normally, I would have vetted the work orders and fixed it before hand. This is similar to managers in the software world, where the team lead or senior engineer would say," No, we won't do that, it's a bad idea". He never should have been exposed to an option that could screw everything up so badly, but I mistakenly left it on the form. He was just trying to fix what he perceived as a potential problem. He was used to making small changes to work orders to save money or get a more refined product.

The biggest problem with our company's structure is that the operators, for whatever BS org reason, don't have the "pay grade" to tell him to pound sand. Managers need to sit below engineers, in my opinion.

> you must be measured like crazy - set goals based on metrics that will push things in a direction you see effective.

In my sector of manufacturing, margins are king (regardless of locale). If you can cut 10 seconds from an operation, or find a tool that lasts 20% longer, you can save tens of thousands of dollars a year, so we track everything.

Again: describe a set of work principles explicitly that all agree on - it's a human communication and collaboration issue you were faced with.

A tool is not responsible for this breakdown. Lack of clarity around ownership and responsibilities is, by the look of it.

IM humble O.

I'm willing to entertain that the teams using Jira are just making worse choices about the work principles they agree on than our teams using gitlab issues, and that it is coincidental and unrelated to the tool. Surely you agree though, that in general a tool can adversely affect user behavior? The agile manifesto said to value tools and process es less than individuals and interactions, not to discount their impact altogether. Developing software in a single paradigm language when your domain is better suited to a different paradigm is a horrific blunder I have witnessed twice in my career. Developing giant systems using vba macros in excel is a common mistake you hear about. I can however believe that the teams that selected jira over gitlab might have done so because they already bad this use pattern in mind, and not because the tool encouraged it.

I’ve worked in fantastic settings, truly following the agile principles, using jira as a tracker and board.

I’ve been places with many different tools and people.

Guess what, it’s ALWAYS about the people.

If a team is following principles derived from or resembling the manifesto, the tool will be shaped accordingly.

Jira, as an example, sure can be shaped, and I’ve done it myself several times - remove cruft, keep it simple, change if needed.

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