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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

And it's not just the first six months. It's something one ought to do all the time, to better serve the people one is there to serve.

Just going to the place where the thing happens and looking at the thing happening to better understand is a hugely undervalued job.

I don't want a detailed digital report of how my child is doing in preschool. If I want more details, I'll take a couple hours of vacation and join them in the preschool, just to observe. I don't need a product manager to tell me how a customer uses a product in detail. If I want to know in detail, I'll visit them and watch.

Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.

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> I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.

> It's something one ought to do all the time, to better serve the people one is there to serve.

IME, it seems like most managers believe that you are supposed to serve them, which I think gets right to the heart of whats wrong in many organizations.

> Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.

This rings very true in my experience. Every new layer, every new TPM organization adds more overhead. They start off with “were gonna boost productivity and get things done faster!” but when that doesn’t happen the result is a demand of more process, more bureaucracy, more JIRA/story point blah blah all of which ultimately falls on the engineers who still have to do the actual work but now have to learn how to bullshit the bureaucracy.

There's a saying I learned in shooting that applies to most physical activities/sports. "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast." It also applies to working as part of an aorganization. Process and bureaucracy might make you slower as an individual contributer but still speed up the organization.

There's an important qualifier to that saying: it only applies if the motion is relevant to the task at hand. Smoothly doing the dishes will not make your shooting faster.

That might sound obvious, but it's not always. Having commonly used tools on a central toolboard instead of at each workbench makes it seem like part of the task to go to the toolboard, when in practise it's an irrelevant wasteful side-task. You can improve how smoothly (quickly) you go to the toolboard, but the improvement in speed comes from moving the tools to the workbenches again.

Likewise, smoothly doing paperwork of the sort we're discussing here will make your paperwork faster but it won't improve your first-order work.

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