Is your manager just next level laid back? I feel like most places are going to notice and be bothered seeing the yellow circle on your Teams or Slack status consistently for long periods of time.
Of all the bad heuristics for trying to determine whether someone is being productive, this has to be near the bottom of the list. It's the digital equivalent of measuring engineer productivity by looking around the room and seeing who is at their desk. Except that it can be trivially gamed by a simple mouse jiggler script.
This also obviously breeds other bad incentives i.e. the faster you work the more work you get.
Is it important to you to work on a team using an Agile framework with Fibonacci pointing?
But then again, points are incommensurable between teams.
This is true, assuming that:
1. the whole team has approximately equal skill
2. the system is uniform and well-documented
3. the people actually give a shit about the product
If any of these assumptions are not met, then the expectation is naive.
As a manager, I have every expectation that we won't be doing scrum exactly by the book, but that's totally fine. I'm more concerned about (reasonably) consistently reproducible levels of productivity, not squeezing every point out of a sprint. If there's slack time, great. That seems to be when people are most likely to contribute new stories, learn something new, etc. Besides, rigidly following scrum feels anti-Agile, anyway. People and interactions over tools and processes.
It took me about 2 months to learn this after getting my first job. Nowadays I intentionally add minor bugs that turn up during demos so I have stuff to "go back and fix" later.
Bugs are more urgent.
Tests and refactoring should be done as part of every ticket and typically don't need to be explicitly called out. This naturally pushes "done" so you don't run out of tickets early.
You'll have a very different experience telling the product owner you spent the whole week working on bugs that they noticed and they told you to fix (even if you left them in originally on purpose) than telling them you spent all week refactoring code. The former is an instant "great!". The latter is gonna get a concerned look and more questions.
The topic wasn't correctly doing development work, but finding ways to slack off while looking good.
In fact I'd be disappointed by a dev that constantly introduces careless bugs, it's a dev smell. Most bugs should be unique and result from ambiguous/incomplete specs.
Don't agree it is good advice to build a career being dishonest to others. I'm not even a goody-two-shoes... it's just not necessary in all but the most dysfunctional of places.
External perception of how well a developer is doing often has very little to do with how good a job they're actually doing. I don't think making refactoring and test-making your "easy work" would have the same effect on appearances as the fast-features-and-some-bugs approach, at least at a lot of places.
I think this is driven more by junior devs still trying to figure out what their job is.
If you leave or introduce some trivially fixable but noticable flaw in the demo, that will (hopefully) get noticed and everyone can feel that they are doing their jobs without needing to make up something.
But you do touch on a real phenomenon, the Iceberg secret. The solution of which is typically to do mockups with wireframing software:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...
[1] This is assuming you're not missing meetings, and it's not a role that is customer facing with defined hours (e.g. storefront that's open for an advertised set of hours).
[2] The way to tell, BTW, is there's always someone else who's working less than you're expected to but is getting a pass.
This can also be a sign that the manager doesn't really know what you're doing and/or has not set clear goals for you, so they have nothing else to measure except your hours.
As VP Eng with an org of 35, my CEO was always giving me grief about the number of hours people on my team were in the office. I always pushed back with our milestone tracking. We are on target, and that's all that matters to me. People know what they need to get done, and that's what I want to manage, not hours in the office, vacation balances, or anything else. I'm not their parent. I set expectations, support them in meeting those expectations, and let them make the adult decision about their time.
I'll happily explain that to anyone who asks but I've only had a few people ask. Again, if you get your work done most people dont give a shit.
- Set a reminder to go fuck around with your LinkedIn profile for a few minutes every couple months, so at no point are you suddenly active on it (and so, probably thinking about looking for a new job).
- If you have a job in an office with a relaxed dress code (like most devs, probably) make a point of dressing interview-nice at least a couple times a month, from the start. That way it's not notable when you happen to dress nice one day and also happen to take a slightly long lunch....
Here, it is always joked that intentionally giving those signals is the trick to support getting the desired pay raise.. some years ago even saw one guy pulling that off.
When coworkers would learn I'm searching for something else they either understand me and/or try to persuade me not to jump ship. Why should they, lol? And if I go they wish me all the best as I would do to them.
And actually just the same for bosses?
If someone would question my work ethic or similar because of my Slack status I would explain to them that this is bogus. If they insist, I would complain about them with their boss. If that all is not futile I would just find another job.
This place was hands down the worst place I’ve worked at. Nothing was ever getting done, everyone was running with their hair on fire constantly, it was hell. But managers paid a lot of attention to the color of the IM dot instead of, you know, fixing actual problems.
Fuck this place. I don’t miss it. I hope it gets run into the ground by the multiple layers of incompetents at the helm. But it’s unlikely, their customers are in a regulated, captive market.
Then it's just normal.
As long as they continue to complete their work to my satisfaction level I don’t question them on it. I’ve made clear to them that there’s a few core hours they need to make sure they can be available for meetings with other teams and our 5-10 minute standup is about the only checkin I need. I can already see their git commits and jira history so if I really really wanted to follow along as they go I check that instead of interrupting the devs.
My management might want us to work harder if they found out, but every time they’ve tried to get more productivity without increasing pay there’s been a mini exodus of employees and I think they’ve(consciously or not) picked up on the amount of output they are going to get for their salary.
The common opinion I and other managers I know well enough to speak openly with is that this a fantastic event for good managers and terrible for bad ones. The good ones work load has diminished because we as managers no longer have to do performative micromanagement for our bosses or other managers. Good managers also already were managing against plans or results that don’t change whether remote or in office. The bad managers have had their workload increase because micromanaging remotely doesn’t appear to be a solved problem
Being micro managed as a manager is even worse than as an IC - there's a certain level of badgering you have to pass on so you can satisfy higher management, and there's a limit to how much of that you can filter. So you get micromanagement of yourself plus the extra shitty feeling of having to do it to others.
"What has turnover looked like in the past year?"
Sweat shops have high turnover, press for a number for this question.
"What are your on call expectations? How do you manage incidents out of hours? How frequently do incidents like that happen?"
If they don't mention comp time or anything like that during those three questions they probably don't offer it, and if incidents happen with any frequency you can assume you will work a good bit of unplanned overtime.
"How is my work evaluated?"
The harder the criteria here the less likely they use butts in seats management. If it's someone vauge about "how well you collaborate with the team" or similar it's probably a subjective measure probably related to if your butt is where they expect it to be when they look.
So, what would you prefer? That I clock out early because I've put in a solid day's work despite not getting to have lunch, or that I do a half-assed job just to look busy that I'll just have to revert and fix the next morning?
One gets so utterly weary of all this Taylorist bullshit that managers get in the process of earning their MBAs.
Retention isnt talked about often but if companies spent half as much time retaining employees as they do hiring new employees then they would be far better off. A new hire needs 3-6 months before they are going to be as functional as someone who has been with a company for several years.
The challenge is actually getting people to take advantage of this. I work with folks who default to overworking, so I have to be pretty insistent that they take time for themselves.
The peace of mind that comes with knowing that when I say "Hey, sorry, I need to take Wednesday off" the reply will be "Hope you've got something fun planned!" instead of the likes of "Hmm, well, we were ahead last sprint so if we slip this one it's okay" is incalculable. (I probably don't have something fun planned, but the sentiment is appreciated.)
Good managers help you improve your skills, give you meaningful feedback, facilitate work getting done, and get out of your way.
Most of the time my team has a good work life balance. They will all buckle up if shit hits the fan then we go back into normal mode.
I don't think there is a single thing that helps retention better than WLB. Comp is a close second but someone will always pay better that you. You cant win that battle. WLB is hard to screen for while interviewing so when you find it you are less likely to take a chance on losing it by taking a new job.