The author went from "trust them to do the right thing" to "Set clear deadlines and regularly check in on their progress. Make them accountable for those deadlines" real fast
You’ll be accountable for team deadlines regardless - would you rather be allowed to sail over a deadline you didn’t know existed and be reprimanded for it by higher ups, or have a clear picture of deadlines and someone checking up on progress?
I said I was going to do it for the following (rather good!) reasons.
It is around that time when I am usually informed that I have zero autonomy over such decisions.
Now I know.
If I am not allowed any autonomy then could you please be explicit and upfront with all the trade-offs I am allowed to make, all the risks I am allowed to accept and the technical debts I am allowed to accrue?
Oh, don't be a perfectionist! I am not - I have no autonomy on such decisions. Here's a list of known defects - tell me which ones I am allowed to ignore.
Аpparently I am a difficult enginer. Meanwhile the leadership is outstanding.
A competent professional understands from context the amount of time available, the absolute requirements of the role (ie regulatory compliance, internal engineering practices, whatever), and their own sense of "would I put my name on this crap" and then says a number.
If you hire a plumber he doesn't ask you if you give him 2 days or 2 weeks or if he should use copper or plastic or if he should bring his good tools or his bad tools. He just gives you a reasonable estimate and does a reasonable job. If he is asked for better, he knows how to make it more robust by spending a little more time or using better materials, the same way you should know to make it scale up to more users or spend time refactoring into some better abstractions. But there is a bar that he won't go under and no amount of company policy or explicit bosses are gonna fix the fact that at the end of the day, it's a professional's job to predict how they are going to go about their work and how long they think it'll take.
And the variance in effort due to lack of standardization, technical intricacy and hidden complexity is orders of magnitude greater than plumbing so our initial estimates always suck. Most competent proffessional in this insdustry know that nobody knows how to do accurate time estimates on delivering complex software projects, so why don't you know this and why do you want me to lie to you about the crudeness of my estimates?
Frankly, I've worked with hundreds of managers too and you sound difficult to work with. You seem to have unreasonable expectations that are impossible to manage with facts.
Anyway thanks for the advice on how it came across, I struggle with how to give this sort of view on things without coming across judgemental and I guess I failed here again, but I was honestly trying to say that I've seen your view shared before and I think the difference between you and other engineers that tend to be easier to work with isn't skills, it's just a slight difference in approach. But there's many different dystopian teams with unreasonable expectations for me to say that I'd think any different had I had the same teams and bosses that you had. Take care!
Your trivialization of the complexity is laughable.
The tools are "standard". The data models aren’t.
It's like plumbing alright. With random, unknown substances in the pipes.
Software industry estimates are way off the mark compared to plumbing industry estimates.
People who don’t like this fact refuse to understand why software isn’t like plumbing.
I relate with this. Any skilled engineer worth their salt know that there are going to be a lot of unknown unknowns. Slippage is 99% guaranteed.
What surprises me is that managers are surprised at slippages. Like, did they ever engineer anything in the past?
> If I am not allowed any autonomy then could you please be explicit and upfront with all the trade-offs I am allowed to make, all the risks I am allowed to accept and the technical debts I am allowed to accrue?
This question is the one that irks managers. Because in reality, they want to be "own" only the successful decisions, not the failures. And they dare not ever clarify anything because it may end up leading to a failure. BUT, they also want to penalize you for the failure.
Managers are the biggest cop out there are.