[HN Gopher] Lessons learned as a software developer turned proje...
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Lessons learned as a software developer turned project manager
Author : ilovefood
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-05-25 10:25 UTC (1 days ago)
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| canaus wrote:
| Are there any resources on how to move from developer to product
| X role?
|
| I've realized I'm more interesting in creating solutions and ways
| to make them better than coding them, but the path to get from A
| to B seems muddied.
| onelesd wrote:
| If your org has a software consultancy sales arm, you can make
| this shift by becoming a solutions architect. You'll get to
| work with sales and product to create solutions for prospective
| clients. A good product person will jump at the opportunity of
| a dedicated architect to help them with the tech portion of
| pitch decks.
| bavila wrote:
| I don't have any resources but I can share a personal anecdote,
| as I've recently been offered a position as a product manager
| after having worked as a developer for a few years. A couple of
| product people I used to work with at another company reached
| out to me about the job based on how they've seen me handle my
| work. Here are some of the traits they noted as to why they
| thought I'd make a good fit:
|
| - Rigorous questioning of product goals
|
| - Ability to write clear and well-organized documentation
|
| - Ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to non-
| technical persons
|
| - Consistently following up with stakeholders
|
| - General curiosity
|
| I guess I've always had a tendency of viewing my role as a
| developer more holistically than others (i.e., not just being
| interested in coding, but ensuring that what I'm building is
| truly a good product from a business perspective, and helping
| to demystify the development process when speaking with non-
| developers).
|
| But it would have been tough to break into this role without
| having proven myself to others who are already in my
| professional network, which is probably why the general advice
| is to try to move into the role somewhere you're already
| employed.
| ilovefood wrote:
| This was the reason I decided to write this article, I was in a
| similar position and had to improvise somehow. I didn't find
| many resources for people transitioning from developer to
| product/project manager roles. I think one pragmatic way to
| approach it is to find an opportunity within your organization
| to try it out without having too big of an impact at first.
| This way you can learn what works for your business. I really
| believe that product management is not a 100% transferable
| skill like programming would be, it's more dependent on who and
| what you are dealing with, hence the lack of general resources
| adapted to devs. There might be some general guidelines here
| and there, but in my many interviews this year, I found out
| that product management at company A can be totally different
| than at company B. I'd gladly read some resources if somebody
| answers your question better than me though!
| mind-blight wrote:
| This is seriously I've of the best articles on project
| management with dev teams. It highlights tons of the
| important things without sugarcoating how dynamic and next
| the whole process can be. I was a tech lead at my last job,
| and it became mostly project management in a hardcore scrum
| environment. I definitely stumbled transitioning between the
| roles. I'm gonna pick up your book recommendation too!
| Minor49er wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's a great overall guide for this since
| different employers will expect different things. But you'll
| make progress if you show interest in not just building, but
| refining the product as a developer, plus telling your manager
| that you're interested in product manager/designer/etc. If you
| can provide examples or observations about the product and its
| lifecycle, it can help take those conversations to something
| tangible
| t43562 wrote:
| I think a project manager trying to run agile is almost a
| contradiction in terms.
|
| Agile is usually a team practise which outsiders like a PM don't
| get a say in. The Product Owner feeds work in and stakeholders
| get to argue about the order of each item and that's all.
|
| A retrospective allows the team to adjust their way of working to
| fit better to their situation and it is them that decide not some
| PM.
|
| Standups are aimed at killing long status meetings and if they're
| not then something is wrong. The Ceremonies have a purpose and
| the overall purpose is to use the development resource that is
| available to do the things that most need to be done and not
| waste it on anything else.
|
| To bring this back to the article - how can a project manager
| decide what is or isn't efficient for some team? How can they
| estimate anything when they are far from the details - no matter
| how much programming they did in the past?
| azangru wrote:
| You described the point of view of an agile practitioner,
| leaning towards scrum. Could you contrast it with project
| manager's role? What's a project manager - a role eliminated by
| scrum - expected to do?
| t43562 wrote:
| Presumably they become product managers or something like
| that and try to get a series of changes through various teams
| in a co-ordinated way that add up to some achievement or
| "project".
|
| Their estimates have to be based on what teams predict and
| velocity and so on and on.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > I think a project manager trying to run agile is almost a
| contradiction in terms.
|
| I believe you can find that "contradiction in terms" at
| thousands of organizations these days. Probably more than are
| "running agile" _without_ a "project manager".
| t43562 wrote:
| I suggest that it's "agile in name only" because it was
| fashionable. The people at the top have probably bent it all
| back to waterfall because ... who knows - maybe it suits
| their style of thinking or makes them feel in control?
| g051051 wrote:
| > Agile is not efficient and doesn't scale
|
| Truer words were never spoken.
| mmargerum wrote:
| "Senior developer " is the worst role you can have. You are the
| architect, manager of your devs, heat shield, meetings attender,
| and you still full time coding job. You get 2% annual raises for
| your trouble because you are salary capped.
|
| I jumped ship to a tech lead job. Now I do what I always wanted
| which is to direct a team (dotted line) by scaffolding out the
| project using diagrams and shallow coding. Very few soul sucking
| status meetings. .Dream job and a nice 25% salary boost.
| eikenberry wrote:
| You're describing the role of the tech lead or lead dev, not
| senior developer... at least not anywhere I've worked or known
| people who worked. Senior developers is the sweet spot where
| you get to do a nice bit of architecting and still mainly write
| code. It's as high as you can usually go in the tech tree
| without having to deal with the 'manager' stuff you mention.
|
| Really sounds like that last job was just garbage and you moved
| on to someplace better. Had nothing to do with the position
| other than it wasn't the lead position you wanted.
| jghn wrote:
| > "Senior developer " is the worst role .... I jumped ship to a
| tech lead job
|
| At a lot of companies the description you gave for "senior
| developer" would be described as a tech lead. In many other
| companies neither example you gave would line up to their
| terminology. And every possibility in between.
|
| There's not much uniformity in titles and descriptions of
| roles.
| superfrank wrote:
| Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. I've been a tech
| lead at 3 different places and they've all been close to what
| he described. Being a just a senior developer was always far
| more relaxed.
| mmargerum wrote:
| Tech lead, to me, is a guy who orchestrates projects at a
| very technical level that includes some shallowing coding for
| proof of concept and helping developers when they get stuck.
|
| A lot of companies mistake tech lead for "senior dev" or "dev
| manager" or some chimera of both.
| ilovefood wrote:
| OP here, I can completely relate. I am changing jobs too for a
| similar role, hopefully :)
| mmargerum wrote:
| Best of luck. In the right company tech lead is a blast!
| Cloudef wrote:
| True, especially in small company / startup ...
| mind-blight wrote:
| Yeah, what you just described as a senior engineer has been my
| experience as a tech lead. It's really organization dependent
| mmargerum wrote:
| That's also true. Most organizations don't have a real "tech
| lead" type of position just management and senior devs and
| the lines blur.
| mouzogu wrote:
| I'm a senior developer who doesn't want to be a tech lead. Kind
| of unsure about where any kind of progression lies.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Specialization and experience is pretty much it.
| mmargerum wrote:
| It's ok to be happy staying there as long as you are OK with
| being salary capped. The salary wasn't even my biggest issue.
| My biggest issue was my title and compensation didn't match
| what I was actually doing day in and day out which was
| everything.
|
| If I decide to slow things down as I get older I may go back
| to just straight coding. I love it.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Senior dev is not what you were doing, judging by your
| description of it.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| This really limits my desire to advance as a dev + keeps me
| leaving companies (as I never want to be the keeper of the
| expertise). I do not want to deal with meetings.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Grass is always greener. If you're a team lead, you're
| constantly in meetings and never using your creativity skills.
| If you're just a coder, you have no say in the architecture.
| Optimal situation is just be a 1-person lifestyle startup
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When I was a team lead, I rarely was in meetings. About 60%
| of my time was coding, the rest was reviewing others' work,
| giving direct technical guidance to team members, and
| answering questions from upper management. Typically upper
| management communicated asynchronously and didn't pull me
| into meetings on a daily basis.
|
| An organization that has a team lead constantly in meetings
| is horribly mismanaged; and is looking for a talking head to
| boost someones' ego.
| mmargerum wrote:
| You have to be in a very functional organization to enjoy
| life as a tech lead . Otherwise you just end up a manager
| who knows how to code.
| t43562 wrote:
| The team lead does have a little authority to go with the
| responsibility whereas the Senior Developer tends to be given
| things to be responsible for without any authority to do
| them. But I agree about endless meetings and very little joy
| of coding.
| DawsonBruce wrote:
| I was promoted to senior engineer this year at my
| organization...
|
| And what you've said is 100% true.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Senior developer is such a loaded term that I find it futile to
| draw any conclusions based on the job title alone. Depending on
| the shop it can mean anything from "literally not a novice" to
| "coordinates the architecture between several teams".
|
| In fact I'd encourage to do the opposite, describe the job
| activities and then map them to whatever mental model you have
| about dev career ladder.
| andi999 wrote:
| Wait, senior developer is paid the same as developer?
| mmargerum wrote:
| I don't remember saying that but I do remember saying I had
| capped as a senior developer.
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| > You can't lead developers if you have no clue about developing.
| Sorry.
|
| I've been both a developer and a development manager (and a few
| other things), and once upon a time I would have agreed
| wholeheartedly with this.
|
| Then about 10 years ago I started working with the best PM I have
| ever known. He is absolutely not technical.
|
| He is, however, a great listener, opionated about protecting
| people from burnout and dumb processes, honest to a fault, and
| able to speak candidly and openly to techs, devs, execs, and
| everything in between, switching language as he goes.
|
| On one project we worked on, I had an advisory role and he ran
| the development sprints. He was amazing at understanding what the
| devs needed and managing the manager's unrealistic expectations
| of how quickly things could be done.
|
| He also put his foot down and insisted that everything flow
| through him, to be integrated into schedules based on, well,
| balancing everything else with business priorities.
|
| It took a some time for the devs to trust him, and it took a lot
| of soft skill work on his part to gain that trust, but before
| long they realized their weeks were pretty evenly balanced.
|
| The first big win was no more high priority interrupts from the
| manager, who had to work through him. That helped a lot.
|
| He knows nothing about development, in the sense of having no
| idea how to do it.
|
| He does know people and knows how understand what they need.
|
| FWIW, YMMV. He's a rare breed.
| gbrindisi wrote:
| I also have similar experience with people in leadership roles.
|
| My theory is that technical leads have a narrower distribution
| of quality, while not technical leads vary wildly, from crazy
| good to nuclear winter bad.
| dnissley wrote:
| I'm watching Ted Lasso and it's uncanny how well this describes
| the titular character
| doctor_eval wrote:
| This resonated with me in so many ways. I frequently use the
| "garden" analogy and I think developing software efficiently in
| small teams is absolutely crucial. Society wastes so much time,
| effort and goodwill on unqualified software project
| (mis)management.
|
| I have lost two important (to me) jobs because I refused to adopt
| stupid, inefficient processes handed down by non-technical
| "managers" who thought they knew how to manage developers better
| than I did, despite my 30 years of experience.
|
| Reading this almost made me cry. If I could upvote this a
| thousand times then I would.
| mpyne wrote:
| This was a great read indeed. I was sort of surprised at the
| direct attack on 'agile', especially when the author's
| recommendations at the end could practically have come straight
| out of agilemanifesto.org.
|
| Seems like the Agile Industrial Complex has twisted the meaning
| of 'agile' in developers' minds completely out of what the
| manifesto's authors meant by now.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Right? I am pretty much fully onboard with the Agile
| Manifesto but in industry, "agile" has come to be synonymous
| with "scrum". And scrum is terrible.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I didn't read the text, but I'm glad to see people switching to
| project management. I've been one myself for 16 years, until I
| found that it was a dying career or, at least, a career
| obfuscated by alternatives like "product owner", "customer
| success" or just by the fact teams are getting more and more
| self-managed. I've seen a consistent reduction of job openings
| for project managers. Some specific niche oriented job boards
| don't even have "project manager" as option to select in the
| opening creation form. So four years ago I left my last project
| management job to never look back nor forward, as there wasn't
| much to look at anyway.
| visviva wrote:
| What did you switch to?
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Product manager.
| esel2k wrote:
| Same here. Was project manager before now product manager
| and would never go back. As project manager I was only
| looking after budget and timelines and creating gantt
| charts for management. As a product manager I read market
| analysis, run customer research, talk to partner companies,
| run workshops, create a vision and discuss various
| potential solution with dev teams and others.
|
| I think the role of project manager is dying for a good
| reason. Developers can organize themselves and it is more
| important to have that leading person motivating the dev
| teams with interesting problems while respecting them -> my
| approach. The rest is shared between product mamager,
| senior developers maybe some shared delivery lead resources
| or the engineering manager.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| As someone who has been in the industry long enough that I
| should know, but I always just call people PMs and never
| delved past that... what is the distinction between being a
| Project Manager and Product Manager?
| corrral wrote:
| Project manager:
|
| - Reads Jira (or whatever) and moves things around (yes,
| they may also add things sometimes, but I'm drawing a
| general distinction).
|
| - Gantt charts.
|
| - Tracks project status, communicates it upward.
|
| - May also do some communicating expectations downward.
|
| - Translates blunt assessments of the project's progress
| into managerese.
|
| - May have some responsibility for keeping development
| processes going, especially ones that involve lots of
| communication (think: Agile shit, or just project status
| meetings generally)
|
| - Helps unblock process-related shit.
|
| Product manager:
|
| - Writes to Jira a lot.
|
| - Does market research, or works closely with those who
| do.
|
| - Guides the direction of the product (e.g. which feature
| do we tackle next, do we pivot).
|
| - Works closely with key stakeholders (clients, product
| owners, domain experts) to determine that direction.
|
| - Sells that direction to management and such.
|
| - May have some significant sway on final decisions for
| e.g. design.
|
| - May do quite a bit of business-model analysis.
| Unbeliever69 wrote:
| My your account, a project manager is a plumber. Nice
| analogy.
| andi999 wrote:
| I talked to a 'pure' project manager for a big company,
| basically this guy went to a 2 hour project meeting then
| to his secretary got a new folder and into the next 2
| hour project meeting. Basically ticking boxes related to
| gantt charts. This is the far end of project manager, a
| fully political position with not too much expertise in
| the specific project required.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| I have found that product managers are more motivated
| towards sales and marketing of a product/solution,
| project managers are more logistical and keeping people
| informed.
| eatonphil wrote:
| In companies that do product development, project
| managers are responsible for
| schedules/timelines/reporting. Product managers are
| responsible for what is the problem, what is to build.
| It's a massive difference. Good product managers are
| experts of the market, have vision for the company and
| product. Project managers focus more on bookkeeping.
| tremon wrote:
| It's pretty much in the difference between a project and
| a product: by most definitions, a project is a tool for
| change in an organization, and has a limited lifetime and
| a limited scope. A product, on the other hand, is a tool
| for performing some business function (either internally
| for staff or externally through sales), and its scope can
| be whatever the business needs.
|
| Typically, a project manager has authority over resource
| allocation and resource planning, but must defer to the
| stakeholders for everything else (most importantly, for
| actual design/implementation decisions). A product
| manager has authority over the complete lifecycle of his
| product, including design, implementation and resource
| allocation.
| digisign wrote:
| Finally there's Program Manager... a 'program' being a
| continuously running project. Think, a government program
| for...
| ghaff wrote:
| It varies depending on company, type of product, etc.
| However, in my experience with mostly computer systems
| hardware, project managers were more internally focused
| and concerned with minutiae of schedules, resources,
| dependencies, etc. Whereas product managers interfaced
| with sales, customers, and--depending or the organization
| related groups like product marketing, marketing
| communications, etc.
|
| But PM/PMM roles can vary a fair bit.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| The most relevant distinction between the two from the
| company's perspective, IMHO, is that the product manager
| is often seen as potential revenue generating agent,
| whereas the project manager is pure operational cost.
|
| One would have to articulate a lot to make a point about
| a project manager being directly associated with
| sales/revenue etc. -- the top line. "Oh yeah, the project
| manager can increase customer satisfaction and then
| contribute to upselling, especially in companies focused
| on farming and not much on hunting customers!" -- I
| agree, but it's rare now.
| snidane wrote:
| Many times non-technical project managers were useless. Just
| overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting notes,
| often losing valuable information in translation.
|
| It made sense to rebrand to other job titles so as not to
| attract the same wrong people full of certifications which were
| irrelevant to software dev.
|
| In the end I can see it being named project management again,
| but only after the wrong crowd is weeded out.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Many times non-technical project managers were useless.
| Just overpaid glorified secretaries trying to take meeting
| notes, often losing valuable information in translation.
|
| I'll also point out that this stereotype is widely accepted
| by engineers, so even if you are a former engineer and do
| have the technical chops, many engineering teams out there
| will treat you like a secretary anyway and disregard your
| technical judgment. I'm a project manager but have been
| coding for longer than a lot of engineers I work with have
| been alive. I've seen the spectrum of engineers from great
| collaborators who treat you as a [technical and professional]
| equal, to arrogant assholes who treat you like you're their
| note-taker/janitor/servant.
|
| For a concrete example, I remember a project manager arguing
| with a senior developer about what a particular wireless
| specification required, the project manager had a Bernie
| Sanders moment when she had to remind him, "I wrote the damn
| spec!"
| plebuhn wrote:
| I agree that project management is dying as a field, I think it
| is a natural reaction to the top-down command and control style
| of project management popular in the early 2000s in favor of
| more agile, self-orienting teams.
|
| I do see a new flavor of project management coming back branded
| as technical program management, which is more a flexible
| position responsible for the large cross-functional projects
| while filling the gaps of a dev team via process development,
| facilitator, and/or scrum master. Usually, this role is only
| necessary for large orgs with multiple teams or highly
| regulated industries that require a lot of coordination.
| tmountain wrote:
| Some companies seem to be glomming project management into the
| list of job responsibilities for the dev lead on the team.
| Oftentimes this results in a role where the dev lead is 1/4
| project management (or scrum master), 1/4 engineer, 1/4 people
| manager, and 1/4 hiring manager. Say what you will about it,
| but I think the trend will continue as organizations try to cut
| costs with the coming economic downturn.
| BFLpL0QNek wrote:
| Noticed this to and it's not great. The person is spread to
| thin and there's a lot of different skills to do each role
| well.
|
| The best project manager I had was a film producer
| moonlighting as a pm between films. The film producing
| experience, tight deadlines, tight budgets, scheduling, lots
| of cross functional teams, bringing them together at the
| right time etc really carried over well.
| ellen364 wrote:
| My theory is this happens for two reasons.
|
| First reason, product managers at a company start getting
| pulled into a lot of client management stuff. They have less
| time to spend on the product itself and the resulting vacuum
| is often filled by the lead dev. The lead dev demonstrates
| they can fill the vacuum, so starts getting asked to fill
| other vacuums relating to management and hiring.
|
| Second reason, management doesn't have a clear image of what
| a "developer" role should look like in their company. E.g. at
| tiny startups a dev might be entirely responsible for a
| product and even help answer customer emails. (I've done that
| and I actually think it's fine, as long as you and the rest
| of the company know that's the deal.) At the extreme opposite
| end, a dev might have little autonomy and be practically
| writing the Python syntax version of tightly specified
| business logic. But most companies operate in the fuzzy
| middle and I think many struggle to define their concepts of
| dev / QA / product. In those companies, it's easy for a dev
| to become someone who is officially "a developer" but with a
| bunch of semi-official hats.
|
| I might have to add a third reason to my theory, now that
| you've reminded me about cost cutting.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _management doesn't have a clear image of what a
| "developer" role should look like in their company._
|
| combined with
|
| _In those companies, it's easy for a dev to become someone
| who is officially "a developer" but with a bunch of semi-
| official hats._
|
| results in a similar story with Devops and it's younger
| brother, SRE. My job role officially changed from "Devops
| Engineer" to "Site Reliability Engineer" when I switched
| jobs two years ago and I'm lacking in finding ways of
| differentiating the two.
|
| It's seemingly become the default response now on Devops
| communities when someone makes a thread saying "I want to
| get into Devops, what do you do?" that the job role means
| 'whatever the company wants it to mean', which is how we
| end up with Devops practitioners and teams getting turned
| into kitchen sinks for dealing with anything and everything
| the feature development groups _aren 't_ tasked with
| because of a severely unchallenged assumption that the dev
| team brings in revenue, while the operations people consume
| it.
|
| An assumption that's never said outright-mind you, but the
| organization and delegation of work between the two domains
| of functional teams, IMO says it pretty loudly.
| lliamander wrote:
| I don't see those responsibilities as being equally
| emphasized at a given point in a team's lifecycle.
|
| Early on, the tech lead will be primarily an engineer and
| hiring manager: there's not enough people to really need a
| process yet, and so the tech lead lays the technical
| foundation while building up the team with the right people.
|
| As the team grows, the tech lead will reduce their engineer
| responsibilities and start focusing on project management in
| order to deal with the complexities that come from a larger
| team.
|
| Once the team is at a steady state, both in terms of people
| and process, the tech lead can focus on people management,
| primarily by training people to take over the other
| responsibilities.
|
| I'm not saying there won't be periods where a tech lead is
| being stretched too far as the team transitions between these
| phases, but if the stretching persists for too long then
| something has gone wrong.
| treis wrote:
| When I was a dev lead I split my time between (1) high level
| sizing business needs to develop a roadmap, (2) architecting
| solutions, and (3) enabling/QC on more junior devs. That felt
| pretty right to me. I agree adding on PM tasks to that is too
| much. Generally why we had something like a PM to do that.
|
| Last couple jobs had Engineering Managers to do (1) and
| generally manage the team. The problem is that EMs don't
| really know anything about anything. Maybe at one point they
| were a developer and knew stuff. But since they're not in the
| code every day they don't know the reality of the code base
| and their general programming skills decay. Effectively they
| become a relayer of messages between the dev team and the
| business with lots of information being lost along the way. I
| much preferred the previous way.
| wembeley wrote:
| I don't believe this is strictly a cost-cutting measure. I
| think companies are realizing subconsciously that people who
| can do this are worth their weight in gold (although I might
| be biased as one of them) because they can put together the
| whole picture of software development. You can certainly
| achieve the same effect with a well-functioning team, but
| that's harder to manufacture than hiring one person who can
| put the whole thing together in their head. Of course the
| tradeoff is what you said: these people get burnt out if not
| carefully managed and they are probably less optimal than
| they could be performing any one of those roles in isolation.
| But the value of getting a synthesis across those functions
| and moving a project in the right direction is extremely
| valuable.
| watwut wrote:
| The problem with that setup is that such one person is
| super rarely actually keeping all those roles in their
| head. At least one of those roles suffers a lot, usually
| more of them.
| vsareto wrote:
| If someone's that skilled, you might be able to double up
| on slower remote jobs and collect two salaries instead of
| getting one position with the demands of two jobs but with
| the salary of 1x to 1.9x of a slower job.
|
| There seems to be diminishing returns for salary increases
| with responsibility increases.
| lliamander wrote:
| What do you do now?
|
| In general, I would consider this trend healthy. Managing your
| time and your priorities, communicating with stakeholders, etc.
| are all skills that all engineers should develop over time,
| even if just for their own personal work. At the team level,
| shared processes and priorities should be guided by a tech
| lead/engineering manager who has the incentives to keep process
| overhead to a minimum. Ideally, once a process has been put
| into place there should be very little for a dedicated project
| manager to do on a day-to-day basis.
|
| Where project management skills shine most is when the work
| involves multiple teams and the "lowest common manager" is
| either too high up the org chart to be involved in the details
| or doesn't exist (because the coordination is between separate
| companies). This usually manifests as "customer success" or
| "technical program management" roles, though they could just as
| easily be called "project management".
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| A quick informal poll for devs stuck with agile out there:
|
| After scrum, do you:
|
| 1. Immediately get to work
|
| 2. Spend time going through recent communications
|
| 3. Walk away from the keyboard to decompress
|
| ?
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| 3. Burn through my 15 minutes morning paid break to go make
| some breakfast or coffee and decompress.
|
| The scrum is rarely a productive meeting, it is more of an
| outlet for the extroverts of the team to talk.
|
| As an introvert, this tires me.
|
| Often the people in question don't even take breaks themselves.
| I wish they would take their break to have that small talk so I
| could keep my break for a better time.
|
| This seems generalized to all teams I've worked in across
| several companies.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > After scrum
|
| You mean the daily standup?
|
| Scrum is a full process. There's no "after", no "before". It's
| a steady state.
|
| (Anyway, I need to decompress almost all meetings I have, of
| any kind.)
| Cloudef wrote:
| https://toggl.com/blog/mars-software-development Very much
| related
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I tend to wake up really early and get straight to work, so by
| the time scrum comes around, I've already gotten 3-4 hours in,
| but haven't yet eaten or showered, so that's what I do next.
| Unbeliever69 wrote:
| Love the remote life! What would this look like if you were
| working in an office?
| t43562 wrote:
| We put our standup after lunch if that's what you mean, because
| some developers are in the US and it's morning for them. It
| lets most of us get a quite peaceful morning of work in -
| somehow it spawns less meetings.
|
| Afterwards there are usually meetings about issues raised in
| the standup or just others or just back to what we were doing.
|
| Standups shouldn't be stressful and if they are it's a bad sign
| of the way the team is working. We should be able to say what's
| going on without feeling we'll get jumped on for it.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| 3.-
|
| I am most productive before the stand up. The stand up really
| burns my energy.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| 3
| JustSomePackets wrote:
| Working in a IT project/consulting company it varies a lot
| depending on team members and client.
|
| The agile manifesto is just about trying to add value through
| work, iterating on smaller chunks of work, iterating on your
| ways of working, semi-regularly spending some time with the
| team reviewing how things are working out, and adapt
| accordingly.
|
| Scrum on the other hand is a framework of meetings, roles,
| rule, and a common language that help heavily process oriented
| companies/people dip their toes in. A first step if you will,
| then you iterate to make it your own. Unfortunately, some
| people "swallow the manual" and take it far too inflexibly. Or
| deity forbid some business transformation consultancy sells
| your upper-management the Scaled Agile Framework and its time
| to polish off the old CV.
|
| So depending on where the particular project lies on a scale of
| understanding between those two: any and all of the above.
| Standup is not meant to be stressful, it's just meant to be a
| forum to raise issues, but some people insist on pulling teeth.
| pojzon wrote:
| > You can't lead developers if you have no clue about developing.
| Sorry.
|
| Yessss. So many companies dont understand that. Every time I was
| a part of project that struggled it was due to terrible middle
| managers that did not understand anything and could not decide.
|
| They often try to dispatch ALL their work to someone beside
| status meetings and forwarding emails.
|
| Useless leeches. If you are this kind of Project Manager do
| everyone a favor and leave.
|
| Team will most likely not even notice you are not there.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > You can't lead developers if you have no clue about
| developing. Sorry.
|
| Laissez-Faire Leadership.
|
| I've been on several massive teams where the project managers
| had no idea about the tech stack, but worked so well with the
| dev teams that they relied on the devs to give them input on
| tasks and proper expectations and allowed them the ability to
| have a stake in the game, not just sitting there taking
| directions from people who know nothing about their tech stack.
|
| I think its disingenuous to say you can't lead developers
| without having an intimate knowledge of the tech stack they're
| using. I've worked on small teams and massive teams and in only
| a few cases ran into non-technical managers who thought they
| could strong arm developers into hasty releases and poorly
| coded prototypes. Most of the managers I've worked with who
| were not technical, went out of their way to build a more
| affable relationship with developers since they knew we were
| the key to the project's success.
| [deleted]
| saos wrote:
| > You can't lead developers if you have no clue about
| developing. Sorry.
|
| Out of curiousity would you say the same about product
| managers?
| lstamour wrote:
| You need to know the product and if the product is software,
| you should be familiar with its quirks or can chat with
| developers at that level.
|
| You don't have to know how code works to know something about
| how it works. Ideally, you should be able to give directions
| to your QA person on how to get started interactively testing
| new features, etc.
|
| Leading developers requires tech knowledge, leading product
| managers requires strong product knowledge as well as an
| understanding of what's possible and what might not be
| possible, which one develops over time learning an app.
|
| Might not align well with the above statements, but I
| recommend the following books for product folks:
|
| INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
| https://g.co/kgs/CxFues
|
| EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
| https://g.co/kgs/2DhX7s
|
| Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While
| Embracing Uncertainty https://g.co/kgs/EthDBf
|
| Product can contribute strong to the visible software while
| leaving the tech and implementation decisions to technical
| teams...
| corpMaverick wrote:
| No. As long as the product manager is really an
| expert/specialist on the product. Understand the market, the
| user, some tech, usability, etc.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've had good software engineering managers who couldn't code
| anything beyond simple shell scripts.
|
| It's _possible_ to be a great developer manager without having
| been a developer yourself, but it 's much harder and much less
| common.
|
| In my experience, the managers who excel despite not having an
| engineering background usually get promoted through the ranks
| quickly, so you may not see them much anyway. Being able to
| effectively manage people without completely understanding
| their work is a valuable (and rare) skill.
| superfrank wrote:
| Can you go into a little more detail about what they did that
| made them good?
| bryceacc wrote:
| in my experience, good managers of any kind will be there
| to push on issues that block me or help
| communicate/coordinate across the company whenever my work
| needs. Everything else should be hands off
| simonw wrote:
| "couldn't code anything beyond simple shell scripts" is very
| different from not being able to code at all.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Isn't the thing that non-technical managers lack,
| perspective? Like how long is it going to take and what is
| the LOE? You don't get that by being able to write a shell
| script. You don't always get it from being technical
| either.
|
| I was in a technical role for 5 years before I started
| managing a team and I still lack perspective sometimes. I
| don't always see the big picture. I don't always understand
| the LOE on my asks. I try to be clear with my team that
| this is one of my limitations and to please call me out on
| it if I'm missing the mark, etc.
| grahamm wrote:
| Seems to be the same story over and over. I am also a senior dev
| who was was taken in as tech lead which on day one turned in to
| scrum master but told to keep it light and develop at the same
| time. Then the team grew and the role became team lead,
| responsible for organising and team, time lines, deliverabes and
| recruitment, but I am not a project manager, we don't hire
| project managers, still need to code as well (fat chance). You
| get to hate it and start to envy the junior and mid level Devs.
| mind-blight wrote:
| This is exactly my experience. Senior management spent 2 years
| convinced that 1) we didn't need project managers, and 2) tech
| leads weren't just glorified project managers besides all of
| the evidence to the contrary. The messaging was 'we're working
| out the kinks - it shouldn't take that much time is our
| processes are being implemented correctly'. I bought in for
| about 3 months before it became pretty clear that coordinating
| stakeholders and balancing business and technical requirements
| was a full-time job. The role became a mess that burned out
| anyone in it
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