[HN Gopher] Biggest productivity killers in the engineering indu...
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Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry
Author : bubblehack3r
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-08-18 14:21 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.eng-leadership.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.eng-leadership.com)
| mkoryak wrote:
| Slow edit refresh. When is say slow, I mean over 100 seconds.
| larrysalibra wrote:
| Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry:
|
| #1 Hacker News
| d_burfoot wrote:
| World's greatest productivity hack: stop reading blog posts
| about productivity
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Kind of reads like leadership that wants to squeeze work out of
| people. At least some of your talent is going to need to think
| deeply to build actual systems, at some point, otherwise you're
| just selling duct-taped together garbage. You CAN sell duct-taped
| together garbage, companies do it all the time-- it's not very
| interesting to work on though, hence your "unmotivated, lazy"
| engineers.
| convolvatron wrote:
| without trying to draw the line between designed systems and
| duct tape, this question of whether or not the organization is
| functional is far more important to me as a motivating factor
| than these other things. Do I fell like the quality bar is high
| enough that people will demand that I write adequate tests, or
| will they just wonder why I'm taking so much time. Does my work
| dovetail with other people's? Are they depending on me? Is this
| useful structure or just some ill-conceived minor feature
| request that I know is going to cause trouble later.
|
| Does anyone actually care about what I'm doing, or are we just
| running out the clock.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I really hate every article from this site when they get posted.
| The advice is never really useful, and the authors strike me as
| the worst kind of micromanaging, ineffective leader to work
| under.
| ipnon wrote:
| Most of the work of a manager is not coordinating the work of
| subordinates but instead justifying the necessity of employing
| managers.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Another one: "We're moving our stack to <flavor-of-the-month>."
|
| or one that I lived through: "We're switching from SQL Server to
| Oracle." That one burned a few years that could have been spent
| on new features or improvements.
| nijuashi wrote:
| (everything is working with no effort)
|
| No one:
|
| IT infra: let's move our repo platform to SaaS!
| jclulow wrote:
| - Perfectionism, but defined as "Wanting to make things amazingly
| well, but never finishing them"
|
| - Procrastination
|
| - Issues from context switching and distraction
|
| Is this ... ADHD?
| playingalong wrote:
| Lack of clear goals from the management.
|
| Too many meetings, especially the recurring ones. Domination of
| spoken culture instead of written for collaboration.
|
| Lack of proper sleep and rest. Working outside of your normal
| brain activity hours.
|
| Sudden fire drills - "unforeseen" audit with deadline next
| Tuesday, a security vulnerability mentioned in TV and you needing
| to redeploy/upgrade everything ASAP.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| > Domination of spoken culture instead of written for
| collaboration.
|
| I have sometimes wondered if this was just me. Glad to see it
| listed. I can't count the number of times that "oh yeah, we
| talked about that and decided xyz" or "do you remember where we
| landed on abc in that meeting?" in a distributed environment.
|
| I can't force others to communicate about everything in
| writing, but I've learned to take detailed notes of my own
| thought processes and to write down everything important that
| happened in a meeting or conversation immediately after it
| finishes.
| cabraca wrote:
| > I have sometimes wondered if this was just me.
|
| Same for me and even if you have notes you will get "thats
| not what i said", "thats not how i remember it", etc.
| wild_egg wrote:
| Send the notes out afterwards and have them validated
| collingreen wrote:
| Meetings not degrading and wasteful enough? Make your
| employees also fill out a questionnaire and affidavit of
| a written summary of their potentially nuanced words to
| really move that morale needle!
| dkga wrote:
| Actually there is one way, which we use frequently at
| work and is quite effective. One of the participants has
| a screen shared and types in bullet points on topics and
| action points. In the final minute we just go over them
| and then as soon as the meeting ends the person presses
| send to all participants. Anyone not explicitly objecting
| shortly afterwards (which they wont because they just saw
| it being typed live and were asked again) would be
| tacitly confirming it. No extra hassle, and in fact less
| hassle.
| weebull wrote:
| Careful now. You'll be saying waterfall processes are a good
| thing.
| larsrc wrote:
| A trick from my PhD days: start the day with one to two hours of
| concentrated work. Don't look at your email or news or anything
| until you've done that.
|
| This worked fabulously for me because it allowed me to "swap in"
| my work enough that I could avoid distractions.
|
| And yes, I have ADHD.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Whoops. I've been starting my days with one to two hours of
| notifications and code reviews. I'll try your way. I also have
| ADHD
| zvr wrote:
| Mildly annoyed that the graph on "Perfectionism" has the time on
| the y axis instead of the x one...
| seanhunter wrote:
| That will be your perfectionism.
|
| Joking aside yeah that's perverse.
| omoikane wrote:
| I wish the two axes in the perfectionism graph were swapped so
| all of the graphs will have time as the horizontal axis.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| A big one is keeping iteration times fast.. If you have to wait
| more than a few minutes to run through your test suite or deploy
| to a dev environment it really kills the momentum. It starts easy
| but as you add complexity, dependencies, slow or flakey tests, it
| is slowly gets eroded.
| fear91 wrote:
| Honorary mention:
|
| SAFe agile
| throw156754228 wrote:
| I feel like Slack is 80% of the problem. Honestly I'd like to get
| rid of it at our company, and just have everything come down/go
| back up through my manager. I realise some of you probably have
| never experienced this.
| patrick451 wrote:
| I wish IT would restrict slack access to the first and last 30
| minutes of the day. Productivity would soar.
| ok_coo wrote:
| I heavily agree. It's something I had at my first office job. I
| had no email address, no messaging app, everything came through
| my PM or manager. Ive never been as productive as that job.
| Straight to work with no distractions and had clear goals.
| _jss wrote:
| There has been so much research on this, and this article seems
| to ignore much of it.
|
| The book Accelerate is a good start.
| amelius wrote:
| Solutions:
|
| #1 get a private office
| kiliancs wrote:
| This is so different from what comes to mind when I think about
| how to improve productivity:
|
| - require engineers to present and justify engineering
| investments (and understand that what you don't accept has real
| costs) - have engineers estimate the work in the roadmap, and
| provide clear risks and possible mitigations - note all of the
| above means the goals are clearly defined first - not everything
| you wanted to accomplish may fit; be prepared to distinguish
| essential from good to have, and to change the order of your
| priorities. - have teams commit to dates based on estimates, a
| healthy error margin, additional responsibilities, meetings... -
| plans change, things happen, life happens, engineering is hard.
| It's OK, it's expected! Make sure there are clear communication
| channels from engineers to the top, and from the top to the
| engineers, so that expectations are adjusted as soon as possible,
| and maybe make further adjustments. - Communication should happen
| often. Be always available to listen, don't micromanage. -
| managers should protect engineers and said communication channels
| - managers and PMs do not set deadlines - don't hire cheap; hire
| motivated team players. - the primary role of your >Senior
| engineers is to be force multipliers (how is a whole different
| conversation), not to do superhero work - communication,
| communication, communication; you'd be shocked how much time is
| wasted by engineers being unsure how to proceed and not sure who
| to ask of if the question will be well received; there are no bad
| questions.
|
| I feel like I could go on and on and expand on many of these.
|
| Yes: multitasking hurts; yes, procrastination is bad; but beyond
| looking at each "issue" individually, engineering leadership
| should provide processes and culture that protect, motivate and
| facilitate success.
| dwb wrote:
| Oh we can't just avoid context switching, can we? The way the
| company works is completely beyond the question. I should have to
| aggressively protect special "focus time" instead, because it's
| my problem I have to solve.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Timeboxing is a pretty bad idea for the simple reason that it
| doesn't define the way to handle tasks that exceed the timebox.
| It simply assumes that tasks will take no longer than the
| timebox. Real life tasks don't work this way. In doing so,
| timeboxing closes the door to experiments, to discovery, and
| innovation.
| shaftoe444 wrote:
| > Let's get back to this week's thought!
|
| Really made me laugh.
| ssttoo wrote:
| > Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry: eng-
| leadership (.com)
|
| Funny how the domain name is the answer of the topic in question
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