Sure. Now imagine your car’s GPS knows you have 60 miles in the tank, and your journey is 300 miles. It can query the APO and figure out what the best petrol station to refuel on your journey is.
Respectfully, if that’s your mindset then I think the problem lies with you and not with the manager.
> good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it
The absolute best way to get a shitload of people to speak for it is to get a shitload of people to use it. The best way to get them to use it is to make it _so good_ they use it naturally. Using the test framework from the article as an example - a period of time passed between the meeting and the work actually being recognised. The manager clearly gave the right feedback to keep working on it rather than “I’m not sure - your other thing is quite important too”. The sign of a good wolf is someone who can tell the difference between “this isn’t a good idea” and “there’s a process to be followed to find out if there’s a good idea”. Ignoring the first one is suicide, but ignoring the second one is what makes you succeed.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Someone comes with an idea? Smile and nod, because ideas are worth the paper they’re printed on. If someone comes to me with a prototype of something that I think is jaw droppinly good, depends on what it is. Internal tool? Ask them what their coworkers think of it. Internal facing admin/feature? Same. User facing feature? Ask them what they think the next step is. The goal is, as you put it, to get everyone on the team trying to tell me it’s a good idea not just one person.
>Respectfully, if that’s your mindset then I think the problem lies with you and not with the manager.
Adding "respectfully" to a sentence that says, "you are wrong and the problem is you", does not make it respectful. You could have simply left it out and your comment would have provided the same content. I'm fine being a kettle but don't pretend you are not a pot.
To get back on topic:
So you would:
- talk to team mates
- ask for next steps
And then what? You seem to want to avoid saying you would do anything because that goes against the premise of getting out of the way. But if an idea is brought to you that is jaw droppingly good, are you just going to ask some basic questions and do nothing? Or are you going to support it?
The point of saying respectfully was, just like my reply on how I’d handle the scenario you posed, to be gentle about it.
> and then what
You’re missing the point. My job as a manager isn’t to tell this person “wow, good job, let me go organise a presentation to <pointy haired boss> and we can get you 3 engineers working on it and get it added to your sprint work”.
> you seem to want to avoid saying you would do anything because that goes against the premise of getting out of the way.
Because getting out of the way _is the point_ and the action I’m taking. The “wolf” doesn’t need me to champion them, they need me to not be in the way.
> if an idea is brought to you that is jaw droppingly good are you just
You didn’t ask me what I’d do if they brought me something that I thought was dumb, misguided or not worth doing. And the answer to that is “get in the way”. I would ask them why they think this is a good idea, is it likely to benefit the team/org/product/business, is it a better thing to do than their current project, should we pitch it to the team.
As a manager your job isn’t to make your ICs successes happen, it’s to balance the project/company needs with the opportunities for the individuals. My job isn’t to champion someone’s project. I’m not a PM or an assistant to organise meeting.
If someone does something so good, then I won’t have a choice but to make sure that they have the space to keep doing it, but if they do something that’s as good as the 15 other things that are going on, I’ll get it prioritised with the rest of the stuff that’s going on.
> My job as a manager isn’t to tell this person “wow, good job, let me go organise a presentation to <pointy haired boss> and we can get you 3 engineers working on it and get it added to your sprint work”.
If you see something of extreme value it is not your job to allocate time and resources to it?
> Because getting out of the way _is the point_ and the action I’m taking. The “wolf” doesn’t need me to champion them, they need me to not be in the way.
And my point is in real life leaderships job is not to "get out of the way" of good ideas or people that get things done, it is to champion them.
> You didn’t ask me what I’d do if they brought me something that I thought was dumb, misguided or not worth doing. And the answer to that is “get in the way”. I would ask them why they think this is a good idea, is it likely to benefit the team/org/product/business, is it a better thing to do than their current project, should we pitch it to the team.
First, why would I ask? Is is that unexpected that you would "get in the way" of bad ideas? And let me get this straight, a bad idea comes your way, you do something, a good idea, you do nothing?
> As a manager your job isn’t to make your ICs successes happen, it’s to balance the project/company needs with the opportunities for the individuals. My job isn’t to champion someone’s project. I’m not a PM or an assistant to organise meeting.
That is your job! Their success is your companies success! I do not understand the line you are trying to draw here. Your job is not to champion "someones" project, it is (among other things) to champion amazing projects that you think are jaw droppingly good.
> If someone does something so good, then I won’t have a choice but to make sure that they have the space to keep doing it, but if they do something that’s as good as the 15 other things that are going on, I’ll get it prioritised with the rest of the stuff that’s going on.
So at the end of all of that, what it boils down to is that you would do something? We're going to call it "making space" but I feel like that means it's at the top of a list of things you are making sure happen yes?
If you want to keep cutting hairs you can, I will keep supporting people who do good work, no matter how self propelling they are. So far it's worked well for me and them but ymmv.
> If you see something of extreme value it is not your job to allocate time and resources to it?
Have you ever had the situation where a kid is good at something, and the parent latches onto it and stifles whatever good was coming out of it in the first place? IME with these people, the freedom _is_ the key to the success. The minute you start to bring other people in to help, they lose their baby, and their interest.
Also; The best person is already spending time and resources on it, and they did so without me needing to tell them to do so. They're doing fine without me.
> Is is that unexpected that you would "get in the way" of bad ideas? And let me get this straight, a bad idea comes your way, you do something, a good idea, you do nothing?
I dunno, I guess it depends on how you would expect me to respond to bad ideas. Even a bad idea can have some merit, and I always want my team to talk to me. Flat-out rejecting their misses isn't how I operate, as there's a reason they suggested the thing they did. Maybe they read about a new build tool, and we don't need a new build tool. Next week they might read about a new test approach, or a new game mechanic and we _do_ need one of those. The most important thing is that they talk to me next week, and the next week.
> So at the end of all of that, what it boils down to is that you would do something? We're going to call it "making space" but I feel like that means it's at the top of a list of things you are making sure happen yes?
I'm not really sure what your point is here, sorry. If you're trying to pin down "what exact action would you take in the hypothetical situation that a high performing engineer comes to you with an unspecified item of extreme value" from me, I think I'm destined to miss the mark for what you're looking for. I think I've been clear - my job is to let high/excellent performers do excellent things, and if they're already doing that then my job is to just let them keep doing it. The real hard part is getting everyone else to _not_ go on tangents because they think they're a wolf.
Like I said, you feel free to continue to do nothing to support good work done by good people and just "let it happen", I will continue to support it actively when I see it.
I think you forgot to follow these guidelines in your previous response. You came off very dismissive and went straight to "you're the problem" interpretation.
I’ve only done 20-200-2k, but I agree with you fully. At 2k, there’s a weird middle ground (IMO) where you actually need a handful of wolves to keep things nimble. They cause an awful lot of strife particularly to the people who are trying to grow from 2k -20k, but they are the thing that keeps the other people moving in the right direction until you’re big enough that it’s just not tolerable anymore.
At that point you get an office of the CTO to be formal wolves!
you need flexible organziational glue logic at this scale, and the so called wolve can help, so this office of wolves can be the ones patch wires and to reprogram the organzational FPGA's or rewrite the organizational routing table (or what ever it is distributed software people use as glue logic...)
You and another person made this point _but_ I’d encourage you to look at what $50/mo gets you on AWS all in. In reality it will get you a t4g.small plus 200GB of (very slow) storage. Honestly they start to chug at 500 or so users in my experience.
For this you avoid AWS, Azure and GCP. Their pricing is simply not competitive. We operate root servers at Hetzner serving dynamic content to six-figure audiences.
PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch clusters can be operated at a fraction of the cost of comparable managed services offered by the major cloud providers.
The idea that this necessarily involves excessive maintenance effort is nonsense.
The skills needed to use hyperscalers properly are better invested in fundamental sysadmin know-how.
Which is why you should not be going to AWS to begin with when there are plenty of providers who will give you orders of magnitude more performance for this price.
(of course, say goodbye to resume points and your cloud provider conference invite. Question is, what are you trying to do? Are you building a business, or a resume?)
It's also the most valuable part of the entire article, and is true whether you're using waterfall, scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, or whatever. It's also the only thing that reliably works - the better you are at breaking down your work the better your estimates will be. As you said though, breaking down the work is oftentimes the largest part of the work because it requires _starting_ the work in the first place.
Jira is excel for task management. OOTB setup works absolutely great, and then someone comes along who wants a custom field on tasks to support <something that they read about elsewhere> and now you have to fill in that custom field. they leave, and someone else comes in and adds a new one. 5 years later you have 11 new fields that partially overlap, some are needed for some views, some are needed for other, but you can't use default boards because person Y decided that they wanted to call Epics Feat's, and made a custom issue type.
And in the end, the people who actualy use those boards just export a filter to excel and work there...
> How was that not the first thing to be checked ?
I'm a very technical person, and would be considered "smart". A few weeks ago, the TV remote was acting up. I changed the batteries, still happening. Restart the TV, still happening. The mobile app is working fine, I'm wondering if there's a fault on the IR blaster. Use a camera to check the IR blaster on the remote, seems fine. Factory reset the TV, still happening. Take the TV off the unit, pull out back of the TV off, solder to IR blaster looks ok. Put it all back together, still happening. Phone samsung, and go to make a coffee while I'm on hold. Come back, it's working while I'm on hold. Total time, 4 hours at this point.
Turns out, I had put a coffee cup in front of the receiver that morning, and unluckily put it back when I lifted the TV down from the stand...
I really wish they had used func instead, it would have saved this confusion and allowed for “auto type deduction” to be a smaller more self contained feature
Indeed. I am a frequent critic of the c++ committee’s direction and decisions. There’s no direction other than “new stuff” and that new stuff pretty much has to be in the library otherwise it will require changes that may break existing code. That’s fine.
But on the flip side, there’s a theme of ignoring the actual state of the world to achieve the theoretical goals of the proposal when it suits. Modules are a perfect example of this - when I started programming professionally modules were the solution to compile times and to symbol visibility. Now that they’re here they are neither. But we got modules on part. The version that was standardised refused to accept the existence of the toolchain and build tools that exist, and as such refused to place any constraints that may make implementation viable or easier.
St the same time we can’t standardise Pragma once because some compiler may treat network shares or symlinks differently.
There’s a clear indication that the committee don’t want to address this, epochs are a solution that has been rejected. It’s clear the only real plan is shove awkward functional features into libraries using operator overloads - just like we all gave out to QT for doing 30 years ago. But at least it’s standardised this time?
More information is always good.
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