[HN Gopher] Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and inve...
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Keep work fresh by teaching your successors and investing a bit in
long-shots
Author : KentBeck
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-07-13 17:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| Yebo_en_mesh wrote:
| This is interesting!
| angarg12 wrote:
| > If you're doing what you're told to do, they are paying you too
| much.
|
| I'm glad Kent Beck got that one out. I work for a Big Tech that
| pays (comparatively) well, and sometimes there is lot of
| ambiguity. Some new hires have a hard time adapting, and complain
| that they lack direction or have nothing to do. When these kind
| of companies pay you big bucks, part of the job is to be
| proactive at finding and solving the problems in your
| organization.
| [deleted]
| jstarfish wrote:
| > When these kind of companies pay you big bucks, part of the
| job is to be proactive at finding and solving the problems in
| your organization.
|
| No, that is explicitly a _manager 's_ job. Expecting ICs to
| "find something and kill it" signals desperation-- like some
| aging OnlyFans thot trying to remain relevant by polling their
| audience for content ideas. It's a glaring red flag that top
| management is directionless themselves, and are externalizing
| their own failure by crowdsourcing the direction of the
| company.
|
| If this is the industry expectation, it's no wonder Google
| products have become such a fragmented mess. They "find" a
| great many experimental products...and later kill them. There
| is no top-down vision; they seem to throw literally everything
| at the wall that every "directionless" new hire comes up with.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. If I'm paying you nearly half a million
| a year as a US FAANGish senior engineer, I'm not going to
| have much patience for the excuse that "my manager didn't
| find enough high-value work for me to do". Compensation like
| that, to me, implies a higher degree of ownership and
| responsibility.
|
| If you're a junior engineer, or sitting somewhere on the
| left-hand peak of the bimodal software engineer compensation
| curve [0], then sure, I'd expect your manager/PM/TL to slice
| up some reasonably high-impact work for you to take care of.
| Otherwise, bug PMs for ideas. Learn the basic shape of the
| organization you work in. Draft some one-page proposals and
| pitch them.
|
| Don't expect to get paid like a heart surgeon just for
| crushing well-scoped React feature requests.
|
| [0] https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I've never had that sort of comp but for long
| stretches of my career I've largely charted my own path.
| While my first manager in my current job and I always got
| along very well, he traveled a lot, I traveled a lot, and I
| never expected much in the way of specific direction. If I
| had a question I asked him.But we largely did our own
| things under a general umbrella. Probably atypical but I
| was hired pretty atypically as well. (Basically a position
| was created for me.)
| singleshot_ wrote:
| I developed and managed a team of professional services
| consultants and I have the opposite view. Teammates who
| needed me to explicitly tell them what to do are ok if
| they're interested in growing beyond that but not otherwise.
| Ideal team members would see problems coming down the track,
| identify a solution, implement it, and brief me before I
| heard about it from someone else. If I thought their solution
| was not workable, I have a window to redirect them. If not,
| they solved a problem and I make a note so I can help them
| get promoted later.
|
| Granted my PS practice ain't no Google, but subordinates who
| require direct instruction for any longer than it takes to
| get comfortable are for the birds.
| extragood wrote:
| I'm currently in a similar situation by the sound of it.
|
| There's an ebb and flow of inbound projects, and one of the
| engineers has taken advantage of his down time by building
| out infrastructure and reusable platforms. He pauses that
| and resumes paid work for clients as they come. I love it -
| he gets a lot of satisfaction out of building what he
| thinks we'll need without explicit deadlines, and consults
| me and his direct manager as necessary. His work is
| inspiring the more junior engineer on the team to learn and
| work more creatively and productively. That frees me up to
| establish better relationships with our Sales and Success
| teams to bring us new and better clients, which in turn
| increases their close rates. With the right people and
| environment, you can create a positive feedback loop that
| is fairly self-sustaining.
| ethanbond wrote:
| No decent manager on the planet thinks that they know
| everything that needs to be done.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| > Expecting ICs to "find something and kill it" signals
| desperation
|
| Ugh. Way to misrepresent GP. Table stakes for strong
| engineers is to be able to proactively find and solve
| problems in products (among other things.) Of course, they'll
| need the support of the larger organization, managers, PMs,
| etc., but they're are not just a bunch of drones that take
| orders.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Our guidelines (BigTech consulting department) on a high level
| are
|
| L4 - problem and solution is well defined
|
| L5 - problem is well defined, your responsibility to come up
| with a solution or at least be able to reach out to the right
| people for help.
|
| L6 - neither problem nor solution is well defined
| singleshot_ wrote:
| 1) I don't know what the problem is. 2) I can see the problem
| but I need to be told both the solution and how to implement
| it. 3) I see the problem and if you tell me the solution I
| can execute it. 4) I see the problem and I know the solution.
| Should I execute the solution? 5) advisory: I found a problem
| and I solved it.
|
| Once you have a critical mass of threes and fives in the team
| you can go do something else and they can take over.
| heisenbit wrote:
| A few observations
|
| - I find 5% for any investments very low. It is hard to get
| deeper into a new topic with that level. Our work has very high
| context switching costs.
|
| - at the moment I work one day on another project requiring a
| fair amount of learning. While I learn a lot this way I found the
| two project setup exhausts my ability to push yet another set of
| things forward. There are limits to my ability to manage
| initiatives.
|
| - the whole agile treadmill can be leveraged by management
| against self management. I found slowing down things and pushing
| myself to explore alternatives in my 80% block helps a bit to
| stem the tide.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Aside: has anyone ever subscribed to a substack blog from this
| banner or do we all just press continue reading?
| photon_lines wrote:
| I rarely do. I recently started using sub-stack for blogging
| myself, and I added in a paid version as well just to annoy
| people haha :) Just kidding though - the paid version is for
| everyone who appreciates my work and who wants to help me
| continue writing. It takes quite a while to come up with
| content and posts and time isn't 'free'. The free version is
| for anyone who wants to continually get new posts in their
| inbox which attempt to explain concept topics in an intuitive
| and visual manner. Yes - the pop ups I agree are relatively
| annoying, but I appreciate what sub-stack is attempting to do
| regardless. If it were up to me, I'd simply include a subscribe
| button at the end of each post which asks the user whether
| they'd like a free or paid subscription should they click on
| it. That's me though. I'm not sure what type of UI testing
| they've done nor what effect that would have.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I agree in principle and practiced this for many years. But I
| moved into a role where there is simply no time. I work too much
| just to keep up with the normal workstream and while I maintain
| the list, there is no chance I get to it which is even more
| depressing.
|
| Gotta have a job that allows you that extra time to explore.
| theK wrote:
| Very good and simple pattern. Not only for yourself but also for
| organizational design.
| [deleted]
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Only somewhat related, but in my line of work (corporate law),
| where we work on a lot of different kinds of transactions, I find
| that my experience of working on a particular type of transaction
| can be roughly divided into five stages:
|
| - Stage 1: The first few times you work on a particular type of
| transaction, you are completely lost. You've never seen these
| documents before, it all feels alien and scary (bearing in mind
| you are probably at an early stage in your career at this point).
| You need someone more senior to hold your hand through it all,
| and you feel like you're asking a million questions.
|
| - Stage 2: You've gotten your head around the basic structure and
| don't feel so useless. You're learning a lot with every deal,
| which is exciting. You're still asking a lot of questions but
| they are more intelligent questions, and you are able to
| contribute meaningfully.
|
| - Stage 3: You are by now quite experienced at this type of
| transaction. You can pretty much run things yourself. You love
| doing this work because you are good at it, you can speak
| confidently about it and people trust you with it. Hopefully by
| this stage, you have someone more junior who is just feeling
| their way through Stage 1, and you can support them.
|
| - Stage 4: You've done so many of these deals that they all start
| to feel the same and it gets a bit boring. Hopefully by this
| stage the junior has moved on to Stage 2. They can at least
| handle the most tedious stuff, and with your support they are
| also getting familiar with the more complicated stuff.
|
| - Stage 5: Your junior (not really a "junior" anymore) has moved
| on to Stage 3 and can take the day-to-day running of the deals
| out of your hands. You remain involved mainly in a supervisory
| role, making sure quality of service remains high and dealing
| with the occasional novel issue that crops up. But in general you
| have a lot more time now, to work on other types of transaction,
| and of course to go out and build out new client relationships so
| that the work keeps flowing. And hopefully you have a second
| junior moving into Stage 1 to repeat the cycle.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Outsider perspective: you have nailed the training pathway, at
| least conceptually. Many level five practitioners are so far
| out of touch with level one that they have a tough time getting
| anyone else to level three. Keep up your good work!
| realitythreek wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with this but want to add that the 80/15/5
| split aren't set in stone. It's more like risk tolerance. The
| more you spend on the riskier activities (not exactly what you're
| asked to do), the higher the chance of failure but the greater
| the reward. You can drive your team or organization in a
| completely different direction.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I like this a lot but I think the number can be different
| depending on the company.
|
| In my company we have "let yourself be nerd sniped" as an core
| cultural value, I think we'd be closer to 60/30/10 or something
| like that. But it's hard to tell for sure because sometimes the
| 10 blows up into a mad 5 week rabbit hole quest with, often but
| not always, spectacular results. Would suck if we'd not have
| those because some boss said 10% fun stuff is the max. I guess it
| balances out over the year but attaching a number makes it a
| rule. So on second thought, maybe less explicit can be better?
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(page generated 2023-07-14 23:00 UTC)