- Prep for task of management: were judged to be good management material because had performed well as doers
- [dmr] Obviously not great TDD; test should be around comms, empathy, etc
- Tens of thousands of accounts receivable programs have been written; somewhere, one is failing
- A project requiring no real technical innovation is going down the tubes
- Technology did not sink the project
- [dmr] but often it gets blamed. Not about psosible, but about failed choices or implementations
- politics used to describe any aspect of the work that is people-related, but better definition: politics constitues the project's sociology
- b/c we go about work in teams & projects, we are mostly in the human communication business
- no time to think about the job, only do it
- what proportion of your time ought to be dedicatred to actually doing the task you are charged with? Not 100%
- Need provision for brainstorming, investigating new methods, figuring out how to avoid some of the subtasks, reading, training
- [dmr] This is a factor of who managers think they work for. If/when it's short-term EPS (or execsowners w/ a similar mindset), managers are likely to see their job as one of getting people to work harder. But when they see themselves as working for their employees, they value working smarter
- [dmr] Ther'es of course more factors - trust, resources, (actual) deadlines. But good mgrs foster and grow their people's desire and abilitly to do good work
- Spanish Theory Management: only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore path to accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from soil or people's backs
- vs. English Theory that held that value coudld be created through ingenuity
- Spanish Theory managers impress importance of delivery date (even though world isn't going to stop b/c project completes a month late); they're value extracting
- Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity
- Philip Crosby, book Quality is Free : gave examples for idea that letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficent to offset the cost of improved quality
- work expands ot fill the time allocated for it
- in healthy work env, reaons people don't perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation w/ others on project and the project goals
- Rules of thumb apply when measuring variations in perofrmance:
- best people outperform worst by 10:1
- best performer 2.5x better than median
- top 50% 2x better than bottom 50%
- Productivity Nonfactors
- Language - [dmr] I expect this would change today; Fortran is not that different to C, relative to Python/Ruby/Go to C
- Years of experience - [dmr] I expect this to not be the case when work required defining the spec. Given that the data collected involved being handed a spec, the work is by definition junior-level, and so the flat curve across experience is not surprising
- entire cost of work space for one dev is small % of salary paid to that dev
- varies in range from 6 to 16%
- [dmr] I wonder what this ratio is in SF today
- most orgs don't even attempt to measure amount of intellect work performed; dno't measure costs very effectively, either
- Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring at all
- doesn't mean measure will be free or even tcheap, may not be perfect - just better than doing nothing
- during solitary work periods that people actually do the work
- [dmr] Strongly disagree w/ this characterization of not-alone time as not working time. Software Eng is in large a job about communication (see earlier chapters) w/ others - that is the work
- People have to be assured it's not their fault if they can only manage or two uninterrupted hours a week; it's org's fault
- [dmr] well this seems outdated. Perhaps the new ed. coudl talk about the @mention on Slack
- [dmr, re: email habits] Implicit assumption of responsivness w/in 24 hours. Async is good, but expectations need norms
- patterns that crop up in successful space: emphasize individual and member of group; deny neither individuality nor inclination to bond into teams
- Managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way; people will be same at end as at beginning
- [dmr] How disappointingly fixed in mindset
- to lead w/o positional authority (w/o anyone appointing you leader) you must
- step up to the task
- be evidently fit for it
- prepare for it by doing required homework ahead of time
- maximize value of everyone
- do it all w/ humor and obvious goodwill
- on innovation
- often, no one has time to innovate b/c everyone is 100% busy
- most innovation is unwelcome b/c it requires accomodating change [dmr] and a willingness to fail
- mgmt requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgmenet, and intuition based upon experience
- interesting opportunities for private self-assessent are a must for workers in a healthy organization
- Purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment
- most forms of teamicide do damage by demeaning work or deaming people who do it
- teams are catalyzed by common sense that work is important and doing it well is worthwhile
- team assigns itself the ask of setting and upholding a standard of prideful workmanship
- teams adopt still higher standard to distinguish itself
- motivational accesssories
- mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, awards
- seem to extol importance of virtues
- do so in such simplistic terms as to send entirely different message: mgmt believes virtues cna be improved w/ posters rather than hard work and managerial talent
- basically any form of it is bad for teamwork
- managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:
- annaul salary or merit reviews
- management by objective (MBO)
- praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
- awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
- performance measurement in almost any form
- 1982 book Out of the Crisis by W Edwars Deming makes point that MBO and its ilk are managerial cop-outs
- By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team formation, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures
- matters that all parties understand that success of individual is tied irrevocably to teh success of the whole
- best success is one in which there is no evident managment, in which team works as genial aggregation of peers
- best boss is one who can manage this over and over again w/o team members knowing they've been "managed"
when you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic; self-heality quality (of human intervention to resolve un-spec'd needs) is lost
- Peopleware premise = main problems are more likely to be sociological than technological in nature
- need agendas for working meetings so no one risks anything by not attending b/c htey come to have confidence that off-agenda matters won't be discussed; no one has to attend defensively
- if you can say definitively what group action terminates the meeting, then it's a working meeting
- meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony; it's all FYI
- an Apple manager makes point of releasing at least one person at start of each meeting
- allows person to make quick statement
- makes clear not person's relative usefulness, rather importance of work she will be doing instead of sitting in
- ... wasting people's time
- need being served was not boss's need for info, but for reassurance; establishes that boss is boss; attendance is expected, hierarchy is being respected
- no chance of effecting meaningful change w/o going through two intermediate stages
- old status quo --> chaos --> practice and integration --> new status quo
- in order for vital learning center to form, middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony
- senior workers at all levels share some responsibility for community-building
- policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder; e.g., via
- pilot projects
- war games
- brainstorming
- provocative training exercises
- training, trips, conferences, celebrations, retreats