What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.
Pay off my mortgage, only 100k to go! Then I won't "have" to work.
Buy an acre close by to grow vegetables on to eat and share, I'll do this after I pay off my mortgage.
Exercise more, I'm lazy and I'm trying to get up earlier to exercise and play video games before my wife and daughter wake up.
Do a 4 day work week to spend more time growing vegetables.
I'd love to figure out what area of the technology stack I enjoy most, for now I'm a full stack engineer looking into backend engineering as a primary focus. Not systems level, but business logic level, and not frontend I'm a "that's good enough" guy, not a perfectionist. I'm learning Go.
Other than that I'm good I think. My work compensation vs responsibilities are perfect right now, I don't want a promotion. I like where I live, close to both of our families, hospitals, schools, and entertainment. Weather could be better but it's not the worst.
My note taking system is a single "donelist.txt" that sits in a GDrive/onedrive/xdrive on my machine. Entries are:
9.11.22
scrum
working on stry1234
meeting X
- do a thing
lunch
created PR for stry1234
meeting Y
8.11.22
scrum
working on def4321
lunch
created PR def4321
meeting Z
meeting A
...
This is good enough for me although I'm still figuring out how to plan ahead better. Maybe I should write down how I expect the week to go, goals and schedule, on Monday and update from there.
Incredible, I've been scrolling through these comments thinking of my own passion which is Final Fantasy VII speedrunning. Fell in love with the game as a kid and only recently discovered the FF7 speedrunning community who are amazingly kind and generous. The runners themselves are incredibly helpful and can be found on Twitch. There's also a Discord where technique, glitches, and skips are worked on and improved.
I'm working on running in the 100% category which currently has a world record of 17 hours 38 minutes, it's a marathon of concentration. I'm not a young single person so finding the time to do a run has been the hardest part.
For casual players there are a ton of mods that make the game more challenging, updates for the graphics, and tons of other really interesting modifications. I love the New Threat V1.5 mod and the Chibi style character model updates.
What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.