Management

Effective team management

• it is not enough to just have great people, processes & vision is key parts of healthy team
• good manager must keep team productive & each member in heathy developing state
• to grow as dev you need to focus on decision making and only after that on tooling
• don’t be afraid to: risk, take responsibility and influence processes
• develop yourself and your team through work, not external activities
• be realistic with goals and deadlines
  • team must understand current goals
• be open to criticism & criticize yourself
  • as questions
• planning
  • focus on details if appropriate
  • don’t be overoptimistic (overpesimistic too)
  • understand how you going to achieve goals
  • listen plans from devs (shift left)
• listen to team & members to avoid problems and burnout
  • don’t micromanage
  • it is ok to reduce workload on member if necessary

How estimate amount of work

• common misconception is that “skilled team” will somehow figure out time & effort it takes to build a project and this can be used in business plan
  • heuristics with additional time OR t-shirt sizes won’t help here
  • estimation is still necessary, so need to be done properly
  • some well defined work is easy to estimate, BUT project with unclear bounds/goals/requirements are harder beasts
    • common problem is that bounds etc are formed when task is already ongoing
• problems
  • management often will use some projects as buffer for unplanned work AND/OR lower estimates of hot project to force faster delivery
    • also politics play a huge roll here
  • estimates often given before hand AND then engineer tries to meet it by changing scope and quality of work
• how to estimate
  • gather political context (how fast we need to do it, what priority of this project, how much research is involved)
  • gather technical contexts (how much unknowns will task involve)
  • create risk assessment that higher-up can evaluate
    • ex: what we need to do, what we might skip, what we can outsource
  • remember that it is ok to sometimes say “it is impossible”, BUT not always

• If you refuse to estimate, you’re forcing someone less technical to estimate for you.

• remember that you must meet baseline of productivity amoung your peers

Working with hireups

• you often can choose working environment, BUT you can’t choose your manager
• don’t try to change person, try to learn from them, their experience, find an approach to them
  • often care about common goal, clear visibility and will to agree on smth you disagree will make your life easier, BUT it is ok to challenge person too