> If you feel like you have to use the digital panopticon to micromanage your tech/knowledge employees, you are potentially a really shitty manager.
The higher up the management chain you go, the lower your visibility into developer productivity. It is natural that executives and owners should want that visibility, it's just that it's too fuzzy -- it can't be had with the kind of resolution that they want. Hence we have all these faddish metrics that get gamed and never end up being useful.
We should have empathy for management's need to know even if we don't think they can really get a clear picture.
What to do? Two things:
- Manage better. Companies need managers who can get a good sense for their direct reports' abilities, skills, and productivity. And those managers need to have good BS detectors too. And managers need these skills up and down the management chain.
- Look for outcomes. Teams and employees that never deliver enough value should be looked at with some care -- maybe they are, but the value they deliver is not very visible, or maybe they're expert bullshitters.
Regarding outcomes, long delivery delays need to be investigated because one of the many problems we have as an industry is in estimating time and effort needed to deliver. This happens for reasons, but mainly that software development is harder than we tend to think.
(Also, investigate your software development lifecycles. Maybe your change management schemes are wasteful and delay-inducing.)
I say software development is hard, but I think management is probably much harder. The business school metrics fads that lead managers astray don't help.
The higher up the management chain you go, the lower your visibility into developer productivity. It is natural that executives and owners should want that visibility, it's just that it's too fuzzy -- it can't be had with the kind of resolution that they want. Hence we have all these faddish metrics that get gamed and never end up being useful.
We should have empathy for management's need to know even if we don't think they can really get a clear picture.
What to do? Two things:
- Manage better. Companies need managers who can get a good sense for their direct reports' abilities, skills, and productivity. And those managers need to have good BS detectors too. And managers need these skills up and down the management chain.
- Look for outcomes. Teams and employees that never deliver enough value should be looked at with some care -- maybe they are, but the value they deliver is not very visible, or maybe they're expert bullshitters.
Regarding outcomes, long delivery delays need to be investigated because one of the many problems we have as an industry is in estimating time and effort needed to deliver. This happens for reasons, but mainly that software development is harder than we tend to think.
(Also, investigate your software development lifecycles. Maybe your change management schemes are wasteful and delay-inducing.)
I say software development is hard, but I think management is probably much harder. The business school metrics fads that lead managers astray don't help.