Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

by Michael Lopp

To me, ownership means that a person is responsible for all decisions for the thing.

Gantt charts are great at showing the order of operations for building software, but never in history of ever have they effectively been used to measure when to ship that software.

The arrival of project managers (or whatever you end up calling them) needs to coincide with a clear and present danger to the product or the team. They are here to help with X because if we don’t solve X, we are screwed.

There are project managers who go crazy with this power and become political. They become information brokers, which means they’re precisely the opposite of the job. They’re using information to control rather than to illuminate. My advice: fire these people as quickly as possible.

As a lead, you have three jobs—people, process, and product —and

bored people quit.

These are my three techniques for detecting boredom: 1. You notice any change in daily routine:

You ask , “Are you bored?”:

The reality is that someone is going to tell you they’re bored quietly and when you least expect it. They’ll tell you halfway through your one-on-one, and they won’t use the word bored. They’ll say something innocuous like, “. . . and I really don’t know what to do next,”

you always need to be able to answer two questions regarding each person on your team: 1. Where are they going? 2. What are you currently doing to get them there?

you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them: “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”