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

by Michael Lopp

The idea of the unrelated creative excursion : creativity begets creativity. The act of experiencing the end result of others’ creativity is the single best way for me to figure where the dial is hiding and conjure the demon

Panic is the mother of the path of least resistance.

an individual tends to be very bad at work estimates until they’ve begun the work.

A project manager is responsible for shipping a product, whereas a product manager is responsible for making sure the right product is shipped. A program manager is an uber-mutated combination of both that usually shows up to handle multiple interrelated projects like, say, an operating system.

the addition of each new person on your team increases the cost of each of the following: Communication. How much effort is required to get Idea A and make sure it travels to all the necessary people? Decisions. How quickly can a group of people best choose Path A or Path B? Error Correction. How long does it take to detect and fix when something is going wrong?

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.

A good project manager’s job is to decrease chaos by increasing clarity.

The irony of the arrival of crap project managers is that you’re effectively punishing inefficiency with useless bureaucracy, which, wait for it, creates more inefficiency.

Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer. Over time it means you’ll have a harder time talking to engineers because you’ll forget how they think and how they become bored.

if you’re an engineering manager and you can’t assess technical ability, you’re screwed. You’re going to be hiring smooth-talking QA guys who don’t know how to code.

Your job interview isn’t over until you understand the unique structure that has formed around this particular group of people. It’s not just the organizational chart, it’s the intricate personalities that have settled into a comfortable, complex communication structure.

When a nerd says “We can build it better,” he’s saying, “I have not devoted the necessary time to understanding the existing solution, and it’s more fun to build than to investigate someone else’s crap.”

Amaze your nerd. Build calm and dark places where invoking the Zone is easy. Perform consistently and efficiently around your nerds so they can spend their energy on what they are building and not worry about that which they can’t control. Help them scale by knowing when they’re stuck or simply bored.

When that annual review begins, your employee is hanging on every word, carefully listening to your tone, wondering, good review or bad review? If it’s sounding good, that must mean cash; and cash rocks. If it’s sounding bad, they stop listening and start pre-bittering themselves to hate you for the next month since you clearly have no idea where they added their value this year.

Skill vs. Will Plus Epiphanies It’s a simple graph. One axis is skill—how much skill does the employee have to do his job? Is he qualified? Overqualified? How long has he been doing it? When is the last time you know he learned something new? How quickly does he handle tasks compared to his peers? The other axis is will—this is where we measure the employee’s desire. Does she like her job? Really? Has she told you that? Is she viewed as energetic by her team? When is the last time she generated a great idea that blew your mind? Is she talking in meetings or listening? Is she ever talking? Is she always talking?

His diminishing skill is diminishing his will, which, in turn, further diminishes his skill because he has zero confidence to go gather new skills. Yikes. A skill/will negative feedback loop. Didn’t see that coming, did you? Here’s the upside. Just as skill and will fade together, they also rise together. If you focus on one, you often fix the other.

An annual review is a discussion, not a speech. The goal of the discussion is, first, to agree that the review is in the ballpark.

Rule of thumb: If you’re delivering big bad news, schedule two meetings. At the first meeting, you’re presenting the review, not the objectives. They’re going to want to know about compensation and you’re going to want to say it, but don’t. The moment you say “No increase,” the review is over, the employee is pissed, and you’re going to be on the defensive. The meeting has become a mental fight and fights only prove who can punch harder. It’s the second meeting where everyone involved has had time to digest the review. You

High skill, low will: Boredom is imminent—needs a change of scenery and responsibility. Stat. High will, low skill: Needs training, needs mentorship. Needs management. The good news is they really, really want it. Savor this because as soon as the skill kicks in, they’re going to start wanting your job. This rules. Low will, low skill: Boy, did you screw up. It takes a fairly concerted effort to ignore the needs of your employee so long that (a) they no longer have the skills necessary to do their job, and (b) they don’t want to do it. Roll those sleeves up, pal. You’ve got work to do. High skill, high will: Great job but, ummmmm, guess what? No one can maintain this for very long.

Your résumé should be designed to give me a glimpse and a hook. The glimpse is a view into the most recent years of your professional career. It should convey your three most important accomplishments and it should give me a good idea where your technical skills lie. The hook is more important. The hook will leave me with a question. Maybe it’s something from your “Other Interests” section. How about an objective so outlandish that I can’t help but set up a phone screen. I’m not suggesting that you make anything up; I’m asking you to market yourself in a way that I’m going to remember. A résumé is not a statement of facts. It’s a declaration of intent.

when I ask that question, which will be clearly, painfully open-ended. I’m not looking for the quick, clean answer; I’m looking for a story that shows me more about how you communicate and how you think.

if you don’t have a list of questions lined up for me, all I hear is: You don’t want this job.

The basic fact is this: you’ve chosen to leave and you’re going to leave. Giving an excessive amount of notice is professional cruel and unusual punishment both for you and for your team because it extends the organization’s stress regarding your departure while also preventing your team from doing something critical: moving on.

I’m placing a cost on the departure of a wanted human leaving and comparing that cost with whatever usually minor situation existed in the past that led to a shields-down situation. The departure cost is always exponentially higher.

Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields. Every single moment.

Humans—engineers especially—significantly underestimate the cost of getting things done in groups of people. We focus on the obvious and measurable work that needs to be done—iterate on a design, write the code, test, iterate, deploy—and we put a huge discount on the work required to share that process with others. Engineers have a well-deserved reputation for regularly being off by a factor of three in their work estimates, and that is partly due to the fact that we are really shitty at estimating the non-linear chaotic work (and fun) that exists in keeping a group of humans pointed in the right direction.

you need a well-defined leadership role to deal with unexpected and non-linear side effects of people working together. You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.

Culture — An invisible binding force that holds your company together. It’s like the Force, except real.