polotek

polotek, 24 days ago

I'm glad I asked this question explicitly in this way. Lots of great info in the replies. Thank you all for being thoughtful and candid.

I have some thoughts, but they'll have to wait until later. I will share some of my own experience though. I forget to do that sometimes.

polotek, 24 days ago

Okay. I can give some if my answers to the question about estimates. I've never been presented with formal methodologies around estimation. In my early career, it always seemed like more senior people would just come to with numbers based on fuzzy intuition and experience. This never really bothered me. It's just the way things were done.

polotek, 24 days ago

The reason it was mostly okay is that my early career was as a contractor. I worked for firms that hired me out hourly. Estimates were just estimates. If it took longer, we would explain why and renegotiate the hours. There were conflicts sometimes. We missed something huge on our side, the client was in a bind and couldn't afford to move dates, etc. But none of that fell on me directly as a team member.

polotek, 24 days ago

When I became a Senior Engineer™, it's because they wanted me to lead projects. But I became the person who had to answer the question "how long do you think this will take?"

At this point, I had observed a lot of what more senior people talked about and thought about when they did estimates. I paid attention when they asked me questions about my part of the work. So I started to model those things I had seen.

polotek, 24 days ago

One of the key things here is that I still had string mentorship and guidance. There were always people around who were more experienced then me. I talked to them directly and explained my thinking. And they would either say "yeah that seems reasonable" or they would say "uh, no that doesn't seem right. Let's talk about it some more."

polotek, 24 days ago

This was 20 years ago. The industry has shifted in and pretty big ways. As a manager for the last 10 years, I've had different experiences growing teams of engineers. Many of them have the impression that their instincts are the only ones that matter. Many people react poorly to being told "uh, no that's not right."

At the same time. Many engineers are starved for experienced mentorship where none is available. There's nobody else to talk to about whether their estimates are any good.

polotek, 24 days ago

I didn't realize at the time that the support I had early in my career was not only good but also atypical. It wasn't until my 3rd job that I had my first experience of managers and more senior dev who were unhelpful and also not better than me at what we were doing. That was wild. And pretty frustrating.

polotek, 24 days ago

But back to estimates. My process for estimates is still pretty informal. Some folks here have pointed to books and blog posts that outline much more rigorous methods. But that doesn't appeal to me. I gravitate towards work environments where keeping things informal is expected. And that usually means there is a lot of flexibility in determining the tradeoffs. E.g. timeframes or scope of work.

polotek, 24 days ago

@anderseknert @bitmaker management commits to that all the time. I just don't understand why people love making these blanket statements about management when they don't want people doing that about their role.

polotek, 24 days ago

@anderseknert @bitmaker what? Don't get shy now. Finish the statement.

The thing I'm referring to with enginewrs is literally happening in the thread we are in. You also chose to use the word "never". Whereas I have spent several tweets seeking to explicitly make statements about nuance and balance.

So help me understand. Are we the same?

polotek, 24 days ago

@anderseknert @bitmaker the difference is that you're gonna always speak as if your not experiences are universal. That's the issue here for me.

polotek, 24 days ago

@anderseknert @bitmaker I told you which part. Pretty explicitly.

polotek, 24 days ago

@anderseknert @bitmaker yeah I'm sure you think so. I don't assume you go around making people feel like shit on purpose. The question is whether you can actually hear other people when they give you feedback about how you're coming across.

polotek, 24 days ago

There's something that is always funny to me when I have this conversation about engineers having higher expectations. I know people are gonna wanna fight with me. Because they have no control or the management is dumb or the expectations are unreasonable.

But what's wild is that we also know that engineers definitely have expectations of other engineers. Engineers constantly talk shit about how they work with people who should do better.

But somehow this never gets reconciled all the way.

polotek, 24 days ago

I'm trying to tread carefully here. Probably failing though. I want to say explicitly that I like the work Hicks and her colleagues are doing. It feels like they are investigating what happens on engineering teams in a mor rigorous way. I appreciate that. But these are things that good managers have known and talked about for a long time. Maybe what I'm struggling with is that I know what comes up once you get past these initial findings. Things get more complicated.

polotek, 24 days ago

I'll just go ahead and say what I feel about the current state of the engineering discipline. The industry has grown too fast due to high demand. We never had great structures for actually teaching people. But now we have a huge influx of people who haven't really been taught anything. They're just piecing things together and winging it. With software specifically, that's not the worst thing. This medium can tolerate a lot of mistakes. But eventually the impacts do start to show.

polotek, 24 days ago

I think one thing that can contribute so much more to a feeling of psychological safety at work is knowing your shit and being more successful at your tasks. Instead, what I see is a lot of early career engineers constantly feeling like they're failing. Because the systems are overly complex, and they're not able to keep up with the expected pace of output.

polotek, 24 days ago

An industry full of people feeling like they're faking it won't ever feel psychologically safe. No matter what else we do around that. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take action to improve the things we do have control over. We should. I'm just saying I also want to see this discourse tackle what I see as the bigger barriers to achieving better outcomes.

polotek, 24 days ago

Sure. This is what I was referring to when I said "unrealistic expectations". Of course there lines that shouldn't be crossed. But we can't keep promising people that they will never feel uncomfortable at work. You will. Especially if you're not doing a good job. So how do we reconcile that with "psychological safety"?
https://hachyderm.io/@sanedragon/112366668022281972

polotek, 24 days ago

"being yelled at". No you shouldn't get yelled at. But a lot of people's perception of "yelling" is pretty overdeveloped in my experience. People are allowed to be frustrated with you at work sometimes.

"Being blamed when it doesn't work out". Blame is toxic. But we should be talking about accountability. I think engineers need to get more clear about what they do agree to be held accountable for. Right now it feels like the answer is not much.

polotek, 24 days ago

"Not meeting expectations". Yeah see. This one. This is the one I'm more confused about. You do have expectations to meet. That's why you get paid money. In some cases with tech workers, it's quite a lot of money. So I need to understand how to reconcile this with what's required to make people feel "safe".

polotek, 24 days ago

@pythonbynight @glyph I think that's absolutely true. I tell those people that they shouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about it. Because it's not their responsibility. If they feel they're still being held accountable for the "failure", then they should probably seek employment elsewhere.