DecisionOps: Effective Engineering Management

drewcoo 2021-08-19 15:57:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

MintingOps (n) creation of new words by dressing them up with a postfix "Ops"

The piece is not about operationalizing decision-making, how to make decisions in ops, or even about which elective surgeries I should choose. It's an incoherent grab bag of management ideas.

lbriner 2021-08-19 15:50:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It doesn't really answer any of the hard questions. There is nothing particularly controversial but the hard questions include:

1) How do you actually measure performance? 2) How do you deal with performance and variance in individuals? 3) How do you set an acceptable performance level? 4) How do you make allowances for external disruption that affects performance?

With more than 3 years in management, I have personally found that you cannot really measure development performance much more than hand-waving.

A much more effective approach is to find somewhere that each member of the team can have a stake in something and be engaged. Make someone in charge of teh CI server or the deployment server or Git practice or coding challenges. It is much easier to see how people are performing then.

thinkingkong 2021-08-19 15:55:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Engineering manager efficacy is easy to measure. Did the team ship on time or not? You can argue about the metric and challenge whether or not its appropriate but at the end of the day thats mostly what teams care about. Everything else around hiring, retention, planning, okrs, etc, etc are all about building a resilient and predictible system in order to achieve the goal of generating more revenue.

deegles 2021-08-19 15:58:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Did the team ship on time or not?

If you force people to meet a metric, they will. Features will be cut left and right and quality will suffer when shipping is the only goal. A story as old as time itself.

sharatsc 2021-08-19 17:08:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Exactly. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/machiavellians-gulli...

aplummer 2021-08-19 16:56:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah and also in a significant amount of cases, the real job is expectation management around downstream dependencies and timeline. Arguably the only true metric is "was anyone surprised at the engineering deliverable in time and quality" IMO.

goodpoint 2021-08-19 15:50:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If we could stop adding "Ops" to every word...

chrsig 2021-08-19 16:36:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

That'd be detrimental to the EgoOps everyone has adopted to help them feel like they're part of some special forces team.

sharatsc 2021-08-19 14:56:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Thoughts on (software) engineering management.