7 ms·

Why are you so busy?

376 points by tjlingham 4y ago

omega3 4y ago
I love how far removed from reality these idealistic blog posts are from "technology thinkers". You're busy? You shouldn't be so let me give you some cookie cutter advice filled with: "you need", "you should", "you could". More in my book.
- scandox 4y ago
  I don't think this is removed from reality. I think people who are in perma-crunch believing that just over the next hump they'll find level ground are the ones who are removed from reality.
  - tirwander 4y ago
    This is spoken like someone that has yet to really face any real and lengthy incredibly stressful life events. I really wish I could be this privileged and out of touch to make a statement like this.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Well this seems like a useful attitude to have. Some people probably can’t escape their workload with better time management. Fair! Some people certainly can though (I know many such cases), rendering your comment a little ridiculous, and extremely rude. Note for future empathy exercises: most people encounter difficulties in their lives.
    - ISL 4y ago
      If you want to remain functional during lengthy and stressful life events, it is critical to understand your capacity, prioritize the tasks ahead, seek skilled collaborators/contractors, and forgive yourself for the things you simply cannot do. When a life-crisis turns into an extended campaign, it is essential to know how to prevent yourself from burning out. Burning beyond that level must be reserved for true emergencies, where the goal is to bring things back into a new balance. If you're operating beyond your capacity for too long, the endeavor will begin to stumble. That's what the article was trying to help the reader avoid.
      - sinenomine 4y ago
        I could be mistaken, yet can't help but imagine divorce when reading such lines: >When a life-crisis turns into an extended campaign It's sad to see people trying hard to keep a stoic stance while such a vile thing is being done to them. Why such ruinous dynamics didn't get a society-wide political solution for a decade after decade... My generation is afraid to marry due to reading such stories.
        ISL 4y ago
        With the important acknowledgement that divorce can be devastating to many people, especially children (myself included): One can readily argue that divorce was created to solve the problem of entrapment in unhealthy marriages. The possibility of divorce ought to make people more willing to marry; it is possible to escape if everything goes wrong.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      This is spoken like someone who has faced too many lengthy events like this, and doesn't enjoy thinking there may have been a way around some of them.
jvanderbot 4y ago
What does this mean: "We’ve modeled the architecture, work, and communications of the team(s) as effectively as you can (with respect to what you can influence)" I get modeling systems, but can someone enlighten me? This seemed like a straightforward and high quality article, so I'd like to understand every inch of it.
- tjlingham 4y ago
  Great question! I'll try my best to explain, though it's late and I may ramble – apologies in advance. (You said you understand this bit but I'll put it here too just incase someone else could benefit). By modelling "the architecture", I'm referring to the architecture or the design of the system where work is happening. Think, for example, whether it's a system composed of many small components (modules, micro-services, micro-frontends, mono-repo), or a single large application (more traditional monolith). By modelling "work" I mean: how do you distribute the work and the ownership of that work to teams. You can't easily have teams that share ownership, because if everyone is responsible then no one is. And you need to ensure responsibility for work is clear. For example, what are the outcomes you need from the other team building out that new API? Does your team also integrate code into those services that the other team are building? Probably not, but for some it isn't always clear. And if it's fundamentally required, how can you have many teams effectively contributing code to a single service without stepping on each other's toes and dilluting the concept of ownership? By "communications of the team(s)" I mean to say that you need to influence how teams communicate. In a perfect world, all teams would be perfectly autonomous and never need to have the overhead of talking to or depending on another team to deliver work. In reality, teams need to communicate but there are different models to facilitate this (self service systems, service oriented software design, documentation, etc.). Organic collaboration can be harmful as companies grow beyond certain limits if not kept in check. The book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton is a deep dive on this topic if you find that interesting. I hope that answers your question.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Thank you. A quibble: "model" may not be the best choice of verb here (it's what threw me off). I think "have well understood processes in place" is what you're trying to communicate, which is both "model" and "adhere".
tuneloud0 4y ago
[flagged]
tppiotrowski 4y ago
The Phoenix Project is a good novel where the protagonist cuts scope to save the company. It's been years since I read it, but this post made me think of it.
- tjlingham 4y ago
  I would certainly be lying if I said the Phoenix Project hadn't helped me form some of my ideas around capacity and limits on WIP. Agreed, a great read.
RyanOD 4y ago
I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“
- whaaswijk 4y ago
  I think the “doing your work well” part is often the question. Am I really doing all I can? Could I do better/more? This then leads to working more and being busier. Maybe the problem is that it’s hard (for some of us) to know what “well” really means.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    I think "Could I do better/more?" is just a dumb question. As an employee, I have no plans to ever ask that of myself again. I'll get some things done that I set out to do, sometimes they'll take more or less time than I think, and the rest is either neutral or margin. There's no point in doing more. But you're right, you need a measure of what the right amount is, and I think that varies and can be hard to pin down.
  - tjlingham 4y ago
    This is one reason why I go all in on practices that are backed by data to correlate with business success (CI/CD, DevOps, etc.). Think the Accelerate book. Software development has the added difficulty of being quite a young industry (relatively speaking), but (with tongue in cheek) how can you be expected to do better than practices espoused by industry leading research and companies?
    - whaaswijk 4y ago
      Thanks, that sounds like a good strategy. I’ll have a look at the Accelerate book. > how can you be expected to do better than practices espoused by industry leading research and companies? True, but not everyone has reasonable expectations :-) In those cases perhaps all that remains is to either have a frank discussion or to part ways.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
A while back I took a couple years off from working. Sometimes I'd still find myself saying "I've just been too busy" when asking myself why I didn't get something done. Didn't take long to realize that "I'm too busy" had been an excuse I had been using to justify poorly thought out priorities. I still haven't fully broken the "I'm too busy" pattern but at least now I know there's a decent chance that I haven't actually been too busy and I need to look more at what it is that I have been doing and whether or not those things are truly more important than whatever I was "too busy" to do.
- scruple 4y ago
  My brother retired in his mid-40s. He has the same problem. He was a chef and had spent 2 decades working himself to the bone, genuinely being too busy to get things done. In retirement, he became "the busiest unemployed person I know" and hearing that a few times helped to snap him out of it.
- PcChip 4y ago
  Agreed, sometimes you can literally replace the phrase with "it's not important to me" and shock yourself
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    Yep. A lot of the times I don't care about something, I use the time excuse.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  One has to be fair to oneself too though. Most of us could probably do more in a day's time, than we do. There are consequences though, if one goes to the max for a time. For example we could learn a lot and get a better paid job. However, we might lose some friends, because we did not put any time into interacting with them instead of learning a lot. Just as an example. So cut yourself some slack too. The balance of that might not be obvious.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than we probably should, and so do our employees. The imbalance this creates in good times is offset by the job security we enjoy in bad times. How do I know this is true? Because I'm old enough to have withstood three recessions, the last one by the skin of our corporate teeth. We've had two good employees leave in good times for less work for more money. Both came back after a few years when boom business cycles that drove that dislocation reverted to the mean. What the "anti-work"/"no wagie" crowd get's right is the inequity of hard work in a commoditized job at a company that doesn't give a rat's ass about you or your work product. What they get wrong is that small businesses like mine, who do care, require hard work to smooth the volatility - providing security for the business, the employees & the owner. We do this while insurance (health & general) rockets skyward, as the government stealth taxes the crap out of us, and while foreign competition engages in currency & regulatory manipulation for unfair advantage. My advice to the "don't be so busy" folks... get busy. Do a good job and tactfully take credit for it. Work hard and make sure your name is associated with results. An economic storm is probably coming as soon as politically motivated band-aids come loose. Most likely after the US mid-term elections, but perhaps after 2024 if they can somehow postpone it that long... get ready.
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  did we read the same article?
- 627467 4y ago
  "more part-time" are there more part-time positions due to recession (or fears of one)? Are there job board for part time jobs, ideally remote?
- stemlord 4y ago
  >We've had two good employees leave in good times for less work for more money. Both came back after a few years when boom business cycles that drove that dislocation reverted to the mean. Did they experience a pay increase between leaving and coming back?
idiocrat 4y ago
There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. The people who have free time tend to require external motivation/explanation, so you will end up micromanaging them, wasting your own time.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. > The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. Sounds like a great recipe for burning out your highest performers.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Also people look busy for all the wrong reasons. It’s a ridiculous rule of thumb. Like the ‘he did $1M of damage on his first day, why fire him, I spent $1M’ training him’. The odds are the new hire is a fool who will repeatedly make costly mistakes.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  If you think this, just fire the people with free time. It is false that someone with free time has it because they are incompetent. It is false that someone who needs up-front hand holding needs it throughout an assignment. I need a decent amount of explanation to wrap my head around concepts, but once I have the prerequisite information and the tools I need to develop a tool, I can do it. And like others said, "give the busy people all the work" is how you get your top workers to navigate to LinkedIn.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Some people are very good at appearing busy or at making themselves busy by being inefficient or by adding unnecessary steps and noise to the thing that needs doing.
- 4y ago
grensley 4y ago
I was thinking to myself as I read this: "this man has never worked somewhere long enough to be the guy who has to fix things when it breaks", and lo-and-behold, he's had 7 jobs in 8 years.
- lumost 4y ago
  The other thing you learn working at one organization for a long time is what matters for that organization (and it’s stakeholders) value. That’s almost never getting one random deployment out the door, or implement new industry best practices/technologies.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  And here I was thinking my 3.5 yr average was on the low side.. (I mean it really is but I feel slightly better now).
- siva7 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing out. Someone who can’t hold a job for more than a year on average in almost a decade isn’t someone i would take team/engineering advice from.
  - laserlight 4y ago
    > can’t hold That's a bit presumptuous. He could have left for better opportunities.
    - glouwbug 4y ago
      Don't sweat it - It's easy to gatekeep when your job is your identity
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wnolens 4y ago
  Aha.. like an engineer who's never supported the product they shipped. Lotta talk. I agree in spirit with everything he wrote. Except that it's just not real life, even when I've worked for businesses FLUSH with cash to "do the right thing". Even after saying almost his exact words to an otherwise intelligent boss, quantifying my point, and being proven right when I predicted his optimistic plan didn't work. Reality is messy when you peel back the first layer.
jiggawatts 4y ago
Please note the important caveat in the article: If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps). This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy". I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in the last twelve months: Me: "I can help you guys to set up Azure DevOps pipelines to automate your builds and deployments, you just need to make sure your code builds on an isolated machine first." Them: "That sounds nice, but we're too busy to work on that." Me: "May I ask what is keeping you guys so busy?" Them: "We have three (manual) deployments this week." Me: "ಠ_ಠ"
- christophilus 4y ago
  When I started at Microsoft, this exact scenario happened. I was told I couldn’t automate things because there was no time. I did it anyway, and a 3 person job suddenly became an extremely part time job for one person. It blew my mind that anyone at Microsoft, of all places would have this mindset.
  - TideAd 4y ago
    When I was at Microsoft circa 2018, our team had a senior engineer whose primary job was doing manual validation of releases. That and keeping a single custom legacy build server running.
    - wnolens 4y ago
      I would love to share my experience of release management at MSFT but it would out me. In the ballpark of 20ish engineers chasing build errors and test failures for a month to bump a version number (one line change).
  - zo1 4y ago
    Because it worked out for you, that time. As a manager and probably the person that would have told you no, or to justify more before we attempt it, I've seen this scenario go pear-shaped way more times than not. It's about risk, priorities, and specifically knowledge/experience (sometimes wrong) that says this is "not a good idea". Sometimes it's also just plain old complacency, though.
conradev 4y ago
While I love this quote: > as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable. I feel like this is missing an acknowledgement that "what a team is capable of" actually depends on the manager! Managing people and priorities takes skills that require practice and learning. A manager that, for example, assigns people to work on things they enjoy working on and avoids excess pressure is going to have a team capable of a lot more than a team where the manager doesn't bother. So, when I see the list of "reasonable ways for the business to exert influence over the work" I feel like a huge missing one is "help the manager manage their workload and the team better". The manager has a manager and this is ostensibly their responsibility to see and correct
- tjlingham 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more. This is written from the perspective of a manager so I am likely asking a bit too much from the reader to make the connection. Thank you for the feedback! My experience tends to be that managers will rarely get help to manage the teams WIP and it's often left to that same manager to provide that mechanism of back-pressure. But if they then don't, for whatever reason, then it can be bad news for the team. I'm weeks away from going on a significant period of leave and I sincerely hope that the precedents I have set carry forward during my absence.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Surely then all that should matter is reviewing the code and reviewing the WIP (jira). for each manager each day doing anything else is pretending project managers are managers
  - teekert 4y ago
    As a manager, my long term goals are perfectly aligned with my teams. I want them to be (mentally) healthy, motivated and happy. This is what makes the team (and me!) loyal and productive, and it will prevent sickness/absence. I never get the manager vs team perspective, it feels like whenever there is a “versus” in perspectives, something is wrong and will lead to problems over time.
refurb 4y ago
I've worked in offices where everyone is super busy but seemingly little to no progress is made. It's really maddening. One time I put together a strategy where the recommendation: "watch and wait". The idea was - there wasn't any work to do, what we had was "good enough" and flexible to be a good option no matter if the market shifts, and our job was to watch the market over the next quarter, observe, and collect insights. We were anticipating market changes, so any work done now might be worthless in 3 months. People weren't comfortable with that at all. Clearly we should kick off some new product feature, or engage new start-ups on something innovative. We had to do something. It reminds me of that scene from the movie Ronin when they are waiting for more information on the target: Gregor: It would be nice to do something. Sam: We are doing something. We're sitting here, waiting.
- jordwest 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote: > “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Doing nothing is uncomfortable, because you might accidentally discover a truth about yourself that you've been busy avoiding.
bfung 4y ago
In the tech engineering manager role, the busy comes from constant re-evaluation of the next important things from "the business", aka, the non-tech managers that don't care to understand nor keep the current priorities nor work with a software development process. The explanation/deep dive of that reevaluation with non-tech people take a LOT of time.
atoav 4y ago
The crazy thing about this is that it can be purely mental. My most productive coding session this year happened when I had to quarantine and I knew my employer wouldn't mind if I just did nothing. There was no pressure, but I still wanted to move on a little bit with the project. Just a few hours a day. I mai ly did this because I like the project and I would get into a lot stress later if it was not done. I got more done in two half-days at home than in a week of full days at the office. No distractions, no meetings, no obligation to answer mails and phone calls. Paradise.
- blitzar 4y ago
  "In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity." You entered this state.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Thats why I think the approach ti estimates and project planning should be: developers are trusted not to slack off and not to over engineering it. So it takes as long as it takes. But if it might go up an order of magnitude talk to the team to see if it is still worth doing or how to reduce scope. Instead of the usual estimate, negotiate the dev down, use a mythical man-month then bollock them for not getting it done on time (ok these days microaggressions are in fashion as you can’t outright yell)
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  I also do this (flow on my own mini projects) a few times a year it seems. I think it’s easy to idealize it, but likely those times are enabled by cultivation of your thought during all the other times at work, and there’s a selection bias of I know that you can accomplish it in that time. Basically it’s a well defined task already specc’d out (or defined bounds or a path forward) in your mind ahead of time. This is just as important to flow as removing distractions.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> then you should actually (yes you should, I'll die on this sword) Die on this hill :) You'll certainly die on a sword, but you won't have defended anything in doing so.
- tjlingham 4y ago
  Well, bugger. Thank you for the correction.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    It's a great article. Glad to help :)
  - astura 4y ago
    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
DunstanN 4y ago
Being busy is more about power struggle between someone paying the money and someone doing the job. It's similar in other jobs. The most important part is that the one paying, usually have no idea how to do the thing. If she trust you that you do your job well or is scared that you leave - you wont be busy, but if she doesn't trust you or thinks she knows better, and you can't stand up to this, the only thing left is being absurdly too busy.
Cryptonic 4y ago
In a team of specialists, it can kill the whole nice plan if one leaves for annoyance about productivity. People get offers all the time on linked in, don't give them a reason to listen. One time I left because I could rarely do my actual job. Meetings, wasting time with bad internal tools, having useless complex processes, nobody wanting to take responsibility for final decisions. I totally work (paid or flex) overtime, if I have the feeling of productivity in the normal time. But not if the company or project structure is a time wasting machine where you learn nothing but how to be annoyed.
rapjr9 4y ago
I watched my manager fall into the "I'm so busy" trap over a few decades. At first he planned things carefully, allowed extra time, adjusted schedules based on feedback. Then his friends started filling him full of business management ideas that I think they got from magazines. Things like "just ask for more, you'll be surprised that your employees will deliver" and "don't give raises above inflation" and "start the next project immediately after the previous one" instead of giving employees some time to relax. Part of this advice he pickup up from medical professionals, who have always had insane work schedules (80 hours shifts as a resident, really? Why doesn't medicine listen to its own advice?) There are lots of older medical professionals who edit a journal, give speeches, consult with companies, are writing a book, are running a blog, doing research, and are still seeing patients in their practice! They have trained themselves to get sleep in 20 minute increments, to push through when they feel sick, and to always take on any opportunity that presents itself no matter how busy they are. And because they demand this of themselves they also demand it from everyone who works for them. It is completely destructive, after a few years of this my manager could no longer remember anything beyond the last week, was setting ridiculous deadlines ("we can do the experiments and write a journal paper in two weeks, but it has to be world class"), and basically missing all his deadlines because they were stupidly unreasonable. His professional career took off though, which added even more tasks to his work, which gave his employees a respite because he had to reduce the number of meetings with them. So it looks to me like there are some meme's that came out of the management/medical worlds that profess to get the most out of employees and they have been widely adopted, but they do not work and just grind up people. If you can ride it out you become a big important person, but you also become dead inside and can't hear anything anyone says any more.
wolframhempel 4y ago
As a tech lead, when you're asked to deliver more, the first impulse tends to be asking your team "how can we do more work?" The correct question should be "What can we NOT do?" - and usually there's a long list of things that don't generate business value - from processes, meetings, reporting and overly detailed planning sessions to technical hurdles including slow builds, pre-check in hooks, sign off requirements etc. I know that most feel that they absolutely HAVE to do these things, since there are part of the business process/ definition of done/company guidelines etc... but here's the thing: If your team delivers value, people stop asking questions. It might take some forceful pushback and even some fights initially, but even if your team is absent from meetings or doesn't jump through every hoop, as long as you churn out value, you make yourself, your superiors and the business as a whole look good and in turn will be cut some slack.
- ISL 4y ago
  To piggyback there -- people stop asking questions when counterparties meet or exceed expectations. It is essential that expectations are set reasonably, otherwise one or both parties are in for a world of hurt.
- helge9210 4y ago
  > I know that most feel that they absolutely HAVE to do these things, since there are part of the business process/ definition of done/company guidelines etc... Anecdote: at current position I've noticed 100% of my team time goes to "these things". As a team lead I tried to figure out the actual necessity. After I've "lost" the half of the team insisting on doing all the rituals the remaining half started to deliver actual value with much less stress.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    As the company gets bigger, it naturally starts doing more rituals. Some are justified, most are a cargo cult. The sad part is that since rituals are an inherent to a big company, following (and enforcing) rituals is synonymous to being professional. And fighting them is often seen as amateur. No, I'm not doing performance reviews and weekly 1:1 with each team member. Not because I'm an amateur, but because I'm in the trenches with them every day. Maybe I'll start doing those when we get bigger. But let's get there first.
Anoushk 4y ago
If i like doing what i do i just get busy, no sense of time
mkl95 4y ago
Context switching and interruptions can make you busy really quickly
kaon123 4y ago
I have a question: I've noticed that whenever I talk to Americans, or read American blogs and books, they always tend to talk about working so many hours. Personally having worked in Switzerland and Holland I've never experienced this. Is it that Americans actually structurally work overtime? Or is it the braggadocio way American English works where everything is always in hyperbole? Has anybody here worked on both continents? Can you tell me more whether a cultural divide exists?
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  I haven’t worked in both continents. But in US some people do and some people don’t. We definitely have many people who subscribe to a work hard to get more attitude. Those people work hard including long hours because they are ambitious, especially startup cultures. Founders really hustle. Alternately there are those that work hard because their manager makes it expected and the employee need their job badly and it’s “easy” to fire people in US. Alternately there are MANY people too that have good WLB or coast. Personally my WLB has varied by job and responsibilities. I’ve had many years of ~35h weeks, and never worked a 50hr week. My partner though is more neurotic and ambitious and often works 10hr days.
Bakary 4y ago
Whenever I read articles like this filled with buzzwords and a LinkedIn way or looking at the world, I am always under the impression that the main driving force behind the busyness and burnout is just the fact that it's all unimportant nonsense and the worker is aware of it whether on a conscious or unconscious level. "Leader-ofleaders"? We are talking about attention economy software and scrum meetings, not Hannibal crossing the goddamn Alps.
tuneloud0 4y ago
[flagged]
damethos 4y ago
I highly recommend reading "Four Thousand Weeks". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-weeks https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...

376 points by tjlingham 4y ago

I love how far removed from reality these idealistic blog posts are from "technology thinkers". You're busy? You shouldn't be so let me give you some cookie cutter advice filled with: "you need", "you should", "you could". More in my book.

scandox 4y ago
I don't think this is removed from reality. I think people who are in perma-crunch believing that just over the next hump they'll find level ground are the ones who are removed from reality.
- tirwander 4y ago
  This is spoken like someone that has yet to really face any real and lengthy incredibly stressful life events. I really wish I could be this privileged and out of touch to make a statement like this.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Well this seems like a useful attitude to have. Some people probably can’t escape their workload with better time management. Fair! Some people certainly can though (I know many such cases), rendering your comment a little ridiculous, and extremely rude. Note for future empathy exercises: most people encounter difficulties in their lives.
  - ISL 4y ago
    If you want to remain functional during lengthy and stressful life events, it is critical to understand your capacity, prioritize the tasks ahead, seek skilled collaborators/contractors, and forgive yourself for the things you simply cannot do. When a life-crisis turns into an extended campaign, it is essential to know how to prevent yourself from burning out. Burning beyond that level must be reserved for true emergencies, where the goal is to bring things back into a new balance. If you're operating beyond your capacity for too long, the endeavor will begin to stumble. That's what the article was trying to help the reader avoid.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      I could be mistaken, yet can't help but imagine divorce when reading such lines: >When a life-crisis turns into an extended campaign It's sad to see people trying hard to keep a stoic stance while such a vile thing is being done to them. Why such ruinous dynamics didn't get a society-wide political solution for a decade after decade... My generation is afraid to marry due to reading such stories.
      - ISL 4y ago
        With the important acknowledgement that divorce can be devastating to many people, especially children (myself included): One can readily argue that divorce was created to solve the problem of entrapment in unhealthy marriages. The possibility of divorce ought to make people more willing to marry; it is possible to escape if everything goes wrong.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    This is spoken like someone who has faced too many lengthy events like this, and doesn't enjoy thinking there may have been a way around some of them.

jvanderbot 4y ago

What does this mean: "We’ve modeled the architecture, work, and communications of the team(s) as effectively as you can (with respect to what you can influence)" I get modeling systems, but can someone enlighten me? This seemed like a straightforward and high quality article, so I'd like to understand every inch of it.

tjlingham 4y ago
Great question! I'll try my best to explain, though it's late and I may ramble – apologies in advance. (You said you understand this bit but I'll put it here too just incase someone else could benefit). By modelling "the architecture", I'm referring to the architecture or the design of the system where work is happening. Think, for example, whether it's a system composed of many small components (modules, micro-services, micro-frontends, mono-repo), or a single large application (more traditional monolith). By modelling "work" I mean: how do you distribute the work and the ownership of that work to teams. You can't easily have teams that share ownership, because if everyone is responsible then no one is. And you need to ensure responsibility for work is clear. For example, what are the outcomes you need from the other team building out that new API? Does your team also integrate code into those services that the other team are building? Probably not, but for some it isn't always clear. And if it's fundamentally required, how can you have many teams effectively contributing code to a single service without stepping on each other's toes and dilluting the concept of ownership? By "communications of the team(s)" I mean to say that you need to influence how teams communicate. In a perfect world, all teams would be perfectly autonomous and never need to have the overhead of talking to or depending on another team to deliver work. In reality, teams need to communicate but there are different models to facilitate this (self service systems, service oriented software design, documentation, etc.). Organic collaboration can be harmful as companies grow beyond certain limits if not kept in check. The book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton is a deep dive on this topic if you find that interesting. I hope that answers your question.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Thank you. A quibble: "model" may not be the best choice of verb here (it's what threw me off). I think "have well understood processes in place" is what you're trying to communicate, which is both "model" and "adhere".

tuneloud0 4y ago

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tppiotrowski 4y ago

The Phoenix Project is a good novel where the protagonist cuts scope to save the company. It's been years since I read it, but this post made me think of it.

tjlingham 4y ago
I would certainly be lying if I said the Phoenix Project hadn't helped me form some of my ideas around capacity and limits on WIP. Agreed, a great read.

RyanOD 4y ago

I turned this into a poster and hung it in front of my desk. Great quote. “as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.“

whaaswijk 4y ago
I think the “doing your work well” part is often the question. Am I really doing all I can? Could I do better/more? This then leads to working more and being busier. Maybe the problem is that it’s hard (for some of us) to know what “well” really means.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I think "Could I do better/more?" is just a dumb question. As an employee, I have no plans to ever ask that of myself again. I'll get some things done that I set out to do, sometimes they'll take more or less time than I think, and the rest is either neutral or margin. There's no point in doing more. But you're right, you need a measure of what the right amount is, and I think that varies and can be hard to pin down.
- tjlingham 4y ago
  This is one reason why I go all in on practices that are backed by data to correlate with business success (CI/CD, DevOps, etc.). Think the Accelerate book. Software development has the added difficulty of being quite a young industry (relatively speaking), but (with tongue in cheek) how can you be expected to do better than practices espoused by industry leading research and companies?
  - whaaswijk 4y ago
    Thanks, that sounds like a good strategy. I’ll have a look at the Accelerate book. > how can you be expected to do better than practices espoused by industry leading research and companies? True, but not everyone has reasonable expectations :-) In those cases perhaps all that remains is to either have a frank discussion or to part ways.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago

A while back I took a couple years off from working. Sometimes I'd still find myself saying "I've just been too busy" when asking myself why I didn't get something done. Didn't take long to realize that "I'm too busy" had been an excuse I had been using to justify poorly thought out priorities. I still haven't fully broken the "I'm too busy" pattern but at least now I know there's a decent chance that I haven't actually been too busy and I need to look more at what it is that I have been doing and whether or not those things are truly more important than whatever I was "too busy" to do.

scruple 4y ago
My brother retired in his mid-40s. He has the same problem. He was a chef and had spent 2 decades working himself to the bone, genuinely being too busy to get things done. In retirement, he became "the busiest unemployed person I know" and hearing that a few times helped to snap him out of it.
PcChip 4y ago
Agreed, sometimes you can literally replace the phrase with "it's not important to me" and shock yourself
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Yep. A lot of the times I don't care about something, I use the time excuse.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
One has to be fair to oneself too though. Most of us could probably do more in a day's time, than we do. There are consequences though, if one goes to the max for a time. For example we could learn a lot and get a better paid job. However, we might lose some friends, because we did not put any time into interacting with them instead of learning a lot. Just as an example. So cut yourself some slack too. The balance of that might not be obvious.

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Those of us who loathe laying off good employees are busy because we are understaffed. We're understaffed because we are sure that a downturn, recession or worse is upon us (or coming soon) and that the agony, expense and distraction of layoffs (to equalize income & overhead) are a bear market squeeze not worth the bull market juice. So we get by with fewer employees, more part-time & gig workers. We work harder than we probably should, and so do our employees. The imbalance this creates in good times is offset by the job security we enjoy in bad times. How do I know this is true? Because I'm old enough to have withstood three recessions, the last one by the skin of our corporate teeth. We've had two good employees leave in good times for less work for more money. Both came back after a few years when boom business cycles that drove that dislocation reverted to the mean. What the "anti-work"/"no wagie" crowd get's right is the inequity of hard work in a commoditized job at a company that doesn't give a rat's ass about you or your work product. What they get wrong is that small businesses like mine, who do care, require hard work to smooth the volatility - providing security for the business, the employees & the owner. We do this while insurance (health & general) rockets skyward, as the government stealth taxes the crap out of us, and while foreign competition engages in currency & regulatory manipulation for unfair advantage. My advice to the "don't be so busy" folks... get busy. Do a good job and tactfully take credit for it. Work hard and make sure your name is associated with results. An economic storm is probably coming as soon as politically motivated band-aids come loose. Most likely after the US mid-term elections, but perhaps after 2024 if they can somehow postpone it that long... get ready.

agentdrtran 4y ago
did we read the same article?
627467 4y ago
"more part-time" are there more part-time positions due to recession (or fears of one)? Are there job board for part time jobs, ideally remote?
stemlord 4y ago
>We've had two good employees leave in good times for less work for more money. Both came back after a few years when boom business cycles that drove that dislocation reverted to the mean. Did they experience a pay increase between leaving and coming back?

idiocrat 4y ago

There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. The people who have free time tend to require external motivation/explanation, so you will end up micromanaging them, wasting your own time.

JadeNB 4y ago
> There was a saying: If you want something important to be done, give it to the busiest person, not to a person who is free. > The busy people tend to be more efficient and organized. You do not need to explain them what to do -- they can figure out themselves. Sounds like a great recipe for burning out your highest performers.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Also people look busy for all the wrong reasons. It’s a ridiculous rule of thumb. Like the ‘he did $1M of damage on his first day, why fire him, I spent $1M’ training him’. The odds are the new hire is a fool who will repeatedly make costly mistakes.
unethical_ban 4y ago
If you think this, just fire the people with free time. It is false that someone with free time has it because they are incompetent. It is false that someone who needs up-front hand holding needs it throughout an assignment. I need a decent amount of explanation to wrap my head around concepts, but once I have the prerequisite information and the tools I need to develop a tool, I can do it. And like others said, "give the busy people all the work" is how you get your top workers to navigate to LinkedIn.
colechristensen 4y ago
Some people are very good at appearing busy or at making themselves busy by being inefficient or by adding unnecessary steps and noise to the thing that needs doing.
4y ago

grensley 4y ago

I was thinking to myself as I read this: "this man has never worked somewhere long enough to be the guy who has to fix things when it breaks", and lo-and-behold, he's had 7 jobs in 8 years.

lumost 4y ago
The other thing you learn working at one organization for a long time is what matters for that organization (and it’s stakeholders) value. That’s almost never getting one random deployment out the door, or implement new industry best practices/technologies.
indigodaddy 4y ago
And here I was thinking my 3.5 yr average was on the low side.. (I mean it really is but I feel slightly better now).
siva7 4y ago
Thanks for pointing out. Someone who can’t hold a job for more than a year on average in almost a decade isn’t someone i would take team/engineering advice from.
- laserlight 4y ago
  > can’t hold That's a bit presumptuous. He could have left for better opportunities.
  - glouwbug 4y ago
    Don't sweat it - It's easy to gatekeep when your job is your identity
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wnolens 4y ago
Aha.. like an engineer who's never supported the product they shipped. Lotta talk. I agree in spirit with everything he wrote. Except that it's just not real life, even when I've worked for businesses FLUSH with cash to "do the right thing". Even after saying almost his exact words to an otherwise intelligent boss, quantifying my point, and being proven right when I predicted his optimistic plan didn't work. Reality is messy when you peel back the first layer.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Please note the important caveat in the article: If the following are true: Your team is following software engineering practices that have been shown time and time again to be indicative of highly performing technology teams (think CI/CD and DevOps). This is all too often the root cause of developers being "too busy". I've had some variation of the following conversation nearly verbatim with six different teams in the last twelve months: Me: "I can help you guys to set up Azure DevOps pipelines to automate your builds and deployments, you just need to make sure your code builds on an isolated machine first." Them: "That sounds nice, but we're too busy to work on that." Me: "May I ask what is keeping you guys so busy?" Them: "We have three (manual) deployments this week." Me: "ಠ_ಠ"

christophilus 4y ago
When I started at Microsoft, this exact scenario happened. I was told I couldn’t automate things because there was no time. I did it anyway, and a 3 person job suddenly became an extremely part time job for one person. It blew my mind that anyone at Microsoft, of all places would have this mindset.
- TideAd 4y ago
  When I was at Microsoft circa 2018, our team had a senior engineer whose primary job was doing manual validation of releases. That and keeping a single custom legacy build server running.
  - wnolens 4y ago
    I would love to share my experience of release management at MSFT but it would out me. In the ballpark of 20ish engineers chasing build errors and test failures for a month to bump a version number (one line change).
- zo1 4y ago
  Because it worked out for you, that time. As a manager and probably the person that would have told you no, or to justify more before we attempt it, I've seen this scenario go pear-shaped way more times than not. It's about risk, priorities, and specifically knowledge/experience (sometimes wrong) that says this is "not a good idea". Sometimes it's also just plain old complacency, though.

conradev 4y ago

While I love this quote: > as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable. I feel like this is missing an acknowledgement that "what a team is capable of" actually depends on the manager! Managing people and priorities takes skills that require practice and learning. A manager that, for example, assigns people to work on things they enjoy working on and avoids excess pressure is going to have a team capable of a lot more than a team where the manager doesn't bother. So, when I see the list of "reasonable ways for the business to exert influence over the work" I feel like a huge missing one is "help the manager manage their workload and the team better". The manager has a manager and this is ostensibly their responsibility to see and correct

tjlingham 4y ago
I couldn't agree more. This is written from the perspective of a manager so I am likely asking a bit too much from the reader to make the connection. Thank you for the feedback! My experience tends to be that managers will rarely get help to manage the teams WIP and it's often left to that same manager to provide that mechanism of back-pressure. But if they then don't, for whatever reason, then it can be bad news for the team. I'm weeks away from going on a significant period of leave and I sincerely hope that the precedents I have set carry forward during my absence.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Surely then all that should matter is reviewing the code and reviewing the WIP (jira). for each manager each day doing anything else is pretending project managers are managers
- teekert 4y ago
  As a manager, my long term goals are perfectly aligned with my teams. I want them to be (mentally) healthy, motivated and happy. This is what makes the team (and me!) loyal and productive, and it will prevent sickness/absence. I never get the manager vs team perspective, it feels like whenever there is a “versus” in perspectives, something is wrong and will lead to problems over time.

refurb 4y ago

I've worked in offices where everyone is super busy but seemingly little to no progress is made. It's really maddening. One time I put together a strategy where the recommendation: "watch and wait". The idea was - there wasn't any work to do, what we had was "good enough" and flexible to be a good option no matter if the market shifts, and our job was to watch the market over the next quarter, observe, and collect insights. We were anticipating market changes, so any work done now might be worthless in 3 months. People weren't comfortable with that at all. Clearly we should kick off some new product feature, or engage new start-ups on something innovative. We had to do something. It reminds me of that scene from the movie Ronin when they are waiting for more information on the target: Gregor: It would be nice to do something. Sam: We are doing something. We're sitting here, waiting.

jordwest 4y ago
Reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote: > “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Doing nothing is uncomfortable, because you might accidentally discover a truth about yourself that you've been busy avoiding.

bfung 4y ago

In the tech engineering manager role, the busy comes from constant re-evaluation of the next important things from "the business", aka, the non-tech managers that don't care to understand nor keep the current priorities nor work with a software development process. The explanation/deep dive of that reevaluation with non-tech people take a LOT of time.

atoav 4y ago

The crazy thing about this is that it can be purely mental. My most productive coding session this year happened when I had to quarantine and I knew my employer wouldn't mind if I just did nothing. There was no pressure, but I still wanted to move on a little bit with the project. Just a few hours a day. I mai ly did this because I like the project and I would get into a lot stress later if it was not done. I got more done in two half-days at home than in a week of full days at the office. No distractions, no meetings, no obligation to answer mails and phone calls. Paradise.

blitzar 4y ago
"In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity." You entered this state.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Thats why I think the approach ti estimates and project planning should be: developers are trusted not to slack off and not to over engineering it. So it takes as long as it takes. But if it might go up an order of magnitude talk to the team to see if it is still worth doing or how to reduce scope. Instead of the usual estimate, negotiate the dev down, use a mythical man-month then bollock them for not getting it done on time (ok these days microaggressions are in fashion as you can’t outright yell)
therealdrag0 4y ago
I also do this (flow on my own mini projects) a few times a year it seems. I think it’s easy to idealize it, but likely those times are enabled by cultivation of your thought during all the other times at work, and there’s a selection bias of I know that you can accomplish it in that time. Basically it’s a well defined task already specc’d out (or defined bounds or a path forward) in your mind ahead of time. This is just as important to flow as removing distractions.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> then you should actually (yes you should, I'll die on this sword) Die on this hill :) You'll certainly die on a sword, but you won't have defended anything in doing so.

tjlingham 4y ago
Well, bugger. Thank you for the correction.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  It's a great article. Glad to help :)
- astura 4y ago
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on
deleted 4y ago
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DunstanN 4y ago

Being busy is more about power struggle between someone paying the money and someone doing the job. It's similar in other jobs. The most important part is that the one paying, usually have no idea how to do the thing. If she trust you that you do your job well or is scared that you leave - you wont be busy, but if she doesn't trust you or thinks she knows better, and you can't stand up to this, the only thing left is being absurdly too busy.

Cryptonic 4y ago

In a team of specialists, it can kill the whole nice plan if one leaves for annoyance about productivity. People get offers all the time on linked in, don't give them a reason to listen. One time I left because I could rarely do my actual job. Meetings, wasting time with bad internal tools, having useless complex processes, nobody wanting to take responsibility for final decisions. I totally work (paid or flex) overtime, if I have the feeling of productivity in the normal time. But not if the company or project structure is a time wasting machine where you learn nothing but how to be annoyed.

rapjr9 4y ago

I watched my manager fall into the "I'm so busy" trap over a few decades. At first he planned things carefully, allowed extra time, adjusted schedules based on feedback. Then his friends started filling him full of business management ideas that I think they got from magazines. Things like "just ask for more, you'll be surprised that your employees will deliver" and "don't give raises above inflation" and "start the next project immediately after the previous one" instead of giving employees some time to relax. Part of this advice he pickup up from medical professionals, who have always had insane work schedules (80 hours shifts as a resident, really? Why doesn't medicine listen to its own advice?) There are lots of older medical professionals who edit a journal, give speeches, consult with companies, are writing a book, are running a blog, doing research, and are still seeing patients in their practice! They have trained themselves to get sleep in 20 minute increments, to push through when they feel sick, and to always take on any opportunity that presents itself no matter how busy they are. And because they demand this of themselves they also demand it from everyone who works for them. It is completely destructive, after a few years of this my manager could no longer remember anything beyond the last week, was setting ridiculous deadlines ("we can do the experiments and write a journal paper in two weeks, but it has to be world class"), and basically missing all his deadlines because they were stupidly unreasonable. His professional career took off though, which added even more tasks to his work, which gave his employees a respite because he had to reduce the number of meetings with them. So it looks to me like there are some meme's that came out of the management/medical worlds that profess to get the most out of employees and they have been widely adopted, but they do not work and just grind up people. If you can ride it out you become a big important person, but you also become dead inside and can't hear anything anyone says any more.

wolframhempel 4y ago

As a tech lead, when you're asked to deliver more, the first impulse tends to be asking your team "how can we do more work?" The correct question should be "What can we NOT do?" - and usually there's a long list of things that don't generate business value - from processes, meetings, reporting and overly detailed planning sessions to technical hurdles including slow builds, pre-check in hooks, sign off requirements etc. I know that most feel that they absolutely HAVE to do these things, since there are part of the business process/ definition of done/company guidelines etc... but here's the thing: If your team delivers value, people stop asking questions. It might take some forceful pushback and even some fights initially, but even if your team is absent from meetings or doesn't jump through every hoop, as long as you churn out value, you make yourself, your superiors and the business as a whole look good and in turn will be cut some slack.

ISL 4y ago
To piggyback there -- people stop asking questions when counterparties meet or exceed expectations. It is essential that expectations are set reasonably, otherwise one or both parties are in for a world of hurt.
helge9210 4y ago
> I know that most feel that they absolutely HAVE to do these things, since there are part of the business process/ definition of done/company guidelines etc... Anecdote: at current position I've noticed 100% of my team time goes to "these things". As a team lead I tried to figure out the actual necessity. After I've "lost" the half of the team insisting on doing all the rituals the remaining half started to deliver actual value with much less stress.
- hbrn 4y ago
  As the company gets bigger, it naturally starts doing more rituals. Some are justified, most are a cargo cult. The sad part is that since rituals are an inherent to a big company, following (and enforcing) rituals is synonymous to being professional. And fighting them is often seen as amateur. No, I'm not doing performance reviews and weekly 1:1 with each team member. Not because I'm an amateur, but because I'm in the trenches with them every day. Maybe I'll start doing those when we get bigger. But let's get there first.

Anoushk 4y ago

If i like doing what i do i just get busy, no sense of time

mkl95 4y ago

Context switching and interruptions can make you busy really quickly

kaon123 4y ago

I have a question: I've noticed that whenever I talk to Americans, or read American blogs and books, they always tend to talk about working so many hours. Personally having worked in Switzerland and Holland I've never experienced this. Is it that Americans actually structurally work overtime? Or is it the braggadocio way American English works where everything is always in hyperbole? Has anybody here worked on both continents? Can you tell me more whether a cultural divide exists?

therealdrag0 4y ago
I haven’t worked in both continents. But in US some people do and some people don’t. We definitely have many people who subscribe to a work hard to get more attitude. Those people work hard including long hours because they are ambitious, especially startup cultures. Founders really hustle. Alternately there are those that work hard because their manager makes it expected and the employee need their job badly and it’s “easy” to fire people in US. Alternately there are MANY people too that have good WLB or coast. Personally my WLB has varied by job and responsibilities. I’ve had many years of ~35h weeks, and never worked a 50hr week. My partner though is more neurotic and ambitious and often works 10hr days.

Bakary 4y ago

Whenever I read articles like this filled with buzzwords and a LinkedIn way or looking at the world, I am always under the impression that the main driving force behind the busyness and burnout is just the fact that it's all unimportant nonsense and the worker is aware of it whether on a conscious or unconscious level. "Leader-ofleaders"? We are talking about attention economy software and scrum meetings, not Hannibal crossing the goddamn Alps.

tuneloud0 4y ago

[flagged]

damethos 4y ago

I highly recommend reading "Four Thousand Weeks". https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-weeks https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...