Mike RobertsThere was a movement 10+ years ago in industrial software development to embrace groups of engineers and product people as more than the sum of their parts - to work as true teams. But today the de facto has become async acrimonious PRs, individual assignment, and individual assessment. “More than the sum of parts” has been discarded in the name of an easier and more measurable, but far less effective, mediocre standard of engineering leadership, based on isolation. I find it very disappointing.
Self-follow-up : Even Emma Stone knows we're doing it wrong. In the middle of her Oscars speech last night for best actress (possibly the peak example of celebrating individual achievement) she said "It's not about me; it's about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts" . I wish we made software a bit more like Oscar winners make movies. https://youtu.be/Q8urFpWdi9c?si=I1Lk7SRVyBFsgD9V&t=110
Oscars 2024 | Emma Stone wins Best Actress | 96th Academy Awards | ITV
Matt Weagle@mikebroberts On point. The atomization of people and work is very disappointing.
Ben Judson@mikebroberts I’ve been struggling for a while to engage in deep collaboration on software teams. There have been periods where it came together, but few and far between. Some people like to blame it on remote work, but IME that’s not the primary factor.
@shiftingedges I agree, I think remote is often an excuse. I think the bigger reason is most management / leadership can’t or don’t want to get involved in the “messy” work of managing groups of humans.
@mikebroberts what I’ve noticed most often is that the understandable desire to plan (often, to hit a metric by a date) leads to systems where engineers feel their job is to move certain numbers of “points” to the completed column. No one is incentivized to have the conversations that allow us to delete points from the board, or improve the system in unplanned and esp in unquantifiable ways
FlowChainSensei@mikebroberts @shiftingedges As Grace Hopper is famous for saying: "You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership." And #fellowship
Jeff Grigg@flowchainsenseisocial @mikebroberts @shiftingedges
I was starting to wonder, even before the pandemic hit, ...
"What do all these 'managers' do all day?"
I see that their schedules are crammed full of overlapping meetings.
So they spend most of their time negotiating with each other?
And as an Individual Contributor, I seldom see "Line Managers" actually talk with the people who they are "supposed to be Managing" as their primary job function. How's that supposed to work?!?
Saager Mhatre@JeffGrigg @flowchainsenseisocial @mikebroberts @shiftingedges
> So they spend most of their time negotiating with each other?
🤣🤣🤣
Dude, soooo much management doesn't want to get into the messy work of business strategy. I'd be absolutely gobsmacked if those people actually approached people management.
Darrin West@mikebroberts I think this is an undesirable outcome of Scrum. Less experienced producers (scrum masters) embrace the rhetoric of: all resources are equal/interchangeable. If that were true, collaboration would be unnecessary, because you wouldn’t need advice or discussion. Clearly incorrect. But if followed for long enough, that’s the result. But in the worst, lowest common denominator way. And “learning from one another” never becomes a user story.
Tobias Fiebig@mikebroberts But how else would you ensure that KPIs are sufficiently personalized to use them to increase individual performance and identify "non team players" who can be "made redundant" when management "streamlines costs". ;-)
Bob Thomson@tfiebig @mikebroberts probably the purest experience I had of Scrum was completely tainted by an incident where I was admonished by the scrum master there for my personal velocity, which was mainly the result of my taking time away from my stories and mentoring junior engineers who needed some input.
@bobthomson70 @mikebroberts I had my 'sysops' course at $university last week; One of the big points:
"Seniors are seniors because they mentor juniors. If a company does not have juniors it cannot have seniors.
If it only has juniors, it sets them up for failure."
One of those things managers do wrong so regularly, yet are always surprised when it ends in disaster in the end. -.-'
ck@tfiebig @bobthomson70 @mikebroberts the number of times I have heard "we only hire seniors" but of course, none of them has any grey in their hair... so as long as they are seniors under 40 they are good
@cursedsql @bobthomson70 @mikebroberts Oh, the "we are hiring people who are no longer juniors but not yet seniors and give them a senior title so we can lowball the salary, and honestly... no 'juniors' in the company, cause we do the same with them"-approach. -.-'
Well, this industry certainly does its thing to make sure people get gray hair early... -.-'
Robert Atkins@bobthomson70 @tfiebig @mikebroberts That’s a miserable misunderstanding of even what *scrum* is meant to be.
@ratkins @tfiebig @mikebroberts absolutely. And this was the most like actual Scrum of any such job I’ve had and I’ve had a lot of contract jobs. All cargo cuit Agile.
@bobthomson70 @tfiebig @mikebroberts Scrum is a waste of time. Scrum Masters worse than a total waste of everyone's time.
@flowchainsenseisocial @tfiebig @mikebroberts I believe the business world is beginning to think this also. I would say though like devops, often they dismiss ideas they’ve only had a half arsed go at anyway. The trick is to work out what actually works for your org and its workers rather than imposing.
sabik
Matrix 
@mikebroberts management doesn't care about anything that doesn't show up in their metrics. If they can be shown that the old way (presented as a "different way"?) is better for the bottom line or makes some graph go the desired direction faster, they'll be all over it.
/\ndy@mikebroberts preach, brother
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta@mikebroberts it depends on where you go! Every place I’ve worked I’ve been able to build teams that are more than the sum of their parts. It has been hard to get non-engineering people to be part of the team but when they are, that’s good too!