What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.
Pay off my mortgage, only 100k to go! Then I won't "have" to work.
Buy an acre close by to grow vegetables on to eat and share, I'll do this after I pay off my mortgage.
Exercise more, I'm lazy and I'm trying to get up earlier to exercise and play video games before my wife and daughter wake up.
Do a 4 day work week to spend more time growing vegetables.
I'd love to figure out what area of the technology stack I enjoy most, for now I'm a full stack engineer looking into backend engineering as a primary focus. Not systems level, but business logic level, and not frontend I'm a "that's good enough" guy, not a perfectionist. I'm learning Go.
Other than that I'm good I think. My work compensation vs responsibilities are perfect right now, I don't want a promotion. I like where I live, close to both of our families, hospitals, schools, and entertainment. Weather could be better but it's not the worst.
My note taking system is a single "donelist.txt" that sits in a GDrive/onedrive/xdrive on my machine. Entries are:
9.11.22
scrum
working on stry1234
meeting X
- do a thing
lunch
created PR for stry1234
meeting Y
8.11.22
scrum
working on def4321
lunch
created PR def4321
meeting Z
meeting A
...
This is good enough for me although I'm still figuring out how to plan ahead better. Maybe I should write down how I expect the week to go, goals and schedule, on Monday and update from there.
Incredible, I've been scrolling through these comments thinking of my own passion which is Final Fantasy VII speedrunning. Fell in love with the game as a kid and only recently discovered the FF7 speedrunning community who are amazingly kind and generous. The runners themselves are incredibly helpful and can be found on Twitch. There's also a Discord where technique, glitches, and skips are worked on and improved.
I'm working on running in the 100% category which currently has a world record of 17 hours 38 minutes, it's a marathon of concentration. I'm not a young single person so finding the time to do a run has been the hardest part.
For casual players there are a ton of mods that make the game more challenging, updates for the graphics, and tons of other really interesting modifications. I love the New Threat V1.5 mod and the Chibi style character model updates.
I wish this would happen to food production, local growers setting up small operations of good quality organic food. I can imagine multiple tiny operations enabled by automation and hydroponics growing food to supply their town. I feel like this will happen but not in my lifetime.
We already have alot of unit and integration tests as high coverage was a primary metric from the start. I'm not convinced on the value of alot of the tests though so this could be somewhere to focus on.
I have introduced E2E/UI testing using TestCafe which benefits the relationship between Devs, Quality Analysts, and Business Analysts. Mainly because it forces all three parties to work together to define the UI level testing up front which acts as a contract when signing off completed work.
If you don't have, or don't think you have, a concrete reason for your insomnia then try this.
When you yawn or feel drained go to bed, take a nap, or find a quiet toilet cubicle and close your eyes for ten minutes. Don't ignore your body.
If your at home and have the option to sleep what I find works for me is lying flat on my back. Then relax, in sequence, your forehead, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, fingers, chest, stomach, groin, upper legs, lower legs, toes. Take around 1 minute to relax your whole body. If you can't relax something tense it up, then release it.
Once your fully relaxed close your eyes and clear your thoughts. What works for me is trying to focus on a spot in the dark directly in front of me. As your mind wanders pull it back to focusing on the spot in the dark. Sometimes I need to repeatedly relax my forehead and eyes while doing this, just let your eye sockets go limp.
Occasionally when you are pulling yourself back from your thoughts to focusing on that spot in the dark it can be jarring. Just keep trying. Eventually I fall asleep.
I've noticed recently that this is meditation, except without the sleep part.
There was a post on HN a few days ago from someone who wrote a book called "The first 100" or something similar. Could be helpful? I'll try find the link...
I've just this week built stripe into my app. I use CRA with an ExpressJS server to communicate with the Stripe API. I use Stripe to manage everything, the only part I needed to implement was the webhook endpoint for cancelled subscriptions so I can disable the account on my end and another endpoint I call from the frontend to create the specific plan the user picked.
We believe in keeping things simple in business. Our products are easy to use, mobile friendly, accessible, and to the point.
SalesPendingCRM.com (BETA) is a tool for SMEs in the property market to help manage clients through their sales pipeline. Teams can collaborate under a single organisation to create, update, and finalise sales.
General feedback and testing would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
Features:
16.6.18
- 14-day free trial available.
- Pay for your subscription in cryptocurrency!.
- Live chat support from me if you need help or have any questions.
23.6.18
- SSL certificate added providing secure HTTPS connection to the site.
- Google authentication popup information updated.
- How it works section added to explain how the core features of the application work.
- You can now generate sales letters using information stored in a client record!.
- Update the organisation's name and license number from the settings menu.
Since my first post I've added some updates based on the feedback I've received. If you have any feedback for me please let me know on the live chat on the landing page. I'd really appreciate it.
We believe in keeping things simple in life and business. Our products are easy to use, accessible, and to the point.
SalesPendingCRM.com (BETA) is a tool for SME office administrators primarily in the property market to make lead and sale monitoring easier. Teams can collaborate under a single organisation to create, update, and finalise sales in realtime.
What kinds of metrics are used for planning and operations? Productivity sinks?
I view engineering teams as a collection of highly driven professionals whos productivity levels are by default at 80% max daily.
Their productivity is impacted by bad planning, bad developer experience, bad documentation, meetings without agendas, 1:1s with no support or actionable feedback, individual recognition instead of team recognition, etc.
It's the engineering manager's job to remove the things that impact team productivity, measure the impact, report the issues affecting productivity, and plan to make them not happen again in the future. These are external to the team, things soaking up their time and making them stressed.
When you try to measure an individuals productivity of any role, you are now impacting productivity and should be removed to allow them to do their best work.
Use surveys to gather feedback from teams and allow teams to weed out, or help to reduce, internal productivity blockers.
And please communicate this to all members of a team, it's one of the primary internal to the team stress sources I've experienced;
role != authority
Roles are a collection of responsibilities, they do not grant additional authority.
From my experience what I've mentioned above would certainly make my day to day alot less stressful.