Timeline for How to avoid having a higher total effort after delegating tasks to the team
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
41 events
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| Oct 18, 2023 at 22:33 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @Kent: "How do you track the work your team is doing?" - team members report regularly what they are working on, and I periodically check the completion state of all open tickets. "Does your team estimate how long each ticket will take before starting" - they do, but it's rarely accurate. A task estimated to take one week can easily take two months, which in turn can mean the developer actually worked on it for two months, or just for a few days with lots of time in between waiting for 3rd parties. "record how long each ticket actually took after finishing?" - I have no tool to do this. | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 17:20 | comment | added | Kent | "systematically tracking this kind of detours like the above would require considerable amounts of my time (that I do not have)" - your process should be doing most of the heavy lifting here. How do you track the work your team is doing? Does your team estimate how long each ticket will take before starting, and record how long each ticket actually took after finishing? | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 13:09 | comment | added | John Doe | @O.R.Mapper if that is how your developers work I'm afraid you have way bigger problems than spending 3 hours trying to help them TBH | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:49 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper |
@JohnDoe: Actually, it would have worked on the server (or in any timezone West of A's), as well. Also (pseudocode): if (value.time == 24 - y) { value.time += y; } else if (value.time == 24 - z) { value.time += z; } Repeat adding these until all testers/test systems say "Great, unit tests all pass!"
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| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:42 | comment | added | John Doe | @O.R.Mapper that's why you run the tests both on your machine and on the server, the same unit test would've worked on A's PC but not on the server since it was in a different time zone and the value was base don A's PC location. There's plenty of code around that "it was fine on my machine". I think my points still stand | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:38 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @JohnDoe: The developer already found out on their own it was wrong. Then they implemented a solution that (after some tweaking) a unit test would most likely have evaluated as correct, leaving it up to a human user to check and find out about the unsuitability of the chosen solution again. | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:27 | comment | added | John Doe | @O.R.Mapper the test is not supposed to say "hey, the time is different exactly by your time zone so you need to do this and this to fix it, check it" but "this is wrong, check it". It is then the developer that needs to find the solution | |
| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:25 | comment | added | John Doe |
@O.R.Mapper I know tests aren't magic, I work in software development as well. This example seems pretty straight forward to verify. 1 test on A's PC doesn't pass (hour mismatch that he saw). 2 test on A's PC passes but not on server due to 1 hour hack. 3 final code review. Some of the steps you wrote can clearly be removed, I don't know if this is just an example of it really happened but if it did I think you need to have a good meeting with who is giving you these developers and explain the situation because from what you've written they are clearly not suited for the position
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| Oct 13, 2023 at 12:14 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper |
@JohnDoe: Automated testing is not magic. It must be a very sophisticated automated testing engine to determine that one of the date times is shifted by just the timezone offset of a particular developer's location ( 5 ), to recognize the developer has hidden the issue by introducing a hard-coded value that just works for said developer, to suggest specific co-workers from another timezone and persuade a developer who does not believe their solution is problematic to change it anyway ( 6 ), and to trawl the documentation for a suitable method ( 7 ).
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| Oct 13, 2023 at 11:49 | comment | added | John Doe |
Point for point: 1 seems ok, apart from (maybe) finding the table for them but better safe than sorry 2 you already did that in the first step. Either decline, refer them to the material you already provided or cut the time. This should take 5 minutes MAX. 3 Nothing you can do about that. 4 15 minutes it's way too much, just tell them to verify in the debugger and move on, 45 secs max. 5.6.7. Some automated tests would've easily caught that. 8 It's ok, you should verify the solution anyway if you are the team lead. That's 50m tops of your time and experience for them for the future
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| Oct 12, 2023 at 21:00 | history | protected | Kilisi | ||
| Oct 12, 2023 at 20:55 | answer | added | Steve | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 20:07 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Sorry I missed that and since you point it out, it makes it doubly clear that you would do well to read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which for about 2,500 years has been the most important manual on the achievement of objectives; at least as important as Machiavelli's The Prince. Consider also the WWII movie, Band of Brothers and much of the work of Bruce Lee or Cynthia Rothrock, among others. If you're really going through all that you described and still putting in more than you get out, is the common factor your students, or your own analysis/perspective? | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 19:42 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @RobbieGoodwin: I'd hope that the guidance/estimated effort ratio would improve for larger tasks, but ... I've already described what actually happens whenever I assign larger tasks in the question, look for "Assign only larger tasks". | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 13:53 | answer | added | Salman Arshad | timeline score: 3 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 9:55 | answer | added | AdrienF | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 2:50 | answer | added | bob | timeline score: 2 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 2:29 | answer | added | Mars | timeline score: 15 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 0:30 | answer | added | Xavier J | timeline score: 3 | |
| Oct 12, 2023 at 0:26 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | May I suggest that a two-hour example cuts no mustard? Simply checking your junior's work will prolly take longer… just as might checking your own work. Do you not think there might be huge differences in projects taking 20-odd hours? | |
| Oct 11, 2023 at 19:00 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @njzk2: No, the developers in question have between 2 and 10 years of experience. | |
| Oct 11, 2023 at 18:49 | comment | added | njzk2 | is developer A an intern? | |
| Oct 11, 2023 at 9:17 | answer | added | Chieron | timeline score: 7 | |
| Oct 11, 2023 at 4:13 | vote | accept | O. R. Mapper | ||
| Oct 10, 2023 at 19:25 | comment | added | Tom W | Would you consider yourself conflict-averse? There comes a point where you need to get serious about low ability which your examples seem to show to me. I would consider that you could tell them to get off your back and do their work themselves after around step 3. There is no special expertise required to know how to research time zone conversion and implement it correctly. | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 19:20 | answer | added | Tom W | timeline score: 8 | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 17:30 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Oct 10, 2023 at 17:22 | review | Close votes | |||
| Oct 15, 2023 at 3:03 | |||||
| Oct 10, 2023 at 17:10 | comment | added | cdkMoose | If you don't ever let the juniors do the work, how will they improve from 8 hours to 2 hours? | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 12:31 | answer | added | Hilmar | timeline score: 8 | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 11:11 | answer | added | Hans-Martin Mosner | timeline score: 24 | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 10:13 | answer | added | Aida Paul | timeline score: 78 | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 10:00 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @TymoteuszPaul: I guide them, I am responsible for assigning tasks to them, I am responsible for distributing tasks assigned to my team in such a way that they are completed in time, and while I cannot unilaterally decide to hire or fire anyone, my boss who formally has that authority will, for my own team, not do anything against my wishes or requests. | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:58 | comment | added | Aida Paul | @O.R.Mapper what does that mean though? Team lead can be anything from "yeah guide them" to actually being functional manager with hiring and firing power. | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:57 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @TymoteuszPaul: I'm officially their team lead. As for the additional team I mention, I am officially the head for that project, so I'm also in charge of supplying them with tasks. | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:50 | comment | added | Aida Paul | What is your actual position within the team and the company? Are you boss of those 5 or their peer? | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:42 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @PhilipKendall: One of the issues here is that the department that supplies some of these developers managed to convince our management they provide us with highly skilled technology experts. And I feel unable to verifiably counter that claim with just (lots of) anecdotal evidence, while systematically tracking this kind of detours like the above would require considerable amounts of my time (that I do not have). | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:40 | history | edited | O. R. Mapper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:40 | comment | added | Philip Kendall | From your description, it sounds like you've been given a bunch of junior developers to work with. Junior developers need handholding, but ideally by senior developers, not by the team lead. If you don't have any senior developers, this probably isn't a problem you can fix, your employer is trying to do things on the cheap. | |
| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:36 | history | edited | O. R. Mapper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 10, 2023 at 9:29 | history | asked | O. R. Mapper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |