Managing Engineers: Make High School Science Club Management Methods More High School-Like?
February 4, 2021
I read an interesting and thoughtful essay in Okay HQ. “Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured – Just Not How You’d Expect.” The “you” seems to be me. That’s okay. As a student of the brilliant HSSCMM encapsulated in decisions related to handling staff, I am fascinated by innovations.
The write up points out:
Since the advent of the software industry, most engineering teams have seen productivity as a black box. Only recently have people even begun to build internal tools that optimize performance. Unfortunately, most of these tools measure the wrong metrics and are shockingly similar across companies.
The idea is that MBA like measures are off the mark.
How does the HSSCMM get back on track? The write up states:
Productivity in engineering therefore naturally increases when you remove the blockers getting in the way of your team.
The idea of a “blocker” is a way to encapsulate the ineffective, inefficient, and clumsy management tactics touted by Peter Drucker and other management experts.
What does a member of the science club perceive as a blocker?
- Too many interruptions
- Slow code reviews
- Lousy development tools
- Too much context switching (seems like a variant of interruptions, doesn’t it?)
- Getting pinged to do work outside of business hours (yep, another variation of interrupting a science club member).
Let’s summarize my HSSCMM principles. The engineers — at least the ones in the elite of the science club — want to be managed by these precepts:
- Don’t interrupt the productive engineers/professionals
- Don’t give us tools the productive / engineers and professionals don’t find useful, helpful, good, or up to our standards
- Provide feedback, right now, you inefficient and unproductive human
- Don’t annoy productive engineers / professionals outside of “work” hours.
These seem perfectly reasonable if somewhat redundant. However, these productive engineers / professionals have created the systems, methods, apps, and conventions that destroy attention, yield lousy software and tools, and nourish the mind set which has delivered the joys of Twitter, Facebook, Robinhood, et al to the world.
Got that, Druckerites? If not, our innovations in artificial intelligence will predict your behaviors and our neuro morphic systems will make you follow the precepts of the science club.
That sound about right?
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2021
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