> Testing is really important, but few developers like to write tests. That means it’s your job.
As a leader of an engineering team (and an engineer), I think the is this is entirely the wrong approach. It's a leader's job to get the team to understand why writing tests is important and have them write them. Sometimes an individual isn't a great fit on the team and you need to figure out how to handle it (i.e., they refuse to write tests but the rest of the team is).
There are few points in this article that resonate - but there are many that are complete off base such as
> Managers translate the project’s Big Picture into individual tasks for developers, with their details and interactions specified in minute detail
I agree that leaders/managers translate the big picture to developers (provide vision) - but the team should figure out the minute detail - otherwise you're removing autonomy, the ability to fail, and are yourself falling into the pit of micromanagement.
I like how this statement completely skips the reason why developers don't like to write tests. The majority of managers refuse to allocate any time to write any tests. Hell, when we come up with a 6-week estimate for a project, they then tell us we must do it in 4. At 4 weeks, the complaints and blame game begins over why the project isn't completed. Why? Because it was a 6 week project, morons.
I've only had one company with management that wanted unit tests written for code. Yet there was no official time dedicated to this process. That 6-week project that would be estimated without unit tests? Still 4 weeks. Huh? What magical world do you live in?
Quality requires time. That 6 week project now needs 8-9 weeks. Not 4. Not 5. Find me management that understands this and actually cares about quality instead of impossible deadlines that fit their fantasy plan for the current quarter, and we'll talk.
To be clear, I love writing tests. I would always have them if the decisions for project deadlines were left to me. Such decisions are out of my control, so the company gets what they are willing to pay for.
That's not the only reason. Writing tests is hard.
Writing tests that are not highly coupled to implementation is hard. That means that every time you change the system, you have one or many test changes to make too.
How do you know what to test and what not to test? How many tests do you write? One line of code can, if you think about it exhaustively, require 3 or even more tests.
A lot of time you'll write code that facilitates testing. Do you test this code? What happens if the code silently fails and now you don't have proper test coverage of all the code paths said code is supporting? This is particularly true if you are mocking objects.
Learning how to test, properly, is almost as hard as learning how to code. My advice is, if what you're doing is boring, like most Rails apps, lean on the library as much as possible, break up anything that goes against the grain into unitary features, and test them each in turn. You don't need to test that ActiveRecord.belongs_to works.
It doesn't surprise me that there's developer reticence towards testing. I tried powering through that reticence, believing there's some "magical world" as you put it, where testing actually helps you code faster and more accurately, but I found even myself a TDD apostate, I don't even do it for my own projects anymore.
Technically these issues are solved with what I indicated is always missing: time. What you outlined is accurate: proper testing also requires proper planning for tests. For more complicate projects, you don't just start writing them without mapping out everything that needs to be done - and how to go about it. And yes, when code changes, more time must be invested into refactoring the tests.
This disastrous ecosystem exists with QA too (which is again, a form of testing). A lot of companies - usually the smaller ones - don't invest any resources at all for QA. Others just do point-and-click smokescreen tests that'll discover bugs that are blatantly obvious (also typically the ones the developer should never have committed to begin with). Real, proper QA? That requires investing serious time into test cases - completely figuring out every possible interaction and scenario that can take place. All before a single actual test is run. And similar to unit/functional tests, QA test cases need to be reviewed whenever the smallest bit of functionality changes.
The reality is that most employers who "want test cases" want there to be a magical solution that gives all the benefits, without any effort.
Employer, start of project: "Oh, it'll save time? Great!"
Employer, end of project: "You said it'd save time, lies!"
Developer: "I specifically explained how it saves time in the long run. Not the initial implementation."
Employer: "..."
"It's a leader's job to get the team to understand why writing tests is important and have them write them."
And sometimes you shouldn't write tests, or perhaps no unit tests, or perhaps write the tests but throw most of them away, etc etc. It is all highly context specific.
The real issue for managers is even if they start out technical, within a year or two they lose touch.
Sure. I don't disagree about not writing tests at times, etc. That's different than the point I'm trying to make. Leaders aren't necessarily tasked with doing any job a developer thinks is shit. The leaders job is to help the developer understand the why behind doing it.
Also, do you have anything quantitative to back your statement about being out of touch? That hasn't been my experience generally and I work quite hard to ensure I don't lose touch. That's obviously only data on my experiences - but I didn't make the assertion (I genuinely interested though).
Another recent engineer turned manager here. I can attest to losing touch, as I've had to work extra hard to see where things are trending in my spare time. If development wasn't also a personal hobby, this would be exceedingly difficult.
Fundamental shifts occur in development all the time, and if you're not actively coding while these are going on, you can definitely get left behind and be out of your element when it comes to decision making.
I have peers that cut their teeth on Enterprise Java and Oracle and now they are managing engineers doing Native Mobile, JavaScript Apps, Ruby on Rails, DevOps, Distributed Databases, and deploying on public clouds like AWS.
It's very easy for them to get lost in the jargon and they end up leaning on and trusting senior engineers to guide them a lot.
While this can be a good thing, it's very easy for the wrong senior engineer to lead them astray and start pushing their own agenda (rewrite all the things, resume driven development, etc).
> While this can be a good thing, it's very easy for the wrong senior engineer to lead them astray and start pushing their own agenda (rewrite all the things, resume driven development, etc).
This is a very good point, but how does an organization do this? Who can be at a management level for the majority of their time, yet still remain technically sharp enough in multiple technologies over time, to know when someone is outright lying to them? And it's not like you can just ask them to walk you through it - even ignoring the significant minority of egomaniac technical people who will more or less outright refuse such a request, in many cases even if they are relatively cooperative, often the subject matter is simply too low level or complex to be explained (or is deliberately explained in this manner), and sometimes the disagreement is not even a matter of fact, but rather a matter of opinion (everything XML, language choice, 100% test coverage, etc). It's a tough problem.
It's a good question, and a difficult one for me to answer as I'm still trying to figure it out.
One possible defense against this is to regularly refresh talent, and encourage high performing individuals to swap between contributor and manager roles without any career penalties in between stints.
Even if it doesn't work out for a contributor to manage people or a manager to write code, the cross pollination of talent could strengthen the technical capabilities across the organization. Contributors and managers would build trust with each other, and ultimately empathize enough with each other to act as trusted partners.
I've seen this play out in the startup ecosystem as you see VPEs leave to become early stage startup CTOs, get their hands dirty to launch ideas, and then ultimately bring in trusted contributors once the products have found product-market fit.
"Also, do you have anything quantitative to back your statement about being out of touch? That hasn't been my experience generally and I work quite hard to ensure I don't lose touch. That's obviously only data on my experiences - but I didn't make the assertion (I genuinely interested though)."
How do you know you haven't already lost touch? :p I joke, but the first time I switched into full time "architect" mode I did lose touch without even realising it.
I guess the key measure would be: could you jump into a senior developer role on your current project and be as productive as the other senior devs on the team? In my experience most team leads can, but very few managers can.
I doubt there is much in the way of hard data either way. I've personally met less than a handful of architects/managers that were clued in over my 15+ year career.
It's like looking at code written by a python developer who, a couple of years ago, used to be a c developer. The developer still understands memory management, but it's no longer forced to the front of their minds. And it shows in the code they write. Likewise because as a a manager you aren't forced to deal with the code your brain quickly abstracts it away. Your "atomic operations" when you think about a problem become a lot larger.
The takeaway is that the usefulness of tests is the feedback it gives you about your code (and confidence, a subtype or result of feedback). All of the BDD vs. TDD vs. Test First vs. Test Whenever can get wrapped up in too much zealotry, and is ultimately secondary to the goal of getting feedback.
Your second comment, the one about autonomy, is the real insight that I wish more developers and managers would get. I almost quit reading the article upon finding the part you quoted. Thanks for pointing it out here!
Way too often, real world discussions about management in teams turn into discussions about technical detail ("If we only had tests / quicker builds / used language X then we'd get better results") and this basic, underlaying problem of room for autonomy in the process is overlooked in favour of topics that are more easily discussed.
The main reason I added this (mostly useless) comment was that all replies so far had followed the same pattern of only discussing the issue closest to technology; the tests.
> Not all of the tests, necessarily, but enough to set an example, set the standard, and get the ball rolling.
I think you stopped your quote too soon. Writing a couple tests sets a pattern, an example o follow, and demonstrates how important they are because you are willing to take time to do them to begin with.
But just giving lip service to the importance of them does not change a culture of untested code.
Setting up code coverage reports, test harnesses, a few examples, and then talking about the test metrics shows it's important to management.
> Few developers like to write documentation. That means it’s your job.
OMFG. Most traditionally-trained devs I've met in person are next to illiterate. Bizarrely incompetent at docs. Unsurprisingly their code quality stinks too.
They'd probably ridicule you for mentioning "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute". (Unless you say you're quoting "the Wizard Book", because they defer to argument from authority.) Read my sourcecode, they say, as if that doesn't mean "Go fuck yourself".
And they simply never want to proactively improve. That would require introspection and self-critique. Pulling teeth.
You have to work within people's limitations, that is, if you can't pick the people you work with. A team is only as good as it's most competent member's willingness to pull everything together and inspire the less-motivated to perform at a higher level. That's leadership, and there's precious little of it anywhere, even (especially!) in the products we use every day.
If there's no real leadership, then you're stuck in the backwaters of being managed. My advice is if you find yourself in this situation, either use it as an opportunity to work on your leadership skills or check out and throw your passion into side projects.
Excellent points! Maybe anyone who decides to "check out" should consider getting physically away from the team, if possible. Find those who proactively help others and apply healthy self-critical thinking.
Kathy Sierra in "Badass: Making Users Awesome" said: "An important, unconscious way to develop expertise is being around high-quality, high-quantity examples of expertise." The flipside is apparently true: exposure to mediocre examples begets mediocrity.
No kidding. I don't know how many time I've tweaked my code after starting to write some docs (docstrings/JavaDoc/etc.) and realizing that my abstraction boundaries were wrong. If writing those docs were somebody else's problem, my code would have been crap. This is after 10+ years in industry.
On the other hand, end-user documentation can be a lot of really tedious screenshotting in some markets, and it can't always be automated.
I agree with a lot of this. One thing I would add - it's your job to integrate development into the rest of the organisation. UX, design, marketing, sales. Failure to do so leads to animosity between development and the rest of the organisation. Animosity undermines the goals of the organisation. In my experience, the biggest issue to deal with when managing developers is that they feel like they're tasked with implementing stupid ideas created by idiots. its never that simple, and developers are generally rational people who, given all the facts, know when to digg I. And resist something, and when to swallow a bitter pill for the greater good.
Then you've never managed developers. Speaking as one, developers are not always right, and as human beings they are subject to emotion. Emotions make people hard to manage. Period.
Seeing the difference between effective and ineffective management, and the frequency of the latter, I'm not convinced it's easy either.
Some developers aren't great at gathering requirements, estimating costs, triaging requests, saying no, or any number of other things... if only because they'd rather be coding. And that's not even getting into what they can mess up when it comes to the actual development portion.
A good technical manager can help cover for their shortcomings, and let them focus on their interests - what they're good at. They're not just an ablative meat shield.
I've managed developers for years, thank you very much.
You're right about that being one of the challenges, but it's still an easy challenge compared to everything else.
(BTW, the biggest issue within the emotions category is that developers tend to deny, even to themselves, that an issue is an emotional rather than a rational one.)
You shouldn't need numbers to evaluate a proposition with a premise that is self-evident.
I mean, correct diagnosis is one of the first and most fundamental things a hospital does when admitting patients. Failure at this stage cascades through every step that follows, possibly with fatal consequence.
If you're "managing" a place that handles this work without a working understanding of the process involved, there's a very good chance that failures can be traced - in large part - back to your desk.
I have grown to not believe in anything as self evident, anymore.
Directly to this premise. Correct diagnosis is a difficult and often error prone things that a hospital can do. To think you can train someone to be a manager and be good at diagnosis is putting a lot of trust on someone.
Should they be able to help? Certainly. But, at some level, I would expect the manager to be better at knowing which doctor to get you in touch with moreso than how to do the diagnosis themselves.
I think there's an important difference between knowing how to do something well (i.e., on a professional basis), and having a basic working understanding of what the process involves; its inputs and outputs, the most significant enablers of success, the most pernicious sources of failure.
When it comes to the people I manage, I don't need to be able to do their job, but I do need to be able to speak their language and understand their concerns well enough to see the task from their perspective.
I should add that this has always been self-evident to me. And it's always worked very well. But I should also note that it's not the norm, and when people I work with discover how much I know about what they actually do, they're almost always pleasantly surprised. "Oh", they say "you really get it."
Nearly everything about management gets easier if you're starting from there.
It is a good point that being a manager one would have more influence, but that's only true if you are technically and socially respected by your fellows/peers/workers. Sometimes this means you have to really do your homework and work maybe twice as hard as your developers so you don't just ask questions and assume they are right. You have to be a hard ass, keep asking, demand clarity, and always be a hard ass to get things done properly.
I came to the project only a few months ago. The project was "90% finished" but full of bugs too. We recently went live anyway. In the meanwhile, I have asked the manager/client for finding help with QA, because it is quite hard to maintain overall consistency in the system. The smallest changes create big bugs elsewhere. It is not enough that he or me do the testing. We never test enough anyway, and we still regularly hit the live servers with bad bugs that cost money. The system is meant to process money, actually. That is its core task. The problem is that my request for having QA people helping out, would cost resources, and that the recruitment process for QA profiles does not seem particularly easy either. Then, there's also the situation with the graphical designer who seems to hate programmers, and never shows up when he said he would. I think that a good manager will find a way to put the right people in the right place at the right time.
The problem with this kind of article is the author rarely considers/explains the context.
E.g. Managing a team of 10 developers at a company with 30% turnover is very different to managing a team of 3 developers at a company with 5% turnover. Approaches and techniques vary drastically based on context.
Let's try to use the classic analogy with painters.)
Suppose "your team" have to paint a cathedral for a king and you are the "manager". Of course you cannot paint yourself and hence holding an opinion that the paints and brushes are the most important things in this business.
Nevertheless, you have noticed, that some guys, like Leonardo, are much better at painting of the ceilings and in order not to disappoint the king you have to hire him and all the second best guys. Of course, you are sure that these guys are just lucky and overrated.
What you ougth to do, in order to not be beheaded by the king, is to be sure that Leonardo and the other painters has everything they need, of best possible quality and there is not a single obstacle on the horizon.
Now imagine that instead you have decided to hold daily meetings to discuss how to mix the paints properly, about responsibility to the whole team, and importance of writing daily reports about elements finished so far, together with detailed statistics of materials spent on each element.
To be sure that everything is going well, you have to climb to the ceiling few times a day and ask smart, psychological questions in orfer to avoid any possible lapse in productivity by exercising employee's morale and dedication to the project. For that reason you have short meetings in the morning.
Because you have no idea why the masterpieces of these guys are so highly acclaimed, you are constantly trying to improve their decisions by introducing new elements and changing colors, which are, you have been told, are industry standard best practices, and forcing them to use not the paints they used to, but guaranteed, safe, battle-tested priducts they used to paint the walls of the king's palace and stables.
If you look at a company of say 100,000 employees, and a generous span of 1 manager to 10 subordinates, there are 33,333 managers - and as they usually are paid better than their subordinates, the cost is typically over 50% of salaries. And it's a rare industry that is not mostly salary as cost.
And we now have an amazing set of technologies and examples of new organisational forms (Linux?) that say "hey, you can eliminate a huge cost base and be more productive.
Wanna bet how the next decade is going to go for those called "managers"?
Not sure I understand, suppose 100,000 non-managing employees, span of 1 to 10, adds 10,000 managers, span 1 to 10, adds 1,000 more managers, span 1 to 10, adds 100 more managers, and so on. Therefore, for a company of 111,111 employees, there are 11,111 managers. Let's say double the salary on average gives 20-25% overhead?
Why would, for a company of 100,000 employees, it bump up to 33,333 managers?
Linux, organizationally, does not fulfill the same functions as are needed in a company (recruitment, firing, finance, HR to name a few.) How would you model a company after it?
I have never understood why managers need to be paid higher than the people they manage..
That is the single reason for many orgs screwing up their system as this forces excellant developers/workers to abandon their core skills and move into management..
Because once they were the most skilled people and now the market is paying higher wages so either you do too or you don't get to hire managers who can work anywhere else.
It does not force techies into management unless it's an 'up-or-out' kind of organization. It provides a financial incentive (and often a status symbol).
the manager's salary becomes a ceiling for the staff they manage, if managers are always paid more than the staff they manage (and I've heard some managers seriously suggest that they would not be able to manage people who got paid more than them).
It becomes a problem when tech salaries are on the rise, because at some point the company either has to start paying coders more than managers, or has to implement pay rises throughout the management hierarchy in order to retain good technical staff.
At this point its really tempting to promote good coders into management to keep them.
> I've heard some managers seriously suggest that they would not be able to manage people who got paid more than them
This is just greed/pride. As a manager, the only person who knows that an engineer makes more than you is you. And it's pretty common these days for companies to have an engineering track that has a VP-equivalent top position, so it's pretty common that the most senior engineers will make more than most of the managers at the company.
I downvoted you because arguing that managers are unnecessary is so naive and uninformed as to make me suspect that you're trolling.
That's like saying that a film doesn't need a director. Well maybe in theory you could make a film without one but that's not the best way to go about it.
I like to make a distinction between managers and leaders.
- Leaders get a project done. They may or may not be managers. They think about technical problems, they write code, they organize teams and answer questions, they write design documents, they communicate technical stuff to other teams and managers. In some companies these are PMs (but the meaning of PM has been devalued to "someone who does non-technical project management, like bug tracking and scheduling").
- Managers deal with people. They write reviews, they fire people, the might hire people. They do donkey work like finding office space or ordering hardware or making sure that people get compensated properly.
Those are two different jobs, and they're often conflated.
Good points. Another distinction is that managers are named by decree from other managers. Leaders, by definition, must have followers and they typically will only follow those that they trust and that have earned their respect (not by decree).
Since the enormous vast majority of people only have experience working in companies that would never (and definitely have never) tried a flat organizational structure, I think this is kind of a disingenuous statement. From the outside those companies do look like far outliers. But I have a suspicion that hierarchy is only extremely relevant without technology. What I mean here is that technology is a great organizational "flattener" and I think since technology like this is still in its infancy, we can't really make a blanket statement like "this is very hard to achieve". Obviously, you're right to some degree, but I think that is only an artifact of technology not yet having revolutionized "the organization".
In school, most people don't get the project done unless there's a deadline imposed upon them by someone else. And in the professional world that someone else here is the manager..?
School is unique in that most of the questions/projects you will be faced with have a pretty solid answer. Often times a definitive one. Work... not so much.
> Managers translate the project’s Big Picture into individual tasks for developers ... As any professional translator will tell you, this means you need to understand the work more intimately than the author.
Such manager doesn't exist in the current development biotope.
As a manager, I try to let the team and the PM work out the individual tasks, and ensure there is consensus and follow through by individuals. Handling external pressures, clearing roadblocks, and resolving team conflicts are where I feel that my time is best utilized.
Yes exactly. Developer and Manager is two completely different jobs. Developer to manager promoting is a brain drain. A good developer does not have to be a good manager. A good manager does not have to be a good developer.
As a leader of an engineering team (and an engineer), I think the is this is entirely the wrong approach. It's a leader's job to get the team to understand why writing tests is important and have them write them. Sometimes an individual isn't a great fit on the team and you need to figure out how to handle it (i.e., they refuse to write tests but the rest of the team is).
There are few points in this article that resonate - but there are many that are complete off base such as
> Managers translate the project’s Big Picture into individual tasks for developers, with their details and interactions specified in minute detail
I agree that leaders/managers translate the big picture to developers (provide vision) - but the team should figure out the minute detail - otherwise you're removing autonomy, the ability to fail, and are yourself falling into the pit of micromanagement.