Space to Do Whatever, at Work
jeanhsu.substack.comI'm glad to see this sentiment more vocally expressed lately. It's certainly nothing that hasn't been said before, but I think that reality hasn't caught up to the frustrations faced by knowledge workers. Imagine training as a musician, learning the fundamentals, and mastering your craft, only to be used as a glorified set of fingers for playing chords.
This discussion tends to get muddled whenever I bring it up with others because it's seen as an inability to be a team player, or that I'm just trying to daydream instead of "get things done", but my retort is always that you can't know what to get done until you have done the day-dreaming. We need it back.
I'm torn about this one. I personally (like most devs) am hyper-productive when I am focused on a problem that I'm interested in solving. But that often does not align with whatever is the most important for the company or the team or whatever is highest on the priority list. So yeah, I'd enjoy my job more if I could just work on fixing something that seems broken to me.
On the flip side, I've worked with a lot of folks who are way more interested in just... writing... more... code. And I would never give those people free reign, because in about two months you'd have doubled the size of your codebase, your complexity, and the amount of people you need to manage it.
Yeah and then you end up with a manager who hacks out a complicated solution to problems we don't have and ships it to prod.
And obviously you can't tell them it's a terrible idea because they're your manager.
I'm really interested in the community's perspective on this.
It's a philosophy I really align with, but seems somewhat antithetical to big-A Agile
Further, to me this sounds like the ideal work environment, but I've worked with folks who would consider this a frustrating experience with no clear direction.
I think the mistake I’ve seen made time and time again is not recognizing that the software engineers are just problem solvers. That means if you have a good team with a good structure, all you need to do is bring the problem to the team with clear requirements and context. From there the team should be free to solve the problem however they see fit within the constraints of the requirements. You then need to keep them close to the problem so there’s a feedback loop to see the results of their solution.
Allowing people to self-direct but with some guidance is quite powerful. If the team can’t self-organize then the team composition is not correct or training is missing.
However in my experience most management is quite bad and not only fails to setup a system like this but then actively sabotages it with deflating micromanagement or asinine corporate BS
+1 to this, but I feel like "if you have a good team with good structure" is hand-waving away some pretty heavy stuff ;) It's the "#1 be good looking #2 don't be ugly" of the software world - if you have great people, you can literally just point them at a problem and let them go. You just have to stay out of their way.
In reality, most teams are working with some people who are still learning, some people who don't really want to be there, some people who are interested in writing promotion-ware, etc.
Yeah, i think given the license to do 'whatever' they can also be powerful 'problem finders' - that is, discovering opportunities for major level ups that no one else is currently seeing.
I'd love to have this, but I see two near insurmountable problems for most teams:
- velocity metrics go down and timelines stretch, because effort is "wasted" on things that don't get finished.
- someone needs to do the boring hard work of laying out a whole project in advanced, fairly clearly if folks are allowed to jump around on the project.
Without those two, either the team looks bad to management or folks get stuck in a dead end even if they want to work on something (or spend their whole "20%" time just gathering requirements)
> velocity metrics go down and timelines stretch
I think this only works for really particular companies anyway, eg: reasonably flat hierarchy, product owner with product market success.
If you are a startup running out of money, you'll want focus, if you have a tall hierarchy, management will have the say on what you're doing and higher than them will want performance metrics as you pointed out.
It works at Valve, for example, because it rains money on them and they are a flat company. Nearly no time pressure and no overall company goal that needs direction.
Nobody should be using velocity as a metric anymore, it's pretty much now recognised as unhelpful as a measure of how a team is actually performing, I've seen it described as a vanity metric rather than a performance metric.
A team with a decent up to date SM or coach would be looking at their cycle time and throughput as decent measures of actual useful work delivered.
It's not antithetical to Agile or indeed agile... when the team self organises around the "handed out" they simply allow for the fact they have 80% capacity when considering what they'll get done during planning.