[wayn3]

When I'm working contracts and my managers/team leads/whatever are inept at management, I establish the following.

1. I ask you for the high level roadmap. The "birds eye view". Then we talk about what my responsibilities are and how you want things to be prioritised. At that point im practically walking the manager through managing me but w/e.

2. Once I know what he wants from me, I appreciate it to be left alone. I send update e-mails that highlight the discussed priorities and my progress on them with a request to contact me if anything has changed.

That's it. This is on top of any team meetings. You can talk to me whenever you feel like it, but if its about something technical, what you want to tell me better make sense. Or you'll just look ridiculous.

Addressing your "issues":

The only thing that matters is whether your team members are productive. If you don't know how to measure that, you need to figure it out. Assuming you have metrics in place to measure the productivity of your employees:

a. You see me playing a game. Its none of your business. Is my productivity where you want it? If its not, tell me about it. If it is, let me play my game, I'm working on a task that requires some white noise.

b. I only put in 8 visible hours. Is my productivity where you want it? If not, tell me about it. If it is, how I spend my time is none of your business. If you're going to dictate my hours in spite of me doing my job, I'm going to adhere to your bullshit while suddenly being less productive. In the meantime, your competitor is receiving a job application.

c. I only put in 7.5 hours instead of 9. See b.

d. somehow, d. doesn't exist. my bad.

e. See b.

^ Maybe, in some world, you could actually get more work out of me if I spent that one more hour in the office. But that's not how motivation works. You can't ask me to deliver X and then say "but I wanted X+1". Decide what you want. Hours or output. You don't get both. Do you want me to do the work or look like I do the work?

Now, let's discuss how you are measuring productivity. If you manage 15 people and can't figure out how to measure productivity, that's on you, not your employees.

Practically all of the managers I've worked with so far do not really understand how to do this job. Its your job to delegate tasks that you need to deliver on. Not much else. Your employees deliver on the things you measure. If you measure time spent in the office, people will optimize for that. If you measure time spent looking busy, people will look busy. There are an infinite amount of ways for me to look busy doing no fucking work. The only thing you should measure is output.

[hackerstyle]

Thanks for your honest feedback, much appreciated. Usually each team member knows the plan, and what should be finished and when. We have the right tools to generate reports and KPIs but the issue in software development is that things change easily, for example:

a. on a specific day, the expectation is to finish task A, but then, the engineer discovered that it depends on unplanned task B and now we need to finish B before being able to complete A and deploy it.

b. an engineer is working on a specific task, and he's investing a lot of time and effort but it was not finished on time because the actual plan didn't work out and needed additional time.

That's why it's kind of hard to manage output alone.

your example at the beginning was excellent, can you give me more details to how you like to be managed in terms of output? if you have a place where I can read from would be awesome.

Thanks again.

[wayn3]

I do not have a place to read about management technique. I'm not a manager outside of the companies I start myself and when I hire, I really only hire specialists who know very well what they're doing.

What you describe sounds like you don't really have people who are sufficiently senior to work like I do. Manage them more closely.

If you had to replace any one person on your team, would you be able to outperform them in terms of technical skill? If yes, just have them walk you through all the steps they need to go through to finish the task and then discuss things that they might have missed.

If not, I can't really help you. I don't know what to do in a situation where both the manager and the engineer don't really understand the engineers job. Never been in the situation.

But if you think that managing time helps with anything, think about what your own KPIs are. What do your superiors want you to do? Deliver results or appear busy? If its the second, my high level advice would be to find a better job, because your environment is going to become very toxic. Beyond that, if they want you to appear busy, just make your engineers appear busy while looking for a new job.

As far as how I want to be managed, you already know everything. Tell me what needs to be done and leave me alone. I'll talk to you when I need something. You talk to me when your priorities change or when you need something special. Beyond that, if theres any kind of meeting or something else that needs to go in my calendar, I want it in electronic text form. If you "tell" me about it, I'll have to write it down myself anyway.

^ This sounds antisocial af but I don't have an aversion to face to face conversations. Its just that whatever youre going to tell me is either irrelevant or it needs to be written down anyway. So why not just write it down.

Since this does not seem to be the case with your employees - if you tell me to do something, I will come back with a deadline and I will not miss that deadline ever. If the task is bullshit and cant be done, either in principle or because your deadline expectations are unrealistic, I'll tell you about that up front. I'll still work on it if thats what you want but I'm not going to work 12 hour days just because my manager is a clown. I'll send you an e-mail for my own documentation that whatever you want me to do is ridiculous and if you decide that you want to crash and burn over that, be my guest.

Does this sound like an unrealistic manager/employee relationship? May be. I honestly don't know. I've never been an employee.

[hackerstyle]

You are right about my team, they are not seniors but they are smart and getting the required experience. I am feeling good that we're building a solid ground and in the near future we would be operate in a better and faster rhythm. I am very technical and can understand their code and plans easily but it's not scalable, so I am looking at a way to make it run systematically although this will require middle managers.