[resonious]

I'm an IC on a team full of seniors with strong domain knowledge that recently hired in an EM from the outside. In short, it was pretty bumpy and despite the guy being an ex engineer, his constant questions about how the system works were a huge drag. Maybe to him he was digging deep but to me it felt like my (and my teammates') work was blocked by his inability to grasp simple concepts. Like the time spent explaining could've been spent just fixing the bug.

So I guess with the digging deep thing, be careful to not take up too much of people's time!

[diatone]

How long are these Q&A sessions, would you say the work of ICs getting blocked isn’t worth having the manager be able to eg: advocate for that work upwards?

[resonious]

We recently had an hour long session in the middle of the day with the entire team dedicated to explaining to the EM what exactly happened during a recent incident (a fairly sophisticated attack - not a simple bug, to be fair). Then next week another hour long session with the entire team AND a hefty handful of other people where EM regurgitated what we had explained to him. Fine I guess, except I'm pretty sure most people in that "retro" meeting already knew way more about what happened than EM did. So ~40 minutes explaining something to people who did not need an explanation.

[cutemonster]

Sounds annoying. Maybe if he'd asked one person to explain instead of the whole team? How big is the team if I can ask?

> AND a hefty handful of other people where EM regurgitated what we had explained to him.

Is that him trying to show he's doing something useful?

How many people does he manage btw?

[resonious]

The explanation party was maybe 4 or 5 people. The "retro" was 10+ people (almost 20 on calendar but I don't think everyone actually attended).

> Is that him trying to show he's doing something useful?

That is certainly what it looked like to me

> How many people does he manage btw?

About 10.

[cutemonster]

I wonder if, in this case, 10 is too few, and it'd been better with a technical person and manager at the same time? Maybe everyone manages themselves pretty well?

Tech Lead Manager maybe? But I'm guessing. https://www.developing.dev/p/tech-lead-manager-tlm-roles

[dakiol]

What’s wrong with taking “too much” peoples time? I mean, it’s a colleague, asking questions… it’s not that you are going to work more because you’re allocating time to help others.

[cutemonster]

Partly answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42356687