They are probably senior engineers helping the rest of the team, going to meetings, organizing scrums, dealing with product, breaking down jira tickets into manageable tasks, dealing with vendors, doing production support, interviewing new candidates. There is more to engineering than just commits. 10% of the median does not mean you are a slacker.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
1 points (60.0% liked)
Programming
0 readers
1 users here now
A magazine created for the discussion of computer programming-related topics.
Rules
Please keep submissions on topic and of high quality. No image posts, no memes, no politics. Keep the magazine focused on programming topics not general computing topics. Direct links to app demos (unrelated to programming) will be removed. No surveys.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, you've just described me.
I spend almost all of my time:
- Tracking in what specific way the test environment is borked this time so I can figure out what team to bitch at to fix their shit.
- Helping someone on my team figure out how to fix their local development environment or figure out how to make Spring do something that should be simple, but actually requires looking at the Spring source code to find some obscurely-named class or annotation or whatever.
- Maintaining the Jira board, doing sprint-related documentation (because the stakeholders are above looking at Jira, I guess?), running standups, plannings, retros, ~~reviews~~ (don't ask), having 1-on-1s with my team members.
- Answering random questions from business, QA, other engineering teams, etc.
- Forwarding meeting invites.
- Logging my time like it's 1999 and I'm an hourly-paid intern because my company still thinks the internet is a fad. (Exaggeration, but yeah.)
- Code review, though I definitely don't get to that as much as would be optimal. I very much need to neglect some of the less important things above more to do more code review.
The way I think of it, much of what I do is unnecessary busywork made necessary only by the dumb rules invented by C-level people. The rest of what I do that actually contributes to the team's success (I like the word "success" over "productivity", but my employer doesn't so much think in those terms) has, rather than an additive effect on velocity, a multiplicative effect. If I spend an hour helping someone else, it's probably going to save them well more than an hour of banging their heads against a wall.
Yeah this is dumb
@[email protected] The article talks about how they control for engineers who should be doing things other than just coding by talking to their managers, but I know a lot of managers who don't actually know everything that goes on in their teams.