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Manager's Schedule vs. Maker's Schedule
theodp writes "Ever wonder why you and the boss don't see eye-to-eye on the importance of meetings? Paul Graham explains that there are Maker Schedules (coder) and Manager Schedules (PHB), and the two are very different. With each day neatly cut into one-hour intervals, the Manager Schedule is for bosses and is tailor-made for schmoozing. Unfortunately, it spells disaster for people who make things, like programmers and writers, who generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour, says Graham, since that's barely enough time to get started. So if you fall into the Maker camp, adds Graham, you better hope your boss is smart enough to recognize that you need long chunks of time to work in. How's that working out in your world?" Ironically enough, I have a meeting to attend in three minutes.
And this is not racist.
Why don't little black kids play in sandboxes? Because the cats keep trying to bury them!
It's not racist because it does not state that one race is inherently or genetically superior to any other. It only relies on the fact that black people have dark colored skin, a fact that is not disputed. That you get your panties in a wad when you see such a joke does not change any of this.
I've railed on about MBA types and the guys in suits but for the most part I've never had a manager that tried to hold me to an hourly schedule. They have to have an hourly schedule to cover all the meetings and people but they don't hold the makers to it.
This is my sig.
Unfortunately, managers love the term "granularity" and have been using it as a cudgel. They've locked on to "Agile" programming and SCRUM project management as methods for driving this granularity into the development and test processes. They want tasks broken down to 15 minute increments and balk when any task takes more than a couple of hours to complete. All this so that they can achieve "visibility" and "predictability" for a given project, i.e. they get more status reports with pretty charts and graphs. I really despise the term "burn down" which springs from the whole thing as well.
Now, I may sound bitter about this but, I do understand that for all parties involved in a project, especially a large scale project; there needs to be an understanding of where team is at, where it's headed, and where the bottlenecks are located. This is not any easy problem to solve; it involves lots of guess work and dependency graphs that would make Euler weep. I suppose that's what makes it all the more irritating when managers think they have yet-another-silver-bullet for project management that they misuse causing more Maker frustration and possibly increasing the chance for failure rather than ameliorating it.
Sorry, end of rant.
This is a beautiful, well-written essay. One of the best linked from Slashdot in my memory.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes