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When Developers Work Late, Should the Manager Stay?
jammag writes "A veteran developer looks back — in irritation — at those times he had to work late and his unskilled manager stayed too, just to look over his shoulder and add worry and fret to the process. Now, that same developer is a manager himself — and recently stayed late to ride herd over late-working developers. 'And guess what? Yep, I hadn't coded in years and never in the language he had to work with.' Yet now he understood: his own butt was on the line, so he was staying put. Still, does it really help developers to have management hovering on a late evening, even if the boss handles pizza delivery?"
... STFU, keeps the hell out of the way, and does nothing other than bring pizza (and a few beers later on towards the end of the shift), that's ok.
Anything else is NOT HELPING!
If I'm in the shit, I want you in the shit with me. Though, being a manager and staying late with your developers, your first priority shouldn't be riding them but play a support role. What do they need to get the job done? What can you do to remove obstacles from their way? Food? Drinks? Problems come up. What can you as a manager do to resolve that problem?
If the developers are staying late because the manager messed up, it doesn't hurt to stay late (but stay out of the way and order them food)
If the developers are staying late because they come in late or they messed up, no, the manager doesn't need to stay.
Yes -- and pizza is all the better. It's great to know that the challenge is being shared, IF it's a healthy, collaborative effort.
OTOH, if it's an over-the-shoulder kind of assistance, that's rather frustrating. Not so generative, and it's simple enough to know the difference...
If deadlines are coming and you need to stay late with your employees make sure the situation: Everybody's butt is on the line including yours. That being said, also make the distinction between shepherding the process as opposed to micro-managing the process. Sometimes, a management decision might need to be made late. If you're there that helps ease the stress of an already stressful period. You're also there so be helpful so that they code focus on coding. Documentation needs screenshots before product goes out: You can handle that. QA needs someone to tweak the test plan? You can handle that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If the manager asked for the developers to do extra work...a shortened timeline, extra workload dumped on the department, whatever. If the manager has asked his team to give up some of their time (with pay, of course), you're damn right the manager should be there too. He probably has work he could do too, but if nothing else, he should be cheerleading (delivering pizza, atta-boys, making jokes to help keep the developers mood light, and so on). It doesn't matter if the manager messed up or not...developers have a schedule, and if you ask your people to work more than what they're scheduled, you'd better have your ass planted in YOUR chair until the last person goes home.
Only if the manager stays late to 1) eliminate external distractions, 2) order meals, 3) test, or 4) write macros, scripts or other shippable elements, if the product supports such features.
Hanging around just to make sure developers stays put or focused implies the developers aren't professionals or the manager isn't doing his job (item 1 above). If true, then it's the manager's fault for hiring or keeping the developer around and no amount of babysitting is going to deliver quality code. If not true, then an insulting hindrance and is quite likely to hinder or prevent delivery of quality code.
Lastly, there's always the question "Why are developers staying late anyway?" and whose fault is it. If it's the manager's fault, and it always is unless we're talking about developers who work night shifts, then hanging around to make sure developers get work done the manager caused or should have prevented is likely to cause resentment. Tread lightly and focus on items 1 - 4 above.
I don't develop. I sysadmin. Recently I was asked to build out 15 new servers. At 5:30pm. It was an emergency and had to be done ASAP, oddly enough because the coders wrote a crappy code release that required a threefold increase in horsepower just to handle the normal load and the companies QA process never picked up on this highly important fact and the code was pushed to production where it ground things to a standstill. I know the company isn't going to do squat for me. I don't get overtime. I won't get a bonus. I won't get comp time.
For my managers manager to stay the night was a show of solidarity. He doesn't know how to build the systems, but at least he was there. Now the important thing is that he wasn't watching over my shoulder every step of the way. He'd ask for updates every couple of hours and he went out and brought me dinner so I could stay working, but otherwise stayed out of the way and let me do the work.
Psychologically it helped to know that he also missed playing with his kids and putting them to bed that night. Sometimes inspiring your employees is as simple as demonstrating that you share their pain, even if you can't share the workload.
Now if this behavior becomes the norm, it doesn't matter what management does. People will soon be burnt out and will leave.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
How about nobody works late and stick toghether as human beings ?
I've worked 4 years in the game industry and this is just making me sick. The company makes millions and millions and makes programmers work late without any compensation. They even break the law doing so (at least were I used to work) and don't care about it at all.
Yes, the manager should be staying late as well to handle everything that is not development. Make coffee, order pizza, shoo the cleaning staff away, even call people for the developers if desired.
If they're looking over shoulders, making people nervous pacing and repeatedly asking "are we there yet" like a 5 year old on a trip, they really should NEVER be there, that is, they shouldn't BE the manager.
A helpful manager after hours builds team cohesion and inspires the team to follow them. They prove themselves worthy of being followed.Since nobody wants to stay late because they have to, the manager who stays proves that he's not just giving the shirt off of other people's backs.
A manager who could be helpful but instead goes home sends the entirely the wrong message. He proves that he thinks himself better and that he expects to simply crack the whip from on high and have the peons grovel in response. He will easily over-promise to the team's detriment since he won't himself ever suffer for it.
All of this presumes it's really an all hands on crunch. OTOH, some developers just like to stay late for some focused work when everything is quiet. Where there is flexibility, they may do that for a few days then take a day off or they may work late and come in late where permitted during normal times. There is no need for the manager to stay in those cases. A good manager will know when that's the case.
A lot of posts here simplify the situation. People are staying late because of the Manager, or people staying late because of crappy code.
In my experience, people always seem to stay late when there's a deadline. It's just the way it works. Because no matter how reasonable the deadline or how awesome the code, there's always more that can be squeezed in or improved at the 11th hour.
In practice, deadlines are always unreasonable and code is often crappy (or can be improved). If we waited until things were perfect, nothing would ever go out.
So as far as the Management issue goes, do whatever it takes to make your team happy and productive. Stay late for whatever reason so long as that reason is helpful to your team. Be ready to advocate that developers be compensated for putting in extra effort.
All in all, reading through these responses, it's clear who the biggest beneficiary is. Pizza companies.
Apart from agreeing with other replies about supporting the team and staying our of their way, the manager should also be pondering how they got to this mess in the first place. Having to work late is a screw-up, somewhere. Sometimes its because of things outside of the team's control but most of the time it isn't. If it happens regularly then there is definitely a systemic problem with the process that needs to be sorted out.
In this country, our work-week is 40 hours. Our ancestors fought hard and made great sacrifices to win this right and pass it down to us, and I'll be damned if I'll see it steadily erode. Routine unpaid overtime is harmful not only to ourselves individually, but to the entire social contract we've managed to hammer out between capital and labor.
Respect yourself. Do not work more than 40 hours without getting the same time and a half premium someone in any other field would earn. If a project is late, that's not your fault. It's management's, and management ought to pay for the mistake.
In my opinion, the manager must tell the developers to return to their home, and take a good night sleep.
A few years ago (when I worked as a game programmer), it was common to do some all-nighters, since everybody was doing it.
There were some problems, though:
- the code tends to be crappier, since we are tired
- jetlag: if you are alone, this is not a problem, but it's difficult to live as a couple
- burnout: you'll pay your night of work
- you can be very productive the first night, but not for an extended period
Also, when the project finishes, all the tensions disappears, and everybody is completely demotivated, resulting in their resignation in 30% of the cases.
It's not reasonable to work like a crazy when you approach the deadline.
Now, I much prefer the agile approach:
instead of trying to put all you want in the product, just try to put what can fit within the given amount of time.
There are some interesting techniques that you may apply:
- YAGNI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_ain't_gonna_need_it instead of implementing a ton of things, implement the simplest set of what is needed
- BDD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_Driven_Development instead of coding without a goal (except to finish the product), ask your manager to write executable specifications. This includes also to concentrate on finishing the features one after another (and not keeping them half-finished, due to lack of time).
And the most important thing:
if you cannot add a feature in your program, because you lack of time, DON'T ADD IT !
Brew fresh coffee. Take care of the food orders (and maybe go for special pick-up as a treat). Make sure anything that hinders their smooth progress is handled by you. Noise? Go deal with it. Something not where it should be and makes their life harder? Chase it like a rabbid dog and solve it. The best way to ensure their success (and thus cover your ass, if that's your persuasion) is to, precisely, do whatever you can to remove the obstacles to that success.
But heed the warning: if you're staying just so you can keep an eye on them, you're making a huge mistake. If you don't trust them in overtime, then you have no reason to trust them in normal work hours, and your problem is something much bigger and uglier.
In my opinion, I believe this is a good quality any boss should possess.
I used to work in an IT service company with a group of engineers. Every morning, Senior Engineer (my boss) briefs and delegate tasks. Then he visits every work site and check whether we have issues and our well-being. If it is a grave yard-shift, at least he will spend the first hour with us. If he is not around, he will take calls at any time and give any support he could. Essentially what he does is, kick start the work and empower us to finish it.
What I feel is, if someone is breaking sweat for me, it is my duty to support them. At least stay connected through IM, email or mobile. After all, without co-workers, we are nothing!
Apart from the tea lady role, the other good thing about having management around is that when the shit is hitting the fan, at some point you are often going to need to do some rather unconventional and similarly scary things to fix it.
Having the manager a "Hey boss" yell away means you can at least get "approval" for whatever it is straight away. Now the plebs can't be scapegoated or blamed for solving it by doing something against policy. Granted, it would be nice if that wasn't needed, but the fact you CAN get approval for crazy things quickly means the people fixing the problem are less likely to hesitate due to fear for their own skin.