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Twitter's Tech Lead On Making Software Engineers More Efficient
Tekla Perry writes: "Engineering productivity is hard to measure," said Peter Seibel, the tech lead of Twitter's engineering effectiveness group. "But we certainly can harm it." Seibel spoke this week at the @Scale conference in San Jose, hosted by Facebook. He says in large companies one third of software engineers shouldn't be working on the company's products, but should be dedicated to making other engineers more effective. "As an industry we know how to scale up software," he said. "We also know how to scale up organizations, to put in management that lets thousands of people work together. But we don't have a handle on how to scale up that intersection between engineering and human organization. And maybe we don't understand the importance of that. We massively underinvest in this kind of work."
I'm kind of surprised twitter has more than one Software Engineer.. Don't they just send short messages around and count hash tags?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The Mythical Man Month is still extremely relevant on this topic. It's hard for me to take anyone seriously on this topic unless they've read it. Communication is, of course, one of the major challenges with scaling an engineering team.
One thing the MMM points out is that some engineers are 10 times more efficient than others. The obvious solution is to teach the "others" to do the things the efficient programmers do.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Let my manager set my goals, then prevent other groups/managers from wasting my time. I spent 14 years at Qualcomm ('94 to '08), I never worked harder, got more done, and had more fun than those 14 years. The secret? Management was very good at keeping distractions to a minimum.
Sadly, from what I hear now that's no longer the case. At the Parade of Lights last, I dunno, November? I met the new boyfriend of a long time friend. He was in his 50's/60's, spent most of his career in Texas at TI, and had been at QC for a year. He hated it. Why? He didn't want to talk about it and I didn't pry.
About 6 months ago I ran across a guy I knew at QC, he'd been there from the beginning. He said they'd cancelled the Christmas parties (which were epic), and the summer picnics (which were epic if you had kids). He was about to take a 6 month leave of absence and wasn't sure if he'd go back.
Then 2 months ago QC announces a 15% layoff in 2 months. That 2 months hit yesterday. I'm hesitant to contact folks I knew when I worked there, but it sounds like QC has gone from good, engineering management, to bad, MBA/cronyism management.
It sounds awfully like a rehash of Fred Brooks' surgical team model.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."