managers and makers
Paul Graham has written another fine essay titled Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. I highly encourage you to read it, Right Now. First paragraph?
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
My only “complaint” is this paragraph:
For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
Since makers already know why meetings are so costly, I assume that the primary audience for his essay are managers who don’t know how much they’re costing their makers. I further assume that most managers do not know what an “exception” is, so while the sentence is a nice little coded shout-out to nerdy software types (kinda like how GWB used Dred Scott as code for Roe v. Wade), the full nuance of the paragraph is lost for the audience that matters (the managers).
For the normal people out there, in programming, “exceptions” are:
special conditions that change the normal flow of program execution. [...] Exceptions are typically used to signal that something went wrong (e.g. a division by zero occurred or a required file was not found).
exception handling at wikipedia
They’re also
- really expensive in terms of program execution time. A program that is handling an exception is a program that is not processing your dissertation data set
- really hard and tricky to write correctly. Most programmers cannot write anything beyond the simplest exception handler, but most errors are not simple. You can imagine the problem that disconnect causes (aka they are full of bugs).
Finally, if anyone out there still believes in a McQ-compliant .signature in your email, I managed to distill Graham’s essay down to its essence:
achiang@bob:~$ cat .signature * The manager's schedule cuts each day into hour intervals, and it's merely a practical problem to meet. Find an open slot, book them, and you're done. * Programmers prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started. achiang@bob:~$ wc .signature 4 57 308 .signature
[For those unfamiliar with the output of wc(1), the columns are: lines, words, bytes, filename]
- Posted by alex at 08:17 pm
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That’s a pretty common complaint, I think, and he is basically preaching to the choir. I agree with the half-day point. The task switch time to get your brain into the proper mode of thought as well as getting yourself organized is akin to the start-up sequence, and these meetings are essentially a task switch that results in a reset. For SW development folks I have found the best managers are the ones that
1) keep the program managers and higher up corporate insanity from filtering down to the engineers
2) Keep track of tasks and development from a 10,000 foot level 95% of the time or so (only intervening in critical times or with newbs)
3) Keep engineers focused on important long terms tasks with disregard for the “direction of the wind has changed” problem that many big companies struggle with
IMO, most engineers are bad at this, which is why companies that continue to promote their best engineers to managers often struggle with the above issues. Engineers see all of the corporate insanity as a problem that needs to be solved, whereas in reality, they need to be “managed”.