Ask HN: How do you manage software engineers' time?
When I&#x27;m working contracts and my managers&#x2F;team leads&#x2F;whatever are inept at management, I establish the following.<p>1. I ask you for the high level roadmap. The &quot;birds eye view&quot;. Then we talk about what my responsibilities are and how you want things to be prioritised. At that point im practically walking the manager through managing me but w&#x2F;e.<p>2. Once I know what he wants from me, I appreciate it to be left alone. I send update e-mails that highlight the discussed priorities and my progress on them with a request to contact me if anything has changed.<p>That&#x27;s it. This is on top of any team meetings. You can talk to me whenever you feel like it, but if its about something technical, what you want to tell me better make sense. Or you&#x27;ll just look ridiculous.<p>Addressing your &quot;issues&quot;:<p>The only thing that matters is whether your team members are productive. If you don&#x27;t know how to measure that, you need to figure it out. Assuming you have metrics in place to measure the productivity of your employees:<p>a. You see me playing a game. Its none of your business. Is my productivity where you want it? If its not, tell me about it. If it is, let me play my game, I&#x27;m working on a task that requires some white noise.<p>b. I only put in 8 visible hours. Is my productivity where you want it? If not, tell me about it. If it is, how I spend my time is none of your business. If you&#x27;re going to dictate my hours in spite of me doing my job, I&#x27;m going to adhere to your bullshit while suddenly being less productive. In the meantime, your competitor is receiving a job application.<p>c. I only put in 7.5 hours instead of 9. See b.<p>d. somehow, d. doesn&#x27;t exist. my bad.<p>e. See b.<p>^ Maybe, in some world, you could actually get more work out of me if I spent that one more hour in the office. But that&#x27;s not how motivation works. You can&#x27;t ask me to deliver X and then say &quot;but I wanted X+1&quot;. Decide what you want. Hours or output. You don&#x27;t get both. Do you want me to do the work or look like I do the work?<p>Now, let&#x27;s discuss how you are measuring productivity. If you manage 15 people and can&#x27;t figure out how to measure productivity, that&#x27;s on you, not your employees.<p>Practically all of the managers I&#x27;ve worked with so far do not really understand how to do this job. Its your job to delegate tasks that you need to deliver on. Not much else. Your employees deliver on the things you measure. If you measure time spent in the office, people will optimize for that. If you measure time spent looking busy, people will look busy. There are an infinite amount of ways for me to look busy doing no fucking work. The only thing you should measure is output.