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It’s Not Rocket Surgery Simon Cooke Senior Software Engineer Microsoft Advanced Technology Group
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Who is this weird English guy?
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What do you do?
● Grease the skids for the team
● Find the right compromise
● Deliver the good and bad news
● A heck of a lot of communication in all directions
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What do they think you do?
● Just overhead
● Always delivering bad news
● You’re making people crunch
● Publisher’s/Exec’s man on-site
● Just slowing them down
● Sand in the gears
● Derailing their work
● Making more work
● Scheduling meetings all the damn time
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Give Up Now!
You can’t win!
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The End
Q & A
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What They Don’t See
● You’re fixing issues before they happen
● Discovering dependencies & working them out
● Making tricky compromises for schedule
● Sheltering the team from randomization
● Trying hard to make things better for everyone
● Making sure the project isn’t canned
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The Best Outcome
If you’re doing your job right, your team won’t even think about it – or know you’re doing it.
You keep everything running smoothly so that they can focus on with their tasks.
When this works, it’s like magic.
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How Do You Win at This?
● Communication
● Lose the Ego
● Planning
● Respect & Trust
● Friendship
● Psychology!
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Can you hear me now?
● Communication is 90% nonverbal/nonwritten
● Build rapport (mirror bodylanguage)
● Match styles
● Keep it “crisp” in email
● Be transparent
● Explain decisions, don’t just dictate them
● Don’t be mysterious or enigmatic!
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Planning & Scheduling
● Schedules are living documents – not stone tablets!
● Cut early, cut often!
● People are amazingly consistent
● SCRUM can hide this
●Keep notes on estimates vs. actual result
●Don’t tell them you’re doing this – it breaks it
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Planning & Scheduling
● Find hidden dependencies & account for them
● No-one ever makes it through Cert alive
● Fix problems while they’re small
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Naivety and Losing Egos
● There’s no such thing as a stupid question
● Always ask for help if you’re stuck
● Everyone’s an expert (or why hire them?)
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Respect & Trust
● Do what you say, say what you mean
● Consistency goes a LONG way
● Don’t lie to people – they can smell it
● Even a little bit
No, seriously, we’re smart like that and some of us watch Lie To Me and think it’s an accredited University Graduate Course.
… unless you have to.
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Respect & Trust (II)
● Trust, but verify
● Keep confidences confident
● Give second chances
● Credit where it’s due
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Perception is Not King
● Details matter! (Assumptions make an…)
● Your expectations may be wrong
● Work is rarely visible work out – especially for Programmers
● Rumors & resentment are evil – all based on false perceptions
● That Guy Never Crunches…
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Friendship
● Many managers will tell you that you can’t be friends with your subordinates
● They didn’t share their toys as children
Sure, it’s harder… but it’s worth it. Be friends with your team.
Don’t require that they be friends back!
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Psychology
● We’re All Just Monkeys Primates
● Reptilian under pressure
● We like our cliques
● We fear strangers
● And love scapegoats / blaming people who aren’t in the room/our group
● We’ve got old, buggy, weird firmware
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small teams
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Legal
Marketing
Licensing
The Schedule
Team Morale
Budgets Cert
Publisher Execs
Team Leads
Discipline Leads
Individual Team
Members
Compromises
Feature Cut List
Triage
Their Reports
Project Status
Communication
PR
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You
Execs Marketing Publisher Legal
Tensions!
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External Forces
● Business folks can ship a 65% complete business plan
● They also don’t have imaginations… (They’re paid not to have them, and they’re surgically removed at Harvard during graduation)
● No-one knows what makes a good game
● Marketing – often seen as evil
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You
Art
Design Tech
QA
Execs Marketing Publisher Legal
Tensions!
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Internal Forces
● Programming says No a lot
● Design wants to iterate… but what on?
● Art gets bad feedback, and everyone thinks they can do it
● QA is universally loathed
● They all create work for one another!
● This is a communication problem…
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BIG TEAMS
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Dunbar’s Number
● 150 people in pop science/culture
● Really <80 people per context
● Fundamental brain design feature in primates!
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What does it mean?
As you start hitting it:
● Poor team cohesion
● Cliques
● Poor communication
● This one might not be solvable
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Other Team Size Numbers
● Optimal team size (5-10, with drop off after 10)
● The Number of Death (14)
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The Allen Curve
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So what does that mean?
● Put people who need to talk together next to each other
● Call meetings regularly if you can’t do it
● Now you have justification ;-)
● If all else fails…
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Geographically Disparate Teams
● Meetings & communication become essential
● Or else They’re the bad guys! They suck!
● Arrange face-to-faces regularly
● You might call them Tech/Art/QA Summits, but almost as important is the partying after
● Half-life is about 2-3 months
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Clocks on a Shelf
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Resonance/Synchronicity
Kill it by:
● Building in firebreaks (grab & run)
● Take stable drops only
● Decouple dependencies
● Productize the source team’s work
● Keep a team on your staff dedicated to handling the integration/fixes – and plan for this
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The End Game…
(you know what this means…)
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Things You May Notice Happening
● General smell of panic in air
● Blame-throwing
● Low morale
● People sleeping under desks
● People with hair literally on fire
● Cascading mistakes
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Crunch is a BAD IDEA! ● Henry Ford figured this out in 1926
● From 60 hours a week to 40 (with x2 salary) = reduced production cost, increased productivity = better results
● Crunch > a few days = way worse than not crunching at all
● Brains melt!
● Everyone needs time to strategize
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Melting Brains
● Programmers have to read, understand and work with this stuff (ЖύΑΣΘΨΩ¥ə)
● Scary, huh?
● You’d have to be superhuman to do it for 14 hours straight
● No-one is… and it’s not just programmers
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Ways To Avoid Crunch
● Cut early, Cut often
● Identify problems when they’re small
● Sierra’s Carrot: Finish Early, Go Home
● … but only if everyone is finished
● We shipped 100’s of SKUs this way, and it works
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That said…
… sometimes you’re between a rock and a thousand screaming people with knives and Uzis' and their hair on fire.
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Panic Equals Blame
● Everyone does it (a little) (ok, some a lot)
● Doesn’t mean they’re a bad person
● Doesn’t mean the person they’re blaming is bad either
● Number 1 side-effect of pressure
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Your QA Folks May Receive Death Threats…
● They’re here to make you look good
● REMIND PEOPLE OF THAT!!!
● There’s no such thing as a “no repro” bug
Seriously, there isn’t
No, really. Trust me. I’m a programmer.
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What can you do to take the edge off?
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Appreciation During
● Food helps, and is awesome
● Feed everyone – including Contractors
● Encourage people to eat together, not at their desks
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Appreciation During
● Booze helps, but is counterproductive
● (for programmers especially)
● But appreciated! And during crunch, you may need it to survive…
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Appreciation After The Fact
● Give gifts after to team-members
● I do this… Out of my own pocket
● Amazon gift cards, expensive tequila…
● You should have a morale budget – if not, make one, yesterday
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Appreciation After The Fact…
● Give Time Off AFTER Crunch!
● Commensurate with time spent crunching
● BEWARE: Nothing bites more than being called back in to work in this situation
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My Secret Weapon During Crunch
● Amazing information gathering tool
● Defuses interpersonal issues
● Builds group cohesion
● Increases morale
● Practiced at several games companies
● My legacy, ahhhhh!
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The Friday Goof Off - Recipe
For a successful goof-off, you will need:
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Okay, so I get the beer part...
● Requires active listening by meeting holder
● Take notes on everything
● Encourage discussion of issues people see coming up, right now
● Encourage discussion of issues across disciplines
You can do this without people noticing what you’re doing, by carefully steering conversation
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The Most Important Rules
● Must be out of earshot of everyone else
● Build a safe space for unguarded discussion
● Focus has to be on communication
● Take copious notes
● Defuse problems as you hear them – if you can
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… and after shipping?
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Takeaways
● Everything boils down to communication
● You can solve every problem with it
● It’s the cause of and solution to every problem
● Fix small problems while they’re still small
● Communication, Team Dynamics, Schedule… you name it! – fix it early! Be on the ball!
● Pay attention to the details – they matter!
● If you don’t, no one will. Everyone else is knee deep in their own problems.
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Q&A
● Questions? Ask Me Anything!
● Rule 1: No egos. Even if it feels obvious.
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Appendix
● The Allen Curve: Managing The Flow of Technology (Thomas J. Allen, 1984, MIT Press)
● Ford’s Time & Motion Studies; http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/ford.htm
● How to Build Team Cohesion & Morale by Goofing Off: http://accidentalscientist.com/2008/05/how-to-build-team-morale-and-cohesion-by-goofing-off.html
● The Visible Progress of Broadly Scoped Tasks http://accidentalscientist.com/2007/10/the-visible-progress-of-broadly-scoped-tasks.html
● Why crunch mode doesn’t work – 6 lessons (Evan Robinson) http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons
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Appendix
● Dunbar’s Number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
● The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
● The Mythical Man-Month http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
● Parkinson’s Law Quantified: Three Investigations on Bureaucratic Inefficiency; Peter Klimek, Rudolf Hanel, Stefan Thurner - http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/08-12-055.pdf