I'm a current employee, this is still accurate; teams get absolutely no work done in the final 2 weeks of the year outside of extremely critical fixes.
I've seen that, and the opposite as well, where you have a huge team of people constantly working and yet mysteriously nothing gets done and managers aren't sure what people are doing on a day to day basis.
Any manager that’s laying out timelines assuming that everyone will work at 100% capacity permanently is being unbelievably naive. People will take vacations, get sick, or need mental breaks. We’re humans, not robots.
If a team can’t handle someone losing velocity due to the challenges of parenting during a once in a century pandemic, then it needs new leadership, period.
I took a week off recently. My teammates just sat on multiple “24 hour turnaround” requests until I got back, because they were too used to thinking of it as my job to bother even opening them.
The do little work is certainly not true of everyone I know at G. Maybe some teams have slackers but in general they’ve always managed low performers out, with maybe the exception of 2020-2022 when they didn’t want to fire anyone.
It's usually a bad sign when teams pawn off their maintenance work on new people. It means that they have no intention of actually fixing the system (or replacing it) because it's easier to just keep rolling the shit downhill.
If it doesn't feel better in a couple months, definitely consider quitting. You'd probably be happier on almost any other team.
Edit: downvoted by people who pawn off their crapwork on the newbies :P
> did some quick stats and didn't set limits on when people were hired when doing the stats
> manager fckd up and didn't tell the individual they were performing badly
This is even more likely when you account for Nov 20 - Jan 2 being the most likely time of the year for extended vacations (for manager, analytics, and buyers), corporate distractions (holiday parties and team building, next year planning), and a slowdown in all sales cycles.
Any manager that’s laying out timelines assuming that everyone will work at 100% capacity permanently is being unbelievably naive. People will take vacations, get sick, or need mental breaks. We’re humans, not robots.
https://bigasspics.me/
If a team can’t handle someone losing velocity due to the challenges of parenting during a once in a century pandemic, then it needs new leadership, period.
I work at a big corp and my experience is swaths of the year (I'm talking weeks at a time) when upper management is engaging in faction warfare many levels above me, and my own manager doesn't know what the team should be working on until upper management can set priorities. So I have nothing to work on. I guess this is 'coasting'.
As someone who has worked a bullshit cyber security job in government, I will say 50% is a conservative estimate. Our team had 9 people in it: 1 manager, 6 junior-mid level engineers and 2 senior engineers. The only ones that did any actual work were the senior engineers. The junior-mid engineers literally did nothing for months on end. The manager would disappear all week only to turn up on Friday mornings to give "corporate update" presentations to the team.
Neither. The failure is with the team's manager. The team's leadership should have reduced the workload of the team.
It starts at the top. I work at a (non-tech) Fortune 50 and the message from the CEO on down has been the same: take vacation, take care of your family, some priorities/projects for this year will not be met and that is fine.
Or those people are doing work that takes a longer time frame to impact the company. Sure it’s fine for the next year, but once you start dealing with issues down the line you’ll wish you had been taking care of all that work.
This article is pretty light on what evidence this is actually happening, or how often.
To me, this sounds like something that seems plausible on the surface, but in practice would make no sense. Teams are almost always short staffed, so having to carry a team member for 6 months or a year who you know is subpar seems completely illogical even with the URA metric in place. After all, it's not like teams aren't also measured on things like delivering projects on time.
EDIT: I don't mean this to say it couldn't be happening, it would just be nice if somewhere in this article it could mention a source.
Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.
I see the same problem. Reviewing some internal metrics, at least half the team members were basically producing nothing. No artifacts of any kind over months on end.
Overall productivity was the same. The remaining folks were producing significantly more and burning out. They actually lost work life balance, working way beyond 9-5 hours.
In this case, I don’t think my company has figured out how to manage remote workers. Even the direct managers appear checked out, delegating their own responsibilities to this group of ICs who are burned out.
I've seen teams that got very little done for a long time because their manager didn't hold them to finishing tasks. So the team was perpetually in a state of polishing just a few more edges and never finally shipping things.
I don't know what sort of company would respond by firing the whole team, though. If a manager fails, the manager should be out, and a new manager should try to turn the team around.
Any internal team at least slightly aware of the problem would not have a good performance review for the year if their biggest project was to reduce revenue by x% due to efforts to address this.
This is made worse by those insufferable over-zealous team members with a i-can-wag-my-tail-harder-than-you attitude. They send emails from holiday expressing their concern over a change, which frankly no one gives a damn about, and moan their semi-brags on how they are dying under work because how random senior managers (who don't give a crap about them and are just playing them to get more work done) have "insisted on my involvement". These are the kind of rotten apples who don't have a life and drag those that do have/want one to the bottomless pit of overwork. /rant
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