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Re: Free online Perl Practice tests

by OfficeLinebacker (Chaplain)
on Feb 04, 2007 at 17:25 UTC ( [id://598202]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Free online Perl Practice tests

That's great. I would love to have your job. Since this is OT after all, I am going to continue your tangent away from Perl.

In my mind, the job of a manager or leader is not to work, but to motivate and coordinate the work of others. The main point being, if you supervise a team of five coders, your team should be able to create output exceeding the output of a group of six coders each coding independently (if not a little more, since I would imagine your salary is probably higher than a coder's).

I don't know how much work you do managing and how much extra time you have, but if I were a manager, I would be reading management books and websites. How do you attract talent? How do you help the employees which are slipping? How do you attain and then mantain a high level of work? How does your team fit into the grand scheme of things at your company? etc. I'd be way more worried about those questions than, say, what's the -T switch for?


I like computer programming because it's like Legos for the mind.

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Re^2: Free online Perl Practice tests
by sfink (Deacon) on Feb 10, 2007 at 06:32 UTC
    The main point being, if you supervise a team of five coders, your team should be able to create output exceeding the output of a group of six coders each coding independently...

    Good theory, but I think the numbers are a bit unrealistic. I would hope that a manager with a team of five coders would be able to create the output of about three coders working independently. Okay, maybe four, but that'll be tough.

    The trick is that if you actually have three or four coders working within the same group without a manager or other organizational scheme, it'll be a complete mess. They will be doing redundant work, then spending time integrating their work and eliminating redundancy, then deciding how to interface their pieces together, and so forth. The point is that unless you have truly independent projects, there's no way for your coders to work completely independently. (And if you do have several truly independent projects, your company probably ain't gonna make it. It's spread too thin. Focus on what you do differently, and beg/buy/borrow/steal the rest.)

    Ok, so maybe the numbers aren't quite right, but you get the idea. Think of it as parallel processing, which it is. The ideal would be linear scaling, but dependencies between processors (coders) always drop the speedup below that. One job of a manager is to eliminate as many dependencies as possible, and minimize the disruption of the rest. That may mean scheduling first the pieces that need to be resolved to avoid blocking others, or it may mean setting some things in stone to make sure the parts work together while leaving other things loose and flexible so they can adapt to their circumstances.

      I like your analogy, and it's true to a large extent. There's more to it than that. A manager is more than a scheduler for processors. CPUs don't break up with their mates. CPUs don't request (?:p|m)aternity leave, don't have 'bad hair days,' don't overclock themselves when you pay them a sincere compliment about their work. A good manager not only schedules, coordinates, and plans, but motivates, congratulates, and inspires. I think I can state categorically that there are not enough good managers in the world.

      I like computer programming because it's like Legos for the mind.

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