Quality and Innovation

In July, Paul Graham posted an article called “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“. He points out that people who make things, like software engineers and writers, are on a completely different schedule than managers – and that by imposing the manager’s schedule on the developers, there is an associated cost. Makers simply can’t be as productive on the manager’s schedule:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

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.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

This concept really resonated with us – we know about the costs of context switching, but this presented a nice concept for how a developer’s day can be segmented such that ample time is provided for getting things done. As a result, we attempted to apply the concept to achieve more effective communication between technical staff and managers. And in at least one case, it worked extremely well.

Case: Ron DuPlain (@rduplain) and I frequently work together on technical projects. I am the manager; he is the developer. More than we like, we run into problems communicating, but fortunately we are both always on the lookout for strategies to help us communicate better. We decided to apply the “makers vs. managers” concept to meetings, to see whether declaring whether we were having a maker’s meeting or a manager’s meeting prior to the session would improve our ability to communicate with one another.

And it did. We had a very effective maker’s meeting today, for example… explored some technical challenges, worked through a solution space, and talked about possible design options and background information. It was great. As a manager, I got to spend time thinking about a technical problem, but temporarily suspended my attachment to dates, milestones and artifacts. As a developer, Ron got the time and attention from me that he needed to explain his challenges, without the pressure of knowing that I was in a hurry and just needed the bottom line. As a result, Ron felt like I was able to understand the perspectives he was presenting more effectively, and get a better sense of the trade-offs he was exploring.

We had the opportunity to meet on the same terms, all because we declared the intent of our meeting up front in terms of “makers” and “managers”. Thanks Paul – this common language is proving to be a powerful concept for achieving a shared and immediate understanding of technical problems.