Should a project manager push developers to work more hours due to mistakes of manager schedule setting?
Last updated: October 11, 2022 Read in fullscreen view
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There are some managers who like to put schedule risk off onto the dev team. If the team gets behind, make them work more hours until they catch up. This practice is E.V.I.L. It is like if your director asked you, as manager, to pay the company back from your own paycheck if your team goes over budget. The budget is the same kind of prediction of the future as a software schedule is. And as manager you are just as responsible.
Estimating schedules is hard, because it is predicting the future. There is a school of thought that this practice is so hard that teams ought to refuse to do it.
How should you handle a developer who is not good at predicting the future? Should you punish them by making them work more hours? Or should you get them a better crystal ball in the form of some kind of class on scheduling?
If you have a developer who is wasting time, always has facebook open, spends all afternoon yakking with the other devs, takes extended smoking breaks, etc., you should definitely push them to work harder. (I mean, duh.) If your developers are at their desks doing the job of developing software, punishing them for being late is both cruel and counterproductive.
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