Comment by claytonjy
15 hours ago
My experience as well. It sounds nice at first, but since it’s tied to org flattening these “player-coaches” end up with 15-20 reports, which is way too many for even a pure manager.
I noticed it was especially bad for on-call and incident response; these managers get pulled in to all the incidents because of their status and supposed involvement, but are not particularly useful in those rooms, adding even more cooks to the already crowded kitchen.
I worked somewhere once where every once in a while we'd have to create a new deploy meeting because 1) our code was deployed manually over the course of hours and 2) every manager imaginable wanted to be in the meeting asking questions and directing people... you couldn't actually speak to anyone you had to talk through their manager.
I experienced a flavor of this, too. We had some outages, management said no more daytime deploys, so we had after-hours “deploy parties” whose scope and participant count increased weekly. The smarter managers said it was temporary, but couldn’t say how we’d move back towards continuous deployment. If anything went wrong in any service, you’d end up with a dozen or so folks on a zoom call for 3 hours. We did this once or twice a week.
Went on for about a year, worse each week, before i left.
I've experienced this as well. I call it the "better safe than sorry" strategy, and the issue is it ignores the very real cost of all the extra effort and work, from the literal costs to the slow releases to the loss of people who just can't take it anymore.