There is people/resource management and there is also technical management, and most companies really struggle with the latter.
What I mean by technical management is the following:
* onboarding new developers: showing them how to get the dev environment going, how to debug, how to use testing infrastructure, configuration management
* propagating information about design rules: documenting and evangelization of contracts between different different pieces of code, and all the various rules -- what must be authenticated, what must be logged, how to consistently check for access rights, which common module/library to use for what, etc.
* enforcing software development lifecycle: making sure there are design reviews/sign off/etc
It seems that managers offload a lot of the above to senior roles who rely on force of personality and personal effort to get this done, which creates a lot of randomness and also stress. Devs often don't learn these things except by creating breakage and then relying on experience or institutional knowledge.
It's very strange that on the one hand when it comes to corporate policies such as vacation time and provisioning
productivity software, or even using the bug tracking system, there are handbooks, mandatory trainings, lots of online resources, etc. But when it comes to the technical rules such as which library to use, we pass to a medieval guild system of ad hoc 1 on 1 mentoring over Slack.
But perhaps I've just been working in the wrong companies.
What I mean by technical management is the following:
* onboarding new developers: showing them how to get the dev environment going, how to debug, how to use testing infrastructure, configuration management
* propagating information about design rules: documenting and evangelization of contracts between different different pieces of code, and all the various rules -- what must be authenticated, what must be logged, how to consistently check for access rights, which common module/library to use for what, etc.
* enforcing software development lifecycle: making sure there are design reviews/sign off/etc
It seems that managers offload a lot of the above to senior roles who rely on force of personality and personal effort to get this done, which creates a lot of randomness and also stress. Devs often don't learn these things except by creating breakage and then relying on experience or institutional knowledge.
It's very strange that on the one hand when it comes to corporate policies such as vacation time and provisioning productivity software, or even using the bug tracking system, there are handbooks, mandatory trainings, lots of online resources, etc. But when it comes to the technical rules such as which library to use, we pass to a medieval guild system of ad hoc 1 on 1 mentoring over Slack.
But perhaps I've just been working in the wrong companies.