

ASK HN: Randomization at work - hexcoda

Hi,<p>I was wondering how people overcome getting randomized at work, i.e, getting too many little things to work on from different projects. This in my opinion is causing the quality of work on a particular task to deteriorate.<p>Any advice will be appreciated.
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patio11
I sometimes ended up juggling eight or so projects at the last day job.
Finally I learned to take the advice of older and wiser employees (at my
company and elsewhere), and started using my manager as a firewall.

"I would be _thrilled_ to native check that translation for you. Please route
the order through my boss. You know how it goes, I'm only twenty seven, nobody
here expects me to be able to manage my own time." "Boss, you're going to get
a request from Tokyo to use me for a translation project. If you approve it,
$PRIORITY_PROJECT will slip two days late. Your call."

~~~
jacquesm
That's just white-hat social engineering.

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amk
This was a very big issue in my previous place of work. It really got to me,
to the point that I actually quit and found another job. So, speaking from
personal experience, it will also severely affect your programmers' morale if
they just spend all their time doing little things on many different projects,
rather than work on something big and worthwhile.

The solution: Get proper project management practises in place. Split up a
project's work in quantums of atleast 3 days. Don't discuss other projects
when your programmers are busy working on something.

po has an interesting point. Don't take very small projects which don't fit in
your schedule. Another approach would be to talk and upgrade small projects to
bigger projects and quote more time for them.

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po
I think the first thing to understand is if you're accepting these small tasks
because you have to or because you want to. I found that I would often find
every little problem interesting and relevant and would accept working on it.

I soon became overloaded, and I decided that I would have only a certain
number of slots open for projects. For example, two projects from this
department, two from that and one pet project (my choice).

I would say no to any new projects that didn't fit in a slot. This doesn't
work as well when the source of the problem is that you must accept all work
pushed on you. In that case, you probably need to talk to your manager.

Think hard about if the problem is your inability to say no to an interesting
project.

~~~
hexcoda
I think that you are onto something here, I guess I have a problem telling no
to interesting problems (for that matter any problem), I guess I am kind of
compulsive when it comes to this. It will take a lot from me to change. Your
method of creating slots seems most practical. I will take your advice
seriously and try and apply it.

Thanks.

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jimfl
One of the benefits of using a process like Scrum, if it has a daily standup
meeting, is that if you are being randomized, you just say all the things that
you worked on. The team will get the point in short order, and can get it
addressed.

I had had this happen multiple times. Multiple team members had sources of
randomization removed by the scrum master, once it became clear that the
sprint work was suffering.

~~~
imp
I don't know, that seems like a passive aggressive way to handle the problem.
If someone feels like they have an issue with the work they've been assigned,
they should have the responsibility to handle it themselves. It seems lame to
have them hope that everyone else recognizes their problem and help them deal
with it. I'm also not a fan of the daily standup meeting, so maybe I'm a
little biased about that approach.

