How much waiting do you do?

[Guest]

A lot of large companies are able to do a lot of good development with a mass of people, however individuals may feel as though they don't contribute or something. 

 

I'm curious to how big your company is and how much waiting around you do. 

 

Like, how much do you wait for other people because you cannot do anything without another person for one reason or another. 

 

How big is like... 10 people, 50 people, 500 people, so on. If it's really big and you don't know, then you can just put a big number and a plus like 500+

 

 

 

Bonus question!

Senior developers, how long does it take you to get back to people when they ask you questions or message you? 

Why? 

I understand there's a lot of meetings, I'm just curious how much stuff you have going on. 

 

Spoiler

I'll start. 

Company is 500+. 

I completed my task two weeks ago and I haven't been able to do anything since. I'm not allowed to because my tasks are being reviewed. 

Spoiler

I'm mostly just wondering if I'm the only one questioning why I even go to work when I can't do anything. 

 

 

[Ripred]

Stupid amount of waiting, some things that I don't have the authority to sign off, require multiple signatures before I can send the forms in which case sometimes months can pass and I would have to start the whole process over again because vendors will have cancelled or changed there quotes

[Eigenvektor]

Less than 100 people and virtually zero wait time. There's always something productive to do.

[wasab]

nil waiting. less than 20 people but the projects we worked on have teams around the globe and is much larger. we focus on our own piece of software which has no downtime in development although there are blockers from other teams and firms who worked on the microservices which we will need to wait for before integrating. of course, there are always endless mountain full of bug tickets from both staging and production enviorments, some of which have not been resolved for months and probably never will. people can work all day if they want. there is never shortage of tasks. internal communication is as quick as 1 minute skype message/chat. communications with other teams, many whom live on the otherside of the planet is like a full day(your daytime is their nighttime). maybe three days if you contact them on friday and it happens to be saturday where they live. more time if they are on national holidays or something. 

[Cupcakez]

For a few months I tried to answer questions/messages as soon as I got them. Unfortunately that turned out to be really unproductive for me. I would constantly get questions, jump into random calls and solve everybody else's tasks/problems while falling behind on my tasks. (now that I think about it, I probably got used) I remember spending 70% of a work day in random calls, that's when i decided to stop doing it and let people wait for me. 

 

As for waiting, as long as the tasks are not directly dependent to somebody else's, my wait time is usually close to zero because I don't need a lot of outside input. If I really have to wait for something I usually switch to doing something else while waiting. 

 

I do have a friend that works 2 hours a day (and presumably does jackshit the other 6). Her company makes so much money they don't really care (she said that around $2 million pass through her company daily... I should probably go work there too lmao) 

[undergroundbeef]

I think my company has around 70,000 and I'm a principal software engineer. The more integrations points there are, the longer the waits. However, there is enough going on that I can work on something else, or my own pet projects, if I'm having trouble moving the ball forward on my main project(s).

How long the waits end up being are generally a function of the working relationships between the people, how interesting/frustrating the problem is to work on, and who is asking for it.

There are some people who try to pawn all their work off on others that will ask others to do some nonsense that doesn't make sense. Those people will wait forever, unless it happens to be something interesting/fun. I'll do quick wins pretty quickly, just to get them off my plate. Difficult problems that aren't well understood, require working with difficult people, and aren't seen as important by most people, end up taking a long time to get done... or never get done. One project has been going on for 4+ years now; and the first 3 years nothing happened at all. Then there are days like today where someone in the C-Suite got wind of an issue and wanted it solved, so we had a dozen people on a call for 5 hours and figured it out. Without the pressure from the C-Suite that issue would have taken 6 months or more to solve, as most of the people on the call are typically hard to work with. Most things I'm waiting on could be solved in a few uninterrupted hours with the right group of people on the phone. However, getting anyone to spend more than 30-60 minutes dealing with something is often difficult, and when time blocks are split up into 30-60 minute chunks, the waiting is built into the system and everything takes forever.

 

Developing good relationships with people seems to be the best way to speed things up. I can get things done in 5 minutes that will take other people several months or years, because I have good relationships with the the right person and I've helped them just as much as they've helped me. Other people can do in 5 minutes what might take me months, for the same reason.

 

I try to be has helpful as I can, but if I tried to answer every question I wouldn't do anything else. I know this from experience. For a while, I would get a question, go over to the person's desk and help them out, and as I was walking back to my desk, I'd get another... I would just end up taking laps around the room all day. At one point by boss saw what was going on. He moved me into another room and told the whole team that only 1 designated person was allowed to talk to me and all questions had to go through that other person. It was kind of funny. I always spent a lot of time answering the questions, because I wanted people to grow and improve. I also didn't want them to feel like I was too busy to help them, but it can very easily take up 100% of your time, so you have to choose a bit more. I will generally prioritize my own team over outside teams.

 

And yes... meetings are another big time suck. That's another area where boundaries need to be set to avoid them taking up all your time. The same goes for email and now chats. I hardly ever read my email anymore. Usually things get solved without me and I can quickly scan through and see a bunch of final "issue resolved" emails and not have to bother reading the whole thread. There's too much noise, so I pick my battles. Sometimes that means someone needs to tell me to go read an email that's relevant to me.

 

If you're waiting longer than you think you should need to, and you're at a stand still because of it, it doesn't hurt to ask for a status. People forget, things fall through the cracks, and people are dealing with competing priorities. If they got a notice once 2 weeks ago and never heard about it again, it's probably not even on their radar anymore. You want to avoid being annoying if you can, but sometimes it comes to that.