What’s the best way to make sure developers and engineers have the space they need to enter a flow state while they work? What can you do as a leader to help them protect that space?
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Director of Operations in Miscellaneous23 days ago
The real answer is something many senior managers cannot abide because they fear loss of control (and perhaps a reduced justification for their job): let them work from home!Study after study has re-affirmed that employees, in general, are more productive working from home.
For developers, engineers and architects - all of whom require prolonged stretches of uninterrupted work and often need to work until they get to a natural break point - working from home has always been where much of the quality work (and thinking) gets done.
I have 40 years of IT experience in all sorts of companies, industries and countries. My first 20 years (so up to about the year 2005) were full-stack development of complex n-tier systems. Even that long ago, and though we barely had the technology to support it, I produced most of my greatest code working from home.
Chief Technology Officer in Software21 days ago
In my view, involve the developers from the kick start. Let them give their inputs on product and design as you will get a fresh perspective.Give them freedom to create HLD and LLD and provide constructive feedback at every level.
Keep them motivated with regular learning sessions.
Don't be too intrusive in your approach and give them a breather and don't hush hush on the timelines for every module.
Don't follow an approach where you are a manager but be a try leader and lead by example.
Leaders can also be thoughtful about the code review process, especially in larger teams where there are a lot of pull requests and feedback sessions. Constant context switching can be a significant disruption for engineers. You can help by designating a specific time of day for pull request reviews so that feedback can be given without constant interruptions. You just have to be sure to strike a balance between protecting flow state and getting timely feedback, and be willing to discuss as a team how to make improvements to that process.
Identifying and addressing other distractions is also crucial. For example, if the help desk is pinging developers with questions or the on-call schedule is causing too many interruptions, these issues need to be compartmentalized by setting up longer on-call schedules (such as one week on call vs. only one day). It’s all about finding the right balance and making sure that developers have the space they need to do their best work.