When Developers Work Late, Should Manager Stay or Go?
I had to work late and my manager supported by staying late with me. If he was somewhat technical, he could have asked relevant questions or maybe even offered helpful suggestions. But he hadn’t written code in years – and never in the language I was using. He just slowed me down.
I’m now a manager for a team of developers. It’s getting late one afternoon and a customer calls me up and starts yelling in my ear. Some system we sold them was down and they had to produce reports by the following morning or there would be hell to pay.
Of course I stayed late with my developer to solve this customers’ problem. And guess what? Yep, I hadn’t coded in years and never in the language he had to work with. So I could offer very little in the way of technical guidance.
When a manager tells his developers to work late, should he stay late too?
Eric Spiegel
200912 management productivity programming