no-crunch development (Destiny)

by Xenos , Shores of Time, Saturday, August 05, 2017, 08:03 (2755 days ago) @ Kahzgul

A lot of the intent you infer in the statements from the article I didn't infer at all. Having been a manager myself for years I pretty much guarantee that this quote was not about a desire to skip 1-on-1s:

"You should take this seriously, but it's not free," Timmins said. "If I'm a manager, every report I have is about 10% of my time... It's really hard, and you're constantly going to have that pressure: 'Can't we just skip one on ones? Can't we just skip your goals for this period?'

With the amount of stuff that you have to do it's easy to say "this employee is doing fine, it won't be a big deal if we skip our 1-on-1 this week because I have x and y to do". That is a constant battle any manager has. Timmins is saying to be a good manager you basically make it mandatory that you have a 1-on-1 no matter what is happening or however busy you both are.

And the other point you made across two different quotes was about cutting features because there won't be time to finish it, which I think you're taking from the point of view of a engineer or a artist, and I think Timmins is coming from the point of view of a manager or even from the point of view of a company:

"The majority of it is always having enough awesome ideas and things you want to build, so you always need to have that rigour. 'No, we can't do that, and that's okay.' The second you don't, the whole thing falls apart."

You're right that an engineer shouldn't say "no we can't" unqualified to his boss (unless they really are asking for the impossible, but that's a whole different discussion), but a manager SHOULD decide when we can't based on the feedback from his employees and have enough sway with his employees to convince them to not kill themselves trying to get an extra feature in if it's going to have a negative effect on them. That's the way I took it from the article since it's mostly about managing employees. He discusses his experience when he was a tech and the next paragraph is saying that as a unit or a company it should be okay to say we can't do that before launch.