Re:Don't be a douche (Score 1)

I'm in sales and I've told a customer X feature will be ready by a certain date, and then without warning the dev team pushes it back several months, I'm screwed.

Status reports don't protect sales from dev pushing back features. And I have *never* seen a sales guy read an engineer's status report.

One of the parents is right about

To take the lawyer example, the senior partner reviews the associate's draft. He's looking at the work, not a status report.

Managers should be reviewing the engineer's work, not their status reports. Status reports are inefficient because they are write once, read once. Read once because the manager reads it once, sends status to his boss, and throws the thing away.

I'm a team lead of about 10 engineers, and I spend more than half my day on email with other devs. 99% of the conversations are public. That paper trail is productive in terms of making progress on the product, *and* useful for the manager to figure out what we're doing.