Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#111

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:24 AM UTC

JepZ wrote: post #98

TimTheTinker wrote: post #48

I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development by scoping, designing, and buildin…

Most of what you say are qualities I like managers to have too, but 'someone tried to ask us for help with someone else's project without asking her first--she was furious.' is a quality I do not value. I mean, protecting your people is one thing (an essential quality), but being furious because someone in need of help asked in the wrong order doesn't foster cooperation beyond the borders of the own team (causing sil…

I've seen this go both ways. It depends on how funtional/dysfunctional other parts of the organisation are. If they're as competent as you and just asking for things they genuinely need, cooperation is great. If they're not, they turn into "help vampires" and you have to put up a firewall to prevent them destroying your productivity.

I think my current workplace suffers from too much team defensiveness + not having a CTO or equivalent to integrate across teams.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#112

Post by JepZ » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:24 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #20

ken wrote: post #14

I don't have a single "most favorite" but I worked for someone a couple weeks ago who began by saying "I just want you to get the job done right and I don't care how long it takes you". I knew right away I was going to love it there. That's the way to my heart.

I would think that’s the worse kind of manager. One of a manager’s job is to manage resources. There are always trade offs between doing things “right” and delivering. If you look at the old Joel quadrant of smart / gets things done (delivers value to the business), someone who “doesn’t care how long it takes” runs the risk of gold plating features instead of delivering. A deadline is a great focusing mechanism. And…

It depends on the task at hand. The traditional project management knows three resources: Time, Quality and Budget.

So if the job requires a very high level of Quality you might start by telling people you want them to do it right and time doesn't matter (it's not precisely correct but pretty clear). If nothing gets ever done at all, you might need to talk again ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#113

Post by thom » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

Not sure my favourite manager _was_ great. But at one startup our CTO was so completely devoted to agile and TDD that he somehow completely protected us from deadline pressures and technical debt. It was the least stress I've ever experienced in my career, and the best code I have ever written. That said, I don't really think the business case or costs on the project ended up making a lot of sense and the product never launched (the problem it mitigated against was actually solved by EU litigation in the end).

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#114

Post by awaaz » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

mattm wrote: post #66

messit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's little privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard and typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant against people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started openly taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample documentation of who failed what. That sounds pretty horre…

This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well in a company with a good culture. Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader during wartime but terrible during peacetime.

Depends on who you ask. Winston Churchill was a racist bigot who starved 4 million people in India to feed his armies.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#115

Post by manorie » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

My greatest manager hired me for my potential, was always honest and open about everything, he was a great listener and great guy when giving feedback (0 ego). He was lacking empathy, obsessive at times but being open and seeing the goodwill in his every behavior was compensating all of his bad sides. One time he told me "I am not that smart, but at a young age, I have found a way to trick people that I am really smart" (he was Harvard grad with full scholar and worked with best names)

After many years I am still using things I have learned from him and those are saved my ass countless times.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#116

Post by JepZ » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #109

kerng wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big demotivating factor is forcing people to deliver mediocre stuff. That's the way to loose the best. Many folks are motivated by delivering high quality, higher even then the market wants/desires. No need to push or force them - just letting them build the best does a lot of good. There is a book called Peopleware, that discusses that aspect.

I don't believe this, but I am curious what your thoughts are (or others) on the questioning of the premise that this job (or any job) needs "the best".

I know that once I motivated two full-stack developers to work a lot more than they were being paid for by saying 'just because the New York Times frontend developers can't do it, doesn't mean we can't do it'.

I still feel a bit ashamed when I think about how much time they invested (~160%), but I wasn't forcing them in any way. They knew the total budget from the beginning, and with that in mind, we were setting the scope together. It was their will to deliver the best possible quality which made them work the extra hours.

In the end, everybody was happy as the project was pretty successful.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#117

Post by dbt00 » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

a_imho wrote: post #91

Never met a great manager, the least harmful were smart/dumb enough not to interfere with the day-to-day work too much and let the people do their job. I'm still skeptical of the value added by m&ms.

Sometimes the most important job a manager can do is make sure you have a full queue of day to day work to go do and stay the F out of your way. :)

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#118

Post by ddebernardy » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #20

ken wrote: post #14

I don't have a single "most favorite" but I worked for someone a couple weeks ago who began by saying "I just want you to get the job done right and I don't care how long it takes you". I knew right away I was going to love it there. That's the way to my heart.

I would think that’s the worse kind of manager. One of a manager’s job is to manage resources. There are always trade offs between doing things “right” and delivering. If you look at the old Joel quadrant of smart / gets things done (delivers value to the business), someone who “doesn’t care how long it takes” runs the risk of gold plating features instead of delivering. A deadline is a great focusing mechanism. And…

There's a discussion of this in Peopleware. If memory serves me well (I read it over 15 years ago), their data suggested that:

1. If you - the manager - set the deadline yourself, the estimate will often be off (unless you're very experienced and could do it yourself; see 3).

2. If you let your engineer set their own deadline, the estimate will often be off (unless they're very experienced; see 3).

3. If you have a very experienced specialist set the deadline, the estimate will often be about right.

4. If you give no deadlines at all ("wake me up when you're done"), directs will pour their soul into it more often than not, and beat the estimate you'd get from 3.

The main argument against 1 and 2 is that having too tight a deadline is very demotivating. What's the point in working against a benchmark you can't possibly meet? (Having too loose a deadline runs into Parkinson's law, but the problem is usually that the estimate is too optimistic.)

Having tried 4 with various teams over the years, I'd suggest it can work wonderfully - but only sometimes. It requires that your team consists a) entirely of professionally minded engineers who b) can see first hand that what they're doing is useful. You're better off sticking with 3 when not.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#119

Post by gorm » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 10:09 AM UTC

The best boss I had was the first one. I deliver newspapers early on Sunday mornings. When I arrived at the office in the morning he had always arrived a hour before everyone else and done all preparation (packing and changing subscribers in our books) so only thing left was to drink a coffee and start running with the papers.

When it was cold he often drove around and met us on the route and gave us another cup of coffee and cigarettes. If there was a complaint from a customer he took it serious and often went himself to investigate what could have caused the issue or went together with us. We were the best team in town by far, proud and had few complaints. He had faith in his team, always nice and always thought we did our best, values he showed us by his own actions.

Sadly he got promoted and after a while we were the worst team in town as the new boss had a complete different style and threatened people in the team when we got complaints.

Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

#120

Post by pankajdoharey » Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 10:09 AM UTC

holocen wrote: post #71

pankajdoharey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope unfortunately i am describing a manager, our techlead was no good Ruby Developer with no idea about anything. We cleared our doubts from our architect/Manager.

You cleared your ideas with the technical lead of the project. That doesn't necessarily include the manager.

I guess your expectation from the manager is the MBA types? Well they can never be good project managers in Tech, atleast what i have seen. Only tech people can lead good tech companies.