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

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

#121

Post by lozaning »

sleepychu wrote: post #79
lozaning wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a sales job like this for a while at a small VAR. We were an HP, Netapp, cisco, etc Gold partner, but my boss didnt care if I sold any of that, only that I generated enough profit to cover my base salary through literally any means. Ended up writing my own software to interact with the Amazon Marketplace sellers API and all our distributors nightly inventory data and just drop ship stuff in mass, and send a cou…

What did you do with the rest of your time?

A lot of refactoring my code for the sake of refactoring, adding in more error handling and edge case protection, trying to make it only 30 minutes of work instead of an hour the next week, and a fair bit of HN and reddit and youtube.

The skills I taught myself in doing that largely lead to the position I've got now.

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

#122

Post by thisisit »

My favorite, probably not the best by many standards, was someone who was not versed in the tech we were working on. He listened when people talked. If there was something bothering us he got us what we needed, sometimes even spending his personal time on it.

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

#123

Post by teddyh »

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.

The Tao Of Programming, Book 5, Maintenance (Geoffrey James, 1987):

A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. “It will be finished tomorrow,” the programmer promptly replied.

“I think you are being unrealistic,” said the manager, “Truthfully, how long will it take?”

The programmer thought for a moment. “I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks,” he finally said.

“Even that is too much to expect,” insisted the manager, “I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete.”

The programmer agreed to this.

Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night.

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

#124

Post by mtnGoat »

mcny wrote: post #103
JepZ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, what's the point of having Microsoft Lync or whatever chat thing on every computer if I have to escalate up to our common report? A place I worked at, the investors had bought two different American companies and joined them at the top. So, when I needed a service I was supposed to consume to fix something (pretty obvious if I remember), the person at my level and his manager didn't respond to me or my manager…

I had this at a healthcare job I had. Even within IT, every silo was obstructing the others at almost every step.

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

#125

Post by iagooar »

arethuza wrote: post #104
the_clarence wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see some qualities from past manager: - push you to your limits (public speaking) - shield you from management/bigcorp bullshit - hire better people than themselves - don’t take credit from you

"shield you from management/bigcorp bullshit" I've heard that memorably described as managers either being "shit umbrellas" or "shit funnels".

What I ask myself is: why do corps allow to become places where shit is being thrown around, instead of productive work and cooperation.

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

#127

Post by tziki »

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…

I agree - I've worked for a company where there was zero pressure to deliver and an emphasis on quality. This led to endless discussions about minutiae code details and long debates about best practises. We ended up rewriting some parts of the code base because someone suggested it wasn't exemplary even though it was definitely fine.

The thing is, good code rarely looks stellar. It looks like code which you understand without much trouble, and usually there's more than one way to make it that way. If you get caught up into the trap of thinking you have deliver something amazing but don't understand what amazing really looks like, you're in for a lot of wasted resources.

After the aforementioned company I worked for a startup, and man was it a joy to actually ship code that affected lives. Sure, the code wasn't always the most polished, but being trusted to find the right balance between technical debt for speed of execution felt great.

Sometimes saying 'things should be done right no matter how long it takes' just means the management is unable to balance technical debt with other objectives.

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

#128

Post by OkiiEli »

Some qualities from past manager: - push you to your limits in targets delivery

- shield you from management

- hire better people than themselves

- don’t take credit from you

- Inspire and always give you opportunity to grow

- Execute stuff with speed

PS: I just launched a productized content-as-a-service http://contentiskey.co which enables businesses to get unlimited content for only $250/mo.

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

#129

Post by blowski »

iagooar wrote: post #125
arethuza wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shield you from management/bigcorp bullshit" I've heard that memorably described as managers either being "shit umbrellas" or "shit funnels".

What I ask myself is: why do corps allow to become places where shit is being thrown around, instead of productive work and cooperation.

For the same reason we end up with shit codebases - a combination of ignorance, incompetence, egos, politics, "just-this-once", laziness, and because sometimes it really is the right thing to do.

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

#130

Post by edw519 »

3 things he said:

1. "I only worry about 2 things: getting our work done and keeping our people."

2. "Every senior dev I hire must have done one of two things: either ran their own business or was a one-person shop. That's how I know that they know how to do whatever it takes to get software built and deployed."

3. "Our customers can buy this stuff anywhere. They buy it from us because of the value we add. That value includes the ones and zeros that we developers add to every product. The sooner everyone understands that, the sooner they will see I.T. as an indispensable component of our product and not an overhead department."

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