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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?

#131

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

algog wrote: post #58

Here is my story that I need to pass on to the next generation. I was a kid a few years out of college- just joined a top tier investment bank. I was one of many IT guys. After I joined I found out I was in charge of cutting over each month's sales data to accounting. This sales data determined each month's commission traders send over to salespeople- so that feed was a few hundred salespeople's livelihood. Well, the…

It's good practice. The important part isn't who screwed up, it's how do you fix what got screwed up and prevent it in the future. When you play the blame and punishment game it just makes people more reluctant to admit they screwed up and you start finding out about problems, or finding their cause, only after even more damage has been done. Your employees should only have to worry about their ass if they keep making the same mistakes over and over.

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

#132

Post by ghaff »

pjc50 wrote: post #111
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…

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…

It also depends on you (and others in similar roles) having a reasonably well-tuned sense of what is reasonable and what is not. I have a fairly broad charter myself but I help out all the time with things that I could argue are "not my job" as narrowly defined. However, they're mostly at least adjacent to my primary responsibilities and are mostly not a big deal to do.

Were someone to come to me with a request that looked to have the potential to be a big time sink--or if I was getting overloaded with too many one-offs--I would definitely have a discussion with my manager at that point.

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

#134

Post by zapita »

y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #51
zapita wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I work for someone who I can trust when he says something he does what he can to get it done. He tells me the goal we need to archive, and asks me how we can do it. Then he does everything he can to make sure I have all my stuff ready to do it. If there is a problem he helps me fix it. If something goes wrong he blames himself. If the project goes right and the customer is happy he tells everyone it's my accomplish…

> What if your boss is a woman? Then I would write "she" instead of "he". But Fabio is a man.

Your first sentence is missing a period which made it look like you were describing an imaginary boss. “I work for someone I can trust when...”

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

#135

Post by tremon »

scarface74 wrote: post #38
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.

It’s even more demotivating to not have a job to come to because you aren’t delivering value to your paying customers or you didn’t have a product that convinced your investors to keep pumping money into your business. There has to be a balance. The company can’t exist without both customers (either internal or external) and employees.

Speaking purely for myself here, but no, that's not as demotivating. Having to deliver crapware is demotivating, because you know that either the customer or yourself will get burnt by entirely preventable problems. Having to chase a new job is stressful, but not as demotivating since you know (or, have faith that) the stress is temporary.

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

#136

Post by youdontknowtho »

We were on a business trip. We had a drink one night and the subject of a coworker who had a spouse die. He said "we have to protect him" casually as we were talking about some of the upcoming projects. It was just assumed that we would make sure that this guy got whatever he needed.

Of course, you are probably saying...that's just the right thing to do...it's also the law to some extent...you must not work in America. I've seen people treated very poorly in a variety of situations. So had this guy and he was going to make sure that it didn't happen to my co-worker.

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

#137

Post by mathattack »

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…

It’s very context sensitive. QA usually needs someone strong to protect the team, as they’re the ones who most frequently get asked to make up for cost/scope/schedule/quality problems that others caused.

In other casss, being too standoffish causes local optimization (“look how efficient my team is!”) at the expense of the broader org.

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

#138

Post by dexterdog »

messit wrote: post #35
zorked wrote: post #28

At a previous company, I joined a team that had to deliver something a year before I joined. All previous teams assembled to deliver that had failed and had been fired. That the company didn't have that feature was deeply embarrassing, the competition mentioned having it in the first line of their marketing materials. The most influential engineers on the team didn't give a damn about deadlines and thought that being…

> 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…

She was dealing with bad children so they had to be treated like children.

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

#139

Post by dominotw »

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…

> She very effectively protected us from HR and whoever else wasn't on the team so we could focus on our work.

on contrary, bad managers use this excuse that they are protecting you from politics to hold on to important pieces of information from the team so only he has the complete picture of what is going on. I am highly suspicious of managers who keep saying this.

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

#140

Post by scarface74 »

JepZ wrote: post #116
diminoten wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did they get a bonus or just a pat on the back?
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