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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?

#141
First thing to note is that it took me a decade or more to understand what makes (for me) a "good manager". Here's my current list:

1. Removed obstacles for me doing a good job - that could be handling politics, ensuring requirements are readily available, logistics of equipment, working space, whatever it may be. Turns out, a good manager handles a trillion seemingly trivial things that add up to being crucial to smooth team operation, but may never be visible to actual team members; kind of like nobody pays attention to Infra until it breaks :S

2. Made themselves available: I now understand the value, and difficulty, in answering "Yes" to every "Hey, got 2 minutes?".

3. Mentorship: it may be advice particular to current skillset, but typically it's more thoughts and frameworks on things I'm not familiar with or above my paygrade: how to work with clients or management, how to approach one's career, etc.

Somewhere between Time & Mentorship, a personal example: in 2011, we had a major document deliverable; every evening, for weeks running, my lead would spend an hour or more going over the documents I produced, making horribly annoying corrections over and over and over again. It took me a long time to realize a) the kind of time commitment this presented on their part - it would be so much easier for them to fix the document themselves than to patiently guide me, but would not have advanced me; and b) how much it made me pay attention to detail, readability, assumptions and scope ever since.

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

#142
post #34
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…

Really interesting story. Was she a "good" manager, or just the "right" manager for that dysfunctional team?

This is a really great question. The child argues that a good manager adapts to whatever situation is needed. It would be interesting to know if this manager took this "win" and managed all future teams this way as well, even ones that are highly functional or working on more experimental code/projects.

The best manager is the one whose only focus is for each of the team members and the team collectively to be successful. In some companies or teams that may be removing distractions or introducing accountability or getting rid of a bad apple or .... The problem is that we as humans generalize and the first success a new manager has is seen as the best way forever no matter what because it works. That way lays madness.

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

#143
post #116

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…

If you demand something from someone, often they'll give it grudgingly, and only as much as they're obligated to give. If you let that same person decide how much to give, especially when they also enjoy their work, often they'll gladly give you much more.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of us want our code to see the light of day. If given an actual problem to solve, we aren't going to toil away at tiny details forever. We want to see it run! A good manager knows this and will give you room to find that balance yourself, unless you have demonstrated you need help with that.

I read an interesting twist on perfectionism: try to the "perfect compromise". Quality has multiple dimensions and you can't optimize all of them perfectly. Instead, choose which dimension is actually most important for the current problem and prioritize it.

A few years ago I invented[1] the term 'acceptimal', meaning 'acceptably optimal'. It's not the absolute best solution, but it's a pragmatic compromise between time, cost, performance, and simplicity which performs acceptably close to optimally.

[1] Or at least I've never heard anyone else use it who didn't get it from me.

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

#145

First thing to note is that it took me a decade or more to understand what makes (for me) a "good manager". Here's my current list: 1. Removed obstacles for me doing a good job - that could be handling politics, ensuring requirements are readily available, logistics of equipment, working space, whatever it may be. Turns out, a good manager handles a trillion seemingly trivial things that add up to being crucial to sm…

This is a good list and I'd only distill it with the following: The best manager is the one whose only focus is for each of the team members and the team collectively to be successful.

In some companies or teams that may be removing distractions or introducing accountability or getting rid of a bad apple or providing vision, etc. If the team is not successful (over time), it is your fault. The sad part is that most managers are more worried over self preservation and being "important" than worrying about success. Ironically, being focused on team success would make them even more indispensable.

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

#146
He embodied the "Leader as Servant" mentality. He wasn't technical but was the manager over 30 devs/qa/PMs. There wasn't a single request that I had that wasn't immediately validated by him (even if he couldn't necessarily "fix it" for me). He was like the penultimate "border guard", he didn't let stupid politics interfere with our work. He let us decide on technical direction AND methodology (tdd, bdd, pair programming, etc).

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

#147
post #143
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you demand something from someone, often they'll give it grudgingly, and only as much as they're obligated to give. If you let that same person decide how much to give, especially when they also enjoy their work, often they'll gladly give you much more.

It’s called “Work To Rule”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

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

#148
There are specific qualities you spot quickly after years reporting to the good, bad and mediocre. Qualities that stand out to me are: empowerment, defense and support.

Empowerment means a lot of things: not getting in your way (removing roadblocks), making sure you're content (tools and otherwise) and the most important - trust. If you don't feel like your manager trusts you, it will never work. But that road is (or should be obviously) bidirectional.

Defense is when you know your leader is on your team. Not making excuses for you but making sure you're not getting steamrolled. Good managers do this with foresight and take them on the chin when and where appropriate for team failures or misses (Extreme Ownership is a great book outlining this).

Finally support is a culmination of the other two. Knowing you can get help without undue recourse or that your leader will take over a problem distracting you from your main task and complete it with totality and not hold it over your head after the fact. Good leaders are unsung heroes and the two best I've had have also been highly charismatic on top of those other things. I don't hand out the charisma badge easily because I think people self-proclaim being charismatic far too often. But if your leader isn't a people person they can turn people away, shame them inappropriately or even worse.

A friend, who's an engineer asked me for advice the other day as he was considering moving up into a management role beyond his individual contributor slot he had been fulfilling for years. I went through these things and also said that his new role was not to be super-engineer now, but to help them get their jobs done more efficiently and take on battles he has little experience with. I think that surprised him slightly so I offered up another great book: Zapp. It's trivial, short and old. But the context is 100% relevant today and a big miss by many "managers" who think their role is something other than supporting and fostering their team.

edit: mobile removed my formatting, fixed

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

#149
In a company with a dress code of t-shirts and jeans, he wore a fine tailored 3-piece suit. We were doing interactive art history documentaries, and he was a Belgian music history phd brought in as our producer. He was a classic old world European in a 30 something body, with a careful, articulate vocal style that sounded like an actor reading a book on tape. He always explained why things were they way they were, both in the content of our documentaries and in the production process when dealing with outside agencies, licensing, other departments and so on. He's "deal" was total transparency of operations, to the degree everyone understood how everyone else's roles and duties support and enable other team members. We all became a supportive family. That guy was so good, he went on to be the CEO of Philips NV.

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

#150
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably just a pat on the back :-/ but I don't know since they were employed at a different company.

Nevertheless, my feedback towards their team lead was very positive, and that might have helped them too since they both collected a bunch of negative feedback while working with some of my colleagues.

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