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Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#171

Post by sunir »

johnchristopher wrote: post #119
takeda wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that describes exactly my last job (which wasn't bad, I liked my coworkers, but my last manager made it a horrible experience), worst job I had so far. He wasn't bad as an engineer, but he had this crazy OCD to a point that even keys in YAML file should be ordered alphabetically. He had his vision how things should be, and how he would implement them. First, he was not happy that my solutions were done differentl…

> He wasn't bad as an engineer, but he had this crazy OCD to a point that even keys in YAML file should be ordered alphabetically. Eh, I am guilty of that (for myself, I don't run around other people's code). I don't know if it's OCD but I clearly remember the moment I decided to order keys (in yaml, json, etc.): after a debugging session where I lost time because I was scanning whole lists with my eyes, looking for…

Girly?

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#172

Post by nine_zeros »

brazzy wrote: post #134
irrational wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me this past week. I built exactly what the spec said. They came back and said it all looks good, except we expected this to be that. Um, nothing about that was in the spec, nor was it ever mentioned verbally in a meeting. Making the change from this to that will require everything to be redone since it requires fundamental changes. I would have built it differently had it been communicated to me fro…

A key skill of a senior developer is a sixth sense for this kind of unspoken requirements, and asking questions to flush them out. Not always possible, of course.

> A key skill of a senior developer is a sixth sense for this kind of unspoken requirements, and asking questions to flush them out. Not always possible, of course.

While true, a key requirement for even senior developers to function well is good management or a good team lead.

If effective management doesn't exist, the senior engineer should be made manager/team lead since he's doing that work anyway.

On the other hand, if management is micromanaging, then the responsibility of clarification is on the micromanagers.

Management of knowledge workers is a hard job. Most managers are incapable of understanding their reports and understanding their OWN standing among their reports.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#173

Post by DoreenMichele »

throwaway78594 wrote: post #76

(Throwaway account.) The company I own got hacked and our database was stolen, containing basic user and company data for 100,000s of users as well as some partial card data. From the moment I discovered the breach (browsing logs after an unexplained brief outage), for the next 3-6 months, my life did not belong to me, but to insurers, forensic investigators, regulators, the police, credit card companies, press/media…

I'm still not over the incident, and have regular therapy (and regular nightmares)

When you've been dream deprived for any reason -- lack of sleep, medication, drug use, alcohol -- and you resume sleeping more/better, you will have intense, vivid dreams and these often get interpreted as nightmares. This can happen for really prosaic reasons like you quit smoking or you cut back on how much coffee you drink.

If you know about that phenomenon, it can be easier to see them as simply very vivid dreams and treat them kind of like a roller coaster ride. Some people like roller coasters and pay good money for intense experiences of that sort.

The rest will definitely take time and effort to sort. But I'm hoping a little information here will make things slightly more bearable in the short term because if you were working 18 hour days and likely sucking down coffee to help you cope, that phenomenon of very vivid dreams is almost certainly part of what you are going through.

Yes, those dreams may well be focused on recent stressors. But the intensity per se may mostly mean "I'm finally getting more than five hours of sleep a night again." and/or "I've cut down on the coffee habit now that the drama is mostly wrapped up."

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#174

Post by cutemonster »

teddyh wrote: post #159
lostcolony wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was the correct response. If anything, you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head. He isn't looking to work with you or the team, he's actively seeking to undermine you; at that point his presence is a negative, not a positive.

> you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head Is escalating an issue a fireable offense?

In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him.

I wonder how it'd been to be a manager, if he couldn't be fired, and he continued contacting the CEO etc saying you (GGP, whirlingdervish the throwaway) weren't any good at your job.

I guess eventually I'd quit (if I was in GGPs position and couldn't do much about it), and he'd become the manager in my place, if the plan hadn't been to hire another one.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#175

Post by darkerside »

Bootvis wrote: post #109
xxxtentachyon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider first-level details? It’d be super put off if my boss asked me if I had a fever when I emailed in sick.

“Nothing to serious I hope? Can I be of any help?” works for me as an employee.

This is it. Someone not bothering to ask this is actually a bit rude. IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#176

Post by darkerside »

psds2 wrote: post #143
darkerside wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the first point, but I disagree that is always going to be possible or the correct path. If you blindly trust every employee, you will eventually end up hurting the company, the employee, and yourself. Second point, sure. That's the ideal. But it's not always going to happen, and you need to be able to deal with that situation to be a well rounded manager and leader. IMO.

I didn't see any discussion of blind trust. The first point was about focusing on looking at the trust and figuring out how it could be built up.

And I'm saying there are points where it doesn't make sense too do that. I believe that's the most effective path 90% of the time, but you are not a complete manager if you can't deal with the 10% edge cases effectively.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#177

Post by darkerside »

arendtio wrote: post #98
darkerside wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who suffers from the same neuroses, I would push back on some of this a bit. If you haven't built trust with every person on your team, that doesn't make you a shitty manager. The more people you can work with and trust, the more effective you may be as a manager, but don't let a counterexample serve as proof positive that you suck. Trust is a two way street. Sometimes people underperform for other reasons…

> Sometimes people underperform for other reasons that have nothing to do with you. You can still try to find out what causes their behavior (by showing interests into their perspective) and may be able to help them and therefore the team. - If they have a different perspective, it should be helpful to listen to their perspective. - If they have a bad day, it will go away. - If they have family or health problems, yo…

I agree. If you just assume it's your own bad communication that's at fault, you deny your report the opportunity to ask for help they may need..

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#178

Post by z77dj3kl »

deedubaya wrote: post #32

I accepted a remote lead position at a startup. Interviews had gone great. I gave my notice at my soon-to-be old employer and made the transition. Along comes my first day and surprisingly, it’s mostly radio silence. CTO, my boss, doesn’t respond to my emails, doesn’t answer the phone. I call the CEO and he promises to sort it out. Fast forward a week or two later, something is obviously up. Long story short, the boa…

Hope it was those leaving that were sketchy and not those left! Sounds hard as it was already.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#179

Post by yowlingcat »

fighterpilot wrote: post #101
rubyn00bie wrote: post #44

Learning to let my go of my ego and trust... Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can't do that you shouldn't be working with them. two important notes about that: 1. If you just thought of someone you can't trust i…

> When people don't deliver what you expected, it's because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. Why is this necessarily the fault of the manager's communication skills? Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired. If you have a competent person who didn't deliver what you expected, then yes, it's probably the fault of the manager's communication. Not so for the lower-end of that compe…

> Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired.

And who does that person report to? Who made the decision to hire them in the first place?

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#180

Post by johnchristopher »

sunir wrote: post #171
johnchristopher wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wasn't bad as an engineer, but he had this crazy OCD to a point that even keys in YAML file should be ordered alphabetically. Eh, I am guilty of that (for myself, I don't run around other people's code). I don't know if it's OCD but I clearly remember the moment I decided to order keys (in yaml, json, etc.): after a debugging session where I lost time because I was scanning whole lists with my eyes, looking for…

Girly?

Yes, see https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/... and https://signalvnoise.com/archives2/beautiful_code_testfirst....

I don't have good memories from the whole thing.

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