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

Two common themes I'm seeing in all these comments, which are especially clear in this one:

1. Everybody who disagrees with my manager's statement are working in software (I was not).

2. In software, nobody can seem to agree on what exactly "quality" means.

Software is still such a young field that nobody can seem to agree on anything at all. It reminds me of other fields 100 years ago, where you could just try anything and if it seemed to work that was fine.

> 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.

In this case, I would say they'd done such a good job with managing technical debt that they knew they could say "as long as it takes" on a micro-level, and be confident that nothing would blow up on a macro-level.

This was a physical system that has annual (or semi-annual) inspections by a third party. Can you say the same about your software system?

> What I definitely don't mean is "come rock climbing bro".

Ironically, one of my best managers was someone who invited people to go climbing with them. We had some very experienced climbers and some extremely novice ones and yet they were some of the most positive and friendly evenings of my life.

A mix of self effacing attitude ("well of course I found it easy, I've been doing this 20 years more than you and I'm also nearly a foot taller!") tied in with making sure people were only competitive against themselves ("well you've done that in half the time it took last week...") and honest useful advice made it a great experience.

I think there's also something to be said for working with someone who you literally trust your life to once a week... Never used the word "bro" though - that might be where we were going wrong ;)

- Taught me a lot.

- Treated me like an equal.

- Offered me a ton of new opportunities which resulted in lots of salary bumps.

My best manager allowed me to be both right and wrong. He'd give honest feedback about what he thought would or wouldn't work and why, but if I disagreed I was free to prove him wrong or right. I can't remember him ever forbidding me from taking an a specific approach, and I can only remember one time going against his advice and being wrong (mostly because I learned from that experience, not because I think I was usually right).

In contrast...

I worked as a computer operator and most of the time was "down time" waiting for jobs to finish. We had little bits of busy work that none of the operators did, so I did cleaned out the backlog and kept us up-to-date. Documentation hadn't been touched since it was originally written years before I started. I rewrote it, updating it and fixing errors.

Then I tackled rewriting the Microsoft Access application we used to schedule jobs. This was only something we used internally so we knew what jobs needed to run on what nights. It wasn't up-to-date, so we had to manually change the schedule every night, and it wasn't user-friendly, so our FNGs always made errors that required programmers or DBAs being called at 3:00 am to clean up mangled data. I rewrote it to model our current processes and even added some color coding and included recommendations to help FNGs.

My boss "caught" me doing this and told me I had better things to do with my time. I was young, so I asked him, un-politically, "Like what?" He told me to rewrite the documentation. I told him I had done that months ago. He opened it up, looked at one random piece of it, and found a flaw that wasn't really a flaw. I probably rolled my eyes, wrote a macro to make the change to all the pieces of documentation, and then started working on the Access application again.

He "caught" me again, and startled me by basically sneaking up behind me while I was working on it. He said, "I thought I told you not to work on that." I was like, "No, you told me to rewrite the documentation, which I did." Then he told me he didn't want me working on that at all because it was a 'security issue'. Two things about that. The first is that I was told when I was hired that this was a great place to move up the ranks, that other operators had moved into programming after showing what they could do.

The second is that I had access to the entire network, compilers, home directories, everyone's email, all company sales data, payroll, server room, you name it. I ran the backups. I was often alone in the building for periods of over 12 hours. There was all kinds of equipment and merchandise I could have easily stolen, etc.

Now that I'm closer to his age and have more experience, I just see that he was grossly incompetent, in way over his depth, and just trying to coast until his retirement and any changes I made felt threatening to him, despite all the actual improvements I made.

My favorite managers are the ones that made me better at what I do. The ones that I was able to learn incredible amounts from. I joined the company to learn from them, I delivered on what I promised (solving the problem their hired me to solve / filling their need), and they delivered on helping me build my skill set and career.

That's the most important thing for me personally. If they can also be friendly and we have a friendly working relationship (can joke around and grab a beer once in a while) that is also great. However that's absolutely secondary to the first point. In theory I'd be fine with having a boss who I don't really click with personally at all but am still able to learn from.