(Direct Managers for many years). I’d have to pick between mediocre, bad, dishonest and useless. So I would go with mediocre as my best pick because his intentions weren’t bad. It’s just that he wasn’t performing well.
Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
241–248 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#242She fought for us, when there was an issue she cared and sought to understand, she understood that family comes first before work (and lived the example), she protected us from the politics of the large organization, and she did whatever she could to obtain the resources we needed to do the job (a nearly impossible task at that company.) She had a 100-200 people on her staff yet she always made time to meet with whoe…
Thank you for this. Shows how toxic large organizations can get and how much (but also how little) influence a manager can have.
Corporations are by design inhumane but humans can change this, often resulting in better performance.
So, being inhumane is lazy and bad roi :)
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#2433 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…
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."
Were you getting a lot of new senior hires? That sounds hard to achieve. I agree those people would probably be great, but also really really hard to find.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want a better home than other people, take a job and buy a better one. If you want better food, take a job and buy better food. If your employer at that job pressures you to do something that makes you uncomfortable or is immoral, you then don't need to do the calculus of "Do I compromise my morals, or get kicked out on the street with no health insurance?" because, as a floor, you have the community-provided…
Ok, that sounds reasonable. But how do you find this model? Do you not suspect that a lot of people would be happy to tell their boss to stick it as the state will take care of them - then who is funding the cost of all the state programs?
In general, I don't think that most people will choose to live "on the dole" forever. As you've identified, we are driven by status, and having to move into state housing will probably be looked down on, and seen as a "failure" similar to how moving back in with one's parents is seen in middle class families. People will want to work because, whatever the floor is, they will want more, and more importantly they will want not to be seen as failures.
In fact the example of moving back in with one's parents is rather instructive in that middle class young people essentially already have a half-assed privatized version of this reality: their social safety net is their parents and other relatives. Decommodifying healthcare, housing, and food would have essentially extend the same kind of safety net to people who aren't lucky enough to have well-off relatives who can help them in such times.
At the very least, we should decommodify healthcare. One can make theoretical arguments that doing so for housing and food would have huge, negative knock-on effects because the last major experiment with this model were the Soviet-modeled socialist states, which obviously were a disaster. That isn't the case with healthcare. Plenty of other countries have decommodified healthcare, and nothing bad happened: nobody is meaningfully disinclined to work, health outcomes are generally better, and overall healthcare costs are generally lower.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
fairly common. team builds a product that other teams use, so you do a demo. it's obviously better for the engineer to demo their own product. not only does it feel like you have control over your own product but it also gives a face to the project.
it's obviously better for the engineer to demo their own product Again.. rarely does an engineer create a product in a vacuum. Usually a few disciplines contribute to the project, and a manager can be absolutely instrumental. And of the various creators of a product should be candidates to demo a thing. The right person certainly depends on the nature of the product, the team dynamics, the audience of the demo, etc.…
> Again.. rarely does an engineer create a product in a vacuum.
That may be rare, but that’s what people on our team did... multiple times. For my own part, for each of several products, I wrote the project charter, interviewed potential users and stakeholders, created UI comps, built the app (database, server side, front-end), managed the server VMs and infrastructure, negotiated and built 3rd party integrations (when necessary), wrote the documentation, gave the demos, supported users, and released updates for years afterwards based on feedback.
It wasn’t a culture thing as much as a necessity. We were a team of 10 with 3-5 projects in development at all times, and nearly 30 in maintenance/support after several years. And that on top of normal QA activities.
In retrospect, I think Margaret intentionally had us handling such breadth individually in order to set us up for success as much as possible (several of us she had hired straight out of college). I didn’t realize it at the time, but the QA team didn’t have to do all that stuff to begin with. The demand for it only began to really increase after we had released several projects that had a significant positive impact on the department.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#246Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#247My favorite manager was a new store manager at a box store I worked at while finishing my degree. I generally haven't had great tech managers. This store manager was great because he was an outstanding team player who knew the rules of the game and who identified and trusted the strengths of his employees. He didn't micromanage. Sometimes he let you fail.
As a team player, he was out on the floor during the busiest retail times. The best floor associates in retail work well with each other as team players and pass tasks around, but you have to know which other members are competent and reliable. This guy was 100% both and let you know he was another team member and available for anything; if you were running to get a forklift, you could send him to an aisle where you saw a customer looking lost, have him haul goods to checkout, grab him to help load a car.
He trusted his employees and identified and rewarded excellence. I was a customer service queen at my store, and he saw that and told me, then gave me an award for it, and a raise based on it. One time when we had an unusual customer mess-up and a cashier called me to fix it (because she knew I would do everything to make it work), I pulled a team together and got it done, but he gave just me, not my team, an award for it, when I really thought it was team work. Later I realized he was right, that the task had first required a team builder (and, yeah, I got my teammates awards, also). The few times I called him as a manager to resolve a customer issue, he just stepped in and took over, never requiring me to explain my side (which didn't matter, the customer wanted something I couldn't provide, so I got them a manager), because he not only let you do your job, he understood what his was. He paid attention. He knew who was contributing and how much.
Mostly though, if you were good at your job, he knew it, he acknowledged it through opportunities, awards, and raises in addition to telling you, and he let you do it, while he did his job.
Oh, eventually some startup snagged him.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#248My favorite manager was a commander when I was in the military. He was easily the best leader I've ever worked for, hands down.
The man was sharp as hell - he always seemed a step ahead of everyone around him. He'd sit us down and explain his strategies in relatively good detail so we knew what was going on and why we were doing things in a certain way. He welcomed criticism and was generous with the compliments. He ensured everyone got to leave when the day was done, and wasn't afraid to say "No, that's stupid. I'll take the heat until this is fixed." Zero micromanagement, tons of trust, and he was nice, too.
If managers on average were half as loyal to their workers as he is, the world would be a much better place.