Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#311

Post by zoner » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:52 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #309

Boothroid wrote: post #131

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs * Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products * Insistence that all devs time must be billable an…

[deleted]

Not really. It's about changing requirements. You gather requirements along the way, for example: the volume slider should increase/decrease volume. Then you choose the programming language and framework to implement this, while communicating this with the management. Micromanagement will tell you which programming language / framework to use without knowing anything about it.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#312

Post by zoner » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

This question just hit me in time. One of my project I was working on for the last month was dismissed as a new marketing manager came in. It's the company website to show up as a portfolio, with all nice moving parts and responsive design. I even made it HiDPI with two different resolution images of everything. It was almost done.

The new manager will do it in Wordpress. After hearing about it, I reported a sick leave. I'm now sitting home, browsing Hacker News. I might need more than the weekend to recover :)

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#313

Post by frubar » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

Steve44 wrote: post #113

stickfigure wrote: post #7

I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…

You're still not guaranteed that by spending $400 per hour on one person with excellent credentials you will have a better outcome than with 4 x $100. There is also a balance of risk especially on longer term projects, with the 1 x $400 person there will probably be less technical oversight and also if they get ill or leave then the project is is serious trouble. I'm not advocating employing talentless monkeys, they…

If you spend a lot of money you're not guaranteed to get the best. But if you go cheap you are nearly guaranteed to get a bad developer/product/whatever.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#314

Post by rsj_hn » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

There is people/resource management and there is also technical management, and most companies really struggle with the latter.

What I mean by technical management is the following:

* onboarding new developers: showing them how to get the dev environment going, how to debug, how to use testing infrastructure, configuration management

* propagating information about design rules: documenting and evangelization of contracts between different different pieces of code, and all the various rules -- what must be authenticated, what must be logged, how to consistently check for access rights, which common module/library to use for what, etc.

* enforcing software development lifecycle: making sure there are design reviews/sign off/etc

It seems that managers offload a lot of the above to senior roles who rely on force of personality and personal effort to get this done, which creates a lot of randomness and also stress. Devs often don't learn these things except by creating breakage and then relying on experience or institutional knowledge.

It's very strange that on the one hand when it comes to corporate policies such as vacation time and provisioning productivity software, or even using the bug tracking system, there are handbooks, mandatory trainings, lots of online resources, etc. But when it comes to the technical rules such as which library to use, we pass to a medieval guild system of ad hoc 1 on 1 mentoring over Slack.

But perhaps I've just been working in the wrong companies.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#315

Post by ghostly_s » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

FooHentai wrote: post #135

Boothroid wrote: post #131

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs * Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products * Insistence that all devs time must be billable an…

>Insistence that all devs time must be billable That one can hit all areas of ICT real bad when the company is a managed service provider, leading to a 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom' where the company provides great outsource ICT services offering to its clients, but runs an absolute shitshow for it's own systems because they're chronically under resourced (you can't bill it, so don't spend time on it). That has…

I think I get what you mean by 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom', but I've never heard either colloquialism before and can't find anything on Google, either. What's the origin of these terms?

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#316

Post by Boothroid » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

technofire wrote: post #304

Boothroid wrote: post #131

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs * Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products * Insistence that all devs time must be billable an…

> All of this inevitably leads to a bunch of pissed off devs. The ones that are happy to eat it become the golden boys and get promotions. The question asks about behavior that management repeatedly makes. If management repeatedly makes these mistakes, then the mistakes should become expectations, so one should simply accept them and understand that they are part of the game being played. If they are expected behavio…

That sounds a bit like you are suggesting excusing bad behaviour, or blaming the victim. If someone warns you they are going to hit you before they hit you, does it make it hurt any less?

Also when eating it means 60 hour weeks to make up for terrible managers (all the while collecting their substantial pay packets) I'm quite happy to walk out the door and let then find someone else to be abused.

Passed a telephone interview today, got a f2f next week, hopefully onwards and upwards soon.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#317

Post by frubar » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

tmat wrote: post #206

stickfigure wrote: post #7

I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…

I ran into this problem.. I felt like I was worth more than the best offers I was getting. I continued to get job offers, but I couldn't get one for more than 100k remotely or in my area(Burlington, VT). I've got many many years experience, can solve any challenge, and work at twice the rate of most of the developers I have worked w/ in the tech stacks I focus on(ruby, elixir, reactjs/javascript/ember/angular etc)..…

>So I decided to go at it on my own and charge a rate I felt I was worth. Best career decision I've made so far.

I think this, above all else, is the key to the frustration and ever decreasing salaries we're seeing. The market has spoken: employees just aren't worth that much. If you want to capture more of the value you create you'll need to go into business for yourself. It's risky, but sitting a desk in a huge office watching rates go down and down will probably turn out to be more risky in the end if you can't retire before it gets too bad.

Having said all that, would you mind expanding on exactly what you did?

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#318

Post by nashashmi » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

Boothroid wrote: post #131

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs * Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products * Insistence that all devs time must be billable an…

To be fair, these managing behaviors happen in other areas like civil engineering consultancies. In fact, it happens so frequently, I really don't know what a "correct" managing behavior looks like.

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#319

Post by auserperson » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

Boothroid wrote: post #223

FractalNerve wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Give no feedback unless things go wrong > * Treat your highly educated, intelligent and motivated devs like children by misusing agile in order to micromanage them These two points made me cry. I suffered my very first burn-out due to that and although having a higher degree in computer science and love towards programming this really made me feel like a piece of shit. I have the feeling that it's really hopeless…

Oh dear, I'm really sorry for touching a nerve! I think management often have zero insight into how much many devs care about their work. Not all - I'm sure there are plenty with a thick skin and/or that care little beyond getting paid - but some of us are only capable of delivering our best given the right conditions. Lack of feedback is one of the most serious red flags I would say, and shows either the company is…

That is very true for me. A lot of managers don't understand my motivation at work, they don't understand that what actually keeps me going is the love for technology and for software engineering. That is being able to learn and develop interesting things, to research, to create, that motivates me. I can't bother on corporate politics. I don't care on going up the corporate ladder (I'm already in a top engineering position, I don't want to stop doing coding to become some sort of manager/architect/VP/etc).

Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?

#320

Post by j45 » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

Management who incorrectly see IT as a cost center cause a lot of problems.

Every business is becoming or is a software business in that software of one kind or another is increasingly tracking the details, data and processes of the business.

Failing to realize this shift, technology is not utilized as an enhancement and leverage tool for competitive advantage, instead their competitors do.

Business technologists who both understand business and can solve problems with tech will likely become a new class of business professionals like accountants.

That, or technologists will inherit the jobs of hr, accountants because the existing folks are not able to keep up and innovate constantly.