Reinventing the wheel when new management come in, i.e. don't check their ego at the door. The new management think they have to make their mark/impact/whatever in the products/processes by throwing out the old's. I've seen new VP/CTO came in, canceled a release pending product, and promised to rebuild the product quickly with his oversight. As with any rewrite, the project dragged on and on. The product ended up delayed for a year and half. The company bellied up shortly after.
Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
41–50 of 396 posts
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#42Stressing and emphasizing employees to give trust to a company but not giving any in return.
Loyalty and "Do it for the team" sentiments are commonly paraded, but if you hide company performance and important developments, you not only have employees making decisions without context, but also sow seeds of distrust and signal you don't see your workers as capable minded adults.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#43There are some very common ones; * Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new). * Rewarding productivity over quality. * Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to…
Why is overall revenue a better metric than unit profit? Wouldn't overall profit be the first-order effect?
Having 100M revenue with 10% profit is better than 10M revenue with 20% profit.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how that 4th and 5th bulletpoint in any way contradicts OP. Popular != productive, although it can be hard to tell this apart in real life situations.
Will management be able to explain to the rest of the employees why this person gets 10x their compensation? If not, it doesn't matter what the facts are from management's POV, it will lead to the same effect on trust & morale. Most people believe they are high performers and the work that they do for the company is valuable; if they didn't, they probably wouldn't do that work. If you have a workforce who believes th…
One thing that I've learned over the years is that evaluating your own performance and the performance of others is in itself a skill that needs to be developed. Being able to reward high performers requires them to first be identified! In absence of the specific knowledge needed to assess perf, people fall back to likeability and other biases.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#45I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this:
1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can.
1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking longer to do what's necessary.
2) believing that people don't know what you're thinking -- people see you coming a mile off.
3) thinking you can wait to fix a compensation problem until the next comp review -- everyone waits too long on these.
4) believing HR when they tell you that you can't do something that's right for your team -- what they're really saying is that you have to go up the ladder until you find someone who can force them to make an exception.
5) not properly prioritizing the personal/social stuff -- at least this is my personal failing, and why ultimately management has not stuck for me.
6) believing your technical opinion matters -- I've seen way too many VP's making technical decisions that they are too far from the work to make, trust your team!
It'd be fun to see a list of these from the non-management point of view. I'd start off with the inverse of #6 above:
1) believing your technical opinion matters -- the business is what ultimately matters.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#46Task mastering. Ie a Focus on pumping through the JIRA tickets or equivalent as fast as possible. Meaning no time for respite or learning. Meaning lots of shitty metrics and pressure / humiliation if you don't meet them. I get a weekly report of tasks that took more than 25% over estimate within the team and names, for example. It doesn't help that anyone else can log time against my JIRA either. A three person meeti…
I got burned on this once. I was the most senior engineer on a team and spent a lot of time coaching and reviewing the work of college hires, which meant I didn't output as many raw task points as everyone else. I was called out on it so I stopped helping as much. My task completion shot up, but team productivity and quality went down. Overall a negative.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how that 4th and 5th bulletpoint in any way contradicts OP. Popular != productive, although it can be hard to tell this apart in real life situations.
Will management be able to explain to the rest of the employees why this person gets 10x their compensation? If not, it doesn't matter what the facts are from management's POV, it will lead to the same effect on trust & morale. Most people believe they are high performers and the work that they do for the company is valuable; if they didn't, they probably wouldn't do that work. If you have a workforce who believes th…
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Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#48I'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…
Maybe but that makes sense when this "smart person" leaves then no-one knows how to keep their stuff going and the system is likely to crash and burn taking the manager with it. If you have a 4 person team you can handle people coming in and out over time, using best ideas from the team.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean even in sports? What metric are you using to compare on athlete to another? Obviously one golfer won't be able to hit the ball 10x as far or sink the ball in 10x fewer strokes than another. Obviously a gold medal sprinter won't run 10x as fast as the an amateur. But they very well may be better than 10x as many others and that small difference in speed is what makes the difference between winning and…
> Obviously one golfer won't be able to hit the ball 10x as far or sink the ball in 10x fewer strokes than another. Obviously a gold medal sprinter won't run 10x as fast as the an amateur. What's obvious about that? I can pretty well guarantee the existence of golfers who need 10x the strokes of professional golfers. I can definitely guarantee the existence of people who can't manage 10% of the running speed of a gol…
Usain Bolt's average speed was about 23 miles per hour[0] when he set the world record (9.58 sec/100m). Nearly everyone can "run" 2.3 mph for a quarter-lap; that's not even a brisk walking pace.
The 10x programmer idea also applies to adults working as programmers. If you were to limit the runners to an analogous population (runners, I guess, or even healthy adults), I'd definitely take that bet.
[0] His peak speed was a bit faster (~27 mph), but the point stands...
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#50There are some amazing responses here.
My number one pick is always finding the next new thing in management from a New York Times bestseller. Then sending an email on the greatness of the process to the whole team and lo-behold expecting everyone to embrace it.
2nd for me is getting stuck on project names. It seems finding a cool sounding name is somehow more necessary than how it works.
To quote an example, we were using the waterfall model for our development. Then somewhere management read about "Rapid Application Development or RAD" and we embrace it ASAP. But not before dissing that RAD was not the word they wanted because rad the word had negative connotation to it so we needed a new name.