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

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

#51

Post by nlawalker »

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'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.

In many organizations, quadrupling the number of people that report to you is worth doubling the delivery time, hands down. Number of reports is an easy measure of influence.

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

#52

Post by patmcguire »

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…

That's harder to prove, what I definitely see is roles staying unfilled open because the extra $10k a year to snag somebody faster is an obvious cost but six months of lost productivity isn't.

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

#53

Post by quickthrower2 »

stickfigure wrote: post #35
quickthrower2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a way to measure productivity. In a team environment that is not so easy. Is it the code, the communication, the business sense, building a good team? Who made that million? And who only made 10 bucks?

This is a fair objection, and probably a rational basis for at least some pay overegalitarianism. If management can't figure out who the star performers are, there's not much point in differentiating the reward. On the other hand, this seems like a fundamental management failure. The identity of the star performers has not been a mystery to the actual engineers working on every team I've ever been a part of. The info…

What developers think is productive and what is productive may be 2 different things.

Your idea works in teams where everyone at all levels is switched on and tuned in.

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

#54

Post by jcrben »

mbesto wrote: post #8

I believe that nearly all mistakes that management make are largely due to empathy. I think this is effectively why we've seen so many large, uber successful, companies being started by people with comp sci/software backgrounds. Worth noting - conversely, it doesn't mean that all comp sci/software people have the ability/capability to lead technology teams.

Too much or too little empathy?

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

cbanek wrote: post #4

Overly optimistic schedules. Even with a known gelled team, being constantly overscheduled is a nightmare. You cut corners, and are always stressed and tired. Other teams that believe the optimistic schedules may become angry or blocked on you. Over time this just leads to burnout, but since nobody seems to stay anywhere for very long, nobody seems to care.

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by wtvanhest »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

There 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…

On the Nestle example:

One of the biggest constraints in a business is employee focus. Theoretically, you want to maximize future free cash flow. Unfortunately, there are many inputs: rev growth, solid roi on capex, lowering non-essential costs, employee retention, unit costs, brand etc.

Management teams have to distill the message about what they want in a way that many employees can get behind. Nestle was too focused on unit costs, and should have likely added one more constraint like rev growth, but if they added too many, employees as a group would lose focus.

Most businesses have 2-3 essential business drivers. 1 is never enough, 4+ is likely too many to focus on.

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

#57

Post by starky »

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…

How do you propose filtering the candidates? The only way to know for sure how they perform is to actually hire them and see how they perform after some amount of time. Since you will be firing a majority of people this causes a culture of fear. Interviews are far too unreliable for filtering candidates like you are proposing.

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

#58

Post by gkop »

rad_dev wrote: post #50

There 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…

What negative connotation?

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

#60

Post by thaumasiotes »

ww520 wrote: post #43
thaumasiotes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, as you can tell by the fact that your overall profit in the first scenario is $10M while in the second it is $2M. How is that an argument against overall profit?
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