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Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
81–90 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#82I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development by scoping, designing, and buildin…
90% of these things also applies to my best manager.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#83Hi, I work at Mobile Jazz, a 100% remote "devshop" and I think the single most important thing that I can point out from my managers (both the CTO and CEO) that make them and the company so great is their constant focus in empowering others pushing people to be proactive and self-managed.
We enjoy a level of autonomy that I've hardly ever seen anywhere else. Being a 100% remote company, this is super important as it means you have to trust that your employees are doing the right thing and the most important way to make sure they do is to actually empower them to make decisions and being responsible for them while reassuring them them you have their backs.
Besides this specific thing. There are other things that make them stand out like the fact that they reinvest most of the profit of the company back into it while splitting some of that margin amongst all of us in the form of dividends. They also invest a lot in the happiness of the team, organizing gatherings several times per year both for working together (like a "workation" month in Cape Town) but also for pure fun (like skiing in the Alps).
Hope these insights help and light up the debate!
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#84I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development by scoping, designing, and buildin…
She never demoed a project or took credit for something she didn't build herself. Like my teammates, I had to demo every product I built That sounds strange. Didn't you ever work on a product with other developers? Who demos in that case? And what would be wrong with a manager demoing a product that was built by a team he/she manages? It seems to imply that the manager should have no sense of ownership, but a good ma…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#85I think the fact that he has both domain and engineering knowledge.
We work in a university hospital and he has both medical training as well as software engineering. So we can talk to him with software specific terminology and doctors etc can do the same with medical terminology.
That, combined with having passion about what we are doing and actually caring about the team goes a long way. (Our team occasionally does things outside of work together, like going to the movies or something).
The team (and leadership of said team) are one of the best things about my job.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#86I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development by scoping, designing, and buildin…
She never demoed a project or took credit for something she didn't build herself. Like my teammates, I had to demo every product I built That sounds strange. Didn't you ever work on a product with other developers? Who demos in that case? And what would be wrong with a manager demoing a product that was built by a team he/she manages? It seems to imply that the manager should have no sense of ownership, but a good ma…
I think what the grandparent poster meant was that the manager didn’t habitually take credit whereas the developer had to learn to take credit.
Not every demo was done by the developer, but they had to learn how to present their work too. (“Had to demo every product” doesn’t mean “did every demo myself”.)
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#87Unambiguous. Approachable. Genuine desire to help. Clear objectives. Holds you accountable and offers stern feedback. Notices when you grow. Places you with people and problems that challenge you personally and technically. Completely capable of understanding complex tech. Insulates you from noise. Interrupts you when shit hits the fan. Demands answers, but gives you appropriate time to get answers. Makes risky, even costly decisions when time is of the essence and tradeoffs aren't clear.
Never blames you for something that isn't your fault.
Edit: by "placing you with people that... challenge you personally", I mean recognizing that your interpersonal skills need to grow. I'm rough around the edges and very direct, and I'm placed with an overly sensitive team member and expected to have a highly functional team, for example. What I definitely don't mean is "come rock climbing bro".
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#88I remember going to an Erlang conference where Basho was a sponsor. One of the engineering managers held a presentation on something new in Riak and had a small error in it. One of the other basho guys in the audience corrects him and his reaction to that was the following:
"That's Ryan Zezeski, he's awesome and if he says that, you should listen to him". My immediate reaction was: "wow, I want to work for this guy" (funny sidenote: because this was in DC, I thought everyone wore suits, so I showed up with a jacket. I felt like an MBA and never so out of place as an engineer in my entire life).
I have another one where I was working in a startup that was doing telco stuff. This is about 10 years ago, so I was a bit younger. I'm sitting there next to the founder, listening to my music with my huge Sennheiser headphone and the founder taps me on the shoulder. He says: "Reza, we need to talk". I look at him and say: "What do you want, you don't have a clue about this stuff anyway." He just says: "That's right, I don't, that's why I hired you". So I just shut up and listen. It's also not entirely true, he follows a lot tech, he just lacks the knowledge when it comes to the implementation.
Over the years the handful of really good leaders I saw all had the same quality. They all knew when to get out of the way and making a decision when it counts. It's what I strive to do these days. Seems to me that the best way to build trust is to let a person that's a specialist in his field take the spotlight when needed.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#89At a previous company, I joined a team that had to deliver something a year before I joined. All previous teams assembled to deliver that had failed and had been fired. That the company didn't have that feature was deeply embarrassing, the competition mentioned having it in the first line of their marketing materials. The most influential engineers on the team didn't give a damn about deadlines and thought that being…
> A few short months later we shipped. Yes, but what happened to the product?
And the team?
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#90I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development by scoping, designing, and buildin…
90% of these things also applies to my best manager.
Same for me, although the best manager thing applied only to 10% of my jobs ;)
I haven't met any manager in years that hires for potential.