91–100 of 186 posts
1. https://hackernoon.com/the-wrong-section-of-the-bookstore-96...
2. https://hackernoon.com/the-real-work-of-software-management-...
3. https://hackernoon.com/i-started-wondering-if-being-a-team-l...
4. https://hackernoon.com/joyful-technical-leadership-6f4fb8bd7...
It might sound odd, but you can save yourself a whole lot of trouble by learning to keep your facial expression neutral no matter what you hear or see. Communication occurs in a variety of ways and not communicating the wrong thing is important. Its hard to communicate confidence to your team when your immediate reaction to some news is a facial expressions that tells your team something else. Your a manager now, eve…
This advice is dangerous to take too literally though. I understand what you're trying to say but when it comes down to it, people work best with a manager they relate to and respect on a personal level. Being completely stoic at all times risks losing that personal, human connection with your teammates (yes, teammates, not team. To be an effective leader you must be a member of the team, not a separate entity above…
Being stoic all the time communicates quite a lot and not in a good way.
Most important thing to me, learn the difference between leadership and management. A long time ago I was mentored by some great leaders who taught me the difference, and also taught me when to manage situations or specific people. Management isn't a bad word, but applied the way it is most places it should be. My goal with teams is to inspire them to make good choices, show them the right paths and help them succeed…
I honestly don't believe flat organizations exist. They claim to be but there is always an informal heirachy. Which is trickier to navigate then just having a bit of structure. No need to go overboard but at least formalize what exists but unsaid.
As a developer, I'd love to see more managers read and try to follow the advice that makes sense for their company/position from Michael Lopp, aka Rands: http://randsinrepose.com From my perspective, it's a how-to guide for managing information workers, keeping them happy, and keeping yourself sane.
I made the jump from developer to team lead, and all the advice here is great. One thing that I wasn't prepared for and that I don't see other people mentioning (on a cursory glance at the replies) is that your reward function for job satisfaction changes, and the feedback loop length changes. By that, I mean that for me personally I derived most of my job satisfaction from solving tricky problems, fixing bugs and im…
Hopefully the parent comment here will stay near the top, it is the key thing to keep in mind, the rewards are different. As a line manager (you manage people doing the work) your #1 goal is to have your team be super good at what they do. That means developing peoples skills in their technical specialty, their ability to understand direction and act on it, their ability to communicate where they are with the rest of…
I'm a fairly new manager and I'm working really hard on how to word something like this to my devs. Do you have any advice for that?
In the past 13 years have gone from dev -> tech lead -> manager -> director -> VP/CTO at startups (50-250 people). Here are my tips: - Your job is to provide effective technical solutions to business problems via managing a team(s) of engineers, everything else is an extension to that. - Managing is nothing like coding and requires a completely different mindset and skill set. - Authority comes through respect and un…
By that I mean the advice of "find a mechanic you can trust" only is applicable to someone already familiar enough to know how to determine if a mechanic is trustworthy.
A lot of your advice is probably 100% valuable, but as someone working through a lot of these same concerns I'm stuck wondering "Well, how do I know I'm actually doing that?" It leads me to wonder if I'm actually successful at any of this or just Dunning–Kruger-ing my way through it.
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The most effective days of management seem to involve so much compromise that everyone is frustrated with me. It’s got not no real hit for solving problems. Also it is all fuzzy and human. A lot of devs that are pure engineers find management maddening. Something that helps me is writing daily. Keeping personal strike lists and logs. This is private and in a journal, NOT jira or whatever. I track my daily emotional s…
This is super interesting. Something I've started doing on a smaller level. I've already made good progress on managing my emotional state (thus productivity) and want to improve the habit. When do you schedule to write or log? Specific times in a day? If you had a template I'd assume it would include mood tracking and todo list, anything else? Thanks for sharing this.
I check things off and add new things during the day, but it’s usually not a lot of tasking unless there’s a crisis. A year in, crisis seems to be pretty rare now. No one else I work with does anything similar. It does frequently appear that I am ahead of risk by weeks before other people start clocking it. In the beginning the lists were all catch-up, and now they are sometimes about things coming in the next quarter.
I’ve been work journaling for years but I made this effort to formalize and structure at the beginning of the last year when moving into a startup with a lot of internal problems and some huge lifts. Jira was a lie and accountability was missing on all sides. I knew I wouldn’t survive without building my own consensus on truth.
I also did tutorials on architect handwriting to improve my clarity. It sounds silly, but my scribbles would vary a lot and now that structure really helps the process.
I think it’s had a net positive in all aspects of my life. It’s my favorite part of the day.
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Is this some management 101 "best practice"? My manager does this and it is annoying. Facial expressions are an important part of communication and acting like an emotionless robot does not help in times of need.
Not to be an emotionless robot, that is bad, and I really hate that too. I mean more in the communicate what you want not what you don't want. Friendly, confident, happy are good; angry, surprised, despair are not so good. You are correct that its communication, just don't say stupid things with your face.