Lessons from Mythical man-month aside, what mistakes does management keep making and what do they never seem to learn? And of course the effects on those on you and your peers?
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?
#2Promoting technical people with no management experience into management jobs, without providing them with any training or guidance. (Happened to me.) Writing code and managing people require very different sets of skills, and just because you're good at the former doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any good at the latter (or that you'll enjoy doing it).
(Similar problems can happen when a bunch of people with no management skills decide to found a company and start hiring people.)
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#31. Arrogance (only do what I say, don't think for yourself)
2. Fear (you're getting a lot of attention and praise, this somehow makes me look bad)
3. Short sightedness (that's a good idea, we can't use it here, now go do something productive)
A good manager loves his team and opens doors, prevents road blocks, and facilitates approvals for them. He is a steward of their success. He removes fear of failure. He is not self absorbed but finds joy in the team. So, without these attributes, the negative effects are too sad to write about.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#4Overly 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.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#5Promoting technical people with no management experience into management jobs, without providing them with any training or guidance. (Happened to me.) Writing code and managing people require very different sets of skills, and just because you're good at the former doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any good at the latter (or that you'll enjoy doing it). (Similar problems can happen when a bunch of people with no man…
What kind of things did you do to self educate, given you lacked formal training or guidance?
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#6- Trying to "create a buzz" around the office, asking for a "sense of urgency," and other things that result in an illusion of productivity.
- Focusing on fixing problems, rather than preventing problems
- Acting as yes-men to bad upper-management strategy, thereby creating a layer of indirection between the people who think it's a good plan vs the engineers who can explain why it's not quite that easy
- Trying to use software tools (e.g. Jira's burndown charts) to quantitatively/"objectively" measure engineers
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#7I'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.
Until "management" realizes this, the only way that a developer on the upper end of the productivity scale can capture their value is to found their own company. I sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#8I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#9Not firing people fast enough when:
* the employee isn’t good and everyone knows it. Manager lacks discipline or has a low talent bar.
* the person is very talented, but a jerk. Manager is worried it will hurt productivity to get rid of them.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#10There 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 lower overall sales and that leads to lower overall revenue. Had they managed to overall revenue they might have caught the decline sooner.
* Creating environments where nobody trusts anyone else and so no one is honest. Leads to people not understanding the reality of a situation until the situation forces the disconnect into the mainstream.
* Rewarding popular popular employees differently than rank and file. Or generally unevenly enforcing or applying standards.
* Tolerating misbehavior out of fear of losing an employee. If I could fire anyone in management who said, "Yeah but if we call them on it they will quit! See what a bind that puts us in?" I believe the world would be a better place.
There are lots of things, that is why there are so many management books :-)