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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?

#31

Post by Mc91 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #20

Task 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…

At my company we had a good manager. Whenever we saw a problem in the systems, even a minor, low priority one, we opened a JIRA ticket for it. After all, JIRA was there for the convenience of the workers in the IT department.

Then a new manager came in. When he discovered we had JIRA, he told us he was going to use JIRA to evaluate us on how fast we fixed tickets and how many tickets we fixed.

We in the IT department maintained JIRA. That night I completely purged virtually all tickets of tasks that could not be done quickly. I put those tasks in a directory on my laptop only visible to me. From that time on, we only opened tickets for simple tasks we could do quickly. As volume counted as well, we would open multiple tickets for a multi-step task, whereas before we would have opened only one.

Eventually there were some office politics between divisions at the company and I and others were laid off (which I knew was coming, but decided to stay for the severance). When I left, the files containing all the the system flaws I had noted were erased.

The new manager was laid off shortly after I was.

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

#32

Post by super-serial »

Not doing their job - as in not getting requirements and understanding workflows of clients, then having me directly answer calls from these clients.

I'm not particularly fond of the phrase "no one told me it needs to work like that" but I must have said that at least 10 times this year.

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

#33

Post by lobotryas »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
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…

Interesting to compare your response with the current top comment, particularly the 4th and 5th bulletpoints: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033386 Seems like management is damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they reward high performers in proportion to the value they generate, they kill the culture of the company. If they reward everyone fairly & equally, then all the high performers quit. Full em…

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.

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

#34

Post by thaumasiotes »

eberkund wrote: post #23
arcanus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results. I've always heard this is the Netflix model. > difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. I like your thought process but do you really believe this is possible? There are few fields whe…

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 gold medal sprinter.

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

#35

Post by stickfigure »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #17
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…

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 information is not unknowable. Also, we already have a pay grade of "10 bucks": Some people get fired.

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

#37

Post by nostrademons »

lobotryas wrote: post #33
nostrademons wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting to compare your response with the current top comment, particularly the 4th and 5th bulletpoints: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033386 Seems like management is damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they reward high performers in proportion to the value they generate, they kill the culture of the company. If they reward everyone fairly & equally, then all the high performers quit. Full em…

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 they are all solid performers and then they have to confront the fact that management believes one of them is 10x better, you've got a recipe for a toxic culture.

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

#38

Post by tonyarkles »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
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…

Why is overall revenue a better metric than unit profit? Wouldn't overall profit be the first-order effect?

If your product sucks, you'll sell fewer units (potentially).

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

#39

Post by jdavis703 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
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…

Why is overall revenue a better metric than unit profit? Wouldn't overall profit be the first-order effect?

If you're selling non-commodity goods your brand is an important reason why consumers purchase from you. If they realize product quality is going down they'll churn. You might have a short run of good profits, but eventually consumers will start purchasing something better, thus hurting your your total numbers.

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

#40

Post by TFortunato »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
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…

Why is overall revenue a better metric than unit profit? Wouldn't overall profit be the first-order effect?

In this example, it states that because of this enployees were rewarded for reducing the unit cost of the product, which meant cutting in to quality. This led to sales declining because custoners were less interested in ab inferior product.

If management had looked less at the "how much profit can we squeeze out of 1 gallon" angle, and more "how much profit can we make overall", they might have made different decisions, such as preserving the quality of the product, they may have done better overall.

Unit profit is one factor in overall profit / revenue, but # of units solds is equally as important...it's a balancing act.

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