Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making? • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:13 AM UTC

serpix wrote: post #64

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…

> Tolerating misbehavior out of fear of losing an employee. What if said employee pulls in 10x, 100x more revenue/value than average worker for the company? Would you fire him because the rule book say so? That said I trust in effective communication as soon as possible to manage difficult situations or misbehaviour. Often the reasons can be deeply personal or family related and people are preoccupied with stuff outs…

In my experience only (all disclaimers apply) I have never seen an employee whose productivity outweighed the damage they did to the rest of the team if their misbehavior was tolerated by management. I understand how scary it can be to have to let someone like that go, but the dozen or so cases that I had good visibility into over my career the ones where the employee was accommodated all had worse outcomes than those where the employee was let go.

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

#82

Post by mychael » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:19 AM UTC

A few patterns I've seen:

* Preaching about the virtues of a flat organizational structure, but making unilateral decisions.

* Hiring people for a particular challenging job, but have them work on menial unchallenging tasks.

* Creating multiple layers of management for a tiny team.

* Facilitating post mortems that would be better facilitated by a neutral third party.

* Using vague management speak as a deliberate strategy to never be held responsible for anything.

* Rewarding politics with promotions.

* Marginalizing experienced employees.

* Talking too much about culture.

* Trying to be the company “thought leader” instead of helping people do their best work.

* Assuming that everyone underneath you views you as a career mentor.

* Negging employees.

* New hire managers: Firing incumbent employees after you’ve only been on the job for a few weeks.

* New hire managers: Not doing 1:1s with everyone who reports to you.

* New hire managers: Create sweeping changes like re-orgs after a few weeks on the job.

* New hire managers: Doing things a certain way because it worked well at a previous company.

* New hire managers: Changing office work hours to suit your personal life.

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

#83

Post by pbourke » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:21 AM UTC

* Acting as if employees are fungible rather than taking advantage of their relative strengths

* Short-term thinking ("we don't have time to fix the tech debt, we have to get something on the board this quarter")

* Over-resourcing projects from the start, rather than letting a small number of employees germinate it and set it on the right path

* Punishing people, often indirectly, for taking risks, conducting experiments, doing quick prototypes, etc

* Frequent shifts in direction, priority or emphasis. If "everything" is important at one time or another, then nothing truly is

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

#84

Post by mychael » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:32 AM UTC

pbourke wrote: post #83

* Acting as if employees are fungible rather than taking advantage of their relative strengths * Short-term thinking ("we don't have time to fix the tech debt, we have to get something on the board this quarter") * Over-resourcing projects from the start, rather than letting a small number of employees germinate it and set it on the right path * Punishing people, often indirectly, for taking risks, conducting experim…

> Punishing people, often indirectly, for taking risks, conducting experiments, doing quick prototypes, etc

You hit the nail on the head with this one. People seem to forget that so many important parts of our daily life were once upon a time passion projects and 20% time projects (Gmail, Adsense etc)

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

#85

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:34 AM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #77

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 think the folks discussing whether or not 10x developers exist are missing the more basic point here. In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages. It's absolutely in their best interest to hire more mediocre people than fewer exceptional people because the correct incentives haven't been put in place for managers in the company. At many places, the best t…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by xaedes » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:45 AM UTC

zilchers wrote: post #26

Something I see a ton is management by crisis - 20 people from an organization could tell certain managers that there will be performance issues in 3 months if we don't pay down tech debt, but nothing actually sinks in until there is a performance crisis in 3 months.

Makes you think. Maybe you need a "villain" in your team that brings the crisis NOW, when only seeing it approaching on the horizon. Making future problems real

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

#87

Post by altitudinous » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

The same ones. For many years. I don't dwell on them because people generally don't learn from other peoples mistakes, they have to make those mistakes themselves. There have been businesses and business management for many thousands of years. If people learned from other peoples mistakes we would have business perfected by now. Instead we are constantly starting over making those same mistakes. I left the rat race many years ago to run my own business which has been successful; for variety I am looking at returning to the corporate world, I know exactly what to expect because it doesn't change.

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

#88

Post by meric » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:52 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #68

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…

whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude I think we need to put the myth of the 10x developer to bed. 99% of the time, the 10x guy is just someone who solved the same or similar problem at his or her last job and are simply exercising their experience. Sure there are outliers, but that's the same in every field - whereas in programming 50% of people believe that they're the 10x guy and th…

I think I'm 10x in some tasks and 0.1x in others, not sure about everyone else...

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

#89

Post by tropshop » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:56 AM UTC

eksemplar wrote: post #65

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…

There is an inherent safety in having four average employee write something rather than using your unicorn. It's safe because three of them will still be around to manage it when one of them gets a new job, cancer or retires. On top of that, your unicorns are only really worth their wages if they are solving problems no one else can or if they are mentoring others.

Or, the group of four writes something an order of magnitude more complex. It becomes difficult to make changes, estimates grow, and execution is consistently buggy.

With the right unicorn, one can act swiftly, groom a lean architecture, and make instinctive calls that move the needle of the entire roadmap. Real unicorns present sound technical strategies and inspire new opportunities that help push the company to the next level.

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

#90

Post by babesh » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 6:57 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #70

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…

In my experience, the 10x programmer is a bit of a myth. Where I have seen people do some incredible feats of productivity, it usually came with a clutch of bad stuff, too. Like: - they didn't work well with others and soaked up a lot of management time dealing with their shit. - they had really limited areas of expertise where they were amazing, but couldn't fill in for a sick colleague. - they worked in 2-3 day spr…

There are plenty of 10x or more effects. Anything with a binary outcome can be considered as such. If you measure a person's productivity along those lines, you will get 10x or more output. Also, this characteristic isn't restricted to programming. Furthermore, it is probable that someone can be -10X.

Probable examples of 10x, Steve Wozniak for Apple, John Carmack back in the day, Dennis Ritchie, Tim Berners-Lee, Jeff Dean.

If you aren't getting 10X output, it's possible that the problem or situation you have placed the person limits them to less than 10X.

I do agree that there are far more people who claim to be 10X than that there actually are and that many come with costs.

Also it is simplistic to claim a person is 10x. A more accurate measure is seeing a 10x effect. Writing key software that saves a company or gets a company bought is a 10x effect. I've seen that happen several times.