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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?

#101

Post by smackay »

There is one cardinal mistake that management makes (and development blithely accepts):

* Management is always right.

This truism is built into the entire fabric of software development: whether your process is an agile one where the product manager has ultimate knowledge of what is needed and on what timescales; the project that is delayed not because of bad planning or poor company organisation but because the developers are not working hard enough; that the only variable that affects the business is how productive / expensive the developers are - all the factors that describe how effective the management is are completely ignored or irrelevant. The list goes on and on and described in better detail in all the comments here.

Of course the solution to all of this is better data. You can be sure that the volume of data is inversely proportional to the strength of belief of the above statement. This leads to the second fundamental mistake that management makes:

* Not reading High Output Management by Andy Grove.

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

#102

Post by therealasdf »

tajen wrote: post #91
marcus_holmes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I rely on your experience for the non-existence of the 10x dev, but I've seen a x2 dev first hand, at young age. One of my interns did the same work in 3 months as the other in 6 months, plus various bonuses: Refactoring of old code into readable one, introduction of Kotlin, more unit tests, interesting discussions at lunch with other startups... Some people are amazingly smart.

Maybe the coefficient is just not efficient

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

#103

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

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…

"Management" will never realize this because to some extent the reasoning is driven by ego. It feels better to be in charge of 20 mediocre producers than 5 amazing ones. Of course there will be exceptions but the general rule follows.

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

#104

Post by cpeterso »

wtvanhest wrote: post #56
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…

On the Nestle example: One of the biggest constraints in a business is employee focus. Theoretically, you want to maximize future free cash flow. Unfortunately, there are many inputs: rev growth, solid roi on capex, lowering non-essential costs, employee retention, unit costs, brand etc. Management teams have to distill the message about what they want in a way that many employees can get behind. Nestle was too focus…

Google uses a hierarchical system for quarterly and annual goals called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that tries to align goals for the company, orgs, teams, and individuals.

http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...

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

#105

Post by triplesec »

pasta wrote: post #66
wtvanhest wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Nestle example: One of the biggest constraints in a business is employee focus. Theoretically, you want to maximize future free cash flow. Unfortunately, there are many inputs: rev growth, solid roi on capex, lowering non-essential costs, employee retention, unit costs, brand etc. Management teams have to distill the message about what they want in a way that many employees can get behind. Nestle was too focus…

I think Alibaba has a nice priority list: Customers, employees, shareholders.

That looks on the face of it nice and worthy but it's rather be meaningless because those are not actual goals. Those words are way too loose for that. The other thing about it is it smells like a marketing phrase rather than anything truthful

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

#106

Post by r41nbowdash »

* firefighting instead of building resilience

* fear of senior devs/architects, not holding them responsible for keeping stuff in order

* playing blame game instead of looking for structural solutions

* information compartmentalization to keep leverage, like we're running a spy cell and not a dev team

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

#107

Post by morgante »

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…

It consistently astounds me how many companies would rather hire 2-3 average developers (for average or below-average salaries) rather than one great developer for 1.5x the price.

Here in New York, this is especially acute. Many finance companies have thousands and thousands of developers. They'll have a team of developers (costing maybe $500k/yr total) working on a problem which a single excellent developer could easily accomplish (and be happy with $250k/yr).

Tons of companies are penny-wise and pound-foolish, mostly because programming is still considered a low-status profession.

> 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.

There are companies which do this, but they're almost exclusively pure tech companies (ex. Netflix).

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

#108

Post by morgante »

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…

It doesn't have to be 10x. I think 2-3x differences are far more common but even they aren't typically compensated at that multiple in the market.

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

#109

Post by gaius »

meric wrote: post #88
gaius wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think probably most of us are but the 10x guy is someone who believes themselves to be 10x across the board

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

#110

Post by morgante »

nostrademons wrote: post #37
lobotryas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> Will management be able to explain to the rest of the employees why this person gets 10x their compensation?

That's a major part of why I consider open salaries to be a terrible idea for top performers. Performance and popularity are frequently uncorrelated, and I'm not talking about the asshole genius trope. You don't want to force your best performers into allocating lots of time schmoozing to ensure everyone loves them and isn't offended by their higher pay.

Almost nobody thinks they're below average in performance, but mathematically some people have to make less than average.

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