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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?

#111

Post by austinjp »

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…

Before leaping to firing that person, you'd want to talk to them and explain that the misbehaviour has to stop. There may be personal reasons, and the person may need support to change. But if the behaviour doesn't shift then yes, dismissal is absolutely appropriate. The demoralisation stemming from a misbehaver who is protected from on high can be huge.

Great performance does not require being an asshat. It's (nearly?) always possible to find an equivalent performer who's pleasant to be around and a constructive team member.

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

#112

Post by pjbster »

Sticking around and believing that they're essential.

When organisations are formed of people with perfectly aligned incentives, they don't need to be managed. Such people know what needs to be done and have the expertise and autonomy to make it happen.

Of course, such an organisation is hopelessly unlikely to retain this utopian state as the number of employees rises above 2. And it becomes vanishingly improbable if outside funding is involved.

So management is the act of taking care of something which can't take care of itself. A symptom: like an antibody, it arises when a system gets of out whack and its continued presence indicates a chronic condition.

The best thing management can do is to put systems in place to make itself redundant. So, by this definition, anything it does which promotes the opposite goal is a mistake.

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

#113

Post by Steve44 »

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're still not guaranteed that by spending $400 per hour on one person with excellent credentials you will have a better outcome than with 4 x $100. There is also a balance of risk especially on longer term projects, with the 1 x $400 person there will probably be less technical oversight and also if they get ill or leave then the project is is serious trouble.

I'm not advocating employing talentless monkeys, they still need to be good at what they do but from a business perspective it's a more complex and wider ranging decision.

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

#114

Post by alkonaut »

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…

> In my experience, the 10x programmer is a bit of a myth

It's at least a unicorn, so companies shouldn't worry about hiring any 10x developers because they are THAT rare.

What they should do is avoid the developers that actually cost productivity. I'm a 10x developer compared to someone else not because I'm 10x average but because there is a 1/10th average dev there.

I'd say try to find the people who are just way over average (2x devs) and pay them twice the money if necessary. The problem is finding these people and making sure you aren't paying someone average twice the pay.

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

#115

Post by austinjp »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #27

Want to jump ahead a few years from Mythical Man-Month? Let me recommend Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.[2] It's painful that we haven't crawled far out of the 80s practices. The first chapter says: "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." Sorry Google Memo Dude. DeMarco and Lister called it in the 80s. Speaking of DeMarco, he also wrote a book about controll…

Fascinating.

Is the A/B situation DeMarco describes about knowing ahead of time that A will turn minimal profit while B will turn maximal profit?

If so, the conclusion reached seems right: tighter profit margins require tighter control. And control requires resource, which is a cost that further diminishes returns.

But if the described scenario is about not knowing ahead of time whether A or B will turn a large profit, how should this be handled? Regular review, and a scaling-down of control as confidence in profit increases?

Of course, profit is only one metric. There may be others that are more critical.

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

#116

Post by falsedan »

gkop wrote: post #58
rad_dev wrote: post #50

There are some amazing responses here. My number one pick is always finding the next new thing in management from a New York Times bestseller. Then sending an email on the greatness of the process to the whole team and lo-behold expecting everyone to embrace it. 2nd for me is getting stuck on project names. It seems finding a cool sounding name is somehow more necessary than how it works. To quote an example, we were…

What negative connotation?

It's SoCal surfer/skater slang, which sounds unprofessional in a formal business environment. So, stuffiness.

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

#117

Post by tomohawk »

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.

The corollary to that is that many technical types will make things work despite management ignoring the fundamentals. Sometimes its better to let something fail sooner than to make it work, when it's clear the fundamentals will eventually overtake the effort.

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

#118

Post by marcus_holmes »

dasmoth wrote: post #92
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…

they worked in 2-3 day sprints for ridiculous hours, and then stayed home or might as well have. The other points you make might be big problems depending on the situation, but this? What's wrong with someone taking a day off after a burst of productivity? This seems like classic valuing of face-time over results.

it's not team-oriented behaviour. I'm not talking about face-time, but about having the attitude that you're part of a team.

The "10x" works 16 hours a day for 3 days and produces a chunk of code that works, does what it's supposed to, ahead of schedule. So far, so awesome.

But the rest of the team is working away on the rest of the project. Suddenly they're lumped with a huge chunk of code that they don't understand. They weren't involved in the design decisions, they didn't pair-program or brainstorm any of the code. It's pretty impenetrable. And the "10x" who wrote it is now unavailable after that "heroic" sprint so they can't even ask questions.

Teams work together. Heroic sprints of productivity followed by absence is not working together. It's leaving other people to clean up your mess while you claim the credit.

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

#119

Post by jlebrech »

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…

the reason they'll rather hide 4x people that are half as slow, is that they have bums in seats that are available for whatever hairbrained idea they come up with. the x10 (sic) coder will get bored of the mundane stuff surrounding the complex stuff s/he loves
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