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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?

#121

Post by arethuza »

lb1lf wrote: post #100

Working for a company building heavy hardware, I see the following happen time and time again: * Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing. Result: Every time the new organization has settled somewhat and people know who to interact with to make things flow smoothly, everything is upended and back to square one. * Trying to make our products buzzword compliant without understanding the consequences - we've…

"Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing"

These things often to be the observable consequence of political battles between executives. From what I've observed there are always clear winners and losers in these battles (although it may take a while to work out who lost and who won). From the perspective of the execs who were for the re-orgs and who come out on top these reorganizations are positive things even if they are bad for the company as a whole - typically they don't care about the company as a whole only for what they can get out if it.

Edit: A colleague once said that the behaviour of executives became far easier to understand and predict once you found out their individual bonus calculations were done (which, of course, we weren't supposed to know).

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

#122

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

morgante wrote: post #107
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 ea…

In many companies you get paid for status, not for productivity or value.

Management doesn't want super-performers, because they can upset the power dynamic.

Developers must have lower status than management, and super-performers can challenge that.

Companies are actually social networks. Instead of gaining status by posting selfies of yourself in exotic locations with cool people, you gain status by making high status noises in emails, talking in a high status way, having many people reporting to you, and having equity.

Sometimes getting things done is relevant too, but not as often as it should be.

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

#123

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

yeah, I completely agree. There are people who are amazing at this out there. But they tend to be pretty humble about it, too, in my experience. And the best of them are really, really, good at bringing the rest of the team up with them.

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

#124

Post by dilemma »

jdavis703 wrote: post #39
thaumasiotes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brand is more important for commodity goods than for non-commodities. It's the only distinguishing feature.

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

#125

Post by morgante »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #122
morgante wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

In many companies you get paid for status, not for productivity or value. Management doesn't want super-performers, because they can upset the power dynamic. Developers must have lower status than management, and super-performers can challenge that. Companies are actually social networks. Instead of gaining status by posting selfies of yourself in exotic locations with cool people, you gain status by making high stat…

Exactly, that's why I think this is one of the biggest examples of mismanagement out there.

For me, it's actually not about the compensation for its own sake. It's that compensation is a strong signal of how the company thinks about the status of developers.

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

#126

Post by austinjp »

sulam wrote: post #45

I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this: 1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can. 1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking long…

In response to 1 and 1.5 the company should expend reasonable resources to support those who are struggling, and these rules are laid down in Human Resources policies (as I'm sure you know).

Management are just as bound by the rules as non-management, or should be.

Of course, "reasonable" here has a strong subjective component.

I have seen dramatic change in an individual, but it's the exception. More likely is a slow progression to dismissal. This can be handled well by management with appropriate skills, but is hard and is a often suboptimal. However it's possible that this process is a necessity in any organisation that supports its staff. Wishing it to not happen is unrealistic, and indicates naivety. Perhaps these naive, disgruntled employees are part of a larger problem?

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

#127

Post by nopatternhere »

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 manage a team of one very productive person" vs "I manage a team of four PhDs". Which does a partner prefer to boast about?

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

#128

Post by indigochill »

Incomplete targets.

For example, I used to work in a support department where the key metric agents were graded on was "replies per hour". Naturally favoring this above everything else led to a couple issues:

1. Little time spent on reply quality

2. No care given to handling a ticket after the first reply, because sending a stock first reply to a ticket is much faster and easier than working through the individual challenges of each ticket.

Management identified these as problems, but never changed how they graded staff in performance reviews, so the problems persist. From what I've read of other companies, this seems the rule rather than the exception.

Everything else I can think of's already been mentioned.

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

#129

Post by lsadam0 »

Mc91 wrote: post #31
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…

Honestly, poor management aside....I cannot believe you are bragging about this. Rather than confront and address the problem, your solution was to actually delete shared knowledge?

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

#130

Post by arethuza »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #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 us…

"Acting as yes-men to bad upper-management strategy"

Makes me think of "There are two types of managers: shit umbrellas and shit funnels".

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