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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?

#131

Post by Boothroid »

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs

* Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness

* Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it

* Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products

* Insistence that all devs time must be billable and trying to defy gravity in ignoring skills rot etc. through lack of investment in training

* Expectation that devs can be swapped between technologies without problems

* Swapping people in and out of projects as if this will not affect progress

* Deliberate hoarding of information as a means of disempowering devs

All of this inevitably leads to a bunch of pissed off devs. The ones that are happy to eat it become the golden boys and get promotions. Those that point out the bullshit leave once they can and are replaced with the desperate at the bottom who sooner or later arrive at the same position of wanting to leave once they realise what's going on. I think tech can be pretty miserable if you are not in the upper echelon of lucky types that can score a position at a Google, Facebook etc.

Oh and a couple more:

* Give no feedback unless things go wrong

* Treat your highly educated, intelligent and motivated devs like children by misusing agile in order to micromanage them

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

#132

Post by hisem »

greenyoda wrote: post #2

Promoting technical people with no management experience into management jobs, without providing them with any training or guidance. (Happened to me.) Writing code and managing people require very different sets of skills, and just because you're good at the former doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any good at the latter (or that you'll enjoy doing it). (Similar problems can happen when a bunch of people with no man…

Yes, this. I'd add that you end up losing a probably (as he/she's been promoted) skilled engineer as well. Promotion via management is what forces people who might not have the "people-skills" to accept management jobs because they want to be valued.

This reminds me of an article from Rands in Repose:

  As I wrote about in Being Geek, the Curse of the Silicon Valley is that great engineers are often promoted to leadership for their hard work. While many succeed in this role, an equal part fails because the skills required to lead are vastly different than the ones required to be an engineer. The Curse is that we’re often placing our most valuable engineers in a role where they’re predisposed to fail.

  Think of it like this: there’s a large population of immensely talented engineers that should not be leaders. There is no amount of training that would make up for the talent we’d extinguish by teaching them how to write annual reviews.

  But everyone wants to grow.

  Unfortunately, in many companies the only perceived growth path is via management.
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/dna/

I also believe that management should be about facilitating your team's work, rather than endorsing your team's responsibility.

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

#133

Post by kpil »

viach wrote: post #79
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…

This. And also, code if this kind if 10x developers is often unmaintainable and untested, which brings 100x effort for their teammates in the future.

My experience is that the long term effects are more than 10x.

I heard a joke once : Complicated problems requires complicated solutions. Unfortunately, all problems are a bit complicated if you are a bit thick.

The gist is that complexity grows faster than it needs.

Ignoring people that can't make things over a certain threshold, there is a large group of programmers that can make things work, but are not able to build things clean enough or put in the effort required to build testable and maintainable code, simplify support and reduce runtime costs.

Knowing when to stop and what to spend some extra time on is also important.

I'll hesitate to add reducing future development costs, because I've seen too much overly complex code written in a misguided attempt to handle unknown future requirements.

All these costs can easily build up to 10x over time.

A factor is that a team probably smoothes over the effects of one or two bad coders in a way that it's not noticeable at short term - the code is delivered and the worst bits are plastered over, but the long term performance is reduced.

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

#134

Post by pacificleo11 »

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. "

I think it depends on Industry / Role. A creative person in Advertisment or a good chip design engineer or someone great with Algorithm are often worthy of 10 or 20X compensation. Whats wrong is that many people think 10X guys can exist on Application layer / Front end. I think its very hard to do that

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

#135

Post by FooHentai »

Boothroid wrote: post #131

* Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs * Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products * Insistence that all devs time must be billable an…

>Insistence that all devs time must be billable

That one can hit all areas of ICT real bad when the company is a managed service provider, leading to a 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom' where the company provides great outsource ICT services offering to its clients, but runs an absolute shitshow for it's own systems because they're chronically under resourced (you can't bill it, so don't spend time on it).

That has extra interesting results when such a company tries to spin up and sell services which it's built/hosting/maintaining/developing itself.

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

#136

Post by MatthewWilkes »

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…

I think it depends on perspective. I don't think there's a 10x programmer, but I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers. If your organisation is not doing a good job of managing your developer team you may have a very skewed view of what 1x really looks like.

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

#137

Post by FooHentai »

muzani wrote: post #69

* Killing things that are low profit margins, under some misguided Pareto Principle approach. Sometimes these things are loss leaders designed to pull customers for other products. * Spending too much on marketing/sales before people want the product. They usually just end up burning their brand if the product is too low quality. * Too much focus on building multiple small features rather than focusing on the value p…

>Killing things that are low profit margins, under some misguided Pareto Principle approach. Sometimes these things are loss leaders designed to pull customers for other products.

Related: Focusing on a single product when your customers rely on you for a suite. As I like to put it 'Being able to talk to the whole story'. Particularly relevant for MSPs - I once worked for one that went HARD on 'cloud first' to the point they stopped talking to clients about anything else.

Great, except all those clients lost interest real quick and switched to other providers who would talk to them 'about their whole story'.

The short sightedness of this is astounding - For many of those ex clients today, cloud is no longer 5 or 10% of their story, and we would have been able to continue selling to them all the way to their current adoption rates (50%+), IF we had taken them on the journey instead of refusing to talk to them about anything else.

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

#138

Post by quadcore »

I think management fails when they don't understand that the nerds hired them and not the opposite. We are the technology, we did it in the first place. We hired managers to help us. By default, we know better than them (because we are the one who do the tech), they should listen to us and not the opposite. Now, when everybody knows his place, we can collaborate and do great work.

I got the luck to work with great managers at amazon. From what I've seen, programmers are driving the company there - or at least, they have their word to say, often, and power that comes with it. On my team, decisions relative to product development were clearly strongly driven by us. Seems to work pretty well for amazon.

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

#139

Post by k__ »

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…

Haha, we had the buzzword compliance too.

Once a sales junior came to me and said "this year I will make our product be the center of the Big Data hype" like it was some meaningful concept, besides having much data...

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

#140

Post by k__ »

quadcore wrote: post #138

I think management fails when they don't understand that the nerds hired them and not the opposite. We are the technology, we did it in the first place. We hired managers to help us. By default, we know better than them (because we are the one who do the tech), they should listen to us and not the opposite. Now, when everybody knows his place, we can collaborate and do great work. I got the luck to work with great ma…

I wouldn't formulate it so smug, but I think you're kinda right.

I met many founders over the years and those with technical background were the best.

The non-technical founders had often bad ideas to start with or were piggy backing on the techies, while putting them down with their big words etc.

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