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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?

#141

Post by Boothroid »

FooHentai wrote: post #135
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…

Hadn't heard that one before, interesting observation.

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

#142

Post by k__ »

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…

The last point is true, but normal.

All hiring managers want the best of the best, but they won't simply come and knock at your door if you're a no-name.

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

#143

Post by JepZ »

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…

Btw. your example is missing the bus factor. But I understand your point and actually I do not think that salaries are meant to depend 100% on performance.

I think it is more like 90% of time the person invests and 10% performance bonus. That way the one with to 50% higher salary would probably be 5 times as performant as the average dev. If that is fair, is a different (and very difficult) question.

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

#145

Post by pasta »

triplesec wrote: post #105
pasta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would they be meaningless?

You can use this list in any way. For example when you want to increase your product price. This is fine when it is good for the customer (because they will get a better product). But it is not fine when you do it for the shareholders alone.

They are also goals because the ultimate goal is to please the customer, then the employee and than the shareholder.

I think they are great guidelines.

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

#146

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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…

* Rewarding productivity over quality.

Most succinct expression of the basic problem yet - nice one

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

#148

Post by FooHentai »

Boothroid wrote: post #141
FooHentai wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Hadn't heard that one before, interesting observation.

A lot of non-tech companies treat IT as a cost center and that can lead to short sighted decisions that cost them a lot in the long run (or more accurately, they fail to realize benefits that were available to them with appropriate investment).

But it seems counter intuitive that this effect can be worse for some tech companies, where a major part of their business involves convincing clients to treat their tech as more than just a cost center.

Like, you have an entire staff compliment of developers, architects, PMs, engineers and customer service staff, and your own entire ICT practice is a disaster? HOW?

I ended up having to draw people's attention to it by pointing out 'this is your single biggest client, and receives the least attention of them all'.

Loops into the old 'eat your own dog food' wisdom, but from an angle that seems to often get missed.

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

#150

Post by Arwill »

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…

It might be the case with companies like Amazon, but in other areas, or in government contracting, the contractors were present long before current technology was born. And they are still the ones running the show, IT is just a current commodity they sell.
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