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Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
151–160 of 396 posts
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#152I'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 sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results. I've always heard this is the Netflix model. > difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. I like your thought process but do you really believe this is possible? There are few fields whe…
>> I sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results.
> I've always heard this is the Netflix model.
Also, Valve. By some accounts, this creates terrible working environment, where people are competing instead of cooperating. Not to mention it distorts the incentives, as devs are heavily incentivised to project an image of being impactful high-achiever (as oposed to actually just being one, and not having to manage one's image). Of course, it also happens in regular companies, but here higher stakes make the game more vicious.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#153I 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…
The tone you use here helps make my point: just because "nerds" are experts in everything tech does NOT equate to good decision making / good management for the company as a whole. Sometimes it does. Often times it does not. Things aren't usually that black and white; "I built it, so I should run it." Just had this convo with a coworker the other day. He was telling me about all the complaints from the dev team and how we should let them drive the bus. I had to remind him of all the good-tech-but-bad-business ideas several of them have offered in the past. In my experience, the rare "nerd" who also intimately understands the nuances of every day business (relationships, the board, profit margins, brand experiences, etc.) is hard to beat.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You know that famous inverse square root code? Apple basic?
Some things just cannot be pair programmed. They are simply impenetrable to average minds at the time.
Your argument sounds like one for a Handicapper General, to be honest. (If missing the reference Google it). You want to handicap everyone actually competent with a slower partner. And before you claim the usual: it is ok to write suboptimal but simple to understand code, consider that in some cases we actually DO care for performance and size of code..
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#155I'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…
Personally, as a product design manager, I like to find the middle ground. Having a set of "4x" employees is useful when you also have a number of "1x"and "2x" employees that can learn and grow from the influence of the highest skill and/or productive employees.
Attempting to build a "quantity over quality" organization is bad for the reasons you list, but "all quality, no quantity" is a close second in being detrimental.
Each critical "4x" employee that you have is only beneficial if they stay at your company. Burning them out because a company is ruthlessly focused on keeping their staffing lean by only hiring "4x unicorn-ninja-guru-rockstar" developers is a quick way to trigger management to swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.
Edit: fixed a typo
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#156Management have the misguided notion that if you adopt the Agile methodology (TM) you will deliver successful software projects.
Loads of people uninterested in software engineering and technology follow agile training and the end result is loads of pictures of walls covered in Post-it notes, disgruntled developers and no working software or product to show for it.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#157* 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 po…
MSP means "Managed Service Provider", presumably.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#158* 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…
> Importing tech talent, rather than promoting.
is often at odds with both the point above and below it. When a company is in rapid growth, there may be a point where the talent they relied on is not quite ready for the promotion they are hiring in for. Without expanding that search outside, you may become stale in the organization, and not provide the right mentorship to ensure that those interested in getting promoted will be able to do their job properly once there. I think the point should be, that you would want to ensure that those you import will be able to help promote from within as things progress.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#159Working 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…
> a man
"a person"?
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#160I 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…
The tone you use here helps make my point: just because "nerds" are experts in everything tech does NOT equate to good decision making / good management for the company as a whole. Sometimes it does. Often times it does not. Things aren't usually that black and white; "I built it, so I should run it." Just had this convo with a coworker the other day. He was telling me about all the complaints from the dev team and h…
I agree with the argument but not the evidence - I have seen a lot of good tech managed directly into the ground by management teams that have clear track records of non-success. Bad products being sold and kept alive through clever / kleptocratic / crony business practices is what the market for enterprise anything has become because all the purchasers and sellers are one and the same - people that are never the users of said products or even the services and that can skillfully resolve themselves of blame while taking credit for "success" and somehow justifying it all as "positive thinking."