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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?

#191

Post by gaius »

FooHentai wrote: post #148
Boothroid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Well you could be like IBM which sells remote working solutions but has banned it for their own staff. Or maybe that was HP, or both.

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

#192

Post by ramblerman »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #34
eberkund wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean even in sports? What metric are you using to compare on athlete to another? Obviously one golfer won't be able to hit the ball 10x as far or sink the ball in 10x fewer strokes than another. Obviously a gold medal sprinter won't run 10x as fast as the an amateur. But they very well may be better than 10x as many others and that small difference in speed is what makes the difference between winning and…

> Obviously one golfer won't be able to hit the ball 10x as far or sink the ball in 10x fewer strokes than another. Obviously a gold medal sprinter won't run 10x as fast as the an amateur. What's obvious about that? I can pretty well guarantee the existence of golfers who need 10x the strokes of professional golfers. I can definitely guarantee the existence of people who can't manage 10% of the running speed of a gol…

Existence is not enough, you have to prove it is the average. The 10x programmer is not 10x vs the worst programmer, but 10x vs the crowd.

Most people could beat a par 3 in less than 30 strokes given 1 week of exposure to golf.

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

#194

Post by probablybroken »

Spooky23 wrote: post #13

#1 in my book is sunk cost fallacy. Everywhere I've worked, the folks running the show have too much ego and political capital invested in products or projects that are turds. The result is massive financial losses for the business.

My experience has been similar in the past. In more recent times I've seen numerous products rewritten from scratch by completely new teams on different continents - the mindset being that they would do things "properly" - only to encounter all the problems that the original teams had to deal with, and re-implement the same mistakes, but in a different language. In one case, the new team quit to a man ( and obviously, the old team were nolonger around either ), resulting in the loss of two complete product implementations, and all the domain and implementation knowledge.

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

#195

Post by jaggederest »

austinjp wrote: post #115
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 profi…

My metric for projects is that if I'm not returning near-term value at least double my billing rate, it's probably not worth doing.

If you are, the difference between 2.2x, double, and 1.8x is pretty negligible - non zero, for sure, but not worth the additional 20% effort to minimize variance.

If you aren't, as he says, no amount of diligence will fix it, because it's simply the wrong project.

It's the classic penny-wise pound-foolish.

So by my conclusion, many of the 'project management' activities that people do are at best wasteful or indeed actively harmful.

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

#198

Post by ww520 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #60
ww520 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having 100M revenue with 10% profit is better than 10M revenue with 20% profit.

Yes, as you can tell by the fact that your overall profit in the first scenario is $10M while in the second it is $2M. How is that an argument against overall profit?

You and also ChuckMcM were talking about unit profit.

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

#199

Post by ideonexus »

The biggest recurring issue I have with my managers over the last twenty years is their need to add unnecessary complexity to projects. I think a good manager stays out of the way and just monitors employees for any obstructions that are preventing them from meeting their goals. Yet, my experience is that when a manager sits in on a project meeting, they can't help but start giving input on the project itself, adding complexity to defined business rules or adding obscure use cases to the system. Too many managers can't help but dominate meetings because their dominant personalities is how they became managers in the first place.

The worst is when you get two or more managers attending the same meeting. Then nothing will get done as they eat up all of the meeting time arguing about business rules, magnifying the complexity of the system until you end up with some Rube Goldberg chain of logic that they will completely forget minutes after they've left the meeting. A good manager knows to trust their employees and only intervenes to make sure those employees have the resources they need to do their jobs. The most effective managers are humble and respect the expertise of the experts they hire.

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

#200

Post by pestkranker »

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…

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

Can you tell me why? Sometimes, asking a client for 50k instead of 80k with a "spin-off" agreement can pay to both parties. The client can get long-term support with new features without the need to pay for it.

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