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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?

#201
post #94
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude I think we need to put the myth of the 10x developer to bed. 99% of the time, the 10x guy is just someone who solved the same or similar problem at his or her last job and are simply exercising their experience. Sure there are outliers, but that's the same in every field - whereas in programming 50% of people believe that they're the 10x guy and th…

I'd suggest virtually the opposite: a good way to be an outlier is to have reasonably broad knowledge plus being good at learning new stuff, such that when faced with a new problem you can quickly bring the right set of skills/technologies/whatever at it.

I think "10x" is just bad shorthand.

If you want to talk about it from a financial perspective, talk about the rate of return.

Can one developer do ten times the work any other developer does during a week? Probably not.

Can one developer have a rate of return such that they get ten times more valuable work done? Almost certainly.

So developer A delivers 3% improvement per year and developer B delivers 6% improvement per year. Across a career, if you start with 100 units, developer A delivers 245 units at the end, and developer B delivers 2008 units.

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

#202

* 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.

Sometimes it can work. More often it starts innocently and mutually as you describe, but it very quickly becomes a game of firefighting and drains innovation within the product line. Next thing you know, you're selling based on roadmap features and don't have control over your own product anymore.

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

#203

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…

This is often an information problem. To find an expert or specialist takes a lot of time. While it would be nice to always have an expert solution, sometimes we don't have the luxury of time.

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

#204
- Bouncing a developer from task to task without ever finishing a task

- Letting whatever customer screams the loudest dictate product behavior, and then effectively alternating product behavior based on which customer is angry this month

- Deferring technical debt until a customer screams

- Hiring unreasonable product managers who have unreasonable expectations. (This just leads to a lot of time being burnt in haggling and a much worse product delivered.)

- Treating software as an art project, getting obsessed with pixels and fonts instead of functionality

- Not paying enough

(edits)

- Interrupting programmers constantly for trivial matters

- Allowing the entire organization to interrupt a developer at any time because he's unofficially become a "go-to" person

- Not backing up critical processes when departments interact. (This is the information needed when there is a bug, support escalation, ect.)

- Expecting developers to handhold people in other departments

(more edits)

- Micromanaging task priority, assuming that a developer jumped on a specific task and completed it instantly

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

#205
post #77

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 think the folks discussing whether or not 10x developers exist are missing the more basic point here. In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages. It's absolutely in their best interest to hire more mediocre people than fewer exceptional people because the correct incentives haven't been put in place for managers in the company. At many places, the best t…

What incentives would rectify this? What metrics should be tracked?

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

#206

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 ran into this problem.. I felt like I was worth more than the best offers I was getting. I continued to get job offers, but I couldn't get one for more than 100k remotely or in my area(Burlington, VT).

I've got many many years experience, can solve any challenge, and work at twice the rate of most of the developers I have worked w/ in the tech stacks I focus on(ruby, elixir, reactjs/javascript/ember/angular etc)..

So I decided to go at it on my own and charge a rate I felt I was worth. Best career decision I've made so far. I think every developer reaches a point where the only way they can make more is to move into management and stop being a developer, or branch out on their own. I myself hate being a manager and love being a developer.

Managers generally seem to think that a developer is a developer is a developer. When there is a clear difference between a $50/hr developer and someone who can charge $250/hr in the time it takes to solve the same problem. What takes a $250/hr dev 1hr to solve correctly, might take a jr dev 5hrs to just "get it working."

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

#207
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…

My two biggest ones are on this list.

* Software is not an assembly line. It is part science part art. We are not interchangeable. You can't take an embedded engineer and hope for good luck on a Node.js project.

* Constant reorganization. I worked at a major internet company in the late 90s, early 00s and they literally reorganized every two years. It was usually under the guise of helping communication and fostering growth but it simply just toggled from a vertical project based organization to a flat and wide matrix organization. Such a waste of time, energy, and resources.

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

#208
Mistakes by Management:

* Accept that the Internal IT sabotages External IT (using politics/compliance/HR).

Background:

Interesting projects are often handed to external IT, while the internal IT is perfectly capable to implement most or parts of it, they're held back from the project by the management. However internal IT is very often the only rep the external IT can talk to. Management never allows true of co-operation of internal and external IT to restrict costs and to 'benchmark' the internal IT.

Real Story:

1) I'm the "external IT" and the internal IT together with their project-manager (senior enterprise architect) block all my communication to the client and want to be aware of everything beforehand.

2) They're unhappy with my progress, but blocked my selection of a cloud-computing instance via HR.

3) Just got access to their lowest tier EC2-instance via a ridiculously complicated connection processs.

4) I'm not error free, but my consultant manager is on the customer's side, by principle.

5) The data I received is a very small and useless fraction that can barely be used for machine learning (at least with my limited skills).

6) I'm so frustrated and work remotely, away from both offices I've to report to.

7) I see me failing in this settings and I'm afraid of that. I don't know what to do.

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

#209
My list:

1) Re-orgs upon re-orgs believing they'll fix underlying problems

2) Related to 1), lack of accountability when it comes to decision making, like when no one is accountable for the previous, failed re-org when deciding to re-org again.

3) Spending way too much time trying to make perfect decisions, especially around product vision. Much better to decide quickly, be flexible going forward and iterate.

4) Providing perverse incentives. As an example, one place I managed didn't give lower-level managers a budget, only a headcount. So, of course, everyone hired only senior and above developers. This created logjams during promotion time and forced a lot of turnover which could have been avoided with a more balanced hiring plan that included more junior devs.

5) Seagull management, especially from the C-level. For those not familiar, it's swoop in, shit all over everything and then leave others to deal with the mess. Either provide minor course corrections or devote a significant portion of your attention to that area until it's stable.

6) Being too good of a motivator. This doesn't sound like it should be a problem, but I had one manager who was so good at selling shitty ideas to the team that we kept working on the wrong vision. A good vision should largely sell itself.

7) Not caring enough about their employees as people. When the difficult conversations need to be had, it's a lot easier to deal with it if there's an underlying relationship where the employees feel appreciated and considered. It doesn't mean you have to be their friend, just that they believe you care about them. The easiest way to make them believe that is to actually care about them.

8) Not devoting enough time and energy to hiring. This was my secret as a manager. I put a lot of time into recruiting (lots of after-hours meet-ups and mixers) and was picky with who I hired, built a great team, worked to keep them happy and focused and then spent 3 years getting awesome reviews for doing basically nothing but shielding them from unnecessary distractions.

9) Rewarding busy over good. Who deserves most organizational praise, the employee who valiantly wrestled with a production issue until 4am or the employee who pushed a non-event release to production and went home at 4pm? I'm amazed at how often managers recognize and reward the former when the latter is giving customers a better experience.

I could probably come up with another 20 or so, but these are the ones that have cropped up the most in my experience.

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

#210
Giving junior devs all the greenfield applications as "learning experiences". Because groundwork should always be laid by those with the least experience.

Haphazard task assignment - I build a feature, then when they need an enhancement, it often gets given to someone else with no understanding of how it works, even though I am free.

Cargo culting in general. We do "Kanban" just to say we do, despite it having zero relevance to how we actually work. It's buzzwordy. Insistence on daily standup despite having very good communication and everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, were a small team in an open office.

Pushing for faster code review and generally treating it as a negative thing that just slows us down.

Previously we actually hired more devs to "help" get a project out the door - I think we all know what the mythical man month has to say about that.

Having to argue about basic security practices. I got in a heated argument about how we needed to encrypt temporary passwords even though they were system generated. I'm still angry. They wanted to be able to look them up for users. Sigh.

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