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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?

#211

Post by Boothroid »

pestkranker wrote: post #200
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.

I agree that sounds like a reasonable approach - but in my working life it's always been seen as this fantastic wheeze of 'let's charge one customer to build something and then go off and sell it to everyone else!'. It seems like a great idea, but the usual story is that either making it generic burns up days that would otherwise be spent meeting the specific customer's requirements, thereby ensuring a worse product, or you stay on track with the customer's requirements and ditch the idea of making it generic as soon as days get tight.

This is one of the things that always makes me groan, along with 'and you can learn x technology along the way!' >:|

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

#212

Post by FractalNerve »

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…

> * 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

These two points made me cry. I suffered my very first burn-out due to that and although having a higher degree in computer science and love towards programming this really made me feel like a piece of shit. I have the feeling that it's really hopeless and it wants me to make the change to IT-Consulting instead of software-engineering.

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

#213

Post by cmiles74 »

pestkranker wrote: post #200
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.

In my experience, often the product ends up being molded to fit the particular client (it's custom software, after all) and then the cost of altering it for other clients is perceived as too steep. Or you end up with a bunch of similar, incompatible projects.

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

#214

Post by jondubois »

- Not knowing what is important and what is not (micromanaging at the expense of team happiness and autonomy).

- Negativity.

- Not changing their minds often enough.

- Generalising past negative experiences and applying them to new situations without properly acknowledging key differences.

- Not recognising the strengths and weaknesses of individual employees - They prefer to just throw more engineers at the problem as though they were rocket fuel.

- Not letting engineers feel a sense of ownership over a part of the product that they're building out of fear that they might leave.

- Not giving raises until it's too late; seriously undervaluing the long-term acquired knowledge of their engineers.

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

#215

Post by redleggedfrog »

snvzz wrote: post #97
redleggedfrog wrote: post #29

The worst mistake I've seen management make over 20 years of software development is not listening to the technical people. Estimates get shortened. Technical decisions are overruled for business or political reason. Warnings about undesirable outcomes are ignored. Sheer impossibility deemed surmountable. I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it. Overt…

>I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it. How is this a mistake then? It seems As Planned. It'd be a mistake if the management suffered for it.

In every case the companies they were trying to build up failed. Being vested owners, they lost money, and time.

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

#217

Post by jerf »

I'll add one that even after 200 comments I don't see: Failure to explain the reason why. Coming down to their developer with a list of tasks without explaining why those tasks are the most important and will lead to company success.

You might think startups are small enough that this couldn't happen but that was actually where my worst experience was. The founders are visibly in a meeting with a couple people, maybe "suits", maybe not. They come out of the meeting and the next day your priorities are rewritten. Cool beans, that's a thing that can happen and that's not my issue. My issue is, why? What are the goals we are trying to hit now? What's the plan? Why is that better than the old plan?

This is especially important IMHO for more senior engineers responsible for architecture and stuff, because those matters can greatly affect the architecture. Telling me why lets me start getting a grasp on what parts of the code are long term and what can be considered a short term hack, what the scaling levels I need to shoot for, and all sorts of other things that are very hard to determine if you just come to me with "And actually, our customers need a new widget to frozzle the frobazz now more than they need to dopple the dipple now."

Not necessarily the biggest issue, there's a lot of other suggestions here that are probably bigger in most places, but this is one that has frustrated me.

(I'll also say this is one you may be able to help fix yourself, simply by asking. If you are in that senior role I think you pretty much have a professional obligation to ask, and I would not be shy about working that into the conversation one way or another.)

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

#218

Post by EliRivers »

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…

The 10x thing. Here's what I usually say about that:

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

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

#220

Post by mbesto »

jcrben wrote: post #54
mbesto wrote: post #8

I believe that nearly all mistakes that management make are largely due to empathy. I think this is effectively why we've seen so many large, uber successful, companies being started by people with comp sci/software backgrounds. Worth noting - conversely, it doesn't mean that all comp sci/software people have the ability/capability to lead technology teams.

Too much or too little empathy?

Too little. Sorry should have clarified that.
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