Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by donatj » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:06 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #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 haggl…

> alternating product behavior based on which customer is angry this month

This strikes way too close to home.

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

#222

Post by Deestan » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

1) Trying to solve lack of skill with More Rules For Everyone.

One of your teams write messy code? Don't try to educate them. Instead enforce strict coding standards that forbid all but the most basic complexity. Everyone else now have to make their code more verbose and objectively worse, while the problem team still writes bad code but now they make even more of it in a neater formatting.

2) Raise wages only for people who threaten to leave.

3) Run a high tech software development shop but have an IT department that assumes everyone only ever need Excel and Outlook.

Ports are blocked. Local computer admin is locked. Updates are forced, delayed and centralized. Hardware is underpowered. Network blocks ping.

4) Demand to be in full control.

Make sure nobody does anything you don't understand. Shoot down experiments you can't see the point of, even if they're small. Hire skilled and experienced people, but demand that you can understand everything they do.

5) Let random people deal with hiring and interviews.

Hiring is both a hard and sensitive process. On one hand you are giving people an impression of your workplace, and on the other hand you are trying to evaluate the skill of someone who has a different skill set than yourself.

Giving this job to some burnt out elitist asshole who throws resumes in the garbage because they did or didn't include a cover letter, or a wannabe drill sergeant who tries to be "tough" and "test them under pressure" during interviews, gives you a bad rep in tech circles and doesn't help you hire skilled people. Giving it to someone who can't be bothered to reply to applicants or update them on rejections is also shitty.

6) Open fucking landscape workplaces.

Fuck.

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

#223

Post by Boothroid » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

FractalNerve wrote: post #212

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…

Oh dear, I'm really sorry for touching a nerve! I think management often have zero insight into how much many devs care about their work. Not all - I'm sure there are plenty with a thick skin and/or that care little beyond getting paid - but some of us are only capable of delivering our best given the right conditions. Lack of feedback is one of the most serious red flags I would say, and shows either the company is seriously dysfunctional, or that they absolutely do not give a shit about your progress. At that point the job should become just a paycheck until something better comes along. The funny thing is when they expect you to do your best work despite not keeping up their side of the bargain!

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

#224

Post by agentultra » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:09 PM UTC

One of my favourite books on management is Extreme Ownership. The classic mistakes I've seen made are: bypassing the chain of command and forgetting the mission.

There's a process by which my team accepts change requests, error reports, and feature requests from stakeholders. We plan our development in cycles and I co-ordinate efforts between teams so that people aren't getting blocked or stuck. The mistake here is when stakeholders bypass the chain of command and directly assign tasks to people on my team without telling me.

They don't realize the impact this has on productivity, momentum, and due dates. Not to mention morale! My developers don't like it when they have the next couple of days planned out for themselves and someone comes over and interrupts them to work on some non-related, trivial issue. They feel like they have no ownership or autonomy.

This all segues into _forgetting the mission_. A group of people need a clear mission in order to prioritize and co-ordinate work. Often times management will forget what the mission is and prioritize a customer's change request and delay important projects in order to meet their goals of keeping the customers happy. Sometimes you have to remember to say _no_ when doing the opposite harms the mission.

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

#225

Post by justaman » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #136

marcus_holmes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it depends on perspective. I don't think there's a 10x programmer, but I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers. If your organisation is not doing a good job of managing your developer team you may have a very skewed view of what 1x really looks like.

What makes a programmer a 1x? Can you give examples?

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

#226

Post by zpr » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:15 PM UTC

ideonexus wrote: post #199

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…

This. I've also seen where managers seem to know this but do it anyway. Because "hey, you're talented. You can do this."

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

#227

Post by Boothroid » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:16 PM UTC

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…

Unfortunately I've just thought of another - moaning about time estimations - even after these have been pared down to the absolute minimum with the expectation of putting in extra hours on the side to meet the deadline!

Good to get this stuff of the chest sometimes.

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

#228

Post by le-mark » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:16 PM UTC

MatthewWilkes wrote: post #136

marcus_holmes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it depends on perspective. I don't think there's a 10x programmer, but I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers. If your organisation is not doing a good job of managing your developer team you may have a very skewed view of what 1x really looks like.

I've been 100x or 1000x in certain situations. Two examples: a solution required a recursive descent parser which no one recognized or knew how to implement, and another time a team fought a bug in some Java code for weeks, but none of them understood thread safety. So in these two instances, I've done things other simply couldn't. Not because I'm special in anyway, just because I had some experience these others lacked.

Otherwise, I am a thoroughly mediocre performer. I'm a minimum effort Loser[1] all the way.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

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

#229

Post by Boothroid » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #217

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, mayb…

Agreed. Sometimes though I suspect this falls into the deliberate siloing of information category - though God knows how anyone thinks that keeping people uninformed is a good way to write software.

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

#230

Post by honestoHeminway » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

kpil wrote: post #133

viach wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And also, code if this kind if 10x developers is often unmaintainable and untested, which brings 100x effort for their teammates in the future.

My experience is that the long term effects are more than 10x. I heard a joke once : Complicated problems requires complicated solutions. Unfortunately, all problems are a bit complicated if you are a bit thick. The gist is that complexity grows faster than it needs. Ignoring people that can't make things over a certain threshold, there is a large group of programmers that can make things work, but are not able to bu…

Another thing often happening, is features coming down to developers, who by slight alteration can be trivial to implement. This usually happens due to missing domain knowledge of the management and sales (and a lack of insight regarding this lack).