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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?

#241

Post by dajohnson89 »

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…

Unless you're doing your own thing, consulting is often way worse.

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

#242

Post by p0nce »

babesh wrote: post #90
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…

There are plenty of 10x or more effects. Anything with a binary outcome can be considered as such. If you measure a person's productivity along those lines, you will get 10x or more output. Also, this characteristic isn't restricted to programming. Furthermore, it is probable that someone can be -10X. Probable examples of 10x, Steve Wozniak for Apple, John Carmack back in the day, Dennis Ritchie, Tim Berners-Lee, Jef…

I'm of the opinion that many people can be that 10x programmer. But there is a lot of 0.1x positions.

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

#243

Post by vmattos »

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

As a DevOps engineer, I feel it all the time (and not only from managers)

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

#244

Post by groby_b »

pacificleo11 wrote: post #134
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…

"In my experience, the 10x programmer is a bit of a myth. " I think it depends on Industry / Role. A creative person in Advertisment or a good chip design engineer or someone great with Algorithm are often worthy of 10 or 20X compensation. Whats wrong is that many people think 10X guys can exist on Application layer / Front end. I think its very hard to do that

Let me guess - you don't work on app layer or front end? :)

Of course it's hard to be 10x there. The same way it's hard to be 10x on the algorithm side. It's also a matter of scope - if you have a giant backend, and your frontend is a single text box, it's hard to tell if somebody is 10x. As the FE scope grows, you start seeing the differences.

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

#246

Post by tnolet »

* mistaking agile for not having to make up their minds what they want.

* thinking projects can be planned back-to-back with no rework, maintenance, slack or anything calculated in.

* mistaking the end of a development cycle with the actual release moment. Last code commited == app is live.

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

#247

Post by groby_b »

tome wrote: post #166
nilkn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages That's interesting. Not the total compensation of the people she manages?

Nope. Total compensation requires nuance and access to the data. Headcount, everybody can see.

And so, off we go to empire-build. It's a pretty hard impulse to resist. Especially since many places consider "growth" the ultimate goal.

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

#248

Post by ransom1538 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #239

Trying to write code alongside their devs. Here's what happens when a manager tries to fill tickets himself: his sense of control of the project is derived not from relationships of trust and cooperation with his reports, but from direct involvement in the code. So naturally, any challenging or critical piece of code ends up getting written by him (because otherwise, how could he be confident about it?) The manager i…

I couldn't agree more here. As a manager you need to do all the shit work. The work the team hates. Ad integration, 3rd party phone calls, aws cost cutting, etc. All the grunt work too. Going through every god damn qa ticket. If you do this your team will perform at a higher level. Pushing crap work to the team will demotivate them and force multitasking.

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

#249

Post by fbonetti »

lb1lf wrote: 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…

Misguided cost savings is the worst when it comes from engineers. Software developers love to optimize, so if they can save $500 - $1,000 a month buy rolling their own service instead of paying for an existing one, they'll do it, completely ignoring the fact that their time costs money.

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

#250

Post by INTPenis »

* Not including the right technical resource when interviewing new hires.

* Failing to identify when they need and don't need micromanagement.

* Basic PM tasks like meeting protocols and case management.

* Not listening to technical resources to recommendations on scaling.

* Penny pinching when dealing with redundancy and scaling.

* Not communicating with their team.

* Not being honest when failing.

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