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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?

#251

Post by inetknght »

EliRivers wrote: post #218
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…

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…

> well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

I think too much faith is put in the abilities of most management; otherwise this Ask-HN article might not have been asked.

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

#252

Post by gaius »

timwaagh wrote: post #165

i don't think they make too many mistakes. from their perspective its about minimizing cost and maximising earnings and i think they do this reasonably well. some managers can get a bit fanatical about this, which can shoot them in the foot sometimes but that is not the case at any company i worked for.

don't think they make too many mistakes

Nailed it. Customers, employees and shareholders may be unhappy but managers are always happy...

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

#253

Post by groby_b »

matrixagent wrote: post #174
cpeterso wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google uses a hierarchical system for quarterly and annual goals called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that tries to align goals for the company, orgs, teams, and individuals. http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-ranking-system-okr-20...

Anyone else using that? We use it at my company with very varying levels of success.

A lot of places. It dates back to (IIRC) Intel in the late 70s. Doerr brought the idea to Google.

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

#254

Post by thehardsphere »

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…

>You might think startups are small enough that this couldn't happen but that was actually where my worst experience was.

Start ups are merely new businesses. New businesses can be poorly run just like any other business can. If anything, start ups are probably more likely to be poorly run merely because the genuinely awful ones haven't gone out of business yet.

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

#255

Post by johngalt »

Failure to focus on the logistics surrounding the team, while relentlessly pushing out carrots and sticks for more productivity.

If you have the right skills, training, tools, and processes; things get done well. When there are gaps in these areas, no amount of discipline or incentives will make up for it. Don't make the cheese bigger, make the maze smaller.

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

#256

Post by groby_b »

sulam wrote: post #45

I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this: 1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can. 1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking long…

You can't change it dramatically overnight, but you can certainly change it enough that it's worth it.

It's a boatload of work. Expect to spend as much time per week as you usually spend on 3-5 people. Then make the call if you can afford to do that. It's buying you a lot in terms of employee goodwill and team morale. (The second one only if you don't neglect the team over it, obviously :)

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

#257

Post by 0xfeba »

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…

Also hits a nerve for me. Our mgmt just shuffles devs around from fire to fire without really just sticking the same devs to a single project until it's done.

Then we get questioned why projects are not done.

And don't get my started on our new Agile process. We have scrum meetings for our scrum meetings. We have mgmt. popping in the project level scrum meetings to tell us what is and isn't scrummy enough to talk about during the meetings.

And I moved to this company after thinking my last company didn't have it together. Man, I was wrong. No one writes comments here, or any tests. We just "make it work". Pay is awesome though...

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

#258

Post by 0x4f3759df »

Assuming that saying 'Do X' is really 'Do X'. Truth is I have to fix 10 bugs before I can even set up a test case for 'X'...

Also just the general cluelessness of the state of the software.

Managers need to convince the higher-ups that the software is in good shape (because their job is on the line), meanwhile the devs know its got 1000 bugs in the ticket list plus 3000 bugs that didn't make it to the list.

Failure to explain management objectives. 'We promised company X feature Y in Z days'

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

#260

Post by le-mark »

tmat wrote: post #206
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…

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)..…

How did you line up clients willing to pay for what you're worth?
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