Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 396 posts

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

#261

Post by astonex »

* Everything must be done urgently and asap.

* Moving developers on and off of projects in the middle of development.

* Not listening to the lead developers' time estimates

* Focusing on the quickest possible development time instead of quality (and then complaining about going over-budget when bug fixing takes way too long).

* Worrying more about for how long you're sat in your seat rather than the quality of your work.

* Doesn't reward exceptional work.

* Gives developers work that they're not skilled in without adjusting the time estimates

* All 7 hours of the day must be billable time spent coding.

* Constantly wants to change what technologies are used for projects

* Over complicates tasks and/or tries to add their own 'good ideas' which are actually a nightmare to do.

This is my current boss. My stress levels are off the charts. Fortunately I've found work elsewhere and will be leaving soon.

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

#262

Post by dahart »

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…

> Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing

This definitely happens every time a manager or executive is replaced or hired. And it's easy to see why it happens despite the damage it causes. Executive turnover might not be the cause in your case, but if it is, the good news is you can see it coming.

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

#264

Post by sidlls »

jusssi wrote: post #184
sidlls wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These 4x (or 10x or whatever outlandish multiple) developers are rare, if they even exist, unless one constrains the scope of their work to a tiny sliver of their particular expertise. Hiring for such micro optimization is inefficient at best, ineffective usually, and counterproductive at worst.

In my experience, 0.1x and 0.25x developers don't seem to be all that rare. The existence of a 10x developer is a question of what you use as a reference point for your scale.

Not really. It makes it a question of context, at best. Most of the time it also relies on extremely subjective measures.

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

#265

Post by adamb_ »

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…

Spot on. As a manager, it's your responsibility to delegate effectively.

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

#266

Post by gaius »

jaggederest wrote: post #201
dasmoth wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is less a factor of the person and more of the environment tho'.

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

#267

Post by pestkranker »

Angostura wrote: post #237
pestkranker wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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.

This was the one that really struck a chord with me. You start of trying to take the product you created for one specific client and then generalising it. You end up, in practice creating a individual bloody application for each client. (Not a coder, more a manager who created specs and tried to shield the coders from the worst of the shit-storm).

It is not individual applications. It is SAAS.

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

#268

Post by pc86 »

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.

1. Building a product for a specific client takes less time than building a configurable generalized product that you can sell to others. The business may be willing to take a $30k haircut as in your example, but are they also willing to have development take 50-60% longer (and the additional financial costs of that)?

2. Once it's a generalized product, how will that first client feel about being told that a new feature they want won't be built?

3. As a corollary to #2, the first client will also look at it as something they purchased, not a service that you now offer to them. They'll demand things and the business will need to have the fortitude to tell them no, and most businesses can't (or won't) do this.

It's very hard to get a scenario like this to work out where people are still happy with the arrangement 2-3 years in the future.

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

#270

Post by ehnto »

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.

Best case, good people leave and the company spends more than it needed to on onboarding new people.

Worst case, good people leave and your team never fully recovers, the product is technical garbage and you end up spending on a rebuild, or the product fails. Considering the product is the foundation of the project, ignoring warnings from the people building it would be like ignoring someone yelling "Fire" inside a wood mill. They know the product, wood, doesn't come out very well given the current circumstance, fire. We should probably listen.

Ultimately, more money and happier people could have been had if things were done pragmatically but correctly. There is of course such a thing as an overengineered product, so there is certainly a balance between pragmatism, speed and quality. But the mindset being brought up here is that you can forsake quality and happiness for more profit without consequence, and I suspect that's not truly the case.

Post reply on HN