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

Not thinking about team morale until it becomes a issue. Negative mindsets can spread through a team quickly, and once they take hold they can be hard to root out.

I think of YAGNI as a very important principle, and encourage young developers to practice it rigorously, but as you grow in your arts you should eventually be able to reliably predict some elements of the future, and as you approach the middle of your career you should be able to start successfully heading such things off at the pass.

I think it is important while young to be very aggressive with the YAGNI because otherwise you will have a much harder time developing that prediction skill, as the data set will be much noisier.

#1: Management cutting corners in the budget in areas that need the money, but keeping the money flowing in areas that don't. For example, I was a one-man-miracle show brought in to do an infrastructure upgrade for a company drowning in technical debt. I managed to impliment what would have been a $45-70k$ system for ~$19k, at the core node level, but when requesting a ~$8k horizontal cabling job to be done by a contractor, all I got was "no, it's not gonna happen". Which brings me to...

#2: Not putting more effort into communication and discovering needs of departments they have been unable to communicate properly to get approved. I'm a senior sysadmin (taking a break and transitioning to data science), but for a long time all I wanted to do was be in the datacenter with my head in a terminal and doing good work. In retrospect since my break, I have realized that as a senior that's not my role anymore except in case of escalation no one else can solve. I was not playing the board-room politics game to get what my department needed, and that was a failure on my part. Generally, I am now calling for high investment in the CTO/CIO position because they should be the people who can talk to the technical people who don't need to spend all day in a meeting room, and spend all day in the meeting room advocating for them and the things they and the department need. Execs like to stay on their pedestal and force others to rise to their level, but they need to spend at least some effort on actually listening to the middle-men and "going down to their level" so to speak.

I don't care what industry you are in, those two things alone would vastly improve the workplace for workers of all types (not just IT) and business in general. Those two misteps, particularly combined with lackluster reward systems (once spent a year working overtime-exempt salary hoping for a raise, and instead, after having spent the overtime while salary fixing up a place, got shifted to hourly once I was no longer working late and on weekends,) are recipes for hemoragging good talent. Good talent might temporarily forget how good they are, are be stuck for some other reason, but it's only a matter of time before they drop your company like hotcakes and move on. Pay them fairly, and as far as retention goes, real, substantial bonuses can make all the difference.

Never forget, that regardless of industry, your internal IT team is much more critical and important than you can imagine, and ignoring IT as your bastard-child will come back and bite you in the ass. Removing technical debt should be a #1 priority.

It's one reason I am so thankful for being a senior sysadmin for so long. As a senior, since we touch so much of a company, I got to see the internal non-it mechanisms of so many companies I think I have gained a level of macro-business insight not many have.

https://youtu.be/2e9xTsOoqmw?t=1116

> Hiring two mediocre developers at half the salary of one good developer. They usually can't solve problems past a certain treshhold.

This, so much. No matter how many first-years physics students you have, you're not going to invent general relativity.

If everybody around them is a 0.1x programmer, the 1x programmer is effectively a 10x.