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?

#291

Post by Aaargh20318 » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:08 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 worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers

I think the -1x programmer is even more common, the ones that have negative productivity and actually create more work for other programmers. I've encountered many of these types over the years.

They are usually the very hard working type too. The kind who when encountering a problem always solves it by piling on more code, never refactoring, never taking a step back and thinking about the problem. You don't want to be seen idling at your desk, better keep typing.

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

#292

Post by j45 » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

Hiring non technical people for roles that are becoming increasingly more technical.

Many fields such as hr, payroll, etc have become far more technical in the implementation and use of system.

Management isn't realizing how much how quickly their business is changing and the impacts to their business.

Sometimes I wonder if perceived non-tech roles need to introduce an excel competency test not to measure excel talent, but the ability to work with data and details at a baseline level for the organization, or become the weak link.

If you can't work with the details of a business in a basic sense....

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

#293

Post by throwasehasdwi » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:12 PM UTC

fbonetti wrote: post #249

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.

Eh, most developers I know are lazy and won't even measure the performance of the thing they're building if it's "good enough". I can't remember the last time any of us fired up a profiler. Optimization is generally hard and un-fun.

On the other hand, developers love to build shiny new stuff more than they like using things that are already there. The "Optimize" part you're talking about is more "reinvent the wheel" in my experience.

Figuring out how to use X new library isn't fun. Building this cool thing that does the same thing but better is a lot of fun! That's why things get overengineered and built for "scale", which is probably mostly what you'r referring to. Instead of taking something off the shelf that would work fine some developers are compelled to build something that can handle the entire traffic of the internet. They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :)

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

#294

Post by gavingmiller » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

Not training managers on how to manage.

When devs are promoted into management or team lead positions they are not given adequate training on what it means to manage / lead. Thus devs don't learn what good management is, and the stereotype of the bad manager perpetuates.

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

#295

Post by adeel_siddiqui » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:15 PM UTC

Would just like to add one in addition to the points already made in the comments: Offering you a significant raise, a different and more interesting project/location, when you have put in your papers. Asking you to rethink your decision of quitting.

Seems like I didn't exist for the manager until I put my resignation.

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

#296

Post by patrickking » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:15 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #191

FooHentai wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of non-tech companies treat IT as a cost center and that can lead to short sighted decisions that cost them a lot in the long run (or more accurately, they fail to realize benefits that were available to them with appropriate investment). But it seems counter intuitive that this effect can be worse for some tech companies, where a major part of their business involves convincing clients to treat their tech as m…

Well you could be like IBM which sells remote working solutions but has banned it for their own staff. Or maybe that was HP, or both.

That was a slimy downsizing measure. IBM doesn't have to pay severance if their remote workers quit on their own rather than come in 9 to 5.

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

#297

Post by hobofan » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:17 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…

If people (even if they have a special position in the company) can just come to your developers with a list of tasks, without going through a process, that is a much bigger problem.

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

#298

Post by Aaargh20318 » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:19 PM UTC

Not understanding your own product.

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

#299

Post by muzani » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:19 PM UTC

elliottcarlson wrote: post #158

muzani wrote: post #69

* Killing things that are low profit margins, under some misguided Pareto Principle approach. Sometimes these things are loss leaders designed to pull customers for other products. * Spending too much on marketing/sales before people want the product. They usually just end up burning their brand if the product is too low quality. * Too much focus on building multiple small features rather than focusing on the value p…

> Importing tech talent, rather than promoting. is often at odds with both the point above and below it. When a company is in rapid growth, there may be a point where the talent they relied on is not quite ready for the promotion they are hiring in for. Without expanding that search outside, you may become stale in the organization, and not provide the right mentorship to ensure that those interested in getting promo…

More into details...

I've actually been approached by recruiters in a few companies who want me to come in and "upgrade" the whole tech stack. I ask them what's wrong with it? It turns out management was not happy with it being built in a homegrown framework by a junior, even though it was functioning fine.

Situation for the last point: I was asked to come in for a years old team. The team didn't know source control or agile. But because a large number of them were used to operating without these tools, it was extremely difficult to get them to adopt proper techniques, and we only got the juniors and testers to use Git.

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

#300

Post by noxToken » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 3:21 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #273

noxToken wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is especially important IMHO for more senior engineers responsible for architecture and stuff, because those matters can greatly affect the architecture. Telling me why lets me start getting a grasp on what parts of the code are long term and what can be considered a short term hack, what the scaling levels I need to shoot for... This right here has been the biggest problem in my experience. We'll have unfores…

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 o…

This is something that I struggled with at first. I kept gravitating towards abstract solutions, and returning to that code was always annoying. Too many layers for so little payoff.