just read the basic findings W. Edwards Deming. Same mistakes he talks about.
Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
331–340 of 396 posts
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#332One thing I've seen more than once is the extreme opposite of cargo cult. Managers (usually from technical background and no managerial experience) who think that all literature/knowledge on managing is bshit and that they are too smart for it and have better solutions for everything.
Lean? Bullshit -> never even reads about it.
Agile? Bullshit -> never even reads about it.
It's basically: if someone ever tried to sell a consultancy about it, it's bullshit. fake news
Instead of having a healthy approach to things: Read about it, learn, see what applies, see what not, try to think what is just marketing and what makes sense. Don't do cargo cult doesn't mean don't study.
Again, I usually see that when someone gets someone that is clearly a technical person and promotes them to be a manager. They become disillusioned and unhappy and start hating everything about management.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#333Becoming managers to sooth their self-esteem issues.
I don't mean this as a cynical joke at all. In my experience too few managers see the job as a job, and instead they see it as a power and status boost --- a way to be "winning" in the game of life.
It should be a calling. It should be the thing you were put on this earth to do.
Of dozens of managers I've encountered, I've only met 1 or 2 where it seemed to be their calling.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Insistence that all devs time must be billable That one can hit all areas of ICT real bad when the company is a managed service provider, leading to a 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom' where the company provides great outsource ICT services offering to its clients, but runs an absolute shitshow for it's own systems because they're chronically under resourced (you can't bill it, so don't spend time on it). That has…
I think I get what you mean by 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom', but I've never heard either colloquialism before and can't find anything on Google, either. What's the origin of these terms?
Based on the context, something like "the cobbler's children have no shoes" meaning they are too busy doing paid work for others to the same work for themselves.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/159004/the-cobbl...
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Insistence that all devs time must be billable That one can hit all areas of ICT real bad when the company is a managed service provider, leading to a 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom' where the company provides great outsource ICT services offering to its clients, but runs an absolute shitshow for it's own systems because they're chronically under resourced (you can't bill it, so don't spend time on it). That has…
I think I get what you mean by 'Chefs kitchen/Plumber's bathroom', but I've never heard either colloquialism before and can't find anything on Google, either. What's the origin of these terms?
I don't think it's related to too many chef's in the kitchen. More a reference to chefs having a spotless kitchen at their day job, but a messy kitchen at home. Likewise for plumbers.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I started w/ word of mouth and networking through people I already knew. I also started with a lower rate. I raised my rates anytime I had to much work to do. I discovered this technique from another friend.
I was complaining one day about having WAY to many clients. He said and I'll never forget it, "if you have to much work to do, you're not charging enough."
I started 2.5 years ago at $70/hr and am now at $135/hr after several rounds of raising rates. Sometimes I would lose a client when raising my rates, but that was ok and really was the goal. They were usually the most painful to deal w/ anyway. My best clients usually never even balked at it. Just said ok and kept on paying.
I then got to the point where I needed to give myself a brand and bring on another developer because I started taking on very large green field projects(this was something my lawyer and accountants suggested for insurance/legal/protection reasons).
At that point I got more advanced and started doing some content marketing, facebook ads, and google ads to keep the pipeline running. The hardest part was keeping clients lined up in the beginning. Because I would get a client, work the client and during that time stop looking for new clients. Which lead to a lot of down cycles with no work to be done while I looked for the next client. This is still an ongoing thing we're working on at this time to improve our client acquisition techniques.
I also use a pretty unique billing structure that my clients seem to really love. You can read all about how and why we chose to do it this way here https://blog.grillwork.io/why-we-no-longer-use-fixed-price-c...
My partner and I now do about 20-30hrs a week for clients pretty steady and spend the rest of the time working on projects we own fully that we hope can generate recurring revenue. It has been a really fantastic journey that I hope never ends.
Every day get really inspired by the stories on indiehackers.com and just find this way of work extremely fascinating. Very rewarding both personally and financially so far and I don't think I'll ever stop doing what I'm doing if I have anything to say about it.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#337Trying 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…
Interesting, as a manager, I try very hard to do as much of the grunt work as possible and the devs do more feature coding. Out of curiosity, where do you rank data modeling?
I tend to want to either design or review all data design, either relational or other, partly because of my background in data engineering and partly because I have business awareness that the devs don't have. It's just not possible to convey every nuance of a constantly evolving business to each dev on the team without it being distracting.
How would you like your manager to handle being involved in data modeling? Develop a spec and then review? pair modeling?
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)..…
>So I decided to go at it on my own and charge a rate I felt I was worth. Best career decision I've made so far. I think this, above all else, is the key to the frustration and ever decreasing salaries we're seeing. The market has spoken: employees just aren't worth that much. If you want to capture more of the value you create you'll need to go into business for yourself. It's risky, but sitting a desk in a huge off…
I started by talking to my friends and networking with people who needed developers, using online sites to find people hiring or seeking developers I could pitch on my services(this works amazingly well), and doing content marketing to get some SEO and exposure for myself and services. I started with a rate that was a little more than my salary when I left to cover things like savings, retirements, insurance, taxes etc that my job paid and raised my rates any time I had to much work to do. See my other response in the thread for more details.
Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#339Want to jump ahead a few years from Mythical Man-Month? Let me recommend Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.[2] It's painful that we haven't crawled far out of the 80s practices. The first chapter says: "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." Sorry Google Memo Dude. DeMarco and Lister called it in the 80s. Speaking of DeMarco, he also wrote a book about controll…
Fascinating. Is the A/B situation DeMarco describes about knowing ahead of time that A will turn minimal profit while B will turn maximal profit? If so, the conclusion reached seems right: tighter profit margins require tighter control. And control requires resource, which is a cost that further diminishes returns. But if the described scenario is about not knowing ahead of time whether A or B will turn a large profi…
I agree with your general point. It's difficult/impossible to get accurate numbers. I would contend that we have a general idea. Management nearly always imposes more control when it's nervous the costs are approaching the rewards. The flip side is Silicon Valley VC investing. Tonnes of money is thrown and very little control is exercised by investors, at least at first, because the rewards devour almost all costs. The programming equivalent might be Big-O notation. We don't know _precisely_ the costs of an algorithm, but we can do general comparisons.
DeMarco also seems to agree.
The book’s most quoted line is its first sentence:
"You can’t control what you can’t measure." This line
contains a real truth, but I’ve become increasingly
uncomfortable with my use of it. Implicit in the quote
(and indeed in the book’s title) is that control is an
important aspect, maybe the most important, of any
software project. But it isn’t. Many projects have
proceeded without much control but managed to produce
wonderful products such as GoogleEarth or Wikipedia.Re: Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making?
#340Trying 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…
As a manager, what's the best way to respond when your VP or CEO asks you why you don't code a lot? I've been pressured to both code and manage. It takes two totally different mindsets to do that. It is really hard, and it usually means I end up not doing a good job at either.