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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?

#341

Post by beaker52 »

The manager of my current team came up with some complex way of solving a problem that we're facing as a business. He implemented a proof of concept and showed the business without involving anyone else in the dev team at all. Now the business wants to roll with this "solution" to a key part of our software we've been desperate to refactor with foresight of incoming requirements. Instead we're ploughing forward, saving refactoring for later to implement this proof of concept. No design work is to be done - only implementation because we're on a tight fictional deadline. He's throwing more developers on it to "help" and even micromanaging the implementation.

The same manager expressed displeasure that he wasn't involved in discussions with the business about a new project that rose whilst he was away on holiday.

Follow this guide at your peril.

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

#342

Post by lb1lf »

dahart wrote: post #262
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.

Speaking of seeing it coming, since my employer became part of $MultiNationalEngineeringCo, one of the most popular acronyms around the watering hole has been BOHICA. (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again for those lucky enough to work for a smaller company...)

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

#343

Post by s73ver_ »

serpix wrote: post #64
ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

There are some very common ones; * Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new). * Rewarding productivity over quality. * Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to…

> Tolerating misbehavior out of fear of losing an employee. What if said employee pulls in 10x, 100x more revenue/value than average worker for the company? Would you fire him because the rule book say so? That said I trust in effective communication as soon as possible to manage difficult situations or misbehaviour. Often the reasons can be deeply personal or family related and people are preoccupied with stuff outs…

Unless you're giving everyone that benefit of the doubt, then you're just reinforcing the idea that the rules don't apply to everyone. But even then, there's only so much that a personal/family problem can excuse.

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

#344

Post by drpentode »

Boothroid wrote: post #231
elliottcarlson wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Here's another one - promoting without advertising the role first. Come annual review time: 'I am pleased to announce that x, y and z are now Senior Consultants and will be managing a, b, c, d, e and f' (who were never given any chance to apply for the role).

At review time, when you're asked what your goals are, mention the promotion. Ask what you need to do to get there. 90% of the time, the manager is more than happy to help you.

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

#345

Post by fbonetti »

throwasehasdwi wrote: post #293
fbonetti wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :)

This aspect of the industry drives me absolutely insane. I've seen this at every single company I've worked at. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only developer that sees tech as merely a tool? I don't want to build a massively complex system that scales to infinity and does everything for everyone. I don't want to build everything from scratch. I want to build dead simple, boring software that accomplishes a goal and is easy to maintain, so that I can go home and not worry about it.

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

#346

Post by j_s »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #27

Want 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…

I recommend the short book (132 pages) by Gregory Brown released late last year:

Programming Beyond Practices https://amzn.com/dp/B01LYRCGA8 $14.99

detailed examples of the many problems developers encounter, including the thought process it takes to solve them

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

#347

Post by programd »

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…

Netflix is known for a policy of paying well for talent and being generous when dropping people who don't work out, for whatever reason. Their culture document is a great read.

https://jobs.netflix.com/culture/#introduction

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

#348

Post by kpil »

honestoHeminway wrote: post #230
kpil wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that the long term effects are more than 10x. I heard a joke once : Complicated problems requires complicated solutions. Unfortunately, all problems are a bit complicated if you are a bit thick. The gist is that complexity grows faster than it needs. Ignoring people that can't make things over a certain threshold, there is a large group of programmers that can make things work, but are not able to bu…

Another thing often happening, is features coming down to developers, who by slight alteration can be trivial to implement. This usually happens due to missing domain knowledge of the management and sales (and a lack of insight regarding this lack).

I'd say it's a process error if the requirement specifications are locked at the point they reach a dev team.

Preferably the requirements are explored by the team with the stake holders.

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

#349

Post by eberkund »

ramblerman wrote: post #192
thaumasiotes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obviously one golfer won't be able to hit the ball 10x as far or sink the ball in 10x fewer strokes than another. Obviously a gold medal sprinter won't run 10x as fast as the an amateur. What's obvious about that? I can pretty well guarantee the existence of golfers who need 10x the strokes of professional golfers. I can definitely guarantee the existence of people who can't manage 10% of the running speed of a gol…

Existence is not enough, you have to prove it is the average. The 10x programmer is not 10x vs the worst programmer, but 10x vs the crowd. Most people could beat a par 3 in less than 30 strokes given 1 week of exposure to golf.

I was going to reply to the parent but you and the other poster articulating it well for me. Thanks.
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