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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?

#351

Post by mindcrime »

Thinking they can bend reality through sheer force of will (aka managerial edict), right up until reality smacks them in the face. Example:

M: How long will this take?

D: Three weeks.

M: That's too long, we have to demo at a trade show in two weeks.

D: Fine, we can take out half the features.

M: No, we have to demo in two weeks, with all the features, end of story.

D: It can't be done, end of story.

M: Do it anyway.

D: We can't, what your asking for is literally impossible.

M: Fine, I'll loan you three more developers.

D: No, that won't help. Haven't you read The Mythical Man Month for crying out loud?

M: Of course it will help, how can it not help?

D: Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

M: That's not really relevant, get all the features done in two weeks.

D: Then why did you bother asking me how long it would take in the first place?

M: Just do it.

D: ~grumble~ -- storms off in a huff.

...

...

...

...

...

...

2 weeks later.

M: Is it done?

D: No, I told you it wouldn't be done.

M: Oh, OK. Well how long will it take to finish?

D: Another week.

M: OK, fine.

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

#353

Post by tboyd47 »

kaspm wrote: post #337
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…

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 ev…

Maybe data modeling is something that's officially a "manager-level task" at your company, so it's something you have to be involved in. But I would try to err on the side of delegating too much, rather than too little. If you have knowledge in a certain area that gives you special insight into how to improve implementation of code, I would challenge you to try to disseminate that amongst your team and hold them accountable for following it themselves, rather than setting yourself up as a gatekeeper.

All this assumes you trust your team to be thoughtful and do good work. If not then that's a whole 'nother issue.

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

#354

Post by tboyd47 »

drpentode wrote: post #340
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…

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.

Yep - that's true. I dunno, and I'm facing the same issue myself. Wish I had a solution.

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

#355

Post by tnolet »

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…

Peopleware is great. Should be on anyone's list that is in engineering management, a VP or CTO.

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

#356

Post by tnolet »

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…

Peopleware is great. Should be on anyone's list that is in engineering management, a VP or CTO.

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

#357

Post by sulam »

groby_b wrote: post #256
sulam wrote: post #45

I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this: 1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can. 1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking long…

You can't change it dramatically overnight, but you can certainly change it enough that it's worth it. It's a boatload of work. Expect to spend as much time per week as you usually spend on 3-5 people. Then make the call if you can afford to do that. It's buying you a lot in terms of employee goodwill and team morale. (The second one only if you don't neglect the team over it, obviously :)

In our current job-hopping world, where you are lucky to even get 4 years from an employee, you can take someone from good to great, acceptable to good, or bad to acceptable in the time you work with them. Your investment should almost always be on the first two, especially because the last one is a much bigger investment of time and energy. Keep in mind many times what you're fighting is not just lack of experience or some other easily fixable thing, you're fighting personality traits the person has had for years, and will continue to have (to a lesser degree) even if you _do_ "fix" things.

It is one of my signals of inexperienced management that they believe they can/should take on this sort of challenge.

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

#358

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

> * Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it

Yeah that's funny, believe it or not - I prefer the exact opposite. At my last jobs I had a hard time diving into new technologies unless I knew them completely. Thus I think synchronization is an important thing...

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

#359

Post by 0xfeba »

shatteredvisage wrote: post #290
0xfeba wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also hits a nerve for me. Our mgmt just shuffles devs around from fire to fire without really just sticking the same devs to a single project until it's done. Then we get questioned why projects are not done. And don't get my started on our new Agile process. We have scrum meetings for our scrum meetings. We have mgmt. popping in the project level scrum meetings to tell us what is and isn't scrummy enough to talk abo…

define awesome? Currently in a similar situation...

~95k inc. bonus. Good healthcare, paternity leave, etc.

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

#360

Post by Terr_ »

kaspm wrote: post #337
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…

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 ev…

> How would you like your manager to handle being involved in data modeling?

When it comes to business-domain concepts, like "what is a project" or "what subtypes of customers do we have", that's stuff where I feel a manager should be helping to involve more people.

I'm speaking from the perspective of working on a business' proprietary ERP system, and it feels like nobody really knows how the business "ought" to work, they just follow the traditions enshrined in the code and then ask for their itches to be scratched.

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