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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?

#361

Post by zilchers »

tomohawk wrote: post #117
zilchers wrote: post #26

Something I see a ton is management by crisis - 20 people from an organization could tell certain managers that there will be performance issues in 3 months if we don't pay down tech debt, but nothing actually sinks in until there is a performance crisis in 3 months.

The corollary to that is that many technical types will make things work despite management ignoring the fundamentals. Sometimes its better to let something fail sooner than to make it work, when it's clear the fundamentals will eventually overtake the effort.

Ya, great point, though at big companies it can be very hard to just let things fail. Though that reminds me of another answer to the parent question which is managers who reward people who fix broken stuff, but don't reward people who didn't build fragile things to begin with.

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

#362

Post by matrixagent »

groby_b wrote: post #253
matrixagent wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else using that? We use it at my company with very varying levels of success.

A lot of places. It dates back to (IIRC) Intel in the late 70s. Doerr brought the idea to Google.

Oh, I hadn't heard it was that old. Fascinating, so far I've always thought it was something that came directly out of Google itself.

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

#363

Post by matrixagent »

wtvanhest wrote: post #307
matrixagent wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else using that? We use it at my company with very varying levels of success.

Almost all big companies. It was done when I worked at Intel 2010sh

Interesting. How did you like it? Does every person at Intel have their own quarterly OKR list, or do they stop propagating down at some level? Were they always on time? How did lower levels give input with regard to what they thought were important goals? Or did really everything come top-down?

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

#364

Post by groby_b »

sulam wrote: post #357
groby_b wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, ~10 years as a manager (and 30 in the industry) is not a lot of experience. But it's enough to know that "focus on the stars" mostly aims at making the managers life easier - anybody can manage a team of great performers.

Of course it's a judgment call. Some things, you cannot fix. But some things, you can, and the cost of doing so is much less than rehiring. Good management means making those judgment calls, not just saying "meh, I don't care about low performers, too much work".

Maybe, just maybe, that's a tiny part of the reason people on my team seem to stay longer than 4 years. Because we don't just treat them as disposable cogs.

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

#365

Post by groby_b »

matrixagent wrote: post #362
groby_b wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of places. It dates back to (IIRC) Intel in the late 70s. Doerr brought the idea to Google.

Oh, I hadn't heard it was that old. Fascinating, so far I've always thought it was something that came directly out of Google itself.

Google has a good PR department? ;)

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

#366

Post by sulam »

groby_b wrote: post #364
sulam wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, ~10 years as a manager (and 30 in the industry) is not a lot of experience. But it's enough to know that "focus on the stars" mostly aims at making the managers life easier - anybody can manage a team of great performers. Of course it's a judgment call. Some things, you cannot fix. But some things, you can, and the cost of doing so is much less than rehiring. Good management means making those judgment calls, n…

I'd be happy to discuss over a beer. I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules in life, and I've tried to help people more than once in my career (currently I do it in a non-management capacity which is arguably harder). But I think we can agree some situations aren't going to be saved. Good management is knowing how hard to try and when to stop.

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

#367

Post by alimoeeny »

Spooky23 wrote: post #13

#1 in my book is sunk cost fallacy. Everywhere I've worked, the folks running the show have too much ego and political capital invested in products or projects that are turds. The result is massive financial losses for the business.

Who is the author? or a link?

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

#368

Post by mianos »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #176
mianos wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the usual thing is to pay the new guy more and believe his story that the tech he used at the last gig, that he is now an expert in, is better than how you did it. Now management makes the new expert the boss. Next thing the old guy discovers the new guy was just in the right place at the right time in the last place and is useless, but, because he is the new boss you have to do everything again.

Fair point. That would definitely be a bad scenario as well, but would imho be a different issue from hiring someone from outside all together. A bad hire is a bad hire, and someone who comes in wanting to change everything to fit their way (especially if their way is wrong) is not a good thing. I still don't know if the original point is accurate as a common mistake, and perhaps the bigger issue would be that non-te…

I agree, both reasons. The funny thing about this, in a dark funny way, is, management often offers a veto right to the team. They say "if you don't rate the new manager you can deny". Then, they hire anyway, in my experience, more often than not if they like the guy. I think the excuse is "You people doing the work (often with 'in the trenches') don't understand the big picture, this new guy does, so your veto is annulled".

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

#369

Post by kaspm »

Terr_ wrote: post #360
kaspm wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I think that is true in a lot of cases, especially in business process engineering. It's a blessing when you work with a really good business process engineer!

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

#370

Post by kaspm »

tboyd47 wrote: post #353
kaspm wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acco…

Thanks that's helpful!
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