Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 396 posts

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

#371

Post by dvtv75 »

Boothroid wrote: post #211
pestkranker wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products Can you tell me why? Sometimes, asking a client for 50k instead of 80k with a "spin-off" agreement can pay to both parties. The client can get long-term support with new features without the need to pay for it.

I agree that sounds like a reasonable approach - but in my working life it's always been seen as this fantastic wheeze of 'let's charge one customer to build something and then go off and sell it to everyone else!'. It seems like a great idea, but the usual story is that either making it generic burns up days that would otherwise be spent meeting the specific customer's requirements, thereby ensuring a worse product,…

Out of the blue, I was once expected to set up a recording studio and learn the electrical engineering side of things 'along the way! You've got the afternoon, in addition to your normal duties.' My background is in CS, not physics or engineering, so you can imagine how that went - and of course, the manager wasn't to blame.

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

#372

Post by icco »

- Acting like 1:1s and performance reviews aren't the most important aspect of your job by putting them off, ignoring them or saying you dislike them to your reports

- I'll repeat: "misusing agile in order to micromanage"

- Requiring all decisions to be signed off on

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

#373

Post by sulam »

sulam wrote: post #366
groby_b wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh and an addendum: the error bar for inexperienced managers is way too far in the "this is fine" direction.

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

#374

Post by BrandoElFollito »

FooHentai wrote: post #148
Boothroid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't heard that one before, interesting observation.

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…

Because of this mindset, companies who decided to outsource IT as an obvious cost optimization realized how their company actually runs.

Specifically that there are huge off-the-record operations (outside of the ticket system). The more VIP the problem is, the less tickets.

And suddenly, the people supporting them (particularly if they were outsourced but stayed in the company as contractors, and were pissed off) had one sentence "open a ticket". Doesn't matter if this is the CEO asking, or something "urgent", ticket it is.

And the gates to hell opened.

Source : me not being IT anymore (huge company) but strongly advocating against the outsourcing (pointing to the above), and then taking a backseat and watching the world burn with popcorn in hand.

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

#375

Post by UK-AL »

ransom1538 wrote: post #248
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…

I couldn't agree more here. As a manager you need to do all the shit work. The work the team hates. Ad integration, 3rd party phone calls, aws cost cutting, etc. All the grunt work too. Going through every god damn qa ticket. If you do this your team will perform at a higher level. Pushing crap work to the team will demotivate them and force multitasking.

I don't really find those tasks shit work. I actually find them quite interesting.

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

#376

Post by Cshelton »

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…

For a manager that was a developer, this is one of the hardest things to learn. Knowing how and when to delegate properly.

When I first took on a manager role, I for sure made this mistake. Anything hard had to have me fully involved. Grunt work was definitely given out, and yeah, I ended up being stressed out far too often.

I think it's important to have manager training for new managers. Somebody to whisper over their shoulder and say, "give them a shot, trust them on this"

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

#377

Post by e59d134d »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #70
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…

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…

Maybe I haven't met a true 10x programmer but met plenty who pretend that they are 10x. I would say those 10X programmers that I had "pleasure" of working with, are net negative to overall productivity.

In my experience, 10x programmers are hard to manage, they complain all the time, no one wants to work with them, their ego gets bruised easily.

But you keep them around because they seem really smart until you look at overall work produced. They might produce 10x work over a weekend but over longterm, they hardly produce any more work than average programmer.

In my interview process, if anyone even slightly hints that they are smarter than average, I end interview immediately. My team is composed of average programmers who get along and have fun working together.

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

#378

Post by e59d134d »

morgante wrote: post #107
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…

It consistently astounds me how many companies would rather hire 2-3 average developers (for average or below-average salaries) rather than one great developer for 1.5x the price. Here in New York, this is especially acute. Many finance companies have thousands and thousands of developers. They'll have a team of developers (costing maybe $500k/yr total) working on a problem which a single excellent developer could ea…

This is also part of redundancy. If you hire 1 10x programmer and they get sick, no work gets done. If they leave, you will have hard time finding their replacement.

3 average programmers who understand your code adds a lot of redundancy.

And as an interviewer, it is really hard to identify who is 10x and who is not. But very easy to tell who has enough knowledge and pleasant personality. Programming in most companies is team sports, not a marathon.

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

#379

Post by groby_b »

sulam wrote: post #366
groby_b wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Always happy to discuss things over a beer. (Well, I'll have white wine, if you don't mind ;)

And yes, not every situation is salvageable. Alas. Knowing when to stop is why I'm in favor of having a defined process well before you come to the "change, or else" part. That prevents the sad effect that your bar shifts as you collect reports, just because you've got more things to do.

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

#380

Post by groby_b »

sulam wrote: post #373
sulam wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh and an addendum: the error bar for inexperienced managers is way too far in the "this is fine" direction.

That, I'm not debating. Rule of thumb for new managers: Assume the world is on fire, just in case ;)
Post reply on HN