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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?

#381

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#382

Post by amaiti504 »

1) Underestimating the complexity of the problem

2) Closing down a project as soon as the o/p pops out without thinking about scalability

3) Lack of courage to say 'NO' to the client

4) Highly optimistic deadline

5) Daily meetings to ask how much work has been completed. Give me a percentage.

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

#383

Post by morgante »

e59d134d wrote: post #378
morgante wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 companie…

Sure, you don't want to rely on a lone genius. But I'd argue it's much better to have a team of 10 excellent engineers than 30 mediocre ones.

There are tons of companies with thousands and thousands of engineers who could easily make do with 100-1000 engineers if they were willing to attract and retain top talent.

> And as an interviewer, it is really hard to identify who is 10x and who is not.

That's definitely true, but top companies manage to do it. And when they make a mistake, they rectify it.

Team sports still pay to attract top performers. The best players can be a force multiplier for everyone.

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

#384

Post by e59d134d »

morgante wrote: post #383
e59d134d wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 companie…

Sure, you don't want to rely on a lone genius. But I'd argue it's much better to have a team of 10 excellent engineers than 30 mediocre ones. There are tons of companies with thousands and thousands of engineers who could easily make do with 100-1000 engineers if they were willing to attract and retain top talent. > And as an interviewer, it is really hard to identify who is 10x and who is not. That's definitely true…

> That's definitely true, but top companies manage to do it. And when they make a mistake, they rectify it.

I know many programmers from FB, Google, Amazon, Apple. There is no way they are 10 or even 2x. Some of them I worked with too, so I know their work. Others are just friends, we discuss technology all the time.

> Team sports still pay to attract top performers. The best players can be a force multiplier for everyone.

You are right team sports do pay a lot of money for top talent. Unfortunately, my experience with 10x programmers, as a teammate and as a manager, has always been negative. Most of them barely produce more than average programmer on long run but demotivate entire team or department by their arrogance, talking down, complaining, rudeness.

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

#385

Post by snvzz »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #215
snvzz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it. How is this a mistake then? It seems As Planned. It'd be a mistake if the management suffered for it.

In every case the companies they were trying to build up failed. Being vested owners, they lost money, and time.

I agree that makes sense, but the statement was "technical people are the ones to suffer for it". If that was true, it'd be as intended

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

#386

Post by quickthrower2 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #291
MatthewWilkes wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on perspective. I don't think there's a 10x programmer, but I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers. If your organisation is not doing a good job of managing your developer team you may have a very skewed view of what 1x really looks like.

> I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers I think the -1x programmer is even more common, the ones that have negative productivity and actually create more work for other programmers. I've encountered many of these types over the years. They are usually the very hard working type too. The kind who when encountering a problem always solves it by piling on more code, never refactoring, never taking a step back and…

I've worked with this type. In this case very outgoing too and favoured by management. Man that code though! That code!

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

#387

Post by gsylvie »

lsadam0 wrote: post #129
Mc91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we had a good manager. Whenever we saw a problem in the systems, even a minor, low priority one, we opened a JIRA ticket for it. After all, JIRA was there for the convenience of the workers in the IT department. Then a new manager came in. When he discovered we had JIRA, he told us he was going to use JIRA to evaluate us on how fast we fixed tickets and how many tickets we fixed. We in the IT department…

Honestly, poor management aside....I cannot believe you are bragging about this. Rather than confront and address the problem, your solution was to actually delete shared knowledge?

Confront and address? You ain't gonna get your boss fired without a scratch. He's just bragging that he achieved a local maxima, and I think he's correct.

Maybe during the exit interview he could have said, "oh by the way, there's a file on my computer..."

But then he might suddenly find the severance offer is retracted.

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

#388

Post by curuinor »

EliRivers wrote: post #218
marcus_holmes wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 10x thing. Here's what I usually say about that: A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and…

I've studied power laws for a half-decade now and I still don't think I really understand them in my gut, to be honest

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

#389

Post by karmakaze »

afpx wrote: post #205
nilkn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the folks discussing whether or not 10x developers exist are missing the more basic point here. In most companies, a manager's status is determined almost entirely by how many people he or she manages. It's absolutely in their best interest to hire more mediocre people than fewer exceptional people because the correct incentives haven't been put in place for managers in the company. At many places, the best t…

What incentives would rectify this? What metrics should be tracked?

Tracking results of each team. This is a start, however subjective and susceptible to gaming it may be.

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

#390

Post by karmakaze »

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…

> 10x programmer

The 10x effect is not on the immediate output of a particular development task. It's the lifetime value/cost of the choices made. In this respect there are many 10x developers, the ones who can factor complexity into a composition of conceptually and realized simple components. This works if they're presence is early in development, otherwise you may need a 20x to turn a 1x codebase into a 5x one.

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