131–140 of 148 posts
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What does a “good manager” look like?
1. Have clear goals. 2. Communicate your goals clearly. 3. Ask what people need to achieve the goal, and actually LISTEN deeply. Negotiate deadlines/resource allocation until the crew can honestly commit. 4. Dedicate your efforts to getting the crew what they need. 5. Reiterate your clear goals often and clearly.
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Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive…
A false negative has zero realized cost. I would say there's missed opportunity cost.
>> In addition to building clear rubrics, we began unconscious bias training to maintain consistency and objectivity. Is that still valid? I thought the tests to support this concept had failed to be replicated? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.... https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
Having attended an unconscious bias training, I'd say it achieves two objectives: 1. It convinces people to use objective, methodical criteria to evaluate candidates. (Whether or not the "unconscious bias" rationale is valid, the actual remedies boil down to, "have a process instead of winging it", and in today's political climate, "unconscious bias training" is an easier sell than "not winging it training".) 2. It m…
I think now as well as "Security Theatre" it looks like we have "Diversity Theatre" as well.
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…
- hiring by committee as opposed to whims of a given manager
- introducing bar raisers in hiring loop
- promotions requests reviewed by independent committee
- demand for metrics driven automated dashboards
- enforcing skip level 1:1s
- anonymous surveys and complaint box
- enforcing culture of proper credit attributions instead of "we did X"
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…
What does a “good manager” look like?
Get those right and everything else will follow. So simple but only a fraction of managers get it.
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…
Many assume the people that they hire are flawless. That's why you see all the posts on hiring. It's easy for people to think they know everything at this point. It's like celebrating after you acquire a customer...what really matters is if they stay (and how long).
Currently, there's no feedback loop in place to surface this information. Some companies will do a culture or 360 survey that highlights a few issues here and there, but it's a poor process for determining competence and it's administered by HR (or some function of HR). It needs to be owned by the team leader (and hopefully their boss).
I've been working on an app (https://www.fridayfeedback.com) for the last three years to try to help this. Eng teams love it because it's asynchronous and surfaces new insights to help teams improve.
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…
What does a “good manager” look like?
1. Create a continuous feedback loop with every single person on your team. This is why 1-1 meetings are extremely helpful.
2. Understand where each person on your team wants to go (career goals). Do they want to become X in 2 years? Do they even want to work in tech at all? Find ways to help them get there.
3. Document all the important conversations you have. Share it with the person. Most miscommunication happens when you talk about something and it's interpreted in various ways. Documenting these conversations and sharing them helps cut down on this.
4. Act like you care about them as a person.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also found out that there are a few bad "managers" that end up raising because they are popular with people and their bosses. They usually have a very high EQ. You can see a few people with little technical acumen, shallow knowledge of the latest trends, very bad on processes and no work ethic that still rise in some organizations. These people spend a lot of time "managing up" on a side and on the other side they…
Here's the part of management that is hard to understand as an IC: 1/3rd of my job is "managing up," that is, getting my boss what they need to get their job done. This can be defining a hiring process, or writing part of a powerpoint deck or getting them the information they need to write it up for their presentation. 1/3rd of my job is "managing across," or working with other managers - the "shit shield" is often f…
Back to the "managing up" I was talking about in my previous comment. I have seen some people spending more than 1/2 of their time on it. The reason I put it in quotes is because sometimes is time spent on getting visibility, becoming "good friends", and even brown-nosing. For any employee it is vital to have a good relationship with their boss in order to maximize her impact and develop influence. But when building camaraderie with her boss becomes the primary activity, it tells you something about the culture that that person is reinforcing and people that is attracting.
There is a difference between aiming to "create an alliance to get things done" and "develop a relationship to get recognized and promoted" Even if the two do not have to be mutual exclusive, the motivation for bad managers is predominantly in latter more than former.
And what is an order of magnitude better for a company? Someone that looks more for having an impact or a person that looks more to their advancement on the corporate ladder?
I think this post missed one extremely important point. I almost never see it in blog posts, and yet the successful heads of 100+ engineer organizations all know this. Find good managers! Or groom them. Whichever. Just make sure you have good managers. I see endless posts about recruiting, and I see tons of posts about engineering culture, but I almost never see posts from these same sources about the nitty gritty of…
(context: I'm an engineering manager at stripe) Stripe uses the same process for scaling our management corps as we do our ICs. All the steps are tailored to the role the person would be filling at the company. That being said, I think this is a great point. All the considerations others have brought up in this thread can be multiplied for manager roles. It's very important to get this right when you're scaling up a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake?
I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had.
I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart."
So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...