Unlike Babies, the Best Managers Come with Instructions

The reason I thought it would be helpful is that I am not a high feedback person. I seldom praise (need to work on that), I am not expressive, I've been told I 'play my cards close to the vest.' by someone who directly reported to me. That really got me thinking that maybe the circumstances where I am not getting what I want is because my staff really cannot figure out what I'm looking for in general. So I wrote up a 'read me', before I knew there was this trend.

I included self-deprecating statements about things like assigning a task to multiple people because I forgot it had already been assigned 'Don't take it personally, just let me know and I'll fix it.' And, if they need me to attend a meeting, make sure it's on my calendar, or, no chance I'll remember.

In the end, it's only going to be as helpful as it is 'correct' and clearly described. That depends on each manager's level of self-awareness, combined with their sense of self confidence. You'd hope managers would have both qualities, but if not, this can really be a red herring, or even be used as a dark pattern.

unfortunately, this is very unlikely to be true. and increasingly less so as the team size increases.

one confounding factor here is the heavy use of religion to guide technical decisions. the decisions we make now about the direction of the product and the attributes of the codebase are largely subjective. there are arguments on all sides of a position.

a good team, properly enculturated, understands the process. when the issue is important enough to justify digging in and when its just a personal bias. a good team helps all of its members stay on the path and not end up in giant ratholes. a good team uses its experience to inform future decisions rather than create artificial strictures. a good team has enough time and maturity to interact constructively with the rest of the business and the customers.

I shouldn't say 'good' team, I should say 'perfect'

good management greases all of these points of potential friction. but I think at the end of the day management is there to address the last point. its natural and expected for engineers to keep a narrow focus on the technical aspects of the project itself. someone's got to make sure its evolving in a direction that's meaningful in an external context.

The short version is that it worked amazingly well for a little while, with a small team of people that worked well together. However as the team scaled certain personality traits emerged in everybody. What basically happened is certain people became "the manager" in practice because everyone just deferred to this person for decisions and such. Various reasons for that, good and bad:

1. This person was technically very capable.

2. This person had a strong personality that was disagreeable, and people didn't want to cross him.

3. If you were wrong in any way, this person would publicly broadcast your failure, which made people afraid to ever challenge him.

4. Many people aren't really comfortable not having a boss. They will naturally look to someone to lead things, and usually the person they select is not the best one for the job (or even close), it's just the person with the strongest personality. I don't mean to get political here, but I can't help but notice how similar this is to President Trump.

So basically my conclusion is: we can't have nice things because human nature. More specifically, manager-less teams would great for small groups that work well together. It doesn't scale, and doesn't work well for everybody. Some people need management.

I'm thought experimenting on also having a README written by direct reports that the boss doesn't get to see (so people could be more honest). I'm guessing it would quickly leak to the boss anyway, or someone trying to score points with the boss would just whitewash it. Perhaps only the person who wrote something could edit it, so you get lots of perspectives?

Would be an interesting experiment tho.