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

Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 212 posts

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#111

Post by sitkack »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I was personally taught by the store manager of a supermarket how to sweep the floor and of course that built respect for him and the organization. (e.g. he knew how to do every little task like sweep the floor, cut meat in the deli, bake bread, etc.) The (now retied) director of the art museum at Cornell could be seen out in his suit passing out pamphlets for an exhibition together with students promoting clubs and…

Totally an aside, but I saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi 's work (Vatican Bank Scandal) at the Portrait Gallery in DC, and it is absolutely fascinating.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#112

Post by sitkack »

crispyambulance wrote: post #56

Of course people are happier when they're lead by AN ACTUAL LEADER rather than by some a-hole who just "manages tasks" PM-BOK style! I swear, some of the articles in HBR should just be sub-titled: "STUFF YOUR MAMMA TAUGHT YOU BUT YOU FORGOT WHILE GETTING YOUR MBA"

The M in MBA stands for Monkey or Money, or both.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#113

Post by datavirtue »

At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers who were by far the least pretentious managers. Everyone else was under someone from the encient GE Taylorist philosophy of "a good manager can run anything." Very painful uphill battle on anything because you literally had to translate everything into a message that informed them of how it was going to make them look good and advance their career. They simply don't understand or care about the work/product/customer. You could literally build amazing shit with a lot of support from colleagues etc and it didn't interest them because they had no foundation to recognize the potential. If you did manage to have one or two of your managers (I had five-ish) that did see the impact potential the rest of the hierarchy or "matrix" would smother it. Not to mention the clueless (horizontal) scrum masters.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#114

Post by bumby »

skohan wrote: post #43
skeeter2020 wrote: post #24

I think the conclusions miss the mark slightly and focus on a symptom of good bosses: they care about tasks from a state of understanding what is required to do them well, they have empathy for the challenges, and respect for the talent in completing them. Obviously the easiest way to get to this perspective is to experience it first-hand, hence the correlation between those who could do the job and being good manage…

> probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified. From my perspective, as a relatively new technical manager who also spent years as an engineer working with technical managers…

>it's not only about empathy but also about having a thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate intuition around the subject matter.

I read the OP with a very different takeaway than what you may have inferred. I did not get the impression they were saying empathy and technical skills are mutually exclusive. By saying their best managers were in the top quartile, they are implying they were technically competent but not necessarily the most competent in a single domain.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#115

Post by fallingfrog »

Part of the problem is that a manager brought in without any relevant experience will often see their job as an exercise in making numbers bigger- they will attempt to cut costs and increase revenue in the short term without understanding which costs are really important or what the revenue is based on. This leads to brief increases in profit margins followed by customers fleeing to the competition, which the manager responds to with another round of cost cutting.

Even worse, the lack of deep understanding means that the manager cannot distinguish good ideas from bad ones, and often cannot distinguish talent from bluster, leading to poor hiring decisions and directionless leadership.

Everyone knows that putting a untrained business major in charge of a squadron of soldiers would end badly. He might be able skate by until they got into combat, maybe, but after that they wouldn’t listen to him for long. But for some reason we think that putting an mba in charge of an engineering team is a good idea.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#117

Post by datavirtue »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #94
lamp_book wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified. I see this sentiment or implication that technical skills and people skills are somehow mutually exclusive often, even on here which is crazy. I think this stems from some broader trope that people are "balanced" like RPG characters or something,…

They might. But it could easily take a few years, during which time they'll very likely be a mediocre to poor manager. Expecting someone with five years of engineering experience to become an effective manager overnight - often with no training or mentorship at all - makes as much sense as expecting an intern to operate at the same level as a senior on Day 1. Even really smart people with multiple talents need more o…

Hopefully it is never an overnight switch and the engineer's career goals are respected. Any non-shite company is going to have engineers taking on leadership responsibilities at various levels they are comfortable with before turning them full loose.

In some companies, like Gore Industries, and other employee owned entities the engineers and operations people organically select their own supervisors by consensus and set pay democratically. I have been in environments that did that without explicit structure even, and it was very productive. Unsurprisingly,none of those were publicly traded.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#118

Post by lamp_book »

s17n wrote: post #107
lamp_book wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified. I see this sentiment or implication that technical skills and people skills are somehow mutually exclusive often, even on here which is crazy. I think this stems from some broader trope that people are "balanced" like RPG characters or something,…

> The reality is that people who achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others. Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or positively correlated across different areas, but time invested is going to be negatively correlated. Hence the stereotype of nerds with poor social skills: building social skills takes time and effort, and time and effort spent on building those skills is time and effor…

Yes, you make some good points here but I would argue that in most organizations that skills that make for effective engineering are aligned well with those required for managing. At a certain point, reinvesting into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces improvement in technical skills dramatically. Of course, this is not universal and there are specialties, domains, and organizations that require technical competency and competitiveness above all else, but I don't think that's the general case for most engineers.

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#119

Post by danielscrubs »

908B64B197 wrote: post #92
danielscrubs wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, when I was working with small companies this kind of thinking was all too common: Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? “Yes it’s just a backend and a frontend.” Vs “with support for 187 million active users? Which level of accessibility? Will we have a cloud provider? Media upload support? Redundancy? What kind of login functionality? Do we have support if they loose their email account? Why are you lookin…

> Can we make a Twitter clone in a week? Yes. The v1 isn't the hard part of building a competitor to Twitter. The hard part is scaling the user base, getting funding to keep the site running and being able to grow it.

V1 is a hard part, what you are talking about is the insanely hard part. ;)

Re: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

#120

Post by skohan »

RHSeeger wrote: post #95
0xEFF wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this up to a point. It’s been valuable to me as an IC, and I feel it’s a value I provide when the problem is so hard there isn’t a clear solution. It’s nice to be able to say, “what do you think I should do?” as an IC, and nice to be able to analyze the problem if necessary as a manager. On the other hand if nobody knows what to do with a hard problem, everyone gets stressed out about it.

> On the other hand if nobody knows what to do with a hard problem, everyone gets stressed out about it. Those are the problems that it's the developer's job to figure out, in my opinion. If the manager can figure out the problem and solution but the developer cannot, then the dynamic is backwards (or the manager is actually a dev/tech lead, not a project/product manager). Or it's a totally different team structure t…

The reason I think it's good to have a product/project manager who can get down to this level if needed is that it increases the scope of possible solutions. With a strict division between tech and product, typically the solution space is bounded by the product requirements. But if you have a product manager who is able to operate on the level of implementation details, you can adapt the requirements in ways which are better on both a user side and implementation side.

It shouldn't be the norm that a manager is operating on the level of implementation details, but it is good if they can understand them, because maybe they have more levers than the development team has access to in terms of unblocking a tricky issue.

Post reply on HN