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

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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

skohan wrote: post #96
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that's true of non-technical people too right? So the question is if you as an organization are considering investing a year or two to develop a manager, why not start with a subject matter expert?

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by datavirtue »

skohan wrote: post #65
varjag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially a manifestation of bikeshedding. Yep, very common.

Yes and it can go especially poorly when you have a "problem oriented" person on the team: 1. Manager proposes low quality requirements 2. Problem oriented team member points out a flaw in the requirements which is orthogonal to the actual goal of the feature/team/organization 3. Endless discussion around this one detail 4a. Manager changes the requirements just to end the debate, in a way which sacrifices the core g…

Sounds like the text book description of how to start wrecking a software project.

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

#123

Post by danielscrubs »

zabzonk wrote: post #100
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? Why would you want to make one at all?

You can replace it with an in-house customer chat, if you feel the example is contrived.

But my point is, everything looks easy if you look at it shallowly, managers without professional programming experience will look at the problem from that angle.

The best will be able to help, the worst will have this shallow look and expect the moon by morning.

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

#124

Post by skohan »

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…

The savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up on the technical side, and they're not a better manager than they were a developer but those failures are harder to quantify.

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

#126

Post by RHSeeger »

skohan wrote: post #120
RHSeeger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ar…

> because maybe they have more levers than the development team has access to in terms of unblocking a tricky issue.

I think I understand the disconnect here. From my point of view it's the manager's job to figure out what problem the client is trying to solve. It's the developer's job to figure out what the possible solutions are, and recommend what they think is the best one. As a developer, I expect to be in the meetings with the clients long before the solutions are chosen.

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

#127

Post by _y5hn »

chasd00 wrote: post #101
madhadron wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to the conclusion that management is not a profession. Engineering, law, medicine, teaching are professions, that is, occupations that require considerable training or study. Manager is a role in a team that requires you not to be deficient in social and organizational skills. In settings where the people being managed are professionals, I have come to think that there should be a vote of no confidence op…

it's the opposite really, a good manager is rare because being a good manager is very very hard and takes an enormous amount of both study and experience. Being a good manager is like being a therapist for a dozen people with deadlines on mental health. The soft skills required cannot be acquired from reading the documentation.

When the work is managed well there's never need for escalations, defusing, death marches and therapy.

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

#128

Post by datavirtue »

alchemism wrote: post #48
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…

A 'good' sea captain will also exhibit this trait and step in to perform tasks of necessity. Since safety at sea comes in large part from 'simple work' being done rigorously, it is heartening to see the top man wiping down a slick deck to prevent the chance of accidents.

Don't forget the pirates/privateers of the caribbean. Captain was elected and removed at will by the crew. They freed slaves and distributed "wages" according to the level of contribution. The crews were diverse as hell. And they established a republic in Nassau...hundreds of years before the United States was formed. Of course, the companies (ships crew) robbed people and could be murderous at times, but the same could be said of "legitimate" less egalitarian companies of the time.

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

#129

Post by 908B64B197 »

danielscrubs wrote: post #119
908B64B197 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ;)

I meant, cloning all of Twitter today is useless because you won't ever need the infrastructure to handle 100M+ users.

But a basic microblogging platform? It's not impossible to do in a week.

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

#130

Post by skohan »

tigerlily wrote: post #110
madhadron wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to the conclusion that management is not a profession. Engineering, law, medicine, teaching are professions, that is, occupations that require considerable training or study. Manager is a role in a team that requires you not to be deficient in social and organizational skills. In settings where the people being managed are professionals, I have come to think that there should be a vote of no confidence op…

> there should be a vote of no confidence option where a majority vote of the team can immediately remove the manager. Like in a band. Best projects I've worked on have been like bands. Each engineer skillfully playing their instrument, while the manager secures the gigs, promotes the band, listening and acting on feedback from the members.

My metaphor for my current team is a basketball team. Each player knows their role, how to pass the ball to the right person at the right time, and the team collectively adapts to challenges in real time. The manager's role is to look at the big picture, get the team the resources they need to succeed, and make strategic decisions to allow the team to succeed.
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