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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)

#141

Post by hinkley »

jrockway wrote: post #87
hinkley wrote: post #54

Like the Senate, you often need someone who can break ties. A team with an even number of technical people can get deadlocked on a decision. If the boss can’t or won’t step in, it can make for a miserable experience.

If I've learned anything from watching the Senate, it's that 51/49 doesn't drive forward progress. Those 49 will do everything in their power to undermine the 51. If you find your team deadlocked on decisions and you think the way forward is to find a tie-breaking vote, I have bad news for you.

Work is not a democracy but some difficult decisions have to be. I think a lot of the time the arrow points the other way. A boss who can’t or won’t make decisions when pushed to do so also creates an environment where deciding is difficult.

Often all it takes is a qualitative comment that one could mistake for leadership, and the guy who won’t be accountable for any decisions is not leading anybody.

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

#143

Post by toolslive »

combine this with Putt's law, and you understand hell. "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."

Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management.

have fun ;)

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

#144

Post by danielscrubs »

908B64B197 wrote: post #129
danielscrubs wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe you can do it in whatever time you want. You are the one setting the definition of done after all, not the manager.

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

#147

Post by thesimon »

jonas21 wrote: post #108
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,…

> If someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they can probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if they wanted. The "if they wanted" part is key. It's hard to become extremely good at something unless you really enjoy doing it. I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers would rather be doing engineering than anything else. If you make them a manager, they're going to enjoy that less and not be…

> I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers would rather be doing engineering than anything else.

Really? I love software development, but I don't think just churning out random CRUD software based on some specs is very interesting. A lot nicer to solve problems of your customers, see how the product makes them happier and think about ways to improve their user experience.

Somehow I assumed that's how others felt as well.

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

#148

Post by cjfd »

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…

Is somebody with empathy somebody with empathy or a pushover? The problem is the existence of architecture astronauts. How is a manager without technical skill going to distinguish between an engineer pointing out a real problem that needs some work versus the utterings of the architecture astronaut who is going to create an overly complex architecture just because he can get away with it?

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

#149

Post by kmonsen »

staunch wrote: post #37

Steve Jobs was probably the best team builder in tech (and maybe business) history with Apple v1, NeXT, and then Apple v2 and he learned this lesson well. "We went through that stage at Apple where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to be a big company, let’s go out and hire professional management.’ We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all. Most of them were Bozos. They knew how to m…

I do think you can get the worst managers that way as well, and jobs at some points was one of the worst. You do need empathy and ways of handling underperformers that is not screaming at them hoping things will get better.

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

#150

Post by jordache »

I think this sentiment only applies to line level tech managers, where it's likely conceivable for that manager to be close to the work done by subordinates.

If you got higher in the org, the focus of managers become more strategic and process oriented, with stronger alignment with the business side of things.

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