291–300 of 313 posts
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As a manager, I quickly realized that trying to be a technical contributor was a subtle and insidious form of micromanagement. Also, I could give myself my pick of the coolest tasks, which was unfair.
I pick boring tasks that have been sitting on the backlog for a very long time usually .
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Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of the best way to tell other people how to do the actual work isn't work, no. Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.
And yet one that billions of people participate in. You are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are wrong.
> And yet one that billions of people participate in.
Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor they don't like for being a witch and were hoping to have them burned (because the neighbor's chicken pecked your watermelon seeds or whatever; yeah, people are that petty).
Appealing to statistics and what the majority does is missing the point of the big power imbalances that are sadly one of the constants in every human society or system.
It doesn't help that many programmers are rather introverted and prefer passive resistance as opposed to having a good and informative one-on-one meeting, of course. And many managers are stuck in the unenviable position of having to develop skills to extract valuable actionable info from introverted people who prefer to sabotage them behind their backs. I recognize that and I sympathize.
But the inconvenient truth is, and one many managers forget about all the time, is that most of us have zero decision power -- which is quite the shame because we need it in no small amount of situations.
Formulas like Scrum (or anything "agile" really) are a complete and pathetic joke. The process must adapt to the task at hand. The best performing teams I've been in had zero process -- they only had some 10-15 ground rules like "if you are stuck for more than a day please raise the issue with the rest of the team; nobody will think you're stupid, we'll only try to unblock you". Whatever needed to be done, we used our own breed of process that best served it. On the rare occasions Scrum was actually useful btw. Most of the time the schema was more or less "enable your ICs, actively seek to unblock them, then leave them the hell alone, they know what they're doing".
You alluded to (in another comment) that you don't make the decisions; that you facilitate the people to arrive at the right decision. Kudos to you but you should still recognize that you're the minority, sadly.
Most programmers are forced to work with managers whose ego is easily bruised. That's a fact of life, one that can't be fixed by going to another job because the odds are at least 90% that it will be the same there as well.
So yeah, there are problems on both sides, that's unquestionable. I mostly went on to rant about how appealing to statistics is a poor strategy to evaluate if a given system is good (which doesn't at all explain how many companies started getting more bang for their buck after they moved to a 4-day working week btw; among other examples).
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I agree with all of this. But I can honestly say in my entire career I've only had about two good managers. One of the biggest issues in my experience is knowing who the bad/good performers are. Most managers have no idea. I've seen bad performers just let be, and I've seen great performers fired for seemingly no reason at all. Both kill team morale.
I think management is like sorcery. There is no fixed rules and most of it is interaction between people. I fully understand why many technical people shun management work (even when it pays more). Good management is really rare. One in five or even ten maybe.
One in fifty, achieve the above but are able to produce teams that regardless of their manager in the future would produce good results at minimum. Great managers don't seem to just focus on the business but also leveling up each individual on the team.
I think plenty of individuals have had mediocre managers and they would describe them as good.
Working with "the best" ICs reshape your perspective of what is a great ICs. Just like managers. Much earlier in my career I used to believe that great ICs were one in 20, then it became fifty and now, two hundred.
The author's analysis is so entirely subjective as to what constitutes "work" as to be meaningless. I certainly believe that most creative workers cannot spend 8 hours a day being creatively productive, although even there the variation is enormous. I used to observe a factor of 5 or more difference in productivity between the most productive and least productive of my engineering team, and a lot of that was due to t…
> the doctors they worked with routinely worked 12 hrs/day, often 5 days per week, and then spent part of their 2 "off" days working as well. I have a lot of trouble believing this. You’re claiming that 60 hours minimum was standard for doctors yet somehow the nurses had enough sway to get away with 36 hours. Ignoring how much of that as “active work”, I have trouble believing they are even in the facility for that m…
It was an academic medical center, so roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of the staff were residents or fellows. Most of the rest had joint appointments in the clinic or hospital and the medical school and research arm. I know their hours because they largely mimicked my hours. Most started by 6:30AM, and 7:00 at the latest. I often chatted with them in the parking garage 11 or 12 hours later. And not that I said they "routinely worked 12 hour days" not that they did it every day.
My point in both cases is not that they working 60+ hours per week, but that they were working, that is, spending their time in service to the patients and organization, not doing something unrelated or personal, for long, extended shifts.
"Much of a teacher's day is not hard mental work."
It's still work. It requires their full, or nearly so, attention.
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As an IC you can't tell other teams managers or higher ups or PMs to fuck off if they call you directly and tell you they think what you are doing isn't good. Or if they ask for unreasonable stuff. At least without fear of getting fired. A manager needs to prevent this from happening
So the problem managers solve is the problem of there being other managers?
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Well then you are mistaken in your characterization of this not being work.
Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of the best way to tell other people how to do the actual work isn't work, no. Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.
I’ve been reading some variant of this, for many years. One of the reasons that I hated being a manager, was because the job involved a lot of sitting around, waiting for stuff to happen. I couldn’t work on my own projects (because I was on paid work time), and it would have been irresponsible, in the extreme, to put myself into the critical path (because it was no guarantee that I would be able to reliably work). I…
I am currently a manager and the few times where I have said “I am going to write part of this solution my team is working on.” Were the times that I got a big pile of management work and blocked the team. I have since learned my lesson.
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Some of it is capitalism. Here’s a nice introduction to private equity in radiology. https://www.benwhite.com/medicine/the-private-equity-model-i... Now with surgery? Again there’s some capitalism but also surgery is hard. Extremely hard. Here’s a link to a common surgery for orthopedics for example. They have to memorize these procedure steps and be very quick. Time on the table for the patient matters for money and…
I don't think there is any country in the world where doctors work for 40 hours, regardless of the economic model. The world of human disease places some limitations on what can be done. Many people either do not have the grit or the stomach to become doctors (I could easily learn the theory, but I couldn't cope with all the blood, pus, vomit and frequent feeling of helplessness). People develop critical problems at…
There's at least 10x more people that want to be doctors than get to be doctors.
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At least that's what you think. I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll never reveal. I say this with 100% confidence.
> I'm sure your direct reports have a lot of opinions on that setup that they'll never reveal. Then I'll never know how to make things better. It's dysfunctional when you can't communicate safely and equally dysfunctional when problems are hidden for fear of a manager's ego.
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And yet one that billions of people participate in. You are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are wrong.
The other guy is definitely a bit jumpy and as a programmer I can't agree with him (fully) but that part of your comments stood out to me: > And yet one that billions of people participate in. Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor t…