11–20 of 134 posts
IMHO, we should add “Be Human first, everything else comes later”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. I've worked for a lot of bad managers and 2 good ones. 1 of the good ones wasnt a great human but an incredible teacher. The other was an okay teacher but an incredible human. The later I'm still in contact with and we've stayed in touch for 5 plus years. A lot of what I'm looking for in a boss is just someone who kind and understanding. It's shocking how low that is on most managers agendas.
Maybe it's not just about the managers but also how do employees treat the relationship with their managers. i.e. it's a two way street
IMHO, we should add “Be Human first, everything else comes later”.
100%. I've worked for a lot of bad managers and 2 good ones. 1 of the good ones wasnt a great human but an incredible teacher. The other was an okay teacher but an incredible human. The later I'm still in contact with and we've stayed in touch for 5 plus years. A lot of what I'm looking for in a boss is just someone who kind and understanding. It's shocking how low that is on most managers agendas.
Every once on a while you come across someone that is enthusiastic, actually competent, and wants to do things to the best of their ability (or a reasonable approximation thereof), but those are few IMHO.
I mean, I know not all people can be interested in all things, but if you say you're up for something, be it a job, project, or partnership, you've got to give it your reasonable best.
I think the need to be kind and nice all too often is abused by their targets. The key is to find a way to be kind and flexible, but not allowing that to paper over rank incompetence or a bad attitude.
Here's the real Principals of Engineering Management, according to pretty much every middle manager, director, and vp I've ever worked with:
1. Be caviling and pedantic, so you can reinforce your position of petty power.
2. Contribute exactly zero code, infrastructure, etc. Basically, anything that actually provides value to the engineers or the customers, you don't touch.
3. Put at least a couple meetings on the calendar every day of every engineer that they don't need to be at to remind them you rule over their time.
4. Push nebulous "goals", then have very set goals when it comes time to promote/give a pay raise an engineer and then insist they aren't quite there.
5. Put engineers on-call instead of hiring support staff, again to remind the engineer that you own their time, even when they're not at work.
6. Constantly seek updates from engineers, so many in fact that they can't complete the work on time, then promptly blame the engineers for not delivering.
"Managers" are people with business degrees who failed out of anything technical. Real managers are architects and PMs who actually understand the product and the technical lift it takes to actually make things happen. They don't concern themselves with your comings-and-goings, but whether you can get things done or not.
However, there's another side to the manager's job that doesn't seem to be addressed - interfacing upwards with whatever layers link to owners, founders, the board, shareholders, etc. How does that exactly work out in practice? Let's say leadership makes what you think are really stupid decisions with disastrous longterm consequences (ex: Boeing 737 MAX design process, Google signing up with China to build Dragonfly, etc.). What do you do? Pour gasoline on yourself and set yourself on fire in protest, or roll your eyes in despair and proceed to assign your team to the task?
This is typical, MBA armchair psychology. Here's the real Principals of Engineering Management, according to pretty much every middle manager, director, and vp I've ever worked with: 1. Be caviling and pedantic, so you can reinforce your position of petty power. 2. Contribute exactly zero code, infrastructure, etc. Basically, anything that actually provides value to the engineers or the customers, you don't touch. 3.…
You might be right and every manager is terrible, but it's worth noting that the common denominator in all of these interactions is you.
This is typical, MBA armchair psychology. Here's the real Principals of Engineering Management, according to pretty much every middle manager, director, and vp I've ever worked with: 1. Be caviling and pedantic, so you can reinforce your position of petty power. 2. Contribute exactly zero code, infrastructure, etc. Basically, anything that actually provides value to the engineers or the customers, you don't touch. 3.…
Note that in some jurisdictions (including the USA) this is problematic from a labor law perspective.
Quite naïve. Nothing has been said about what employees need to follow. It is like, everything they can do is perfect, the manager is always the one who needs to work on the relationship, and there are no criteria to select / stop working with employees (i.e. those rules will work with any team).
This is typical, MBA armchair psychology. Here's the real Principals of Engineering Management, according to pretty much every middle manager, director, and vp I've ever worked with: 1. Be caviling and pedantic, so you can reinforce your position of petty power. 2. Contribute exactly zero code, infrastructure, etc. Basically, anything that actually provides value to the engineers or the customers, you don't touch. 3.…
Quite naïve. Nothing has been said about what employees need to follow. It is like, everything they can do is perfect, the manager is always the one who needs to work on the relationship, and there are no criteria to select / stop working with employees (i.e. those rules will work with any team).