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

The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 166 posts

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#91

Post by etempleton »

mdorazio wrote: post #11
obblekk wrote: post #5

This is true but nuanced in my experience. Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers. Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. I make this dist…

I’d say the worst managers are the ones who decide that management is the best path to money, competence and effort be damned.

I would say the worst are those who like the power and authority management titles provide.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#92

Post by etempleton »

sph wrote: post #48

Reminds me of my favourite quote by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord: "I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qu…

Hardworking and stupid make great employees though. The problem is for doing such a great job as cogs in the machine they get promoted into positions of authority and then it is hard to fault them too much because at least they are hardworking.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#93

Post by vitaflo »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #43
obblekk wrote: post #5

This is true but nuanced in my experience. Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers. Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. I make this dist…

> Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. Pretty much this, but I want to refine the statement: "the worst managers are those who _want_ to manage."

Yup, the best manager I ever had (by far) did not want to be manager. But she was made manager when half our team was laid off (including our manager) and she was the most senior of the bunch left. She was amazing because she was good at telling higher up's "no" when they would try to take advantage of our team.

The worst manager I ever had desperately wanted to become manager from a group of IC's and brown-nosed his way into the job. His first day as manager he says "I was promoted to manager because I can do all of your jobs better than you can". He could not. He was horrible (and was eventually fired).

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#94

Post by elgar1212 »

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying

Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better

The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting shit done) are the ones who make it very far in the IC path and become team leads. Team leads are the best managers, the actual managers are just there to do boilerplate shit and politicking that team leads aren't interested in

(disclaimer: not talking about all managers or all companies, just the ones I've personally experienced)

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#95

Post by lovehashbrowns »

antipaul wrote: post #40

More details, from the people behind Apple’s internal leadership training: Ever since Steve Jobs implemented the functional organization, Apple’s managers at every level, from senior vice president on down, have been expected to possess three key leadership characteristics: 1. deep expertise that allows them to meaningfully engage in all the work being done within their individual functions 2. immersion in the detail…

A special kind of disaster happens when a manager thinks they have deep expertise but they don’t. I have to be actively vigilant of what this manager is doing because one statement could lead to hours wasted. Just the other day they were about to launch a whole S3 tangent involving two teams because some report came back saying a few EBS volumes were not encrypted.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#96

Post by jokethrowaway »

mdorazio wrote: post #11
obblekk wrote: post #5

This is true but nuanced in my experience. Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers. Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. I make this dist…

I’d say the worst managers are the ones who decide that management is the best path to money, competence and effort be damned.

They're not the worst, they're just a waste of money, they could just not exist and probably everyone else would be better off. They're a -2.

That said, there are plenty of managers who put in a lot of effort into ruining everyone else life to satisfy their ego or what their understanding of the job is. They're -100000.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#97

Post by jokethrowaway »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #86
farorm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think modern software companies moves to remove roles like scrum masters, testers and analysts. My theory here is that e.g scrum masters wants to scrum, it’s their job. Much better to have the team take turn being the scrum master. They own the process and the pain.

The non technical scrum master fills a very important role for higher management: somebody to take blame and responsibility.

I've never seen this, I've seen them be some kind of project manager role or just bubbly people who say some BS and convince company to pay them to waste employees time.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#98

Post by dontbenebby »

waltbosz wrote: post #83
hsavit1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so following the cult like dogma of the late steve jobs is more inline with HN standards? probably yes

No I never said that. My intent was never to defend Steve Jobs. I just think the tone of way the comment was mean spirited and inappropriate. I think it's important to call out bad behavior in the HN community.

>I just think the tone of way the comment was mean spirited and inappropriate.

Making a factual assertions about the behavior of a public figure is neither mean spirited nor inappropriate, especially if the intent is to avoid others coming into harm.

You should discuss your feelings with a therapist rather than engage in what I like to term "emotional terrorism" -- silencing others if they stray from your preferred narrative.

Or, if you like, you can take a look at my comment and tell me how you'd prefer it be phrased, if the core message of "Steve Jobs abused his family and his workers, why should we listen to his views on management?"

(Maybe Steve Wozniak would be someone better suited to speak on management styles... I have never, in my life heard anyone say that Woz was rude to them on purpose... and I've heard a lot of stories about the early days at Apple in the hall at Defcon or whatever.)

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#99

Post by dalbasal »

obblekk wrote: post #5

This is true but nuanced in my experience. Often the best managers look around, see other managers being incompetent and messing up people’s natural abilities, and want to fix the problem even if it requires them to become managers. Often the worst managers decide at a young age they’re good leaders, can lead people to do better than they would themselves, and decide they want to get into management. I make this dist…

>>particularly by poor managers who are already messing stuff up.

Key point. People are political creatures, and in a workplace this is very often dominant.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#100

Post by rocketpastsix »

elgar1212 wrote: post #94

The thing about the IC -> management path that bothers me (and makes me skeptical of people who take it) is that programming and getting PRs merged is so god damn satisfying Going from this to just having meetings, training people, looking at dashboards... I can't imagine anyone doing this who genuinely likes programming. Even if the pay is better The people who are the most inspiring (and also the best at getting sh…

yes its awesome to have my work merged, even though Im not supposed to be doing a lot of coding. But what is equally awesome is when the junior developer who I manage does the implementation work I laid out and gets her PR merged. Even better if it can get through with her defending all of the choices she made (even if we pair on it) versus coming to me to help in the comments.
Post reply on HN