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Some mistakes I made as a new manager

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Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#111

Post by KyeRussell »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #25
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #23

> ANGSTING INSTEAD OF ASKING This is a great way of describing one of my biggest peeves in the office: So many unnecessary conflicts/dramas can be avoided by simple and honest communication. There’s a related dysfunction where managers are (wrongly) convinced that they must answer every question in the most positive and upbeat way possible. I had to leave a company once because my manager was frustrated with many peo…

> So many unnecessary conflicts/dramas can be avoided by simple and honest communication. It's really not that simple in my opinion. The flow of information is "upper management wants this a certain way/at a certain time, I'm just the enforcer, if you don't work to accommodate/comply at a high priority, it's a problem" more often than not.

If these are the only sorts of problems you identify in your workplace, you are certainly running the risk of being on the wrong side of the other ones.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#112

Post by n4r9 »

donatj wrote: post #93

I have told this story here several times (never in this much detail) but why not once more. I had worked at my first software company for around five years when our lead developer left for greener pastures. Soon thereafter as the most senior developer on staff I had a meeting with the owner of the company and his assistant talking about the need to interview people to fill the lead position and it was kind of half f…

> I just want to build cool things

There are so many HN posts along the lines of "I'm great at building software and love it, but after 5-6 years became a manager because of pay/promotion/expectation. I hate it and don't do anything technical now, but here's how I cope."

I have a hunch that the industry is losing lots of poductivity because of such perverse incentives.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#113

Post by roenxi »

kqr wrote: post #80
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

> The other side to this is - don't ask for feedback if you don't plan to action any of it. It's fine to ask for feedback without planning to do anything about it. Balancing the feedback of multiple people means sometimes not every opinion can be accounted for. Being defensive, on the other hand...

If we analyse the sentiment a bit, we discover that there was no point asking for feedback - the course was already locked in and there was nothing to change. The feedback was useless.

Providing feedback has some risk for employees (maybe they'll get blowback) and it is easy for a manager to "ask for feedback" as a power play because they just want to show they can ignore it. It isn't nice to ask unless the intent is to treat the feedback respectfully and act on it.

I can imagine getting surprising feedback that can't be acted on. But that should be genuinely unexpected.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#114

Post by steveBK123 »

melvinmelih wrote: post #92
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

I call it “weak ideas, strongly held”

I'd say possibly a plurality of who say "strongly ideas, loosely held" really do mean “weak ideas, strongly held”

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#115

Post by steveBK123 »

_adamb wrote: post #54
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately. "What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's arti…

This is a much better idea for sure.

One has to accept that you cannot verbally discuss everything into being a 10, and take note of some of the risks&issues that get raised. Which re-reading your response.. I think is implied, just not stated.

Another thing is you may also get interrogation fatigue and not always get real participation in this process. Kind of like the agile stuff only works when everyone is buying in, and as soon as people are going through the motions its hours of wasted meetings.

That said, not to be negative here..

This method of collecting feedback in a way that feels low risk, if participated in only sometimes, is way better than the standard methods.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#116

Post by matwood »

steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

> I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given

One of the hardest parts of getting feedback is simply listening. Everyone's nature is to defend. When I get feedback I nod, listen, and try to never sound defensive - even if the feedback feels wrong at the time.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#117

Post by papito »

matwood wrote: post #116
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

> I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given One of the hardest parts of getting feedback is simply listening. Everyone's nature is to defend. When I get feedback I nod, listen, and try to never sound defensive - even if the feedback feels wrong at the time.

This translates to other areas.

I am working on a new product, my idea and implementation from start to finish.

Yesterday I asked my spouse to use it and tell me what she thought. Anything she had an issue with, I was like a crab - just claw claw claw. One has to resist the impulse.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#118

Post by matwood »

User23 wrote: post #91
david38 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a manager, but when I was an IC, I held your view. I learned that giving even softened feedback resulted in being at best ignored for a week, at worst, becoming a marked man. I resolved to change this for my team. Ask for feedback broadly, and about projects, not me per say. Peoples end up commenting on the project/ sprint, and they feel safer. Much of what they talk about however, I have power over, so I view i…

Can you think of a person that gave you harshly negative feedback that you then got promoted to staff or higher? And what was the feedback?

I've been told before that I 'have a healthy disdain for authority'. I have always been honest, but not an asshole. Promoted many times.

'Harshly negative' sounds like being an asshole. My question to you would be do you want to be right or effective? It can feel good to be right and stick it to someone, but how often does that lead to effective change?

You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#119

Post by anon4242 »

onion2k wrote: post #97
johndhi wrote: post #35

I'm a new manager and am facing a conundrum over a supposed super star who joined my team but, at least from what I can tell, is far and away the least productive member of my team. Any ideas?

You have probably fallen in to the trap of believing that every developer is the same, and that all of them can thrive in every team. That is absolutely not the case. A superstar on a team where they're doing work they want to do, that they find interesting, and that suits their skillset won't be a superstar somewhere else where some part of that equation isn't working. Talk to them and figure out what's different be…

Not a superstar but this fits me pretty well. I was hired by a pretty well-known cool company after having apparently "aced" their interview. It was just that their interview suited me well, it was both designing big stuff and solving small problems which is what I had done previously at several companies when I always was in a team of two or three developers with technical ownership of a complete product.

Pretty soon after I started, it dawned on me that I would probably not partake in designing "the big" stuff. Partly because most of the big stuff was already done and whatever remained would probably be solved by some of the more senior devs. Any semi-large stuff would need to be fought over by the rest of the devs. What was left was drudge-work compared to all I had done before. Also most of my tech-skills (besides the programming language in question) were not needed and when I helped a colleague in another team working on something I knew pretty well, my manager reprimanded me after, telling me that our team couldn't spare the 2hrs I spent.

I was pretty unhappy and during this time was pretty far from living up to my own expectations. My manager never told me I was falling behind however so I don't know about their expectations. I quit soon after.

In my case I was moving from the experience of small companies and being "forced" to do everything, to a large company and only allowed to do very few things.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#120

Post by azangru »

The article reminded me that I don't understand what managers are for :-) Especially if a manager is in fact a software engineer promoted to that role. The promotion likely occurs because a) the person is good at being a developer, and b) the manager's position is better paid than his previous one. Which combines a perverse incentive (of course anyone would like a raise) with a completely different set of responsibilities that the person hasn't been trained for.

I do like the ideas coming out of scrum, some of which would fit well with what the author is describing.

For example, the anecdote about a junior engineer struggling with documentation for a new feature sounded like an opportunity for pairing with a more knowledgeable team member, and talking through the feature while planning the documentation for it. When the author said that he instead would write a design doc and the engineer would implement it, he was not acting as a manager, but rather as a software engineer.

As another example, the author talks about planning the work, which, in a scrum environment, would involve a product owner (someone from the business side), and the rest of the team, to collectively identify and plan the next set of features. In a (sprint) review, the team, together with other interested parties, can inspect their progress and talk about the roadmap (something that the author is trying to do on his own).

I understand the purpose of senior software engineers, or of a product owner. Of a manager, not that much.

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