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You're barely managing

barely-managing.bearblog.dev

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Re: You're barely managing

#21

Post by mecsred »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #18
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? > I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor. > I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%? ...…

I didn't get that the author was saying this post was going to fix everything. What seemed incredibly valuable was that it provides the top level context for how we got here. This article does a good job getting you past first order thinking of how to manage, and makes one consider how & where managers arrived; it's the Chesterton's Fence of management. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

Why are you asking them to recognize that? That's explicitly their point.

Re: You're barely managing

#22

Post by alexvitkov »

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people?

Zero. And I'd worry about the judgement and motivations of someone who decides to spend 4 years of their life studying how to manage others, instead of picking up any other skill.

Re: You're barely managing

#23

Post by BeetleB »

mettamage wrote: post #11
NikolaNovak wrote: post #4

It's interesting. I agree with everything in that article. At the same time , I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc. I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have…

The thing is: soft skills aren't that needed at the entry level. I've noticed that no one cares that I trained a lot of soft skills by doing a psych bachelor, an honors program based on soft skills, hundreds of hours of meditation. They just want to know: - Can you code according to the requirements of the business? Sometimes soft skills are needed for that, but not nearly to the level that I trained them at. So, the…

> I've noticed that no one cares that I trained a lot of soft skills by doing a psych bachelor,

I don't know about your school, but at my undergrad they didn't teach soft skills for a psychology degree.

Re: You're barely managing

#24

Post by giantg2 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? > I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor. > I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%? ...…

I agree on the solution posed being the same as the problem claimed.

"but none of them has offered me, in the end, more credibility as a manager."

Spoken like a true manager. Is credibility/credentializing the point? I mean, it's certainly used everywhere like requirements of having an MBA (which often include leadership/management classes). But I don't know if any training really makes someone a good people leader who didn't already have some natural talent at it.

Re: You're barely managing

#25

Post by shubhamjain »

> We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all.

> They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.

> You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.

> -- Steve Jobs

YMMV, but best managers I worked under were extremely competent programmers and had an eye for the big-picture stuff. They knew when to intervene and when to leave engineers to their own devices. It's when managers start to think their job is to create specs, run & enforce sprint boards, and create processes upon processes, that working under becomes a torture. So, yes, I would say 'barely managing' is a feature, not a bug.

Re: You're barely managing

#26

Post by umutisik »

I used to teach at a university, and am currently a manager at a tech company. It's interesting how similar these areas are in the sense that they are very hard to teach; and are currently mostly figured out from scratch from experience. The one teaching training that really worked for me was that we had a training where a more experienced peer recorded my lecture in a video, and then we watched it together. He did not give me feedback about what I was doing right or wrong, just asked me what I think about what I was seeing, and was essentially teaching me to self-observe. Perhaps there can be technologies to support this kind of self-observation on a day to day basis.

Re: You're barely managing

#27

Post by Propelloni »

iamdbtoo wrote: post #13
NikolaNovak wrote: post #4

It's interesting. I agree with everything in that article. At the same time , I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc. I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have…

Some the absolute worst managers I've ever had were the ones who were also "management coaches" or trained by them. They just read a bunch of books and blindly applied it to everything and taught others to do the same.

I guess I understand your point, but please consider that competent managers do not fall fully formed from trees. Sure, some are better suited to the role then others, but an average person can become an average manager with time any time.

Managers, like programmers or any other professional, start out as novices and get better through experience. Applying book-knowledge to real life and seeing what works and what does not is actually a solid way to learn. It's basically what we do when we learn coding, with the difference that feedback circles are much shorter in coding. Maybe you could help managers learn faster by giving them feedback?

Re: You're barely managing

#28

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? > I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor. > I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%? ...…

management is a lifetime of experience and they themselves often don't entirely understand what they're doing.

My favorite manager of all time just left me alone and believed everything I told him when communicating back to the business. It was never clear to me if that was on purpose (he trusted me) or if he was just a lazy ass.

And I don't care, I loved working for that man. But if you were to ask him to lay out what makes him such a great manager he'd never be able to do it.

These types of bloggers are exactly the people you don't want to be taking management advice from, they have an ulterior motive other than being great managers. They want to *sound* like great managers, not actually be great managers.

Re: You're barely managing

#29

Post by tiffanyg »

Fluff comment, but it's slightly amusing to me that this piece on management* was posted by someone using the name of a certain milkman** in Pratchett's "Thief of Time".

To quote Pratchett directly:

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."

:)

* Directing / organizing / etc. the activities of groups, efforts, etc. towards specific (typically 'orderly') goals

** And "fifth Beatle" of the apocalypse ... (also, "deus ex machina" of the story, IIRC, though funny and insightful even from that perspective - as usual w/ Pratchett)

Then there's always the sort of henchman / understudy, here, in the world of "milkmen" ... https://www.redmeat.com/max-cannon/nourishing-nectar-nubbins... ... "I hate you Milkman Dan".

Re: You're barely managing

#30

Post by giantg2 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #4

It's interesting. I agree with everything in that article. At the same time , I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc. I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have…

"In other words, do I hire person with A and train them on B? Or do I train a person with B and train them on A?"

The real question is where are these places that are supposedly training people? The companies I've seen don't do any real training and expect people to just be proficient at everything.

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