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Conscious unbossing

robertwalters.co.uk

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Re: Conscious unbossing

#61

Post by sanderjd »

darth_avocado wrote: post #53
brightball wrote: post #11

Nobody wants to be a middle manager. I’d be concerned if anyone ever wanted to be a middle manager. If you’re not C level and somebody reports to you, you’re a middle manager though.

Everyone wants to be middle management. You get paid more and Senior or Staff level is no longer your terminal career level (and therefore pay potential) as it is for most IC. Your performance evaluation becomes more subjective and less quantifiable, allowing you to hide your mediocrity and put it on others. Even if you’re same level as your ICs and the pay is same, you still hold the power in the relationship. If yo…

> Everyone wants to be middle management.

False.

> You get paid more

So what? Getting paid more was far from my primary concern when working at a big company. I wanted interesting work with people I respected and liked. The pay was more than good enough as an IC.

The rest of this is machiavellian bullshit that most people don't care about.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#62

Post by klodolph »

parpfish wrote: post #52
asielen wrote: post #24

In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers. Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers. Senior management never faces any…

The most important managers are the ones that serve as an actual translation layer bridging the gap between corporate business speak and developers. I’m reminded of a recent HN article talking about how bad abstractions are actually just indirection and complicate things whereas good abstractions hide complexity and make things neat and modular

At my most recent jobs, it’s been middle and lower management that was most prone to corporate business speak, and upper management had an incredible and somewhat fearsome ability to cut through bullshit. Depends on who your managers are, what company you’re in, and what department or org your team is part of.

Some recent teams I was on the middle managers spoke clearly and directly, but the frontline managers equivocated, were evasive, or even told lies. TBH I think it was just another case of Peter Principle. The middle managers were good managers who got put in charge of organizations, but they couldn’t train or develop good managers below them.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#63

Post by sanderjd »

jrmg wrote: post #3

This is presented as revolutionary, but it’s not clear to me that the results would’ve been any different if they’d surveyed the older generations at the same age.

Yep. Any time I see an article that is "generation ___ thinks / does ___", my first smell test is whether the headline could just be "young people think / do ___". This one fails that smell test, as most do.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#64

Post by ryandrake »

magneticnorth wrote: post #58
Imnimo wrote: post #30

This doesn't really relate to the question of middle management, but it's interesting to compare the Canadian and British versions of this article: https://www.robert-walters.ca/insights/news/blog/Concious-un... https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/insights/news/blog/conscious... They both have comments ostensibly from "Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North" and "Martin Fox, Managing Director of Robert Walters Can…

Oh, huh, good catch. More of their quotes are just theaurus-substitution rephrasings: > Lucy concludes: “It’s clear mid-level management remains a lynchpin of any organisation, and to keep these roles filled employers need to innovate their strategies to make them more attractive ... > Martin concludes: “It’s clear that mid-level management is a cornerstone of any organization. To fill these roles, employers will nee…

This is kind of a dirty semi-secret of corporate PR. When a press release or other company-authored article includes "[Person's Name] says [Thing]," there is not necessarily a Person with that name, and even if there is, that Person didn't literally say the Thing. "Thing" is the narrative that the company wants to push, and they attribute "Thing" to some name and publish it as if it's a news article with a quote.

I was a high-ish level product manager in a medium sized company once, and they would put P.R. "articles" out all the time that "quoted" me by name saying things I never said or wrote. Internally, P.R. would just E-mail me and ask if they could use my name in a press piece, and I said sure. Suddenly I "said" this and was "quoted" with that.

These kinds of articles get copy-pasted in different publications and only the name gets changed.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#65

Post by bjt12345 »

ahefner wrote: post #36
asielen wrote: post #24

In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers. Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers. Senior management never faces any…

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck)…

I wish.

The higher up the rank you go in my company, the more recognizable the faces are from 10,15,even 20 years ago.

Sure, they shuffle the deckchairs, but the turnover and redundancies below them is orders of more chaotic, and I dont understand what it takes to clean house at the senior management level.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#66

Post by ryandrake »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #49
ahefner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I don't know - in my (admittedly limited and very individual / company-specific) experience, the senior management was hard to relate to from the perspective of us rank and file, but clearly had the Sword of Damocles over their head at all times, and tended to get swept away arbitrarily every few years as the winds of corporate politics changes direction. It seemed to require some exceptional execution (or luck)…

My understanding is that all corporate positions above rank and file — and especially the C-levels — live in a meat grinder where the only viabile strat is "figure out how to kill competition on the corporate chaos/ladder before it kills you". Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within…

Then again, these people always fail upward. They may have the sword hanging over them, but when the sword falls and they leave, they do so with a fist full of millions of dollars in Golden Parachute, and then float over to Level+1 at the next company.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#67

Post by nytesky »

kazinator wrote: post #46

Without data about what previous generation said to exactly the same questions, at the same age, the conclusions comparing GenZ attitudes to those of prior generations are completely meaningless. Maybe GenX youth and young Boomers before them also thought management was fuddy-duddy. Hippies, hello? It wasn't GenZ that produced the movie Office Space , The Office sitcom or Dilbert . (Speaking of which, exposure to the…

I was going to say: what do you expect of the generation weaned on the Office? It’s been part of their zeitgeist since birth. I saw a GenZ today with a gag Dunder Mifflin rear view mirror badge hanger.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#68

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

klodolph wrote: post #57
hn_go_brrrrr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with "best practices"? I get the feeling the best practices you're complaining about are TPS reports, whereas I'm thinking more like "don't ship to prod on Fridays".

> I get the feeling the best practices you're complaining about are TPS reports, I’m talking about the actual term “best practices”, and not the actual practices themselves. The term is an ineffective way to communicate something. Managers and engineers alike should be able to explain what they do in terms that can be connected with concrete actions / concerns and understandable business goals. Terms like “best pract…

> “Best practices” also implies some kind of independence of situation which is fictitious.

If you, say, have 30 teams whose projects come together into a product with a 99.9% SLA, you can’t have each team make completely independent judgments of what practices are best for their situation. You can try to, and many growing companies do. What you inevitably find is that the aggregate set of problems is too large, even when every team has a plausible story for why their individual situation makes sense.

The only solution is to write down a “best practices” manual and insist that everyone must follow it, even if they don’t think some practice or another is necessary in their situation.

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