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

Conscious unbossing

robertwalters.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 125 posts

Re: Conscious unbossing

#91

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

klodolph wrote: post #73
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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…

Sure, you can invent a scenario where the term “best practices” is a half-decent term. I’m not speaking in some kind of absolute. I still think it’s not a very good term here. It’s not really describing best practices, is it? It’s just describing the practices that the teams are choosing to follow. I would name the document something like “development standards” or something like that. I’ve this called “meeting the b…

I pretty much agree with what you’re saying, although I wonder how much it’s a euphemism treadmill. You don’t hear people talk about gold standards much these days. I’ve definitely seen overstuffed practices docs that end up as pointless (and ignored) checklists.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#92

Post by saikia81 »

extr wrote: post #26

Try again without the phrase “middle manager” which has a derogatory meme attached to it, as evidenced by this very comment section. If you think you’ve invented a better (scalable) system than having ICs report up through a hierarchy with defined scope and responsibilities, you have probably just reinvented “management”.

I think commenters are being critical of the hierarchycal system with so many levels. It really differs per country.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#94

Post by klodolph »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #89
floydnoel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the word best is highly problematic. best in every possible situation? impossible. only an idiot would believe something so stupid. so it must be best under certain circumstances which means others are best under different circumstances.

Would you say that only an idiot believes in speed limits? Again, the point isn’t that some practices are ontologically best, but that you must limit the freedom of individual teams to decide what’s best in order to achieve organization-wide standards.

The problem is the actual term itself, “best practices”. It really seems like we might be speaking past each other… the question is not about whether the thing you have, which you call “best practices”, should exist. It seems like you are arguing that best practices, the thing, should exist. But I am arguing that “best practices”, the term, should not be used.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#95

Post by klodolph »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #91
klodolph wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can invent a scenario where the term “best practices” is a half-decent term. I’m not speaking in some kind of absolute. I still think it’s not a very good term here. It’s not really describing best practices, is it? It’s just describing the practices that the teams are choosing to follow. I would name the document something like “development standards” or something like that. I’ve this called “meeting the b…

I pretty much agree with what you’re saying, although I wonder how much it’s a euphemism treadmill. You don’t hear people talk about gold standards much these days. I’ve definitely seen overstuffed practices docs that end up as pointless (and ignored) checklists.

“Best practices” is a bad term partly because it has some kind of gravitational pull that attracts junk, partly because you almost always need some clearer term (it’s vague), partly because it describes something that isn’t relevant.

Alternative terms for your practices docs: just call it “development practices” or something. This makes it a little more clear that it’s not a dumping ground for every practice people think is good / best, but only for what people actually care about, which is the development practices that your team has adopted. You can say something like, “Best practices according to research is X, but our team is adopting Y because we believe Y is promising.”

Re: Conscious unbossing

#96

Post by theideaofcoffee »

extr wrote: post #26

Try again without the phrase “middle manager” which has a derogatory meme attached to it, as evidenced by this very comment section. If you think you’ve invented a better (scalable) system than having ICs report up through a hierarchy with defined scope and responsibilities, you have probably just reinvented “management”.

Found the middle manager. The current system must not be criticized because no perfect replacement has been found. C’mon.

There are deep flaws with how hierarchical organizations are run and how incompetent people are put in the positions with most capacity to do damage. Those ideas most definitely need to be discussed, even if there is no clear winner in terms of how to definitively improve things.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#97

Post by theideaofcoffee »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #88

Middle managers are information nodes for large scale human decision making mechanisms. If it were possible to interact individually with everyone in zero time, everyone could report to the king. Until then…

My kingdom for a middle manager that was usefully connected to the organization like that and who could make information flow. I would love for the feeling of information coming to me through someone like that. Alas, that has -never- been my experience in organizations huge and tiny. It’s always through side channels. Always always always.

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my bad luck, maybe lots of things, but the only thing a middle manager has been there for was to push paper up to the equally clueless layer above them and actively interfere in good work getting done.

Re: Conscious unbossing

#98

Post by sam_bristow »

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

I think this is the article you're refering to [1]. The most frustrating manager I've had felt like they were just a layer of indirection to the rest of the business. Every meeting I was in with them was basically a readout of another meeting. No new insights or synthesis of new information.

I have also had managers who are great at linking the wider strategic goals of the organisation to their team's work. They were rare and worth their weight in gold.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42506984

Re: Conscious unbossing

#99

Post by retrofrost »

I think the biggest systemic issue with middle management is that its mostly a political position that comes with political challenges. Middle managers have to be the political interfaces that try to implement and affect policy given to them by upper management, all the while giving feedback on said policy from the line workers to upper management. Good middle managers can really shield good workers from a lot of upper management idiocy. Bad middle managers exacerbate those issues. Its a thankless position that can really make things better, but often is stuck doing a mediocre job due to lack of training and bad circumstances.
Post reply on HN