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So you're a manager now

scottkosman.com

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Re: So you're a manager now

#61

Post by hitekker »

Aurornis wrote: post #3

Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…

Your insight is true enough that almost every recruiter asks a manager "have you PIP'd someone before?" in the first phone screen. It's a hard experience that some junior managers cannot, or will not, do for a variety of reasons.

IMHO, besides the messiness, performance management is unspeakable because people generally hate authority. We've all had bad experiences with authority figures. We're also told many fantasies about the morality of groups of people. If the people are blameless, then the the fault lies with the manager who resembles (or opposes) our teacher, our parents, our government. And so forth.

I use to subconsciously think that until I learned, the hard way, it was irresponsible blame-shifting. A recent HN discussion demonstrated some of those dynamics at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273798

Re: So you're a manager now

#62

Post by MrGilbert »

MrGilbert wrote: post #50
Aurornis wrote: post #3

Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…

Agile Coach / Scrum Master chiming in - I switched from an engineering position to this more people-centric role, and completely agree with you. What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances. It helps tremendously to also be interested in getting to know people. And yes, you will encounter people that are disruptive. Usually, and I can…

Curious to know why my comment received a downvote / downvotes.

Re: So you're a manager now

#64

Post by rrr_oh_man »

Aurornis wrote: post #3

Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…

For anyone struggling with this:

https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...

This podcast has made me a 10x better manager.

Good starters:

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity...

- https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/06/manager-tools-onboardi...

Re: So you're a manager now

#65

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

Bottom tier manager is the worst role in tech.

* You are responsible for sticking to commitments that depend almost completely on other people sticking to theirs.

* You're still on the hook for delivery, so if someone you assigned a subtask can't get that job done, you either have to pass it on to someone else (which often ends up harming the social dynamic of the team) or just do it yourself. Throwing an employee under the bus is not a good look.

* You get to be the "executioner" when a RIF rolls through, even if you get RIFed yourself, and even if you had no input into who is getting RIFed. Those Sunday evening "let's have a chat tomorrow morning" emails, and the following chat, are the most gut-wrenching things I've ever had to do as a manager.

* By the time you become a manager, you're probably one of the most experienced members of the team, so you are still always the "go-to" person when someone needs a gnarly bug fix, or if there's a lore question, or if a sticky situation with a customer comes up. If your reports are too green, it's hard to delegate these things, and this just adds to your own cognitive load.

* You don't have enough clout to make organizational-level changes. So process things that you see that are really inefficient, and you have some ideas how to address them? Now you've got to convince your manager and probably theirs, too, and they usually don't want to rock the boat.

Your best path as a ground-level manager is to not spend too much time here: become a second-tier manager (ie, director) or find a nice landing place as an individual contributor again.

Re: So you're a manager now

#66

Post by AberrantJ »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #52

One thing I struggled with when I was a "manager" before going back to individual contributor is that at every job I've had this far - I have never worked directly for my manager nor when was I a manager did I directly oversee my reports. This seems to be fairly common in tech and consulting. How am I supposed to succeed at a manager if I have no fucking clue what my reports are going to be working on? I feel like th…

This time 100,000.

For some reason my high performance meant that in addition to my high performance I should manage these other people working on other projects (that are just as in depth as mine) and this can in no way detract from the amount of work I do.

God I want to quit.

Re: So you're a manager now

#67

Post by kortilla »

MrGilbert wrote: post #62
MrGilbert wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile Coach / Scrum Master chiming in - I switched from an engineering position to this more people-centric role, and completely agree with you. What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances. It helps tremendously to also be interested in getting to know people. And yes, you will encounter people that are disruptive. Usually, and I can…

Curious to know why my comment received a downvote / downvotes.

Being an agile coach isn’t management

Re: So you're a manager now

#68

Post by hitekker »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
flashgordon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really nice. I've been doing this for quite a while (and also ping pong ic-em and back). Oh and I've also been "the" poor performer. A couple of observations: 1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what…

> I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket. I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers wer…

> Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.

Maybe off-topic: I think a lot of writing comes from a place of control. The writers want to feel like they're in control and the readers want to feel they're in control too. The internet functions as people's outlet and fantasy environ, so scary writing naturally gets filtered out, i.e. post something uncomfortable and people must retaliate to preserve their comfort, their sense of control.

Re: So you're a manager now

#69

Post by f1shy »

hcfman wrote: post #28
RickJWagner wrote: post #6

About 30 years ago I was in the early part of my career and was stunned to learn two of my favorite programmers were former managers. I couldn’t understand why they ‘took a step backward’ to return to programming. One of them explained “In management, they nip at you from the top, and they nip at you from the bottom”. Meaning that you had many more people with demands. A programmer usually has only one, maybe a few.…

"Later, I learned that many managers are paid less than senior programmers." Not in Europe.

Exactly. At least where I'm, not even remotely (30% to 40% more as a manager)

Re: So you're a manager now

#70

Post by olddustytrail »

jghn wrote: post #60
olddustytrail wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple. In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure. It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong.…

To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this: 1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this c…

Yes, if that's your process then that's what you're being paid to do.

OTOH, why shouldn't your team be able to say you're a bad manager and just get you fired? There is rarely a simple process to do that.

They're the productive ones so this seems a little backwards.

At any rate I definitely don't see why a managers job should be made easier to avoid the realistic implications of firing someone. If they can't cope with the clearly defined rules then maybe they're just not a competent manager.

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