Add to it the ability to cut through the bullshit and follow through tasks till completion. The amount of bullshit that ICs, QAs, and products can spin in rounds and add to that the new bureaucracy that comes with being a manager is just unreal.
So you're a manager now
101–110 of 191 posts
Re: So you're a manager now
#102Some 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…
It's a good point but I'll add the problem is also the system/incentives of whatever org you are in. Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle. Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet..…
> I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
While this works in the short/naive scenario, I feel like in most cases these low performers prefer the "gravy" work if you will. The type of work that almost everyone prefers and is good at. So you risk setting a bad precedent for perverse incentives by rewarding poor performance with easier work.
Re: So you're a manager now
#103Some 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…
Isnt this just the definition of check-ins? Simply document how many check-ins have not had progress and be done, no need to stand over anybody's shoulder
Re: So you're a manager now
#104Nothing here is wrong; some of it good, but it's missing the foundational piece that - if you get it right - helps with everything you need to do and mitigates the countless mistakes you are going to make: you need to genuinely care. How you show your team you care is going to be different, but once (ed: if!) you do you get a pass on the little mistakes, they won't jump to the least charitable interpretation when you…
One way to show care is to show if you optimize your decisions for the business, versus optimizing for the team which will outlast the business. It is wrong to be 100% aligned to the business, even if you're the business owner, unless you think this is the last ride you'll ever have.
Re: So you're a manager now
#105Good advice. Recently, I had to manage a team just because I am a senior employee of the company. I messed up the first project, but they still trust me for the second one. Honestly, the pressure is insanely hard to bear sometimes.
Re: So you're a manager now
#106Bottom 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 un…
You forgot the worst one imo:
* when re-org happens / changing jobs, you now have no deep knowledge at all in the stacks you are managing. And no time to develop such knowledge before the next re-org anyway. So you are constantly in a state where you are dealing with topics that you only have a superficial understanding about.
I really feel like the tension between VS is not in your favor.
Problem is: going to Director level takes several years, at least. And even there, you are basically the CEO of a small start-up, in the sense that you need to constantly fight for "market shares", i.e. scope. Else your org risks getting irrelevant pretty fast, and you are in for a lot of trouble.
Re: So you're a manager now
#107Bottom 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 un…
> " You get to be the "executioner" when a RIF rolls through... " The other fun bit about that from the worm's eye view is bottom tier managers who haven't really internalized that their direct reports also are very aware that they're stuck with the "executioner" role and, before/during/shortly after layoffs, frequently reach out with "Got a minute to talk?" with no additional explanation or context, giving their rep…
I've received messages from people (who don't even report to me) asking whether they did something wrong because I had forgotten to close some google doc they shared which then showed me as "active on the document" for hours and they thought "he's combing through everything, I'm in trouble" and eventually reached out because they couldn't take it anymore.
People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.
Re: So you're a manager now
#108Earlier 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.
There are legal, ethical and emotional risks attached to writing about failed relationships with difficult colleagues. These stories are meant to be shared over a hot (or strong) drink.
Re: So you're a manager now
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with…
As a mediocre person, this gives me comfort.
Re: So you're a manager now
#110This was a great read! Saving this to re-read in the future. One question I have though is what are you supposed to do if as a new manager you aren't allowed to... well, do your job? I haven't been able to find a lot of resources on what to do in such a situation. I'm a new engineering manager (~8 months in) and my boss isn't letting me hire full-time devs to replace consultants whenever they leave or their contracts…
> I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team.
I'd start by thinking through how much of that "need" is real.
What is driving the things your team "needs" to accomplish? What hard external constraints are you operating under? What are the interaction points between your work and the rest of the organization? How much flexibility do you have? And, holistically, how much flexibility should you have?
After that, it's a matter of negotiation. Given some understanding of the real constraints as well as the personal/political factors driving your manager, how can you come up with a better approach for your team and your work? I personally found the book Splitting the Difference really useful for approaching these sorts of conversations, but I'm also not especially good at that sort of thing naturally!
Unless you have an absolutely awful relationship with your manager, a starting point would be asking these questions to them. The trick is to pose these as legitimately open-ended questions. I learned the value of this first-hand: if I'm trying to convince somebody about something, asking an open-ended question will either get them to rethink their beliefs or they will come back with an answer I didn't think of, and either way I got something valuable out of it.
At the end of the day, you need to find some way to have slack in your work, or the team will fall apart. Slack can come from changing what you're doing and how you're fitting into the broader organization, or it can come from factors the organization does not "see". That latter is where the real risk lies: that's the dynamic that results in unreasonable corner-cutting and then burns people out.
I should add that I have not been in this situation as a manager, but I have been in that situation as a lead with no formal, positional power. That seems similar enough to be a good staring point, but I'm sure it's different enough that you should take everything I say with a grain of salt!
One thing I've realized is that we talk about "plans" and "budgets" and "roadmaps" as something constant and immutable, but they're not. They're just decisions that the organization made. We can make different decisions! But that in particular might be a view that's more useful as a lead than as a formal manager, because it very much goes against the way most organizations are run. This realization changed my perspective on what's going on, but I suspect it would be impolitic to emphasize it when negotiating up the chain.