141–150 of 191 posts
"Your Job Isn’t to Do the Work Anymore." Unless you work somewhere under-staffed with an org chart that's mostly an aspiration.
This is also only true (maybe) of the officer class of manager. The NCO class (tech leads??) certainly do the work on the ground with their staff.
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Then no high-level decisions would get made. Any technical argument that spans beyond one person would be at risk of running into an eternal stalemate. No strategic choices would be undertaken. (Tone indicator: Not a value judgment. I'm not saying that all managers are particularly good at this, same as how observing that "builders build things" does not mean that the builders are necessarily good at building.)
I feel like "making choices" and "making decisions" isn't really a full time job. Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think? I don't sort of "hate managers" or anything. Just curious about why businesses always seem to think they have to have them.
(Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.)
One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?"
On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that?
And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.)
So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way?
You probably can't. I certainly can't.
There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else.
And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else.
So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.
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 un…
Nitpick, but directors are typically considered executive-tier, not n-tier-management.
Anyone else see the exact opposite, that out of N people that _could_ become managers, it’s the worst individual contributors that do? Mostly because they want it most. People who love being individual contributors are going to become good at it, and they’ll resist management tasks.
I think this is great and very natural. But there’s a kind of zombie myth that engineering managers are the best former engineers that refuses to die. It’s decent engineers with some aptitude and/or desire to manage.
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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…
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…
Agree 100%. This is the difficult conversation template I put together and use: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHyfR0XAc5ehRoqRImV1yAFh...
It certainly reflects the process I've gone during some difficult conversations, at least when I did them well. And I've certainly done the other approach where I just dug my trench and they dug theirs; oh lord, is it a terrible approach!
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> 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…
Nobody writes books about managing your manager, which seems odd. I practiced it, and it worked well for me.
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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…
1. That's because people are unique and there are infinite people problems to solve, so it will never be easy. 2. I don't believe those are the types that OP was talking about. There are people that will just never work out to begin with, and there are people who have bad days/weeks. The latter are already trusted and deemed worthy, so it's not the same class of problem. And remember, being a director is just being a…
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It's just not though. People above you are making decisions to not pay what generally amounts to trivial amounts of money to (in many cases I have seen) completely fuck up their products. I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.) It's why I like working…
As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out. Naturally I wen…
I've been at a few small-scaling-to-big firms going through tremendous growing pains. Most of the time it was that they had the insight to hire team leads & ICs with experience from bigger competitors but not any higher up the food chain.
That is - higher extremely experienced, talented people, and have them report to the some guy that was hired 20 years ago because he went to school with the founder, or his buddies kid, or some dude who never worked elsewhere in the industry. So ultimately the deciders and decisions didn't change and it was all window dressing.