What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make? • Hacker News Board

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#131

Post by sambeau » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

The single most common mistake I see managers making is assuming that their job is to manage the people rather than the project, closely followed by trying to micro-manage the project itself. Trust and delegation are key to all of this.

A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.

Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.

I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.

Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#132

Post by abdinoor » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:46 PM UTC

jevanish wrote: post #38

abdinoor wrote: post #20

A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members. At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they d…

I've always been stunned how few tech companies and startups do 1 on 1s. It's the single, easiest way to surface a lot of this. As long as you don't completely ignore what's brought up in them, you'll get in front of a lot of trouble. @abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?

@jevanish you're right about the one-on-ones being the easiest way. But just doing the meeting is not enough. You would be surprised how many managers walk into a 1:1 with no agenda and are just asking "What's up?"

It is also not enough to just talk about the day-to-day. The 1:1 is not a smaller standup meeting. Just because there is "nothing on your plate" does not mean you skip the 1:1.

I generally prepare by reviewing notes from previous meetings and any goals that we have set together. Also bring a number of questions about company direction, transparency, colleagues, etc. Over the course of many 1:1s I can build a pretty comprehensive understanding of what makes this person tick and how they feel about their work and colleagues.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#133

Post by kelnos » Tue, May 20, 2014, 3:48 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #70

hluska wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only know your side of the story, so I know this assessment won't be entirely accurate. However, based on what you have written, it sounds like you were a pretty good manager who just got caught between your employees and your bosses. I especially like how you recognize your team members' intelligence, and tried to advocate for them with senior management. You likely made some mistakes along the way, but every mana…

One thing I realized later that I did wrong was pushing back on the upper management too much. For example I said I did not want my team working weekends on regular basis as had been the practice up to that point. We ended up not having to anyways but it painted the team in a bad light. Really this translated into me taking a long time to understand what the priorities of the business were vs the development prioriti…

Sounds like the company was already pretty dysfunctional if your team was working weekends on a regular basis. That's not healthy, and if you were my manager, I'd thank you for standing up for our lives outside of the office.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#134

Post by dta5003 » Tue, May 20, 2014, 4:18 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #124

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reading.

I am almost through it and I have to say I am not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I read books like this mostly because of their significance to the SciFi genre and while I think this books has some really great elements, the fact that Paul is basically infallible irks me. Nobody is that perfect in my experience and I wish I wasn't sure that he'd be successful with everything he starts. I did read a critiqu…

The sequel, Dune Messiah, is precisely about this.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#135

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, May 20, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #124

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reading.

I am almost through it and I have to say I am not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I read books like this mostly because of their significance to the SciFi genre and while I think this books has some really great elements, the fact that Paul is basically infallible irks me. Nobody is that perfect in my experience and I wish I wasn't sure that he'd be successful with everything he starts. I did read a critiqu…

> the fact that Paul is basically infallible irks me.

It's supposed to.

> I did read a critique of Dune recently that suggested that Herbert initially wanted to show how dangerous superheros are. This explains a bit about why Paul is a superhero: he has to be to make Herbert's thesis. However, then I'd be rooting for him to fail and I don't like the stories where the protagonist is evil in some subtle way and you are supposed to root for them to fail.

Paul isn't evil and you aren't supposed to root for Paul to fail; insofar as the critique that Herbert is trying to illustrate that superheroes are dangerous is correct, it is correct in the traditional sense of "superhero" where "evil" is very much not part of the mix.

An evil "superhero" is a supervillain, and illustrating that supervillains are dangerous wouldn't be particularly interesting. Supervillains are useful dramatic tools because their danger is blatantly obvious.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#136

Post by Consultant32452 » Tue, May 20, 2014, 4:51 PM UTC

marrs wrote: post #117

kevingadd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen turnover that bad at past employers. In some cases it continued for years after I left. I think it depends on the company, not necessarily averages.

Ditto for a place where I used to work. Unfortunately for me and my colleagues, the reason for the high turnover was that they kept hiring good dev managers who all quickly identified the projects' major problems and set about trying to solve them. This had the unfortunate side effect of revealing the incompetence of the TD, so they had to go quickly.

TD? Technical Director?

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#137

Post by michaelt » Tue, May 20, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

eshvk wrote: post #88

robterrell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better for morale, if temps truly could not be found, would be to advocate for everyone including the management above you to do the data entry. None of you are there to enter data, after all, so it's not like it's more appropriate for engineers to do it on weekends. The upper management would have maybe more incentive to get the proper temps located. And you go from goat to hero.

> Even better for morale, if temps truly could not be found, would be to advocate for everyone including the management above you to do the data entry. As an employee, this strategy has always felt fake and look like make believe work. For example, a long time ago, during a previous firm's crunch time, we had the CTO sit and write code. The guy could write code but he was also not as familiar with the code base and i…

Having the CTO come in when he doesn't have to seems fake, and might be bad employee relations.

But having the CTO go golfing and spend time with his family while he urges employees work weekends is definitely bad employee relations.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#138

Post by snorkel » Tue, May 20, 2014, 5:43 PM UTC

noisy_boy wrote: post #121

mp3jeep01 wrote: post #23

When I first started work out of college I kept a notebook of "things I like/don't like" about my managers, mostly as a training piece for myself. One of the top qualities one of my managers had was his comfort level with admitting to me "I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know where we can find it". Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but an…

This hit too close to home. As a subordinate and as a manager, I've always felt totally comfortable saying, "I'm not sure but I'll check this". As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this ma…

Pretenders are my favorite type of manager to mess with. When they ask if ping requests filled up the disk I would gladly "check" that for them using the "system diagnostic regression suite" and ... nope ... everything looks good there ... But hmmmm ... Seems there was a power surge in the cloud layer ... You better inform upper management that there may a tornado forming in the cloud!!! If you can't argue with stupid at least have some fun with it.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#139

Post by cam- » Tue, May 20, 2014, 5:47 PM UTC

jevanish wrote: post #38

abdinoor wrote: post #20

A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members. At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they d…

I've always been stunned how few tech companies and startups do 1 on 1s. It's the single, easiest way to surface a lot of this. As long as you don't completely ignore what's brought up in them, you'll get in front of a lot of trouble. @abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?

fwiw in one on ones I go over all the tasks/responsibilities of the next position above them, and we see if they did any of those kind of tasks in the last sprint. If they did we record them. We also look if there are any opportunities to do tasks in the next level above as well so they can be assigned that work in the next sprint. That waY i can make a strong argument when the person is ready for a promotion too.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#140

Post by edoloughlin » Tue, May 20, 2014, 6:07 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #92

IgorPartola wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in another reply, this particular data entry job involved doing math at about college linear algebra level and writing SQL among other things. We got to this point by relying on one of the founders to do all the data entry. Suddenly three things happened: our system got more complex so the old tools no longer helped, we signed on a lot more customers, and the founder stepped away for a well deserved br…

Would it really have taken longer to automate it, then feed in the data than to do it by hand? I ask because I have, when presented with similar tasks, spent the time learning how to do it in WSH (sendkey), doing it, then doing more productive things while the script ran.

There's an XKCD for that: http://www.xkcd.com/1319/