People leave managers, not companies

It's probably easier for managers to overrate their skills and performance because the problems they cause are often not overt; if parts of their team are underperforming, the knee-jerk assessment is that "there's something wrong with Joe" rather than "there's something wrong with our process" or "there's something wrong with what I'm doing."

Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.

The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.

I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.

The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).

That's because management is one of those fields that most people think they're qualified for. If you got arms, legs and are literate, many think they're cut out for it.

Same goes for teaching or education in general. So many wannabe educators writing or producing programming lessons that clearly have never studied education theory. A notorious one or two out there as well. Art or professional grade creative endeavors are probably the same way for the vast majority.

Unless you're some sort of savant, no one gets away with shortcutting the learning involved with anything. It's just kind of blissful ignorance.

You don't know what you don't know and it becomes a strength since most are too unmotivated to ever do things the right way, in a well-informed, disciplined manner regardless. To those who are in those fields though, it's painfully obvious.

Problem is, managers shape companies.

Last company I left went bankrupt and got bought by a VC who replaced the whole management.

The new managers were running around telling people how to do things because of the "company spirit".

A few people, including me, were in the company for over 7 years and we knew the company spirit, because well, we lived and formed it.

Now some newly hired MBAs try to tell me that I'm wrong?

The bankruptcy lead many people to leave. The rest left because of the new management. Now the company has the old name and product, but noone of the people that created or formed it remained.

One of the issues I've had that isn't mentioned here is the value of mutual trust. Communication and trust are the two cornerstones of a really solid manager managee relationship in my experience. Whether that lack of trust manifests itself as micro-management, constant check-ins, or a constant threat of surveillance it can easily turn an above average performer into an apathetic and demoralized employee.

I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.

I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.

Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!

The trust and minimal involvement are really key here, the best managers I've ever worked with have been enablers rather than taskmasters. Managers that remove roadblocks, provide you with exactly the tools you need, insulate you from unnecessary cross-chatter, and just let you kill it with as few distractions as possible.

Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.