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People leave managers, not companies

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Re: People leave managers, not companies

#101

Post by aezell »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #79

I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management. If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for. In this case, unless upper manageme…

I came here to make this exact point. I would further state that in tech businesses, tools shift, interests shift, and markets shift. Smart employees respond to that regardless of how amazing their manager might be.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#102

Post by corpMaverick »

dominotw wrote: post #80
ZenoArrow wrote: post #79

I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management. If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for. In this case, unless upper manageme…

I am this exact situation. I love my manager, simply one of the best i've ever worked with. But he is simply is messenger for poor decisions that are made by couple of incompetent people above him. I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually the…

In corporate IT, it is an accepted practice to promote people who don't have hands on experience, or who did the job 20 years ago and haven't followed up on the industry trends. They have a hard time admitting that they don't know and refuse to listen to the competent people in their teams. They don't even know who is competent and who is faking it.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#103

Post by corpMaverick »

ravenstine wrote: post #12

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 micr…

You often have micromanagement and abandonment at the same time. They are so busy micromanagement their people while they neglect making the decisions that they need to make. If somebody steps up, they push back. Everybody avoids moving and are just waiting until the micromanager has time.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#104

Post by haddr »

people also leave the environment, so not only their managers, but their peers. managers are somehow reponsible for creating a proper environment, but it is hard to enforce the atmosphere created by the rest of the team...

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#105

Post by dozzie »

sudhirj wrote: post #76
subsubsub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional. As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted. Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.

There's an interesting read by Taleb: https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person... The argument made is that being a "good employee" and following the rules is a signal to your employer that you're willing to make personal sacrifices to be dependable - the implication being that someone who follows the rules almost all the time is by necessity sacrificing some part of their personal interest. It's…

> The argument made is that being a "good employee" [...] is a signal to your employer that you're willing to make personal sacrifices to be dependable

It would be nice if the employer was giving symmetric signal to be a dependable party that will not throw you under the bus for a mildly controversial statement nor lay off at first financial bump.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#106

Post by dozzie »

crdoconnor wrote: post #58
subsubsub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional. As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted. Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.

>Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? The worst metric. That is, unless the "turning up on time" is actually causing a serious and recognizable problem. Then it's the problem that's a problem. >As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. No it doesn't. If you put the onus on the developer and say "not only do you have to deliver high quality code you have to make me trust that you've deliver…

>> Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric?

> The worst metric.

Not really. If your job is to be available to others (IT support is a good example), turning up on time is an adequate metric.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#107

Post by jcadam »

lazy_lanius wrote: post #82
crdoconnor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME this kind of experience comes when you have a manager who has no fundamental understanding of what it is that they are managing and has no particular reason to trust you. A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9a…

An old co-worker of mine used to work for a company that made flight simulators. He said his manager would stand in the front foyer on the 2nd floor and make notes of who arrived after 9:00am.

I would have fun trolling such a boss. When I was younger, I would stress about job security; work OT whenever asked, say yes to every request, etc.

Now that I'm in my late 30s... I'm finding I have more self-confidence than I've ever had in my life. Couple that with a general sense of professional ennui that's been steadily building over the last few years, and you get someone who just doesn't care if you fire him and acts accordingly.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#108

Post by FilterSweep »

subsubsub wrote: post #47
crdoconnor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME this kind of experience comes when you have a manager who has no fundamental understanding of what it is that they are managing and has no particular reason to trust you. A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9a…

Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional. As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted. Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.

> Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric?

Most devs are "round the clock" employees even though their job doesn't explicitly say so. If a serious production crisis happens at 3:00AM, all hands are on deck.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#109

Post by FilterSweep »

cpfohl wrote: post #53
michaelt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In software engineering, many companies prioritise "getting your work done" (which is admittedly a subjective, hard-to-quantify metric) and consider any metric that contradicts it to be suspect. A person who believes this would say that if according to policy my best employee should work 9am-5pm, but he prefers to work from 7am-3pm and is my best employee, it is the policy not the employee that needs changing. Person…

This. I've literally never held a job that wasn't okay flex time, and I've worked at 4 radically different types of companies as a software engineer over the last 7 years. I'll be honest, I was surprised to read this sorry if environment still existed for programmers

> I'll be honest, I was surprised to read this sorry if environment still existed for programmers

now tends to only exist in mismanaged large teams

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#110

Post by kbenson »

dominotw wrote: post #80
ZenoArrow wrote: post #79

I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management. If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for. In this case, unless upper manageme…

I am this exact situation. I love my manager, simply one of the best i've ever worked with. But he is simply is messenger for poor decisions that are made by couple of incompetent people above him. I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually the…

> I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions.

A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.

The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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