131–140 of 186 posts
The best software teams I've worked on didn't have managers, they had facilitators.
But there are other types of teams, and other situations where other styles are more effective.
The manager is your interface to management. It's their job to tell you what you need to know and what to do. To an employee, they're the face of the business. But at the end of the day, if it's the people that make up a business, then I'd question if they are not the same thing. I asked a new acquaintance of mine about something bothering me. I asked him, "so, how often do you fire people? How do find the right peop…
Being a manager is about being loyal to the company and not individuals. It pays more precisely because it causes pain to peoples' consciences to put an abstraction above fellow employees. Talking about a CEO catching bullets in their teeth is ridiculously inflated language. Why use such imagery? Because the mission of a typical company does not sufficiently compensate for the guilt produced by putting the organizati…
That's not true at all.
Being a manager requires you to balance both the needs of individuals with the needs of the company.
Being a good manager means you can correctly handle when those two needs come into conflict.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flex time shouldn't mean that you show up sometime between 8 and 11. You should be at work within some sort of reasonably consistent window barring unforeseen circumstances. When you let people run wild, you end up with angry people anyway as gold-brickers will always take advantage of the system. Communications and accountability break down as you can never have all parties involved in a matter in the same place or…
Showing up sometime between 8 and 11 is unreasonable, because it prevents people to come sooner then at 8. It should have been "sometime between 6 and 11" to be proper. Also since people know the guy in your story is not working enough, it should be easy to check on him couple of times and then fire him.
If your habit is a 5 hour start window for an 8 hour workday, you're not going to work out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flex time shouldn't mean that you show up sometime between 8 and 11. You should be at work within some sort of reasonably consistent window barring unforeseen circumstances. When you let people run wild, you end up with angry people anyway as gold-brickers will always take advantage of the system. Communications and accountability break down as you can never have all parties involved in a matter in the same place or…
I disagree. I trust my people. We all understand the idea that you get your work done. This gives them the flexibility to do what they need to do for their life. I have one guy that signs off a couple of hours a week during the fall to tend to his home/farm. I have another that takes time to make sure his girlfriend can make it to her Dr. appointment. These are also the people that I see working at midnight or such f…
The company (HR and upper management) and myself (I should not have accepted such a low starting salary) are solely to blame.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"getting your work done" (which is admittedly a subjective, hard-to-quantify metric) Getting "work done" is fairly easy to recognize - you can tell when bugs are getting fixed and features are being delivered and when they are not. Getting work done to a high standard and delivered at an appropriate speed is, I think, only recognizable by another developer who is as good or better than you. >Personally, I always try…
Getting "work done" is fairly easy to recognize Bob closed 20 tickets this week, and Dave is still working on that one ticket from last week. Who got most work done this week?
Hey all, I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify … I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO. The goal was to hopefully…
I enjoyed the article and IMHO it did well in encouraging self-awareness and introspection. I hope it goes far.
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…
The article is based on data that includes, among other points, that the individual manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and that 50% of Americans had left their job because of the individual manager. If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points. (I am personally about t…
I once had a manager who had a bunch of people leaving. They were not leaving him, the manager; they were leaving the situation the division was in that put the engineers in difficult working conditions. But the manager had HR interview several of his people, to see if he, the manager, was the problem. He said, "I had to know." (Of course, if he's that honest and that willing to look, you have a pretty good idea that he's not the problem, even before HR comes back with the results.)