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How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

lizthedeveloper.com

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Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#141

Post by Bahamut »

irremediable wrote: post #130
Bahamut wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some more details - being a good manager can be a delicate dance. When you are a manager, you start to become responsible for high level tasks that have huge impact to a company. However, if you micromanage too much, you create an awful culture of fear and hamper developer productivity. So how do you inspire developers to execute in a timeframe dictated by others? You have to be a leader who inspires the engin…

Thanks for sharing your story. This is part of why I love HN: I can learn from the experiences of people who're interested in similar things to what I'm interested in, but who're much further along in life. Also wow, well done on shielding your junior engineers from the worst of the death march. Did you suffer much from burnout during your heroic effort? How did you cope?

I have a lot of resilience from a lot of life experiences. This not having been my first crunch time also helped me cope - I focused on getting as much of a good night sleep as I could (typically 6 - 7 1/2 hours a night, usually ended up closer to 6 - 7 1/2 is my optimal amount), and dosed on lots of caffeine if not well-rested. Exercise is also important.

I did have to sacrifice all other interests thought during the time period though. All I know is, I'm definitely taking a vacation in two months.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#142

Post by Roboprog »

curun1r wrote: post #132
dmfdmf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to disparage the whole management class but I think part of it is that manager types don't really get the motivation to solve problems. They think that if someone doesn't have a manager telling them what to do then they won't do anything, but that is just psychological projection. Fred was one of the happiest (and busiest) guys at this company and many strived to achieve his status. Regarding respect; Af…

> They think that if someone doesn't have a manager telling them what to do then they won't do anything As someone who has moved from being an IC to being a manager, I can assure you that's not true. What we do think is that an engineer won't necessarily work on the right things. Engineers have a tendency to work on something until they've solved it, which isn't the same things as finishing it. This is why personal p…

"Focus"

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1503

Courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

Looking forward to that Vice-Podmaster promotion? :-)

You should note that the phrasing of your concerns probably strikes a certain amount of dread in some of your underlings.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#143

Post by geebee »

jshen wrote: post #56
ionforce wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it flawed?

The most obvious flaw, a programmer is only worth 5.7 times their 1999 salary if their work is generating 5.7 times as much revenue as it would have in 1999. I see no evidence that this is the case. If it were the case, and the vast majority of programmers are earning 1/6 of what their work is worth, then there is a huge opportunity that you can exploit to get rich. Go for it, and let us know how it works out.

To me, the strongest evidence that programmers are worth considerably more than they are typically paid comes form the absolute insistence from silicon valley companies that there is a "shortage" of programmers at the market rate (or well above the market rate).

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#144

Post by codeonfire »

jghn wrote: post #60
snoman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the reason for the perpetuation of this myth is that, if a manager is doing their job really really well then all of that stress and BS is hidden from their directs.

Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!

Managers create the BS, so they can hardly be credited with shielding people from it. They also create a lot of BS for their own reports such as playing the "your job is to make me look good" game, or having devs do a bunch of leg work so they can present everything as their own ideas.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#145

Post by jshen »

michaelochurch wrote: post #139
frozenport wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse because you might code up a storm and not add any value. You might work a dead project and only loose the company money. I have seen many a John Henry try to save a project from technical failure when it was a business failure.

It's even worse because you might code up a storm and not add any value. You might work a dead project and only loose the company money. Very true. We have the value-add potential that, on paper, would justify upward of $700,000 per year. Unfortunately, most of us are managed ineptly and so much of that value is squandered. There are plenty of ways that the surplus generated by our talents could be spent (expansion,…

I can summarize your point of view as, "pay me a million dollars and I'll blame others for the problems"

Who wants to hire that attitude?

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#146

Post by fit2rule »

thisGuysAccount wrote: post #114
fit2rule wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These 'types' exist only to allow academia administrivia to be more open for profit. There is not such a thing as a 'manager type of personality', or 'a tech type' - this is an invention, utterly arbitrary, and a product of a corrupt education system that allows such a mythos to occur in order to cater to industrialization of human economy.

There might well not be a "managerial archetype". Each company will have desired traits in their managers, whether they go for the servant leader or the authoritarian delegator, their desired traits will limit who they view as suitable for managerial positions. There will be "manager types," and to people who have worked for that company for 10, 15, 20 years, that is the "manager type" for all companies, in their vie…

At the base of typecasting/stereotyping is prejudice. If you prejudge someone as being 'a manager type' before they've done any actual, you know, management - then you are prejudicial in your approach. Just because someone doesn't wear a tie and conform to social normatives, does not mean they cannot do things "typically associated with" socially-constructed norms, or 'types'. This is the biggest problem with manager-culture today: that bigotry and prejudice is still very much a factor in human interaction.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#147

Post by jghn »

codeonfire wrote: post #144
jghn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!

Managers create the BS, so they can hardly be credited with shielding people from it. They also create a lot of BS for their own reports such as playing the "your job is to make me look good" game, or having devs do a bunch of leg work so they can present everything as their own ideas.

Bad managers, sure. Not the sort that I'm talking about.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#148

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

peteretep wrote: post #34
zobzu wrote: post #14

One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…

> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a > more relaxed job If you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.

Thank you for posting this. I do think some companies undervalue their engineers, but it's crazy how frequently managers are disparaged on this site.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#149

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

codeonfire wrote: post #144
jghn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!

Managers create the BS, so they can hardly be credited with shielding people from it. They also create a lot of BS for their own reports such as playing the "your job is to make me look good" game, or having devs do a bunch of leg work so they can present everything as their own ideas.

Those are stereotypical bad managers, not ALL managers. I know a lot of great managers who are not like that. And even the ones that failed didn't fail due to malice or vanity. Most people I've encountered want to build cool things, even the managers, and they often know their strength is not in coding.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#150

Post by thwarted »

mathattack wrote: post #115

When I was at BigCo, they officially had 2 paths - one involved people leadership, the other technical leadership. The reality was technical leadership stopped a level below director, and only 2 or 3 even managed to make it that far. After 3.5 years there, it had a formative impact of pushing me away from both the company and technology. I recovered on both, but it's something one should take seriously on taking a jo…

One thing you definitely don't want to do is take a team away from people who consider themselves to be engineers who happen to be in a people manager role (and have been for a long time and are considered by their team and the wider engineering org to be successful at it). And if you want to do this, you have to make sure the person, and their team, is on board with making that change.

This can be especially problematic if you don't have a culture of the organization being driven by engineering; where becoming a "manager" affords more success (making decisions, getting things done) purely because you're a manager now (because of the political aspects). Removing the people management leadership position then can feel like a demotion.

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