151–160 of 186 posts
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As manager in the middle you often feel helpless. You want to help your people but you have nothing to offer. Can't give raises, no place to promote people, top management doesn't support your initiatives. It's a difficult place to be in.
My last manager quit because of that feeling of helplessness. Basically my manager left his manager.
I work on a team that lost about 66% of its members in the last year and a half. Every single one of them liked our manager, but the way the organization works at a higher level was making everyone's life miserable. People absolutely leave companies because of the company. I've also had toxic managers at other organizations, so I agree a manager CAN drive an employee away, but that's not always or even usually the ca…
Isn't this attributing the cause of leaving to management as well, just not direct managers?
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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?
As long as you don't take the story points too seriously, Planning Poker can help avoid misunderstandings about the complexity of a ticket. To be clear, though, "Who got most work done this week?" is not a useful question.
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> A good manager will either recognize that you're delivering or not. And a great manager will evaluate the wider effects of your behavior on the whole team and over a long timescale. If you being late to your job causes others to start doing the same, and if your manager cuts you slack because you are a "high performer" then social dynamics come into play that must be...well...managed! Performance also slips over ti…
> If you being late to your job causes others to start doing the same You're missing the point entirely: Who cares if they're also late? Short of them being late to something important like a meeting, it seriously couldn't matter less than any of the thousand other things you should focus on as a manager. Unless you work in something with external time pressures (e.g. I used to work in equities and US market hours di…
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…
Likewise, there probably isn't such a thing as a 10X developer, but I totally believe 10X managers exist (they provide cover, they have empathy, they are able to lead people who otherwise aren't very manageable). I've only met very few of them in my career, most managers are 1X or even negative.
I agree with you that 10X managers exist, but it's utter nonsense to claim that 10X developers don't exist. I've met people who are possibly at the 100X level; it's worth remembering that some tasks cannot be done by an average developer with any amount of time. I imagine that there are probably tasks that don't allow the 10X or 100X to show through; anything basic and repetitive enough (or so heavily specified that…
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As long as you don't take the story points too seriously, Planning Poker can help avoid misunderstandings about the complexity of a ticket. To be clear, though, "Who got most work done this week?" is not a useful question.
One time I got laid off for not closing enough stories. Meanwhile the guy that was kept on was the source of a lot of bugs. So what is that if you generate your own problems and "solve" them?
But to answer your question, the original story should have acceptance criteria such that the ticket can't be closed if there are bugs. Failing that, the bug ticket should be linked to the original ticket.
Continual feedback is also important. If the manager who laid you off valued velocity over bug-free code, that should have been communicated way earlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
As long as you don't take the story points too seriously, Planning Poker can help avoid misunderstandings about the complexity of a ticket. To be clear, though, "Who got most work done this week?" is not a useful question.
Likewise, there probably isn't such a thing as a 10X developer, but I totally believe 10X managers exist (they provide cover, they have empathy, they are able to lead people who otherwise aren't very manageable). I've only met very few of them in my career, most managers are 1X or even negative.
I really don't like the concept of a 10X developer - it implies linear scaling. If you keep writing very similar implementations of very similar things (without actively damaging the code-base) you may very well be an O(n) developer. You keep working at the same pace regardless. If you are a developer of some calibar, the work that you've already done will feed back into the work that you're doing - making you an O(l…
> Everything he touches turn to shit
> he needs to be stopped.
You'll never take me alive.
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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.