371–380 of 674 posts
Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to gr…
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no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? is "knowledge workers" still a thing? it was meaningless when it was introduced in the 60s, even more so now. another bubble creature, i guess.
> no, i am not us based, though i have worked there. but so what? Every country, and even different regions of a country, has linguistic differences. This is true even if all the countries being talked about have the same national language. For example, nobody in the US tech sector is going to know what a Boffin is unless they read The Register. Even on the west coast of the US, vocabulary is different between Califo…
Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to gr…
Is that a bad thing? The person worst at writing code is removed from doing it, and the (same) person managing engineers has at least done it. Unless the managers are pushing technical decisions on the team (does not sound like it), why wouldn't you want the worst engineers to become the people managers?
To say nothing of the common idea that engineering skill and people skill don't coexist often in the same people.
> , so I took my own advice
Always good! I've taken other people's advice over my own to my determent before. Of course I've also taken other people's advice and it worked out way better than my dumb ideas. Blending them is hard.
Any commonly given out advice you benefited from flatly ignoring?
> and was able to see some of them in the audience from the stage.
Sorry, the article implies this is an announcement of the program. It seemed like it was going to be done individually-ish. Was it a massive meeting instead?
Imagine paying hundreds of people to hire thousands of other people and then saying "oops, we overshot by 6,000 hires!". How can any person in a leadership role that is responsible for that kind of misfire possibly keep their job?
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His company hasn’t delivered outstanding returns as far as profits. Tesla’s stock is mostly hype.
Twitter is private, but Elon definitely destroyed value when he took it over.
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Building empires is quite standard in management. I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. So my primary target is to convince the powers that be to give me headcount, and what my team actually does is strictly secondary. Now I'm a mere peon, but this replicat…
> I work at $BIGCO as a manager and have been told that, in practice, if I want to get a promotion to the next level, I'll need to grow my team large enough to have other managers reporting to me first. Imagine if at $BIGCO they told you that in practice, you need to reduce headcount and run as lean as possible so that your team brings as much monetary value for the company with the least amount of expense instead...
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> this is the usual name I dunno if it's just me, but it seems like the term came out of nowhere just a couple years ago.
I also never saw this until pretty recently. At first I assumed people were talking about independent contractors because it was the first thing that came to mind, it possibly fit the context I saw the term used in and nobody explained the acronym they just dropped it there like I was supposed to know what it meant. Took a bit longer to realize they meant individual contributor.
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The skills I want from a good manager are mostly orthogonal to what I want from a coworker working on a project
I am in a weird spot where I am a manager and expected to be an individual contributor. I am also supposed to play several other roles as well. You are right, the skill sets are vastly different. It is incredibly difficult to have to context switch between manager mind set and developer multiple times a day. Both of my roles likely suffer due to my restrictions on being able to focus on one.
As a code contributor, you’re not going to be able to keep your commitments because of management responsibility and as a manager you’re not going to have time to do either career development for your team or be in the room to play politics for your team.
The only time that I’ve seen that work is when my former CTO would do non production code as a research product or a proof of concept that he would give to someone else to make production ready.
Also, the people you report to aren’t going to be as willing to give you honest feedback.
As an IC, I can give a suggestion to my team and I have to convince them based on my ideas. They will free to push back. As a manager, many won’t.
I work with a lot of people who for whatever reason won’t say anything openly when they feel something is wrong. Even when it’s not their manager - ie a project manager.
I’ve never been afraid to voice my opinion and “disagree and commit” (how do you say where you work without saying where you work). But then again I’m older (49), more financially secure and not here on H1B [1].
[1] That last statement is not meant to rail against H1B visa holders. I think the entire H1B visa system sucks and is inhumane for the people who have to deal with it precisely because they have to deal with shit that they shouldn’t have to.
Potentially inflammatory story, but I think about it occasionally, and this is a good context. I was out having a meal with old college buddies; most of us are developers, but some have become team leaders and managers. I will call it a statistical anomaly, but the worst engineers are now in 'people management' positions. The discussion ended with a guy boasting about how his team has X people, and he's looking to gr…
The best engineers almost without fail are the ones who are passionate about it and don't want to be doing anything else. They'll tend to keep being engineers.
And corporations tend to recognize, value, and promote managers based on team size and growth as key metrics. Can't blame someone for doing what their employer tells them it wants. The problem here is not caused by line managers but by executives who set goals in this way.
And I don't really know what line managers do either. They seem to sell themselves to their reports as "dealing with all the corporate bullshit" which is kind of true, but if the corporation is generating so much bullshit that it needs to employ bullshit wranglers, it seems like the better solution would be fix it at the source rather than clean it up after the fact. I get there will always be some amount of administration and stuff that you don't want your engineers spending lots of time on, but that could be handled with a personal assistant type of role that should be able to handle dozens of engineers per PA, rather than a higher paid manager.