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Managing People

klinger.io

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Re: Managing People

#41

Post by mrweasel »

xupybd wrote: post #38
mrweasel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, can't you? Sure it depends on country, but the problem normally seems to be that companies want to fire people and not compensate them. I think most countries allows you to fire people pretty much when even, it's just that it can be rather expensive. You can't fire pregnant women, that's almost impossible, you can't fire because of skin color, religion, handicaps (unless it prevents you from doing your job), bu…

Yeah I worked with a company that had a very incompetent employee. They almost had enough warnings to fire the employee, then the employee came out as trans. No one was phased by that, however it made them impossible to fire. They couldn't do it without it appearing that it was due to that employee being trans. So they hired an extra person to make sure the job got done.

Well, not impossible. My wife's boss actually manage to fire a pregnant employee, due to incompetency, but it made much easier by the fact that reviews and complaints had come in earlier.

I understand why a company wouldn't fire a trans person, the shitstorm would be unbelievable, and you're rarely in a position where you can point out that the person is incompetent.

Re: Managing People

#42

Post by tchalla »

kqr wrote: post #23

> And you got more information than they do, always This sounds like a dangerous thing to think. If the rest of my team does not have more information than me, I have failed to convey the important things I know. My team, on the other hand, has lots of information from the trenches that I might lack. > In every discussion/project/problem/situation, it needs to be clear who makes decisions While I understand where thi…

> This sounds like a dangerous thing to think. If the rest of my team does not have more information than me, I have failed to convey the important things I know.

Two points 1) I think the advice is for small teams / startups where I can easily see this happen and 2) One can tweak the advice to "And you got more *context* than they do" for larger organisations

Re: Managing People

#43

Post by GoToRO »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #17
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #14

> Don't load your work onto others in the company. I've seen this at companies small and large, especially where you might have a "politically" appointed manager, rather than someone a bit more useful. It's also a favourite ploy of sociopathic but useless individual contributors, find someone to do your work for you, then repackage it as your own!

> It's also a favourite ploy of sociopathic but useless individual contributors, find someone to do your work for you, then repackage it as your own! It seems like that could only work once or so per individual, unless there's some other kind of power dynamic in play. I know I wouldn't be put in that situation where someone takes credit for work I did more than once.

You are not part of those meetings where this happens.

Re: Managing People

#44

Post by throwaway7464 »

I have given up on providing feedback to managers. I realized people does not change much. Most managers want to assert power and as an IC its hard for me to accept authority of manager considering my skill level compared to my manager. The best way to deal with manager is always discuss the requirements and nothing more. Your teams feed back is more worth than manager feed back on performance rating. I don't know who came up with this practice but I am grateful to them. This junior developers don't realize for a long time. Any one who has not demonstrated as a good developer is unfit to be a developer's manager.

Re: Managing People

#45

Post by throwaway7464 »

wreath wrote: post #13

The author mentions firing people in almost every point. Is firing people in the US so easy that it is a go-to solution to solve these problems?

Nope. It happens but not so easy. Its the mindset of most managers especially managers with non coding background.

Re: Managing People

#46

Post by okl »

TameAntelope wrote: post #31

Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but I found this list/notes style basically impossible to parse. Why are any of these things true? Credentials alone are not going to get me to blindly accept any of this; maybe some reasoning would help, a few anecdotes, conversations with other experts (or at least quotes) so I can relate this content to other content and start to fit this info in with everything else I already know…

I agree, but for a different reason: There's a vast body of knowledge and literature pertaining to managing people -- assuming that and the associated social skills can be substituted by reading a list of semi-structure generalized anecdotes is lightheaded.

Also some of the points are very superficial/wrong, e.g.: It's hard to get people to own a problem space fully / But this is the goal / If they are the wrong person, you can still fire them

I don't agree with that train of thought at all.

Re: Managing People

#47

Post by okl »

kqr wrote: post #23

> And you got more information than they do, always This sounds like a dangerous thing to think. If the rest of my team does not have more information than me, I have failed to convey the important things I know. My team, on the other hand, has lots of information from the trenches that I might lack. > In every discussion/project/problem/situation, it needs to be clear who makes decisions While I understand where thi…

> This sounds like a dangerous thing to think.

Very one-sided and superficial, for sure.

> Only when the democratic process of discussion and negotiation fails does a person have to step in and make a decision. ...or at least force the discussion onto the relevant subjects.

One important tool to help the team come to the "right" decision for a project is to provide a vision and associated goals that can be used as a yardstick to evaluate the benefits of each alternative. The "debate" should flow into the same direction.

Re: Managing People

#48

Post by okl »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #14

> Don't load your work onto others in the company. I've seen this at companies small and large, especially where you might have a "politically" appointed manager, rather than someone a bit more useful. It's also a favourite ploy of sociopathic but useless individual contributors, find someone to do your work for you, then repackage it as your own!

> Don't load your work onto others in the company.

So as manager don't delegate work?

Some of those points are written like a horoscope: You can understand them whichever way fits your own experiences best.

Re: Managing People

#49

Post by cturner »

xbpx wrote: post #3

I identify with much in this blog post. One novelty argument: Managing is hard because it embodies the dialectic between capital and workers. Therefore a deep understanding of the Marxist critique (and exposé) of capital will help provide an analytical framing around what an effective manager needs to do. You can approach it from other lenses but they all break down due to the two polar forces most strongly at play.…

A difficulty with marxism is that it is thoroughly old fashioned about bucketing people into categories. In a feudal society you were born into a life where you were a serf, or a craftsman, or an aristocrat. Marxism massages the labels but essentially accepts this worldview. The primary handle on each person is a class label, assigned at birth. Talent is irrelevant.

One of the challenges of management after feudalism is making the best of the variety of individual contribution. When you are moving rocks around or ploughing, each individual is roughly equivalent. This was obsolete by the industrial era. A factor in Japan’s rise in auto was giving workers direct and individual (ie not union-filtered) feedback into the manufacturing process.

Now, the multipliers are higher still. There are regular situations where an aggressively small team has executed where several well funded teams of thousands failed.

My view is that capital is nearly irrelevant in mainstream technology now beyond achieving bootstrap and avoiding dumb renumeration errors that alienate talent. Rather, the key tensors are 1. how high you can get the ceiling on your core talent and 2. how small you can get that team, in order that this talent can be engaged with the big picture, in order that they can be identifying and focusing on the most important problems. They are related. The more capable your talent, the more it can participate in the big picture.

These dynamics do not resolve easily with the orgchart-centric, bigger-is-better assumptions of traditional worldviews.

Possible limit to the view - I have not had exposure to fields with vast ongoing capital cost, or complex cross-discipline stuff like silicon manufacture

Re: Managing People

#50

Post by tjungblut »

wreath wrote: post #15
romanhn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably he is US-based, in which case you can. I did find the verbiage of "discontinuing" people rather unsettling, but otherwise it's a thoughtful piece that resonated with my experience.

I see he is based in Berlin, Germany (according to his LinkedIn) where it's extremely hard to fire people (especially for reasons he mentioned in the post) once they are past the 6 months probation period. This smells like he is giving advice that he didn't do himself. Firing people is a pain for all parties involved.

You'd be surprised how many folks (many people on bluecard visas) take such severance "offer" without any legal consultation. Many tech immigrants in Germany do not know of their worker rights.
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