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People leave managers, not companies

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Re: People leave managers, not companies

#71

Post by scaryclam »

perl4ever wrote: post #38
unabst wrote: post #33

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…

I usually think of the managerial responsibilities to be in this order:

- Company, because without it there's no employees - The team you're managing, because teams are more than just a single person - The individuals in the team, since they're the one's that can make a team better

It seriously sucks to have to think of things in that order sometimes. I've never been involved in firing a person I didn't like.

Though, when it comes down to it it's not fair for the team to suffer because of an individual, no matter how much they are liked, and it's not fair for all of the teams to suffer because one of them can't cut it.

That's not to say there's no wiggle room though. I'll fight tooth and nail for an employee or team if I think it's a management fault that they've not performed (especially if I'm the manager screwing up) and will try to take a long term view of their value, not just the next quarter.

Of course, all of this could be making me a bad manager. I've been put into managing people by virtue of being technically strong, not being a great people herder. I really do wish companies would spend as much time mentoring and helping managers get better at hands on managing as they do other tasks.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#72

Post by IronKettle »

titzer wrote: post #61
crdoconnor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? The worst metric. That is, unless the "turning up on time" is actually causing a serious and recognizable problem. Then it's the problem that's a problem. >As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. No it doesn't. If you put the onus on the developer and say "not only do you have to deliver high quality code you have to make me trust that you've deliver…

> 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 dictated our need to be available) there's no reason it should matter whether someone shows up at 9 or 9:45. If you're really worried about people missing each other, set core hours (11-3 say) where everyone's expected to be available.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#73

Post by pqh »

ravenstine wrote: post #12

It's probably easier for managers to overrate their skills and performance because the problems they cause are often not overt; if parts of their team are underperforming, the knee-jerk assessment is that "there's something wrong with Joe" rather than "there's something wrong with our process" or "there's something wrong with what I'm doing." Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micr…

I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#74

Post by Clubber »

dagw wrote: post #65
crdoconnor wrote: post #60

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?

If you manager only relies on that one statistic to make a judgement, he is a bad manager. He should know the details of what Dave is working on.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#75

Post by rtpg »

dagw wrote: post #65
crdoconnor wrote: post #60

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?

Alice works with both of them, and knows that the one ticket Dave is working on requires a lot of refactoring work to solve it nicely.

Or knows that Bob is just that good. Or Dave's having a bad week because of X.

Direct superiors tend to have at least a vague idea of what is happening, along with a certain level of trust. These two make it less likely for the answer to your question to be as ambiguous. At least for ballpark estimates of whether one should be worried.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#76

Post by sudhirj »

subsubsub wrote: post #47
crdoconnor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME this kind of experience comes when you have a manager who has no fundamental understanding of what it is that they are managing and has no particular reason to trust you. A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9a…

Is turning up on time for your job a terrible metric? To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional. As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted. Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.

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 just that, though - managers want dependability as much as they want competence, sometimes more so. This may or may not be good for the company depending on the company. If the leverage of each employee (in terms of their ability to affect the bottom line) is small, then dependability is far more important. If the leverage is high, then the employee's results dominate - the employee can come in whenever they want wearing whatever they want and say anything they want, as long as they make it rain.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#77

Post by Clubber »

k__ wrote: post #16

Problem is, managers shape companies. Last company I left went bankrupt and got bought by a VC who replaced the whole management. The new managers were running around telling people how to do things because of the "company spirit". A few people, including me, were in the company for over 7 years and we knew the company spirit, because well, we lived and formed it. Now some newly hired MBAs try to tell me that I'm wro…

Yes, that's a phenomenon I've experienced twice now. Great small company getting acquired by large company. Managers / execs of large company commence dismantling whatever made the small company efficient / competent.

I have some theories as to why this pattern occurs. Perhaps it's because the managers get paid a lot and feel the need to do something to prove they're worth it. Maybe managers are trying to cut costs, product be damned, to get bonuses. It could be because big companies typically have a lower grade of developers on average than small companies that are good enough to get acquired, and lower grade developers need to be babysat more. I dunno. It sucks though.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#78

Post by brlewis »

dagw wrote: post #65
crdoconnor wrote: post #60

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?

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.

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#79

Post by ZenoArrow »

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 management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).

Re: People leave managers, not companies

#80

Post by dominotw »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #79

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…

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 these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.

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