People leave managers, not companies

I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.

Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.

I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.

So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.

Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.

If they also are producing and not causing other people problems then I see no problem.

However, if they are not producing then that is a problem. However, if they are coming in on time and not producing that is exactly the same problem.

The point is that one problem is unrelated to the other.

>social dynamics come into play

Social dynamics always come into play but in this instance, they really don't matter. If a manager knows how well everybody is performing and is communicating that then these other intra-team dynamics you are talking about simply don't happen.

It seems to me that you're coming at this from the perspective of a manager who fundamentally does not understand what they are managing and isn't cognizant of who is performing and obviously isn't communicating that because they don't know.

Because that's exactly when you would see the intra-team dynamics which you're describing will happen. That is what happens on most software teams, sadly :(

>Success is a marathon, not a sprint

I never said or implied that it was anything else.

>Stop focusing on yourself and the immediate moment.

I am focusing on neither.

I am beginning to suspect that you are exactly the kind of manager I'm talking about here. Hi.

You get an equally or more skilled developer than Bob and Dave to monitor their output and ask them that question. That's the only way.

Was that not obvious from my answer? C'mon.

Good software team management is a superset of coding skill. Not only does the manager need to have reasonable - not necessarily outstanding - developer skills, but also needs to have good people skills, good political skills, a feel for context and strategy, and an ability to improvise creative solutions across all these domains.

The idea that someone who is good at coding should be promoted to management automatically seems bizarre. It's like expecting someone who is good at mountain biking to be good at driving a tank.

So is the idea that management can be measured with "objective" metrics, such as locs, time on/off, bugs killed, and so on.

In fact it's horrifically difficult to quantify the business ROI of software teams or of individual developers. ROI often depends on decisions made higher up the food chain, and it's even harder to get upper management to take responsibility for the consequences of bad decisions and bad attitudes.