Manager: more stress, and roughly the same pay.
Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
81–90 of 192 posts
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember that all the people up the chain deciding compensation are managers. It's natural that they would perceive the management track as more important, because they're on it.
It's a vicious cycle. Someone needs to break the chain.
Be the change you want to see mate, don't wait for someone else to do it.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#83A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dea…
I've found that culture is king in terms of governing what's shipped. From day 1 new hires are looking at what their peers are doing, and more importantly what's being tolerated by the manager and the rest of the team. As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. I point out opportunities for improvement, and more importantly I call out exc…
>As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly.
If you did this in an environment with undercapacity, with the exception of being a very well respected or lead dev, I'd eventually call you out for being a snake trying to set the tone of development with nothing better to do. I had a colleague do this and its obnoxious. Especially because
>reinforce your culture of excellence
is almost entirely subjective.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an issue of incentives, and sadly my experience is it's often not the immediate management that's the problem, it's structural issues with the company that low-level managers have little if any say in. Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn't put their money where their mouth is. Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored w…
Sociopaths, the clueless and losers. This great essay analyzing The Office argues that in a modern business context you're one of the three. [1] Those "functional elites" you mentioned? Usually they're working 20-50% more for 0-25% percent more pay. They're called the clueless because they've been conned into working more for less, usually under some clever guise like company being family or company values or the pro…
> Sociopaths break out of the cycle by operating only with concern for power
There are other ways to break out of the cycle. Keep looking.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#85I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
I grew up reading all kinds of articles and books about how engineering itself is a career track and I believed it. However, when I looked at the great engineers, it seems they eventually turned into executives. Jeff Dean, for instance, is one the greatest engineers. He has deep technical skills. He is versatile, as we can see that he made key contributions in storages, distributed systems, and machine learning. Yet…
LinkedIn says Jeff is currently Chief Scientist, an IC role. And Google famously added an extra rung to its IC ladder just to make room for him.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot believe I'm not the only one! Exactly this is what I'm doing... helping the ones who want. And use my knowledge to do the work of 1 week in 4 hours...
You're far from the only! I love programming and I'm more than happy to work with juniors and solve junior tasks. I feel like this industry puts so much pressure on people to be an engineer or an architect or something more than a person who writes a little script to fix something and moves on. Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
> Everything built today seems to have to be architected and scalable and I hate it.
To have a rough idea on how to scale it, should it take off, is not a bad thing. To do all the work, before it actually takes off, is.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#87Management is about having authority. That is, you're a vector: you must defend the company's values (which you may disagree with) in front of your team (which may disagree with them too).
So you'd better be very aligned on those values to be happy in the job.
(for example, when I was a manager, my manager's goal was to "show the rest of the company we can make websites much faster", which meant putting pressure on everyone. I disagreed with that, making things faster just to "show it can be done" at a very high human price, didn't look like a good idea. So I suffered.)
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#88I am sick and tired of pressure to get into management once you get older and lack of other opportunities to be rewarded. If I can do job of 5 other people, I can be compensated like two others and the company is still ahead. Or if that's just my arrogance talking, there can be an objective system to measure work accomplished and set rewards accordingly. Instead all of my questions about advancement are met with dema…
A couple jobs ago, when I realized I was doing all of the non-trivial front-end work at about the workload of ~4 of the other engineers, I just went golfing half the time. That way I was getting paid the same but for half the time at work! And a job before that, my boss told me that I was making the other engineers feel dumb so she wanted me to do less. So I started crocheting at my desk. She helped me with my technique a couple times too.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found that culture is king in terms of governing what's shipped. From day 1 new hires are looking at what their peers are doing, and more importantly what's being tolerated by the manager and the rest of the team. As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. I point out opportunities for improvement, and more importantly I call out exc…
>As an uninvited specific action recommendation: I've made it a habit to look through PR's (merged and unmerged) regularly. If you did this in an environment with undercapacity, with the exception of being a very well respected or lead dev, I'd eventually call you out for being a snake trying to set the tone of development with nothing better to do. I had a colleague do this and its obnoxious. Especially because >rei…
I can see how that'd be weird for everyone to do it (unless they're themselves reviewing the PR). But in this context I am the engineering manager so it's my job to have oversight - so maybe that helps in my team?
One other bit that's probably worth mentioning is that I'm quick to point out when I've learnt something new from the PR in question. I guess I bundle that with "call out excellent solutions" - but it's a slightly different thing.
> is almost entirely subjective.
Of course. But even the regular discussion of what amounts to excellence helps move teams in that direction. What we're trying to get away from is "don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality" which exists in bucket-loads in giant corporations and I want my teams to have no part of it.
Re: Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business likes predictability. The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. Hence, unless you are the owner/founder, your replaceability will be valued more than your performance.
> The chance of 5 people deciding to leave all at once is exponentially lower than a chance of 1 person. And the chance of 5 random people producing something compared to the 1 you know is a huge contributor is exponentially lower too. > Business likes predictability. That's great. Then they should actually stick with it i.e. reward the 1 that's been contributing rather than gamble on something that might not work. I…
Counterexample: sports teams that improve when they replace their star player.
Football doesn't have great players in an absolute sense. For the last decade, the greatest player, depending on which tiresome fan you ask, had been either Ronaldo or Messi.
Messi didn't pull up any trees at PSG, and Ronaldo's second stint at MU was underwhelming. In both cases, that's because the team tactics had to be shifted to accommodate these players, to the detriment of the other players.
My old team lead was rated highly. But he stifled the rest of the ICs. From above he looked good, from below he looked shit. He should not have been developing software, he needed to be in a process-oriented role. I believe that our productivity would have increased - certainly morale and cohesion would have - if he'd fucked off and not been replaced.