Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I manage teams without a single call

orchidfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 102 posts

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#81

Post by theorchid »

parentheses wrote: post #13

Building a team to operate based on your own personal preferences is selfish leadership... or even dictatorship. There's a very strong "focus culture" which relies on the idea that work is not done in meetings. This is wrong. Progress comes in many forms.

> Building a team to operate based on your own personal preferences is selfish leadership... or even dictatorship.

Is there really anything wrong with that? Most managers manage their teams the way they're used to. Founders build their startups the way they're used to—based on their own experience and mistakes. Founders and managers don't adapt to the team's needs. Instead, they look for a team that will adapt to them.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#82

Post by Closi »

yolo3000 wrote: post #54
Closi wrote: post #17

This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to. A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.

For me the best moments at work have been when the direct manager was sick or on a very long holiday. We're adults, why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead, I trust you'. Maybe if you don't know what you're doing, or you can't manage the stakeholders, but otherwise, the manager just gets in the way, unless they know how to make themselves invisible, or they have the connections and will to p…

> why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead

You might not, but that's just an example where a different style of communication might help some people. It's great that you would be happy without validation, but I can safely say some people do flourish when given it! Lots of people need to be given a bit of confidence, particularly when they are new to a role, and in my experience that's easier over a call.

As another example if I ask people on Slack how busy they are I will often get a different answer compared to calling them and checking in, asking if they need support, particularly if I can hear that they are stressed.

Or while on a text chat someone might say they understand a problem, on a phone call it's much more natural to get them to play it back to you so you can work out when they miss some nuance.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#83

Post by yolo3000 »

robocat wrote: post #64
yolo3000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the best moments at work have been when the direct manager was sick or on a very long holiday. We're adults, why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead, I trust you'. Maybe if you don't know what you're doing, or you can't manage the stakeholders, but otherwise, the manager just gets in the way, unless they know how to make themselves invisible, or they have the connections and will to p…

Expecting everybody else to be like you is the issue. > why would I need someone to tell me This isn't about you. It is about working with others that are not exactly like you. > Maybe if you don't know what you're doing . . . Making up insulting reasons doesn't help either.

So you think most engineers are not capable to work in a group, without supervision? Who's insulting? "If you don't know what you're doing" = "You're out of depth and you need someone to guide you through"

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#84

Post by sieabahlpark »

Closi wrote: post #17

This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to. A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.

[dead]

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#85

Post by dd8601fn »

HyperL0gi wrote: post #62
Closi wrote: post #17

This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to. A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.

I hate video calls, but sometimes is so much easier (and really faster) to align with someone over a complicated issue. feels almost counter intuitive but the more complicated the matter the easier to align over voice / video than text in my view

I have almost never needed video but certainly a voice conversation is much, much faster for two or three people to work something out.

Four+ people and someone is either being held hostage to others and/or just tuning out. The more participants, the more of this that’s happening. And that translates pretty directly to lost time, money, and focus.

I don’t think Teams supports it, but it would be interesting to see studies where orgs go “max participants = 4” without high level approval.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#86

Post by Esophagus4 »

theorchid wrote: post #72
Esophagus4 wrote: post #61

This seems like a version of: https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html but taken to extreme dogmatic-ness. I get it - I’ve fixed problems like this before and you’re so excited you found a hammer, now everything looks like a nail. > a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. And I might spend the entire day thinking about it. As a manager, you should learn to change this about yourself rather than imp…

> As a manager, you should learn to change this about yourself rather than imposing your work style on your team. I think we need a different approach here. I shouldn't have to change anything about myself, because we're slaves to our habits. I shouldn't force this on people who don't want to work this way. I just need to work with teams that are willing to work this way. And so far, I've always managed to find such…

Even on the same team, needs change, sometimes from month to month. I’ve learned to adapt my management style to the needs of the individuals and the situation. Flexibility served me fairly well here.

You can do whatever you like, but I grew out of this phase of thinking I had the magic formula for collaboration.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#87

Post by sonofhans »

theorchid wrote: post #78
sonofhans wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this post is one half of “Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule” — https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html “In all that time, I’ve never met a single person who sincerely wanted more dailies, syncs, and meetings.” Oh, I guarantee that OP has met these people, and that they have told him this multiple times in ways that he does not understand.

Sorry, I forgot to add “I’ve never met a single person, except for managers and recruiters”.

I can easily list in my head many people I’ve worked with who’ve expressed dissatisfaction at the lack of regular contact with their coworkers. I’ve seen this universally across engineers, designers, sales people … and yes, managers and recruiters. (Not as often as I’ve heard “We have too _many_ meetings,” I’ll grant you).

If you claim only to have seen this in those limited roles then I still believe that you are filtering your inputs.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#89

Post by titanomachy »

> I can’t even imagine a task or question that can’t be discussed over text.

As long as everyone on your team is perfectly able to subsume their emotions and act fully rationally at all times, and no one ever has emotional disagreements that require you to deeply understand their position. I wouldn't break up with a girlfriend over text, and I probably wouldn't deny someone a promotion over text either. I wouldn't text someone to tell them that they need to improve their performance or I'll have to fire them. I wouldn't text someone to tell them that we're discarding the thing they've worked on for the last couple months.

But yes, a high percentage of meetings are a result of people not taking the time to put their thoughts into a coherent written form. Sometimes those people are being lazy; you should pressure them to do the thinking themselves first before making a meeting. But sometimes people actually don't know how to do the thinking, and they need your help thinking through the problem. In this case you can save a lot of time with a meeting.

Re: I manage teams without a single call

#90

Post by ninalanyon »

lo_fye wrote: post #18

- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all. - Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs? - Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily) - People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.

> Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth

That's the same fallacy as "A picture is worth a thousand words."

I don't know what kind of software everyone commenting here is writing but in my career my customers provided written specifications and technical standards for what the software should do.

Now quite often they were incomplete, or wrong, or even completely unnecessary but there is no way a phone call however long can substitute for sending back the spec. annotated to point out all the ambiguities, misconceptions, and alternatives. If there was enough certainty in the spec. I might write a small proof of concept mock up of what I thought the user needed (not necessarily what they asked for) so that we would have something concrete to hang our discussions on.

Now we have something to discuss but it's probably better done on a large physical whiteboard in person after which a revised specification will be written and we go round the loop again until we have it thrashed out in sufficient detail to do a real implementation. Drawing pictures on the whiteboard of the physical machinery that the software was designing all too frequently revealed that the customer had an incomplete understanding of not only the software but also the physics of the target design or occasionally even of basic geometry.

Post reply on HN