Mistakes as a new manager

Actually, sometimes it means hiring rank amateurs, and training them to reliably complete tasks like a real business. Understanding the time constraint would be lower for Jr, and thus the equivalent pay scale will be less lucrative... but it is up to individuals to decide their own work ethics.

Using PERT deliverable/vertices redundancies is often necessary for projects no one has seen before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_...

Note, the simple system uses probabilistic time estimates of key deliverables, considers redundancy, and explicitly mitigates teams that introduce liabilities.

If it put people on the moon, than I figured it was good enough for most of my ridiculous projects. Have a great day =3

Rule #17: "Always listen to the person that signs your paycheck. Everyone has an opinion, but some opinions are more profitable than others"

> “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”

That’s the first step in fixing the quality issues, not an end state. Reports don’t know what they don’t know, so step 1 is to get their ideas on how to fix quality issues.

I worked at a company that emulated Valve’s hyper-flat structure on their engineering team, with 1 manager having 50 direct reports. That’s as close to a management-less structure as I can think of, since your manager can’t attend meetings or do 1:1s anymore.

It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy.

Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day.

About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else.

People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping.

1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer.

The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.)

Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.

What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago.

I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again.

Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare.

Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability.

OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!

I'm not OP, but just by the way it was worded. It feels vague and grandstand-y. "I have noticed" is such a silly way to word what's happening here and it's hard not to imbue underlying meanings to it.

And then "can we talk about how we can address that." More vague, leading statements.

Speak to the facts. "The team / org had to roll back this release, the team does not think there is a process improvement that would have alleviated this problem, and the team relied on you to properly make this feature. Our exceptions of all team members is [...]"

Make it clear:

1. This is affecting the whole team (equally)

2. The team as a whole shares this perspective (it's not just the manager nitpicking)

3. There are consistent and vibrant standards that the entire team must adhere to

4. You are not meeting those standard(s) or necessary actions for success.

5. Offer what you think will fix the problem (if anything)

6. Make it clear this is their chance to agree/disagree

7. Continue to talk it out.

Honestly OP seems like a person who has struggled in his position as manager to properly speak to people, and instead of understanding why there was a struggle simply switched to more coded language.

Most people will see through it and react negatively.