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I like this metaphor, it accurately captures a lot of what managing is about, though it's worth mentioning that the greatest difficulties are never, ever techni
by nogrammer 11y ago
I like this metaphor, it accurately captures a lot of what managing is about, though it's worth mentioning that the greatest difficulties are never, ever technical, they're always about people and feelings, which can surprise a lot of new managers.
This article outlines some great first things to look for, but something important is missing: sometimes, after trying everything, it turns out that your team just has some truly terrible, morale-sucking people on it, and they need to be fired before things will pick up. That's sort of the "file a compiler bug" option of last resort, but there really are a lot of toxic people like that out there, especially amongst programmers, and as a manager you'll need to be able to pick them out and deal with them. That's almost the most important part of your job.
- jmduke 11y agothough it's worth mentioning that the greatest difficulties are never, ever technical, they're always about people and feelings, which can surprise a lot of new managers I wholeheartedly agree, and would like to add that this surprises developers and individual contributors perhaps even more than it surprises managers.
- enraged_camel 11y ago>>though it's worth mentioning that the greatest difficulties are never, ever technical, they're always about people and feelings, which can surprise a lot of new managers It can also frustrate developer-turned-managers. Dealing with software is in some ways easy because, for the most part, software is predictable: you get the same output for a given input. If you open your browser console and do: console.log("Hello") The output is always "Hello". But if you go to a human and say hello, depending on their mood and feelings at that moment, you can get wildly different reactions. P.S. I oversimplified, of course. The same function can give different results based on state, data, etc. But the point is, software is rational whereas humans are not always thus.