4 ms·

When my manager comes up with a bad manager-idea, I ask questions like: () what concrete problem are you trying to solve? () what do you think is the root cau

When my manager comes up with a bad manager-idea, I ask questions like: () what concrete problem are you trying to solve? () what do you think is the root cause of that problem? () how, specifically, is this idea going to address that cause? () what might be other possible solutions? This doesn't always work right away, but at least it points the conversation in the right direction.

overcast 10y ago
Sounds like you're managing your manager.
- yazaddaruvala 10y ago
  Seriously: Why wouldn't everyone manage their manager?
  - wojcech 10y ago
    We could make a new word for people who manage each other mutually, coexisteling in their operations without blind hierarchy...we could call it mumanagement
    - rublev 10y ago
      >mumanagement Not 'synergistic' enough to be adopted.
      - rhizome 10y ago
        Could use "μmanagement," which includes side-irony.
        BWStearns 10y ago
        Ψdirony?
    - taneq 10y ago
      How about 'teamwork'?
  - overcast 10y ago
    Because I won't take on the responsibility of someone making twice as much as I do. ;)
    - skmurphy 10y ago
      It's very hard to succeed if your manager fails.
    - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
      What do you care if they get paid more than you? Do you care that they can out bowl you? Do they care that you can out chess them? Life is a marathon, you don't win a marathon by coming first in the race. You win a marathon by beating your last time. Don't misunderstand, I'm always competing with my last paycheck. I always want to be getting paid more. I just don't care about other people's salary and if our responsibilities are lesser/equal/greater. For me its all about optimizing the things I can control. I can control my future paycheck, and I can control how much effort I need to be putting in from week to week. I can't control someone else's salary, and it can't negatively effect me, so why expend the energy thinking about it? Meanwhile: Responsibility != Effort. For me its all about correcting mistakes with the least effort possible (I'm lazy you see). Also, if I'm paid the same, and I input less effort, then I'm technically being paid more :) I would way rather put in the minimal effort required to question and correct (i.e. "manage" as you put it) an error upfront while its an idea, whoever's idea that might have been, rather than to put in the effort to correct the error while shit is hitting the fan. This is just my personal preference. Your milage may vary.
      - r_smart 10y ago
        I love your response, and would only want to add: I only care about how much other people make because it helps inform me in terms of what I can work towards for my own paycheck, and it shows me what the organization values.
    - bermanoid 10y ago
      As an ex-manager at a very large gaming company, I assure you, your manager doesn't typically make twice what you do unless you're at the very highest levels (the CTO is, of course, going to make quite a bit more than a mid-level engineering manager, esp. if they've gotten a lot of stock and have been around a while) or at a company with some seriously skewed engineering pay grades. I regularly managed people that made 20-30% more than I did. That was usually corrected within a raise-cycle or two, but it was by no means unusual. I don't think I ever had a direct report that was paid less than 75% of what I got, let alone 50%.
  - branchless 10y ago
    For many it's because their manager is a bit power mad and would rather burn the whole world down than accept they are wrong.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    There actually are managers out there capable of managing themselves. They're not as common as we might like, but trust me, they're out there.
    - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
      Being good at management, is knowing when you don't need to manage at all.
      - kjax 10y ago
        To paraphrase the late Andy Grove, it's mostly about understanding your subordinates and selecting the optimal approach.
- lmkg 10y ago
  The term I've heard is "upwards management." It is (unfortunately?) a valuable skill.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  In my experience, there's a lot of two-way communication and decision-making with good managers and good employees (and perhaps even more is required with bad managers and good employees...). The higher up the org chart someone is, the more high-level their view is, not from ignorance but from necessity. They can easily have ideas that sound great on paper but might not be so great once you account for the nuts and bolts of whatever subsystem(s) would have to change to implement that idea. So if a manager proposes an idea that only sounds good in theory but would be a terrible idea in practice, management needs to rely on their engineers to do their part and explain when and why that is. It's kind of a dance with a lot of gray areas, because engineers/managers/designers all have their own biases and blind spots and gaps in knowledge, and prioritize things differently. But as long as everyone knows what they're doing and can communicate effectively to people with different backgrounds, it's ideal. Of course there are plenty of terrible managers who don't know what they don't know and don't take useful feedback. And there are terrible engineers who don't know how to provide useful feedback. But with ideal personnel and a good power dynamic, everyone works together in such a way as to cancel out each other's blind spots and add to each other's expertise.
- analog31 10y ago
  I think that in a highly skilled workplace, the hierarchical aspect of management accounts for a relatively small fraction of what managers do. For the most part, I treat managers like any other workers. I'm not afraid to have substantive discussions with them, or to delegate tasks to them. For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. It was a great relationship, because we both had jobs to do, and we did them. In the 21st century, we're getting beyond the point where the hierarchy of authority is accompanied by a hierarchy of knowledge or expertise. In the 19th century business of my imagination, the head clerk knew more about clerking than the junior clerk. A manager was expected to know more about management and business. Today, people change jobs and fields throughout their careers. It's not unusual for a manager to have subordinates who have been managers themselves, or who have even run entire businesses. People know more about the behavior of the businesses that they work for, than they can learn from management pronouncements, because we can read about the behavior of similar businesses. Managers have diverse staffs. I don't expect my boss to be knowledgeable about my field, because he's a chemist and I'm a physicist.
  - hammock 10y ago
    >For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. That doesn't sound like you outranked him. He scheduled your time, set your priorities, and was gatekeeper to the broader organization.
    - taneq 10y ago
      That's because you're defining 'rank' as 'setting schedules'. You could just as easily view the situation as the manager providing an interface to the rest of the company, and helping with organisation - somewhat secretarial role.
    - dexterdog 10y ago
      Yes it does. It sounds like his boss was actually his administrative assistant.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Sounds like you're communicating with your manager.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

overcast 10y ago

Sounds like you're managing your manager.

yazaddaruvala 10y ago
Seriously: Why wouldn't everyone manage their manager?
- wojcech 10y ago
  We could make a new word for people who manage each other mutually, coexisteling in their operations without blind hierarchy...we could call it mumanagement
  - rublev 10y ago
    >mumanagement Not 'synergistic' enough to be adopted.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Could use "μmanagement," which includes side-irony.
      - BWStearns 10y ago
        Ψdirony?
  - taneq 10y ago
    How about 'teamwork'?
- overcast 10y ago
  Because I won't take on the responsibility of someone making twice as much as I do. ;)
  - skmurphy 10y ago
    It's very hard to succeed if your manager fails.
  - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
    What do you care if they get paid more than you? Do you care that they can out bowl you? Do they care that you can out chess them? Life is a marathon, you don't win a marathon by coming first in the race. You win a marathon by beating your last time. Don't misunderstand, I'm always competing with my last paycheck. I always want to be getting paid more. I just don't care about other people's salary and if our responsibilities are lesser/equal/greater. For me its all about optimizing the things I can control. I can control my future paycheck, and I can control how much effort I need to be putting in from week to week. I can't control someone else's salary, and it can't negatively effect me, so why expend the energy thinking about it? Meanwhile: Responsibility != Effort. For me its all about correcting mistakes with the least effort possible (I'm lazy you see). Also, if I'm paid the same, and I input less effort, then I'm technically being paid more :) I would way rather put in the minimal effort required to question and correct (i.e. "manage" as you put it) an error upfront while its an idea, whoever's idea that might have been, rather than to put in the effort to correct the error while shit is hitting the fan. This is just my personal preference. Your milage may vary.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      I love your response, and would only want to add: I only care about how much other people make because it helps inform me in terms of what I can work towards for my own paycheck, and it shows me what the organization values.
  - bermanoid 10y ago
    As an ex-manager at a very large gaming company, I assure you, your manager doesn't typically make twice what you do unless you're at the very highest levels (the CTO is, of course, going to make quite a bit more than a mid-level engineering manager, esp. if they've gotten a lot of stock and have been around a while) or at a company with some seriously skewed engineering pay grades. I regularly managed people that made 20-30% more than I did. That was usually corrected within a raise-cycle or two, but it was by no means unusual. I don't think I ever had a direct report that was paid less than 75% of what I got, let alone 50%.
- branchless 10y ago
  For many it's because their manager is a bit power mad and would rather burn the whole world down than accept they are wrong.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  There actually are managers out there capable of managing themselves. They're not as common as we might like, but trust me, they're out there.
  - yazaddaruvala 10y ago
    Being good at management, is knowing when you don't need to manage at all.
    - kjax 10y ago
      To paraphrase the late Andy Grove, it's mostly about understanding your subordinates and selecting the optimal approach.
lmkg 10y ago
The term I've heard is "upwards management." It is (unfortunately?) a valuable skill.
mwfunk 10y ago
In my experience, there's a lot of two-way communication and decision-making with good managers and good employees (and perhaps even more is required with bad managers and good employees...). The higher up the org chart someone is, the more high-level their view is, not from ignorance but from necessity. They can easily have ideas that sound great on paper but might not be so great once you account for the nuts and bolts of whatever subsystem(s) would have to change to implement that idea. So if a manager proposes an idea that only sounds good in theory but would be a terrible idea in practice, management needs to rely on their engineers to do their part and explain when and why that is. It's kind of a dance with a lot of gray areas, because engineers/managers/designers all have their own biases and blind spots and gaps in knowledge, and prioritize things differently. But as long as everyone knows what they're doing and can communicate effectively to people with different backgrounds, it's ideal. Of course there are plenty of terrible managers who don't know what they don't know and don't take useful feedback. And there are terrible engineers who don't know how to provide useful feedback. But with ideal personnel and a good power dynamic, everyone works together in such a way as to cancel out each other's blind spots and add to each other's expertise.
analog31 10y ago
I think that in a highly skilled workplace, the hierarchical aspect of management accounts for a relatively small fraction of what managers do. For the most part, I treat managers like any other workers. I'm not afraid to have substantive discussions with them, or to delegate tasks to them. For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. It was a great relationship, because we both had jobs to do, and we did them. In the 21st century, we're getting beyond the point where the hierarchy of authority is accompanied by a hierarchy of knowledge or expertise. In the 19th century business of my imagination, the head clerk knew more about clerking than the junior clerk. A manager was expected to know more about management and business. Today, people change jobs and fields throughout their careers. It's not unusual for a manager to have subordinates who have been managers themselves, or who have even run entire businesses. People know more about the behavior of the businesses that they work for, than they can learn from management pronouncements, because we can read about the behavior of similar businesses. Managers have diverse staffs. I don't expect my boss to be knowledgeable about my field, because he's a chemist and I'm a physicist.
- hammock 10y ago
  >For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. That doesn't sound like you outranked him. He scheduled your time, set your priorities, and was gatekeeper to the broader organization.
  - taneq 10y ago
    That's because you're defining 'rank' as 'setting schedules'. You could just as easily view the situation as the manager providing an interface to the rest of the company, and helping with organisation - somewhat secretarial role.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    Yes it does. It sounds like his boss was actually his administrative assistant.
paulddraper 10y ago
Sounds like you're communicating with your manager.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]