3 ms·

That's not true. Managers are measured on delivery, customer satisfaction, and revenue or profitability. These measures are directly related to ability to manag

by samnwa 10y ago

That's not true. Managers are measured on delivery, customer satisfaction, and revenue or profitability. These measures are directly related to ability to manage inputs (engineering resource) to outputs (finished code that drives those measures).

cookiecaper 10y ago
You can see types of results at a high-level, sure, but you can't see cause and effect. Because management is about managing employee feelings, whenever an objection is raised, Bob can say "Well, Alice and Dan were having a really serious issue, which I can't discuss with peers due to confidentiality concerns, and we really had to dedicate a lot of effort to defusing that and retaining them in order to keep our mindshare and minimize legal risk". That's a legitimate managerial effort. Unless you're also in a position to intimately know the issue with Alice and Dan (and if you are then why does this manager exist?), you can't really say "That was an incorrect way to solve the issue." Human emotions create a drag on productivity, can't get around that. A manager's job is to minimize, defuse, and de-escalate that drag. You can sort of say "Bob, your team always has the most problems, you clearly can't keep them under control", but it really depends on a lot of variables, and unlike software engineering, you can't directly quantify the impact of most actions/tradeoffs. It's very non-scientific. If you know of a management culture that facilitates this kind of peer feedback, please let me know. My personal experience is that successful management types are extremely emotionally aware and well-polished, and know that providing criticism to anyone only serves to generate hostility. They will try to manage their reports indirectly, attempting to curb behaviors and get results without having to directly criticize.
- samnwa 10y ago
  All fair points. Thanks for taking the time to expand.

by samnwa 10y ago

cookiecaper 10y ago

You can see types of results at a high-level, sure, but you can't see cause and effect. Because management is about managing employee feelings, whenever an objection is raised, Bob can say "Well, Alice and Dan were having a really serious issue, which I can't discuss with peers due to confidentiality concerns, and we really had to dedicate a lot of effort to defusing that and retaining them in order to keep our mindshare and minimize legal risk". That's a legitimate managerial effort. Unless you're also in a position to intimately know the issue with Alice and Dan (and if you are then why does this manager exist?), you can't really say "That was an incorrect way to solve the issue." Human emotions create a drag on productivity, can't get around that. A manager's job is to minimize, defuse, and de-escalate that drag. You can sort of say "Bob, your team always has the most problems, you clearly can't keep them under control", but it really depends on a lot of variables, and unlike software engineering, you can't directly quantify the impact of most actions/tradeoffs. It's very non-scientific. If you know of a management culture that facilitates this kind of peer feedback, please let me know. My personal experience is that successful management types are extremely emotionally aware and well-polished, and know that providing criticism to anyone only serves to generate hostility. They will try to manage their reports indirectly, attempting to curb behaviors and get results without having to directly criticize.

samnwa 10y ago
All fair points. Thanks for taking the time to expand.