Summary: Blankenship is saying coders get really hard to manage because their managers dismiss the coders' contributions to deciding WHAT to do. Blankenship sa

Summary: Blankenship is saying coders get really hard to manage because their managers dismiss the coders' contributions to deciding WHAT to do. Blankenship says the coders then retreat to safety: HOW to do things is safety for a coder, because of the coder's greater expertise in the area of HOW. But with this type of manager, HOW is often ignored as well. That's why the coders get frantic, or worse, the coders stop commenting on HOW, and start working to rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule). Pretty quickly, the coders have forgotten any attempts at contributing to WHAT to do. In a follow up, Blankenship says a solution is "Be humble. Listen more. Ask more than tell." (https://hackernoon.com/a-wake-up-call-for-tech-managers-d0415775efd0 https://hackernoon.com/a-wake-up-call-for-tech-managers-d041...) and he says the 1-on-1 is the place to start. That's where you want to end up, but I'm skeptical that advice is going to do the trick. Sometimes you need to tell people to do B so they end up doing A. For example, it's not a great strategy to try to make yourself happy by choosing to be happy; instead choose to be grateful (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010965/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010965/). I think this may work better: 1) "Try not to appear insane (and stupid) to the people you supervise", 2) "Make sure your reports understand what you're thinking and doing enough so they could replace you and accurately speak for you in any meeting", and 3) "Don't waste the intelligence of your reports: capitalize on their insights and perspectives." That has worked in my own managing (says the man who just got "laid off" :) ), but I haven't yet tried it out on other people.