4 ms·

To add anecdata to further your point, I wasn't sure engineering was for me until I found a manager who could guide me as a junior. I was fully prepared to quit

To add anecdata to further your point, I wasn't sure engineering was for me until I found a manager who could guide me as a junior. I was fully prepared to quit and change careers, as I felt completely out of my depth and questioned my own competency. Luckily, I decided to try one more work-place and ended up with the fantastic boss I have now. I'm sure for Google, who generally hire incredibly talented engineers right off the bat, a 'no-micromanagement' policy works well; but for a fresh-faced undergraduate straight out of a second-rate university, micro-management and mentorship is crucial. Something that might take a junior hours to do can be solved in minutes with a bit of guidance. I think sometimes the senior engineers I work with underestimate how much knowledge they have to share, and overestimate how much knowledge a 20-something year old engineer with one internship under their belt has.

devnullbyte 7y ago
It sounds like you're lucky enough to have not experienced micro management, but instead close support. Micromanagement plays out as a constant barrage of needing to be updated on every single detail that you work on. It's immensely tiring, and essentially comes from the manager not really trusting you and exercising too much control. They need to know about every action you take and how long is it taking (and why is it taking X long). It's horrible and drives people to look elsewhere. Project managers also fail badly at this. They badly manage the customer and try always be a 'yes' man to every whim they have, and end up driving the engineers crazy by wanting constant updates hour by hour.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  I'd say it's very much more close to a scale than a binary "good/bad" when it comes to micro-management. Sure, I don't want to have to explain myself every hour as to how things are going, but I likewise I don't want to have to track down my manager to get managed. With my new manager, by him checking in with me more frequently to see how things are going I can gauge my performance better from his reaction, pick up on errors I've done early on in the process that I wouldn't have spotted myself, and build a better dialogue with him. Frankly, if this comes from the manager not trusting me then I don't blame him; he shouldn't - I'm an idiotic 20-something year old. I haven't built that framework of expertise where I can do a job without error or guidance. Conversely, a 'hands-off' boss for me meant that I'd be working all day, only to hand in the work and find out I'd done something completely wrong and needed to re-do things from scratch. I might be doing a job as I've read in the spec, but it turns out there's some common practice way of completing it that I'm just expected to know right off the bat. I wouldn't know what the intended outcome of a project was, because I had never completed a project before. Micro-management is like captaining a boat. If the skipper constantly corrects the course, he'll exhaust the crew - but if he doesn't correct enough, the boat can veer off rapidly with no one at the helm.
wjossey 7y ago
Well said. I had a similar reaction when I saw this as to, maybe google just doesn’t hire new grads, but I know that’s not the case. Almost every fresh out of school grad has tons to learn, regardless of how great their education was. Schools don’t teach communication, patience, how to generate buy in, calendar courtesy, or any number of “how we work together” skills. I know when I look back at my 23 year old self I’m embarrassed with how I looked at the world and those that I worked with.

devnullbyte 7y ago

It sounds like you're lucky enough to have not experienced micro management, but instead close support. Micromanagement plays out as a constant barrage of needing to be updated on every single detail that you work on. It's immensely tiring, and essentially comes from the manager not really trusting you and exercising too much control. They need to know about every action you take and how long is it taking (and why is it taking X long). It's horrible and drives people to look elsewhere. Project managers also fail badly at this. They badly manage the customer and try always be a 'yes' man to every whim they have, and end up driving the engineers crazy by wanting constant updates hour by hour.

Aromasin 7y ago
I'd say it's very much more close to a scale than a binary "good/bad" when it comes to micro-management. Sure, I don't want to have to explain myself every hour as to how things are going, but I likewise I don't want to have to track down my manager to get managed. With my new manager, by him checking in with me more frequently to see how things are going I can gauge my performance better from his reaction, pick up on errors I've done early on in the process that I wouldn't have spotted myself, and build a better dialogue with him. Frankly, if this comes from the manager not trusting me then I don't blame him; he shouldn't - I'm an idiotic 20-something year old. I haven't built that framework of expertise where I can do a job without error or guidance. Conversely, a 'hands-off' boss for me meant that I'd be working all day, only to hand in the work and find out I'd done something completely wrong and needed to re-do things from scratch. I might be doing a job as I've read in the spec, but it turns out there's some common practice way of completing it that I'm just expected to know right off the bat. I wouldn't know what the intended outcome of a project was, because I had never completed a project before. Micro-management is like captaining a boat. If the skipper constantly corrects the course, he'll exhaust the crew - but if he doesn't correct enough, the boat can veer off rapidly with no one at the helm.

wjossey 7y ago

Well said. I had a similar reaction when I saw this as to, maybe google just doesn’t hire new grads, but I know that’s not the case. Almost every fresh out of school grad has tons to learn, regardless of how great their education was. Schools don’t teach communication, patience, how to generate buy in, calendar courtesy, or any number of “how we work together” skills. I know when I look back at my 23 year old self I’m embarrassed with how I looked at the world and those that I worked with.