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I guess we both want managers who know enough about our work to judge it, but I prefer if they get that knowledge by observation instead of hearsay.

sanderjd 7y ago
It sounds like you've had bad experiences with peers. That's a bummer. For me, the people I work with, both my direct peers on my team and those I work with on other teams, are the people best positioned and who I most trust to judge my work. I'm really interested in their feedback on my work. It sounds like you'd prefer they just keep their mouths shut about you. That's not how I feel. What I want and expect from my manager is to clue me in to any negative feedback (possibly after converting it to be more tactful, constructive, and actionable) so that I can incorporate it into my work. I honestly don't understand what the setup you're advocating for looks like or how it's an improvement. If you don't trust your peers to evaluate you in good faith, why do you trust your manager? They are also just a person with all the potential for flaws that entails. What does it look like to have a manager who is involved in all your work? Do they do all your code reviews? Do they review all your emails and chats? Do they attend all your meetings? That would be madness. I'd say my manager has direct insight into less than 10% of what I'm up to every day. But pretty much all of that work has some counterpart on some team who can speak to their thoughts on working with me. But I think I'm just missing what you're suggesting. Paint me a picture of what your ideal system looks like in practice.
- cousin_it 7y ago
  I do want to hear what my coworkers think of me, from their own mouths. It doesn't have to be tactful. The only person responsible for my emotions is me, and I never punish anyone for truth. I've followed that principle diligently for more than a decade, and it works well. I also want my manager to know what tasks I'm solving and how difficult they are, the same way a construction foreman knows what the bricklayers are doing. If that requires looking at my code, so be it. But in my experience, when working with junior people I can be very aware of their work without having to look at every single line or email. What I don't want is "triangling". If it's considered normal for Alice and Bob to talk about Carol behind her back, team friendship becomes impossible. That's exactly what I see in American-style software development: team friendship doesn't happen. When someone quits the team, they stop being a friend. Whereas in Russian teams I've worked on, based on the above principles, the norm is that former coworkers stay friends. Today I was visited by a friend from Moscow with whom we worked briefly 12 years ago.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    (Thanks for carrying on this conversation by the way, I have found it interesting.) The fact of the matter is that not everybody wants to provide you feedback (positive or negative!) directly to you, regardless of your principles. You're swimming upstream against human nature. Some people won't believe that it won't affect your relationship and some people just feel that it's awkward to have those conversations directly. These are normal human concerns, there is nothing nefarious or gossipy about it. Managers can grease the skids. I think maybe we've hit on the misalignment. I'm not taking about managing junior developers... My work does not resemble brick laying. There is no single output artifact that my manager can look at to determine how I have performed. Working with other people and teams is a big part of my job. The best way to get insight into how I've performed in my work with those people is to hear it from them. For what it's worth, I think your thing about friendships is a misdiagnosis of the problem. I also made lots of life long friends at work a decade ago and now don't anymore. But I don't think it is my workplace culture that's changed; it's just me, I've gotten older and less open to new people.

sanderjd 7y ago

It sounds like you've had bad experiences with peers. That's a bummer. For me, the people I work with, both my direct peers on my team and those I work with on other teams, are the people best positioned and who I most trust to judge my work. I'm really interested in their feedback on my work. It sounds like you'd prefer they just keep their mouths shut about you. That's not how I feel. What I want and expect from my manager is to clue me in to any negative feedback (possibly after converting it to be more tactful, constructive, and actionable) so that I can incorporate it into my work. I honestly don't understand what the setup you're advocating for looks like or how it's an improvement. If you don't trust your peers to evaluate you in good faith, why do you trust your manager? They are also just a person with all the potential for flaws that entails. What does it look like to have a manager who is involved in all your work? Do they do all your code reviews? Do they review all your emails and chats? Do they attend all your meetings? That would be madness. I'd say my manager has direct insight into less than 10% of what I'm up to every day. But pretty much all of that work has some counterpart on some team who can speak to their thoughts on working with me. But I think I'm just missing what you're suggesting. Paint me a picture of what your ideal system looks like in practice.

cousin_it 7y ago
I do want to hear what my coworkers think of me, from their own mouths. It doesn't have to be tactful. The only person responsible for my emotions is me, and I never punish anyone for truth. I've followed that principle diligently for more than a decade, and it works well. I also want my manager to know what tasks I'm solving and how difficult they are, the same way a construction foreman knows what the bricklayers are doing. If that requires looking at my code, so be it. But in my experience, when working with junior people I can be very aware of their work without having to look at every single line or email. What I don't want is "triangling". If it's considered normal for Alice and Bob to talk about Carol behind her back, team friendship becomes impossible. That's exactly what I see in American-style software development: team friendship doesn't happen. When someone quits the team, they stop being a friend. Whereas in Russian teams I've worked on, based on the above principles, the norm is that former coworkers stay friends. Today I was visited by a friend from Moscow with whom we worked briefly 12 years ago.
- sanderjd 7y ago
  (Thanks for carrying on this conversation by the way, I have found it interesting.) The fact of the matter is that not everybody wants to provide you feedback (positive or negative!) directly to you, regardless of your principles. You're swimming upstream against human nature. Some people won't believe that it won't affect your relationship and some people just feel that it's awkward to have those conversations directly. These are normal human concerns, there is nothing nefarious or gossipy about it. Managers can grease the skids. I think maybe we've hit on the misalignment. I'm not taking about managing junior developers... My work does not resemble brick laying. There is no single output artifact that my manager can look at to determine how I have performed. Working with other people and teams is a big part of my job. The best way to get insight into how I've performed in my work with those people is to hear it from them. For what it's worth, I think your thing about friendships is a misdiagnosis of the problem. I also made lots of life long friends at work a decade ago and now don't anymore. But I don't think it is my workplace culture that's changed; it's just me, I've gotten older and less open to new people.