3 ms·

Reasons Not to Be a Manager

12 points by henrik_w 7y ago

jacekm 7y ago
> many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology This is an interesting line, does anybody share this opinion? My experience are exactly opposite. The managers with whom I enjoyed working always had an engineering background or at least they were very keen to learn and were asking tons of technical questions after being assigned to the team. I think it's important for both parties (manager and their subordinates) to understand each other. To achieve that I think you need some common knowledge, common point of reference to start from. So either management needs some technical knowledge, or technical people some knowledge of management (at least some theory of it).
- mooreds 7y ago
  Here's an article talking about the codeless CTO, an example of what the author talks about: https://medium.com/swlh/the-codeless-cto-471ee6069288 https://medium.com/swlh/the-codeless-cto-471ee6069288
joelx 7y ago
>4. MANAGER JOBS ARE THE FIRST TO GET CUT. As a CEO with many managers, this is false. I would fire all the people under the manager before I would fire a manager. My managers earned their way to management by being the best producers in their jobs.
- segmondy 7y ago
  That's you personally. Most places will let go of leadership because they can afford 3 cheap ICs for the salary of the manager.
segmondy 7y ago
I agree with some points and still wish they balanced it with reasons to be a manager. I'm a Manager and will focus on the topic of the article which is "reasons not to be a manager" I'll dispute some of them. Before I begin, I personally believe that one of the strong things needed to be a manager is a strong and flexible mindset. A lot of developers find a cross to die on. Python/Javascript vs Go/Rust. AWS vs GCP, emacs vs vim. SFC vs NYC or Austin. The reality is you can find a way to be happy with any of these, if you so choose to. It's really a mind thing. It's very easy to become frustrated as a manager if you don't have a strong and flexible mind. You will have to deal not just with your mind but also a whole bunch of other minds in various swings of emotional states. 1. I personally love building, I still write code at home not everyday, but a few times a week. Yet I went into management, why? As an IC, the worst feeling is building something only to find out it's the wrong thing, or didn't add value or it doesn't ship. It's not enough to build. So I was willing to give up building in the office to get things to ship. Actually, I figured I could do 50% coding and 50% management. Turned out that was a fantasy, it's more like 95% management and 5% coding at best. Am I miserable as a manager? Not at all, because I learned that my role is not to be an IC but to magnify the output of my team. 2,3,4,5 are all about jobs. I say as a manager that keeps their feet wet, you get the option of going back to IC and still have the option of being a manager or even moving up the ladder. Being an IC is just as easy as passing the interviews. Being a manager especially to an outside company, they want you to have years of experience. 6. Engineers can be little shits. So? even if you're an IC, an asshole engineer is going to be a little shit to you too. 7. Hard conversation? This is called adulting, and when it happens at work, I rather be the manager in the relationship than an IC when hard conversation is to be hard. The reality is that if you're an IC having a hard conversation with your manager, CAP or PIP might be on the way. I personally don't agree that giving constructive feedback is having hard conversation. I call it telling the truth, if someone is not performing, what so hard about telling them so? I don't expect everyone to perform the same, most folks have different strengths and weaknesses, if you can tune in to your strength and use it to stand out, you are good in my book. What I find hard is having to fire someone, knowing that job is how they pay for their shelter, food, transportation, take care of their family etc. Which is why hiring is super important. In my opinion, this is one of the hardest thing to do as a manager. Most people think they have figured out interviewing, ha! 8. If you believe that a manager's tool set is small, then you're probably not ready for management or still have a lot to learn. There's a lot to learn about management, if you have no experience you have to start from 0, read management books, subscribe to HBR, etc. 9. On getting none of the credit, all of the blame. It's true and false. If your team does well, give them the credit. If they do bad, take the blame. However even if you give your team all the credit, high ups will give you the credit. For the blame, it's always yours. :) 10. As an IC, you are limited, you won't even be invited to strategic meetings that the company is having. Balance to the code is not enough, sometimes the strength of a manager is to nip things in the bud before it turns into a time wasting project. 11. You should be able to do all the fun thing a manager does as an IC. Dream on. Your job as an IC is not to coach, mentor, run meetings, participate in interview, define career ladders. You can't just demand for these things, a good org will have you do some of these, but your primary responsibility is technical contributions and if you have plenty of work to do, you won't have the time to do this. I remember conducting 6-10 interviews a week as an IC when the company was growing and hiring like crazy, I can tell you it was miserable 12. Joy is much harder to come by as a manager. Again, this comes down to your mindset. My joy in management comes from seeing the team grow, seeing someone that was not confident becoming confident, folks getting better, having more autonomy, making decisions and reaching the right conclusion without consulting me, working better with their peers, following processes, the team being more self organizing, and all of this leading to consistent shipping of reliable systems. This is my joy. 13. Taking up emotional space at the expense of personal life. I don't buy that. This is an org thing. Won't matter if you're IC, a manager or a low level customer support. A bad org, or never ending fires, death marches will bring emotional toil to you. 14. Your time doesn't belong to you. How is this any different from an IC? Your time belongs to you according to the contract/understanding you have with your org. It might be 40 hrs a week or 20-60hrs a week. Whatever, you set expectations. If you have a bad outage that's debilitating to the company at 3am on a weekend, IC and managers all get to own it. Hell, IC is more likely to be the one in since they have to do the actual work. A good manager will be there with their team tho and not just over the phone. 15. Meetings are not bad. Learn to have a productive meeting. It's actually easy. (1) Know your agenda. Is it information sharing or problem solving? (2) Know how to say no to meetings that are not important to you. (3) Learn how to cut long meetings down with a hard stop. (4) Demand action items at end of every meeting with someone having full ownership. An organization is a living entity, meeting is the high bandwidth pathway through which information is shared. You can use email, chat, text message, but there's nothing that has as high a bandwidth as people sitting face to face or over a video conference. 16. If your org differentiates between tech lead and manager then true. Some orgs don't and both roles are mixed in. 17. It will always be there for you later. Not true! As you get older, folks get suspicious of you and why you didn't get into a leadership position unless you are fortunate to work in an org that has parallel tracks for management and IC. It actually becomes harder to get into the older you get, as we know in the industry ageism is real. What other reasons might you want to be a manager? I personally believe that being an adult and a grown up is figuring out things for yourself. If you're in a leadership role, you need to be able to figure out things without anyone helping you. So if you're considering being a manager, you need to go do your research and see if it's what you really wish to do. Do realize that it's not just a function of your skill sets, but also the organization you're in. You can be an awesome manager in one company and a terrible one in another one.

12 points by henrik_w 7y ago

> many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology This is an interesting line, does anybody share this opinion? My experience are exactly opposite. The managers with whom I enjoyed working always had an engineering background or at least they were very keen to learn and were asking tons of technical questions after being assigned to the team. I think it's important for both parties (manager and their subordinates) to understand each other. To achieve that I think you need some common knowledge, common point of reference to start from. So either management needs some technical knowledge, or technical people some knowledge of management (at least some theory of it).

mooreds 7y ago
Here's an article talking about the codeless CTO, an example of what the author talks about: https://medium.com/swlh/the-codeless-cto-471ee6069288 https://medium.com/swlh/the-codeless-cto-471ee6069288

joelx 7y ago

>4. MANAGER JOBS ARE THE FIRST TO GET CUT. As a CEO with many managers, this is false. I would fire all the people under the manager before I would fire a manager. My managers earned their way to management by being the best producers in their jobs.

segmondy 7y ago
That's you personally. Most places will let go of leadership because they can afford 3 cheap ICs for the salary of the manager.

segmondy 7y ago

I agree with some points and still wish they balanced it with reasons to be a manager. I'm a Manager and will focus on the topic of the article which is "reasons not to be a manager" I'll dispute some of them. Before I begin, I personally believe that one of the strong things needed to be a manager is a strong and flexible mindset. A lot of developers find a cross to die on. Python/Javascript vs Go/Rust. AWS vs GCP, emacs vs vim. SFC vs NYC or Austin. The reality is you can find a way to be happy with any of these, if you so choose to. It's really a mind thing. It's very easy to become frustrated as a manager if you don't have a strong and flexible mind. You will have to deal not just with your mind but also a whole bunch of other minds in various swings of emotional states. 1. I personally love building, I still write code at home not everyday, but a few times a week. Yet I went into management, why? As an IC, the worst feeling is building something only to find out it's the wrong thing, or didn't add value or it doesn't ship. It's not enough to build. So I was willing to give up building in the office to get things to ship. Actually, I figured I could do 50% coding and 50% management. Turned out that was a fantasy, it's more like 95% management and 5% coding at best. Am I miserable as a manager? Not at all, because I learned that my role is not to be an IC but to magnify the output of my team. 2,3,4,5 are all about jobs. I say as a manager that keeps their feet wet, you get the option of going back to IC and still have the option of being a manager or even moving up the ladder. Being an IC is just as easy as passing the interviews. Being a manager especially to an outside company, they want you to have years of experience. 6. Engineers can be little shits. So? even if you're an IC, an asshole engineer is going to be a little shit to you too. 7. Hard conversation? This is called adulting, and when it happens at work, I rather be the manager in the relationship than an IC when hard conversation is to be hard. The reality is that if you're an IC having a hard conversation with your manager, CAP or PIP might be on the way. I personally don't agree that giving constructive feedback is having hard conversation. I call it telling the truth, if someone is not performing, what so hard about telling them so? I don't expect everyone to perform the same, most folks have different strengths and weaknesses, if you can tune in to your strength and use it to stand out, you are good in my book. What I find hard is having to fire someone, knowing that job is how they pay for their shelter, food, transportation, take care of their family etc. Which is why hiring is super important. In my opinion, this is one of the hardest thing to do as a manager. Most people think they have figured out interviewing, ha! 8. If you believe that a manager's tool set is small, then you're probably not ready for management or still have a lot to learn. There's a lot to learn about management, if you have no experience you have to start from 0, read management books, subscribe to HBR, etc. 9. On getting none of the credit, all of the blame. It's true and false. If your team does well, give them the credit. If they do bad, take the blame. However even if you give your team all the credit, high ups will give you the credit. For the blame, it's always yours. :) 10. As an IC, you are limited, you won't even be invited to strategic meetings that the company is having. Balance to the code is not enough, sometimes the strength of a manager is to nip things in the bud before it turns into a time wasting project. 11. You should be able to do all the fun thing a manager does as an IC. Dream on. Your job as an IC is not to coach, mentor, run meetings, participate in interview, define career ladders. You can't just demand for these things, a good org will have you do some of these, but your primary responsibility is technical contributions and if you have plenty of work to do, you won't have the time to do this. I remember conducting 6-10 interviews a week as an IC when the company was growing and hiring like crazy, I can tell you it was miserable 12. Joy is much harder to come by as a manager. Again, this comes down to your mindset. My joy in management comes from seeing the team grow, seeing someone that was not confident becoming confident, folks getting better, having more autonomy, making decisions and reaching the right conclusion without consulting me, working better with their peers, following processes, the team being more self organizing, and all of this leading to consistent shipping of reliable systems. This is my joy. 13. Taking up emotional space at the expense of personal life. I don't buy that. This is an org thing. Won't matter if you're IC, a manager or a low level customer support. A bad org, or never ending fires, death marches will bring emotional toil to you. 14. Your time doesn't belong to you. How is this any different from an IC? Your time belongs to you according to the contract/understanding you have with your org. It might be 40 hrs a week or 20-60hrs a week. Whatever, you set expectations. If you have a bad outage that's debilitating to the company at 3am on a weekend, IC and managers all get to own it. Hell, IC is more likely to be the one in since they have to do the actual work. A good manager will be there with their team tho and not just over the phone. 15. Meetings are not bad. Learn to have a productive meeting. It's actually easy. (1) Know your agenda. Is it information sharing or problem solving? (2) Know how to say no to meetings that are not important to you. (3) Learn how to cut long meetings down with a hard stop. (4) Demand action items at end of every meeting with someone having full ownership. An organization is a living entity, meeting is the high bandwidth pathway through which information is shared. You can use email, chat, text message, but there's nothing that has as high a bandwidth as people sitting face to face or over a video conference. 16. If your org differentiates between tech lead and manager then true. Some orgs don't and both roles are mixed in. 17. It will always be there for you later. Not true! As you get older, folks get suspicious of you and why you didn't get into a leadership position unless you are fortunate to work in an org that has parallel tracks for management and IC. It actually becomes harder to get into the older you get, as we know in the industry ageism is real. What other reasons might you want to be a manager? I personally believe that being an adult and a grown up is figuring out things for yourself. If you're in a leadership role, you need to be able to figure out things without anyone helping you. So if you're considering being a manager, you need to go do your research and see if it's what you really wish to do. Do realize that it's not just a function of your skill sets, but also the organization you're in. You can be an awesome manager in one company and a terrible one in another one.