9 ms·

Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers

69 points by ohjeez 6y ago

1123581321 6y ago
Lighthouse looks like an interesting product, particularly the skip-level insights and 1:1 scheduling. There is a new type of bad manager taking over, that does all the little things from contemporary management wisdom right, but is adrift as a leader and a bit delusional about the aura of thoughtfulness they project, personal wisdom and ability to mentor. To put it too glibly, it is what happens when one understands the material from Rands and Ask a Manager better than what their company and industry is actually doing. I would like to see manager assistance software tackle this by guiding the manager by periodically guiding the user through some tough personal questions. In case it must be said, I am not afflicted with this kind of bad manager; I’m just observing it in other organizations and trying to prevent myself from committing the same overreaction.
- jevanish 6y ago
  Knowing what to do is a hugely uphill battle on its own, but then actually being brave and making the time to have the necessary discussions with your team is another level. Many managers are afraid of doing so or fear the time commitment. The counter intuitive lesson many leaders have to learn is that when you proactively have these discussions that align interests between employee and company, while also showing some empathy for your team, you fix many problems when they're super easy, instead of massive fires to fight. With all that in mind, that is exactly why I started Lighthouse; knowing what to do and then actually doing it are two separate things. Keeping it all in Google docs and making your own system from scratch rarely holds together as well as someone automating things and reminding you of the right things to do.
xchip 6y ago
It is a hidden ad. It turns out the solution is to hire the author of the blog post.
- the-dude 6y ago
  A submarine.
908B64B197 6y ago
I met a lot of Jobs copycats. Most of them failed at one or most of these: - They could never get a technical co-founder to work with them - They were wrong about the market - They were wrong about design - They didn't have the means to self-finance their businesses (think Pixar and Next) - They didn't have the connections What they had was the college drop-out part and some ideas.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  I also have a turtleneck.
- person8645 6y ago
  Do they also copy the volatile temperament? I've always wondered how important that is to managing creative or groundbreaking teams. I work in architecture, where that temperament is way more common than vision and talent.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    Not the GP, but I've been in a few situations like that, where yeah, they copy the volatility too. I think it was deliberate. Worked with someone who morphed in to that, and I think he thought it was either expected or somehow a requirement for 'success'. Being volatile and yelling and copying other aspects of Jobs (and that behavior in general) is ... not great, but it's doubly so when you're pulling that on people who you're not even paying. Getting berated or public raked over the coals from a jackass 'founder', but you've got decent $ coming in - some people can justify that to themselves, at least for a while. Expecting people to take that shit when they're working for 'equity'? Have seen that and it's insane. Good thing was/is that I've not seen it much, and haven't seen those situations play out successfully. But... the Apple/Jobs myth was powerful on that part for a long time (probably still is?).
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    Definitely! But I didn't get close enough with most of them to know if they too had kids whose paternity they denied. I only have so much time after all.
uberman 6y ago
Does it really have comparatively bad managers? Are a lack of diversity and prevalence of harassment more common in Silicon Valley than say big pharma, big banking, big investing, or big entertainment? I am speculating the answer is "no".
- jevanish 6y ago
  Certainly finance has its own terrible reputation and problems, but that does not absolve Silicon Valley / Tech companies from doing better. They absolutely have the knowledge, funding, resources to do better.
  - quanticle 6y ago
    But that's not the question. The question isn't whether Silicon Valley can do better. The answer to that is trivially yes. We can all do better. The question is, is the quality of management in Silicon Valley worse than it is in other industries and other locations. I would argue no. I would argue that the quality of management in Silicon Valley is at worst average, and is likely above average. In Silicon Valley, workers have far more bargaining power than they have in other areas of the country, and, as a result, if the management is truly awful, they'll simply leave. That's not true elsewhere. If you're working for say, Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin, and you have a bad manager, what are your options? Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent. This isn't a theoretical consideration, either. I've moved from the West Coast to the Midwest, for family and cost of living reasons, and one of the things I've noticed is that the management here just really isn't as good, especially with regards to software projects, as it is on the West Coast. Partially that's down to the companies here being less software oriented than they are on the West Coast. But I would also argue that a significant part of it is that the management here is simply less competent.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      "Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent." Who are they going to get to replace you?
nickpinkston 6y ago
There's a lot of great points in the article, though I'm unsure how Silicon Valley's early/mature companies stack against average ones. Take for instance: - Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup? - Are managers at IBM / GE / JPM better than ones at Facebook / Apple / Google? At first blush, I'd think that we're actually better correcting for firm age, but I'd love to see the data/research.
- jevanish 6y ago
  The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business. In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.
  - quanticle 6y ago
    >The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.
- quanticle 6y ago
  If anything, I would argue that management in Silicon Valley is better than average. A Silicon Valley manager knows that if they mistreat their underlings too much, those underlings will quit and go somewhere else. A manager, at say, a manufacturing plant in a Rust Belt city faces no such restrictions. If they fire a worker, that worker has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the line workers in those locations and industries put up and shut up.
bwanab 6y ago
In my experience everywhere has bad managers. I’ll volunteer that until I got wise to my own failings and quit being one that I was one of them. It’s a hard job. What we need is for our educational system to incorporate management training from the earliest grades. I’m not talking about books on business or BS like that, but teaching the soft skills that people need to manage other people. Irrespective of the field one goes into, those soft skills can help.
- jevanish 6y ago
  Totally agree. Trying to lead clubs and student groups in college taught me more about leading than anything I did in a classroom.
  - xchip 6y ago
    What a subtle way to brag about your, allegedly, "leading skills" XD
fungiblecog 6y ago
Managers are terrible everywhere
- swframe2 6y ago
  My friend's wife texted me recently to talk to her very unhappy husband. During my conversation, he mentioned that he has a really good relationship with his skip level manager. Based on what he told me, I advised him to work to replace his bad manager. If you want to be successful (however you want to define success) and anyone or anything stands in your way then make it your job to overcome it.
majormajor 6y ago
I don't know if tech companies have worse managers than other companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't... but that seems to be missing a rather big point. If your company can have better managers than its competitors you can gain an advantage. So if you say "eh, we don't have it that bad, other industries suck too," you're leaving that opening for others...
- jevanish 6y ago
  This^. Well said.
swframe2 6y ago
Can you share your experience getting a good outcome when there is a bad manager in your way?
waylandsmithers 6y ago
> With a manager only a few years older than you, you have a tough experience. So I'm pretty early in my career but have already had multiple experiences having managers who are a little younger than me. I want it to be fine, but it's just hard to see them as any kind of authority. How do other folks make this work?
- justin_oaks 6y ago
  If management is about authority then then the managing is already going poorly.
  - ip26 6y ago
    "Authority" can refer to wisdom & experience, e.g. "They are an authority on the subject". People like having leaders who are knowledgeable about the task at hand.
    - xchip 6y ago
      You are supposed to be the one with wisdom and experience, that is why he hired you!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- swframe2 6y ago
  I mentioned my problems, with my manager, to very senior coworkers and they strongly recommended that I quit. As a result of their advice, I mentally quit my job. My old job was to make successful products for customers. My new job is to overcome the limitations of my manager. I've tried very obvious things. I have worked out a path to be successful despite the efforts of my manager to prevent it. I included my skip level manager in the conversation. I very carefully review my manager's actions and tell them constructively in our 1on1 when they are managing badly. I spend a lot of time reviewing my progress to make sure my path is the best. I built relationships with other coworkers without my manager involvement so they can support my efforts when performance reviews are due. If I kept the notion that was doing my old job I would be unhappy; changing my point of view has helped a lot.
angryasian 6y ago
In engineering Hiring good managers is not what they optimize for. Yes Engineering management should still have a high level of understanding of engineering principals within that domain, but management also because a people skill. Out of all my interviews, people skills and EQ are very often overlooked.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  EQ has already been co-opted as a term and rendered essentially meaningless. One job, there was a craze for it, starting at the top, so naturally we all eventually had to go to this wretched little one day course on it. I kid you not, everything was about either "fear" or "love." If that sounds familiar, if it sounds like Donnie Darko, you would be right ... almost everything we were "taught" in this emotional intelligence course was almost directly out of that mindset, done straight and not as a parody. Fear and love are the only real motivators, apparently, and we don't want to be afraid of things, blah blah, it was such a wretched simplification and so absurd in its manipulative outlook ("do it, you wouldn't want to be ... afraid ... now would you?") that I began to wonder if this was some kind of larger test on who could keep from laughing.
  - jevanish 6y ago
    Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR. Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-forgetting-curve/ https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...
  - loopz 6y ago
    That sounds like mental abuse. EQ would be more about using empathy to connect to others, try to understand other's points etc. Of course, if you "teach" such stuff to manipulative people, you get wretched results.
marsdepinski 6y ago
When the cheap money dries up, we'll find out what the real definition of bad management is.
- tehlike 6y ago
  it won't dry up.
  - glaucon 6y ago
    Really ?, not ever ?
lcuff 6y ago
I'm not so impressed with this article, and partly it's because of the rather bad news: There's not much to be done about bad management. Peter Drucker, well worth reading if you haven't, said that the thing that makes a manager is character. My definition of character is someone who takes action that may have serious negative personal consequences (extreme version: high-profile whistle blowing). Character can't be built by buying an app or taking a weekend workshop. It's formed early in life. It's an extremely rare commodity. Hence, good managers are scarce on the ground and likely to remain so.
- jevanish 6y ago
  I appreciate the skepticism, but that's a very fixed mindset. People can absolutely change and I've seen it hundreds of times. It certainly can take a "come to Jesus" moment like you find out your team hates you, you get fired, a wave of employees quit on you, etc, but people can absolutely change when they decide to. Character is absolutely important, and it does predispose one to being a better manager, but you can become a good manager later in life. Unfortunately, as we discuss in the article (I wrote it), the incentives aren't always there, nor are the positive examples of what to do.
  - diegoholiveira 6y ago
    I do believe in change too, but what I've seeing in many places are temporary changes to save your job or get a promotion, not a real change, a profound change.
    - jevanish 6y ago
      Yeah, certainly consequences matter. The more they have to change or else X (which they really don't want), the more likely they are to change. That said, unfortunately, many will only do just enough to not get fired.
  - lcuff 6y ago
    I agree that people can and do change, at many levels and in many ways. When we unknowingly treat people badly, and get the wake up call, we can (perhaps) shift to treating them better. My personal journey has included discovering how amazingly angry I was, without even knowing it. It precluded having reasonable (engineering) discussions when people disagreed with me, being able to take and give direction, etc. Therapy helped a lot. Learning to be truthful, disagree reasonably, keep promises, think through problems, treat people kindly are all 'learnable'. But some core elements of our beings are pretty intractable, and I believe having the solid core of 'self' that can stand (again in the face of negative personal consequences) against the often outrageous conduct that's around us in the world is only very occasionally developed in adulthood.
question000 6y ago
I'm a developer and I admit the truth is that managers are bad only because developers are worse. Turnover in tech is extremely high and it's not because devs are constantly being mismanaged, it's because they are egotistical and capable of working independently and often just do without any real penalty. "Oh you fired me, well 9 times out of 10 I'll just be earning more money across the street, good luck recruiting anyone with a bad Glassdoor review!" What incentives does the manager have to get invested with the devs in this situation when employees good and bad can just leave easily. Anyone who's worked in tach a while has seen cases where a dev has just flat out refused to do something a manager has asked them to do. Why? Ego is the only reason when you get paid either way. Look at all the egotistical devs on this forum alone saying "all managers are bad" without considering they could be part of the problem.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > flat out refused to do something that will cause a cascade of other problems because it can't be tested properly because no time has been spent automating regression because the managers agreed to unrealistic timelines because they're not the ones who have to deal with the fallout.
- jevanish 6y ago
  It's certainly a two way street between a manager and team member to work well together, but in my experience the best managers in Silicon Valley/tech retain great people for a long time. In fact, many bring former team members with them from company to company, being a talent magnet.
  - throwaway9870 6y ago
    It is my experience good managers know how to filter through employees to find ones that are manageable. Perhaps not at the time of hiring, but they know how to move people off their teams that they know are not good members. I consider myself a decent manager and built strong teams of people that would still work for me or act as references, but even then, I probably failed with half the people I hired.
- 6y ago
proc0 6y ago
The pervasive problem I've seen is bad accountability models, where the person who knows how to do something is not the one officially responsible (but ultimately it is because they get fired of course, however they're not responding to higher management about it). This causes huge tension and also miscommunication. Knowing how to do something should at least give you more decision power on how to move forward with a problem, but what ends up happening is extra overhead explaining solutions and options just so a decision is made by someone else that might still not understand and make the wrong decision anyway. This also causes a bottleneck and compounds the problem by making the org. very slow to respond to changes in direction. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution, and bad managers tend to be the ones that have the least understanding of the problems, but somehow make the most decisions.
atty 6y ago
> That VP who delivered your best quarter ever sexually harassed someone, again: Do you sweep it under the rug? No. And the idea that this is a decision at all is frankly pretty disgusting. Some things are more important than having a good quarter, like your self respect and the physical and emotional safety of your employees. If your company can’t survive having criminals removed, then maybe it shouldn’t.

69 points by ohjeez 6y ago

Lighthouse looks like an interesting product, particularly the skip-level insights and 1:1 scheduling. There is a new type of bad manager taking over, that does all the little things from contemporary management wisdom right, but is adrift as a leader and a bit delusional about the aura of thoughtfulness they project, personal wisdom and ability to mentor. To put it too glibly, it is what happens when one understands the material from Rands and Ask a Manager better than what their company and industry is actually doing. I would like to see manager assistance software tackle this by guiding the manager by periodically guiding the user through some tough personal questions. In case it must be said, I am not afflicted with this kind of bad manager; I’m just observing it in other organizations and trying to prevent myself from committing the same overreaction.

jevanish 6y ago
Knowing what to do is a hugely uphill battle on its own, but then actually being brave and making the time to have the necessary discussions with your team is another level. Many managers are afraid of doing so or fear the time commitment. The counter intuitive lesson many leaders have to learn is that when you proactively have these discussions that align interests between employee and company, while also showing some empathy for your team, you fix many problems when they're super easy, instead of massive fires to fight. With all that in mind, that is exactly why I started Lighthouse; knowing what to do and then actually doing it are two separate things. Keeping it all in Google docs and making your own system from scratch rarely holds together as well as someone automating things and reminding you of the right things to do.

xchip 6y ago

It is a hidden ad. It turns out the solution is to hire the author of the blog post.

the-dude 6y ago
A submarine.

908B64B197 6y ago

I met a lot of Jobs copycats. Most of them failed at one or most of these: - They could never get a technical co-founder to work with them - They were wrong about the market - They were wrong about design - They didn't have the means to self-finance their businesses (think Pixar and Next) - They didn't have the connections What they had was the college drop-out part and some ideas.

Consultant32452 6y ago
I also have a turtleneck.
person8645 6y ago
Do they also copy the volatile temperament? I've always wondered how important that is to managing creative or groundbreaking teams. I work in architecture, where that temperament is way more common than vision and talent.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Not the GP, but I've been in a few situations like that, where yeah, they copy the volatility too. I think it was deliberate. Worked with someone who morphed in to that, and I think he thought it was either expected or somehow a requirement for 'success'. Being volatile and yelling and copying other aspects of Jobs (and that behavior in general) is ... not great, but it's doubly so when you're pulling that on people who you're not even paying. Getting berated or public raked over the coals from a jackass 'founder', but you've got decent $ coming in - some people can justify that to themselves, at least for a while. Expecting people to take that shit when they're working for 'equity'? Have seen that and it's insane. Good thing was/is that I've not seen it much, and haven't seen those situations play out successfully. But... the Apple/Jobs myth was powerful on that part for a long time (probably still is?).
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Definitely! But I didn't get close enough with most of them to know if they too had kids whose paternity they denied. I only have so much time after all.

uberman 6y ago

Does it really have comparatively bad managers? Are a lack of diversity and prevalence of harassment more common in Silicon Valley than say big pharma, big banking, big investing, or big entertainment? I am speculating the answer is "no".

jevanish 6y ago
Certainly finance has its own terrible reputation and problems, but that does not absolve Silicon Valley / Tech companies from doing better. They absolutely have the knowledge, funding, resources to do better.
- quanticle 6y ago
  But that's not the question. The question isn't whether Silicon Valley can do better. The answer to that is trivially yes. We can all do better. The question is, is the quality of management in Silicon Valley worse than it is in other industries and other locations. I would argue no. I would argue that the quality of management in Silicon Valley is at worst average, and is likely above average. In Silicon Valley, workers have far more bargaining power than they have in other areas of the country, and, as a result, if the management is truly awful, they'll simply leave. That's not true elsewhere. If you're working for say, Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin, and you have a bad manager, what are your options? Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent. This isn't a theoretical consideration, either. I've moved from the West Coast to the Midwest, for family and cost of living reasons, and one of the things I've noticed is that the management here just really isn't as good, especially with regards to software projects, as it is on the West Coast. Partially that's down to the companies here being less software oriented than they are on the West Coast. But I would also argue that a significant part of it is that the management here is simply less competent.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    "Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent." Who are they going to get to replace you?

nickpinkston 6y ago

There's a lot of great points in the article, though I'm unsure how Silicon Valley's early/mature companies stack against average ones. Take for instance: - Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup? - Are managers at IBM / GE / JPM better than ones at Facebook / Apple / Google? At first blush, I'd think that we're actually better correcting for firm age, but I'd love to see the data/research.

jevanish 6y ago
The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business. In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.
- quanticle 6y ago
  >The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.
quanticle 6y ago
If anything, I would argue that management in Silicon Valley is better than average. A Silicon Valley manager knows that if they mistreat their underlings too much, those underlings will quit and go somewhere else. A manager, at say, a manufacturing plant in a Rust Belt city faces no such restrictions. If they fire a worker, that worker has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the line workers in those locations and industries put up and shut up.

bwanab 6y ago

In my experience everywhere has bad managers. I’ll volunteer that until I got wise to my own failings and quit being one that I was one of them. It’s a hard job. What we need is for our educational system to incorporate management training from the earliest grades. I’m not talking about books on business or BS like that, but teaching the soft skills that people need to manage other people. Irrespective of the field one goes into, those soft skills can help.

jevanish 6y ago
Totally agree. Trying to lead clubs and student groups in college taught me more about leading than anything I did in a classroom.
- xchip 6y ago
  What a subtle way to brag about your, allegedly, "leading skills" XD

fungiblecog 6y ago

Managers are terrible everywhere

swframe2 6y ago
My friend's wife texted me recently to talk to her very unhappy husband. During my conversation, he mentioned that he has a really good relationship with his skip level manager. Based on what he told me, I advised him to work to replace his bad manager. If you want to be successful (however you want to define success) and anyone or anything stands in your way then make it your job to overcome it.

majormajor 6y ago

I don't know if tech companies have worse managers than other companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't... but that seems to be missing a rather big point. If your company can have better managers than its competitors you can gain an advantage. So if you say "eh, we don't have it that bad, other industries suck too," you're leaving that opening for others...

jevanish 6y ago
This^. Well said.

swframe2 6y ago

Can you share your experience getting a good outcome when there is a bad manager in your way?

waylandsmithers 6y ago

> With a manager only a few years older than you, you have a tough experience. So I'm pretty early in my career but have already had multiple experiences having managers who are a little younger than me. I want it to be fine, but it's just hard to see them as any kind of authority. How do other folks make this work?

justin_oaks 6y ago
If management is about authority then then the managing is already going poorly.
- ip26 6y ago
  "Authority" can refer to wisdom & experience, e.g. "They are an authority on the subject". People like having leaders who are knowledgeable about the task at hand.
  - xchip 6y ago
    You are supposed to be the one with wisdom and experience, that is why he hired you!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
swframe2 6y ago
I mentioned my problems, with my manager, to very senior coworkers and they strongly recommended that I quit. As a result of their advice, I mentally quit my job. My old job was to make successful products for customers. My new job is to overcome the limitations of my manager. I've tried very obvious things. I have worked out a path to be successful despite the efforts of my manager to prevent it. I included my skip level manager in the conversation. I very carefully review my manager's actions and tell them constructively in our 1on1 when they are managing badly. I spend a lot of time reviewing my progress to make sure my path is the best. I built relationships with other coworkers without my manager involvement so they can support my efforts when performance reviews are due. If I kept the notion that was doing my old job I would be unhappy; changing my point of view has helped a lot.

angryasian 6y ago

In engineering Hiring good managers is not what they optimize for. Yes Engineering management should still have a high level of understanding of engineering principals within that domain, but management also because a people skill. Out of all my interviews, people skills and EQ are very often overlooked.

at_a_remove 6y ago
EQ has already been co-opted as a term and rendered essentially meaningless. One job, there was a craze for it, starting at the top, so naturally we all eventually had to go to this wretched little one day course on it. I kid you not, everything was about either "fear" or "love." If that sounds familiar, if it sounds like Donnie Darko, you would be right ... almost everything we were "taught" in this emotional intelligence course was almost directly out of that mindset, done straight and not as a parody. Fear and love are the only real motivators, apparently, and we don't want to be afraid of things, blah blah, it was such a wretched simplification and so absurd in its manipulative outlook ("do it, you wouldn't want to be ... afraid ... now would you?") that I began to wonder if this was some kind of larger test on who could keep from laughing.
- jevanish 6y ago
  Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR. Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-forgetting-curve/ https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...
- loopz 6y ago
  That sounds like mental abuse. EQ would be more about using empathy to connect to others, try to understand other's points etc. Of course, if you "teach" such stuff to manipulative people, you get wretched results.

marsdepinski 6y ago

When the cheap money dries up, we'll find out what the real definition of bad management is.

tehlike 6y ago
it won't dry up.
- glaucon 6y ago
  Really ?, not ever ?

lcuff 6y ago

I'm not so impressed with this article, and partly it's because of the rather bad news: There's not much to be done about bad management. Peter Drucker, well worth reading if you haven't, said that the thing that makes a manager is character. My definition of character is someone who takes action that may have serious negative personal consequences (extreme version: high-profile whistle blowing). Character can't be built by buying an app or taking a weekend workshop. It's formed early in life. It's an extremely rare commodity. Hence, good managers are scarce on the ground and likely to remain so.

jevanish 6y ago
I appreciate the skepticism, but that's a very fixed mindset. People can absolutely change and I've seen it hundreds of times. It certainly can take a "come to Jesus" moment like you find out your team hates you, you get fired, a wave of employees quit on you, etc, but people can absolutely change when they decide to. Character is absolutely important, and it does predispose one to being a better manager, but you can become a good manager later in life. Unfortunately, as we discuss in the article (I wrote it), the incentives aren't always there, nor are the positive examples of what to do.
- diegoholiveira 6y ago
  I do believe in change too, but what I've seeing in many places are temporary changes to save your job or get a promotion, not a real change, a profound change.
  - jevanish 6y ago
    Yeah, certainly consequences matter. The more they have to change or else X (which they really don't want), the more likely they are to change. That said, unfortunately, many will only do just enough to not get fired.
- lcuff 6y ago
  I agree that people can and do change, at many levels and in many ways. When we unknowingly treat people badly, and get the wake up call, we can (perhaps) shift to treating them better. My personal journey has included discovering how amazingly angry I was, without even knowing it. It precluded having reasonable (engineering) discussions when people disagreed with me, being able to take and give direction, etc. Therapy helped a lot. Learning to be truthful, disagree reasonably, keep promises, think through problems, treat people kindly are all 'learnable'. But some core elements of our beings are pretty intractable, and I believe having the solid core of 'self' that can stand (again in the face of negative personal consequences) against the often outrageous conduct that's around us in the world is only very occasionally developed in adulthood.

question000 6y ago

I'm a developer and I admit the truth is that managers are bad only because developers are worse. Turnover in tech is extremely high and it's not because devs are constantly being mismanaged, it's because they are egotistical and capable of working independently and often just do without any real penalty. "Oh you fired me, well 9 times out of 10 I'll just be earning more money across the street, good luck recruiting anyone with a bad Glassdoor review!" What incentives does the manager have to get invested with the devs in this situation when employees good and bad can just leave easily. Anyone who's worked in tach a while has seen cases where a dev has just flat out refused to do something a manager has asked them to do. Why? Ego is the only reason when you get paid either way. Look at all the egotistical devs on this forum alone saying "all managers are bad" without considering they could be part of the problem.

commandlinefan 6y ago
> flat out refused to do something that will cause a cascade of other problems because it can't be tested properly because no time has been spent automating regression because the managers agreed to unrealistic timelines because they're not the ones who have to deal with the fallout.
jevanish 6y ago
It's certainly a two way street between a manager and team member to work well together, but in my experience the best managers in Silicon Valley/tech retain great people for a long time. In fact, many bring former team members with them from company to company, being a talent magnet.
- throwaway9870 6y ago
  It is my experience good managers know how to filter through employees to find ones that are manageable. Perhaps not at the time of hiring, but they know how to move people off their teams that they know are not good members. I consider myself a decent manager and built strong teams of people that would still work for me or act as references, but even then, I probably failed with half the people I hired.
6y ago

proc0 6y ago

The pervasive problem I've seen is bad accountability models, where the person who knows how to do something is not the one officially responsible (but ultimately it is because they get fired of course, however they're not responding to higher management about it). This causes huge tension and also miscommunication. Knowing how to do something should at least give you more decision power on how to move forward with a problem, but what ends up happening is extra overhead explaining solutions and options just so a decision is made by someone else that might still not understand and make the wrong decision anyway. This also causes a bottleneck and compounds the problem by making the org. very slow to respond to changes in direction. Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution, and bad managers tend to be the ones that have the least understanding of the problems, but somehow make the most decisions.

atty 6y ago

> That VP who delivered your best quarter ever sexually harassed someone, again: Do you sweep it under the rug? No. And the idea that this is a decision at all is frankly pretty disgusting. Some things are more important than having a good quarter, like your self respect and the physical and emotional safety of your employees. If your company can’t survive having criminals removed, then maybe it shouldn’t.