12 ms·

Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)

691 points by mgh2 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 6y ago
I was personally taught by the store manager of a supermarket how to sweep the floor and of course that built respect for him and the organization. (e.g. he knew how to do every little task like sweep the floor, cut meat in the deli, bake bread, etc.) The (now retied) director of the art museum at Cornell could be seen out in his suit passing out pamphlets for an exhibition together with students promoting clubs and concerts. Go to the exhibition and he'll personally give a talk about the art that will help you appreciate anything from a suit of Samurai armor to Mark Lombardi's conspiracy diagrams. It's nice to see the top guy, who performs like a top guy, doing the simple work.
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  When I was in my teens, I got my first "real" job. It was working at a service station. The station was a part of a chain of dozens. The owner was a well-known local multimillionaire. For whatever reason, he happened to be at my station on my first day at work. He and I spent over an hour pumping gas, checking oil, doing an oil change, patching tires, and so forth. I learned a lot more than simply how to work at a service station that day. I continued working at that station for over a year. Never saw the guy again. As I recall, when I started he had stores over half-a-dozen states.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    I love this story and the owner is exemplifying the moral behavior I'd want to if I were in that place... However, > Never saw the guy again. It doesn't scale. If you have the knack to build a company like that, eventually you won't be able to touch the front lines of what your company is doing. Hopefully, having that type of leadership at the top creates emulation all the way down, but still, it rings of "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain"
    - Layke1123 6y ago
      I disagree. If you are a leader in a field, and you have forgotten or no longer can do the work at the very lowest levels (for example, even something simply like mopping), you have lost an expertise that made you valuable in the first place.
    - hashkb 6y ago
      The legend scales infinitely. You don't have to pump every gallon of gas, or write every line of code. But if everyone knows that you can, will, and often do...
      - musingsole 6y ago
        > The legend scales infinitely. I think that's truer than you mean. The legend can scale, but the reality doesn't. Unfortunately I'm more interested in the latter.
        hashkb 6y ago
        I know what I mean (-: At a certain point, you've got to stop pumping the gas. You want the company to outlive you. Gas needs to get pumped after you're gone. You fade into the background and replace yourself; others carry on your legacy. You cash out and ski six days a week or whatever. Edit: some legends are bullshit. Scale that up and it's called "toxic culture".
        musingsole 6y ago
        Yeah...you meant what you meant. I mean your words apply to things like Jesus.
        hashkb 6y ago
        That's a different kind of legend. Point taken, but I don't think that many companies I worked at we're cults. Half, tops.
        6y ago
- afarrell 6y ago
  There is a dichotomy here. If an individual contributor is unclear whom they report to or what the product strategy is, then seeing the CTO contribute to numpy is not comforting. As you say: > It's nice to see the top guy, who performs like a top guy, doing the simple work.
- alchemism 6y ago
  A 'good' sea captain will also exhibit this trait and step in to perform tasks of necessity. Since safety at sea comes in large part from 'simple work' being done rigorously, it is heartening to see the top man wiping down a slick deck to prevent the chance of accidents.
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    Don't forget the pirates/privateers of the caribbean. Captain was elected and removed at will by the crew. They freed slaves and distributed "wages" according to the level of contribution. The crews were diverse as hell. And they established a republic in Nassau...hundreds of years before the United States was formed. Of course, the companies (ships crew) robbed people and could be murderous at times, but the same could be said of "legitimate" less egalitarian companies of the time.
- Wistar 6y ago
  One day a few years ago as I was walking into the Kirkland, WA Costco, I noticed a familiar-looking older guy pushing a line of shopping carts in from the parking lot. It was James Sinegal, then CEO of Costco.
- MarkLowenstein 6y ago
  Joel Spolsky on his sergeant major, 3 paragraphs. One of those anecdotes that will stick with you forever. https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadership/ https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadershi... (Not the original source, but the most readable I found.)
- sitkack 6y ago
  Totally an aside, but I saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi 's work (Vatican Bank Scandal) at the Portrait Gallery in DC, and it is absolutely fascinating.
helge9210 6y ago
"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job" Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department. My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
- matthewmcg 6y ago
  It’s hard to see this happening with the rate structures that most firms use. Clients don’t want to pay partner level rates for junior associate work.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Then that boss is failing to scale his/her team properly. It's not really a point of pride if one person can singlehandedly replace all their reports, imo.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed. If your boss can do your work, has the time to do your work (eg there isn't enough work), the work doesn't need to be done in parallel, and can do similar quality work, and is willing to do that work, you're not needed. That's the takeaway, without oversimplification, which makes sense.
  - markild 6y ago
    Agreed. If not, you could just as well have said "If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed." It's actually an interesting point that. Oversimplified a bit, I feel there are two different ways that people measure their worth in the workplace. There is "no one else can do what I do" and then there's "I make sure that everything I do can be done by someone else". Personally I much prefer the latter.
    - Supermancho 6y ago
      > If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed. I can program in ASM, since I did it in college. That's a different assertion from "if a colleague can do your job, you're not needed". ASM programmers are still needed. Also, there's the whole "making a baby in 1 month with 9 wombs doesn't work".
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I don't mind if my boss can't do my job. I mind if my boss can't do my job AND tells me how I should do it. The major difference there is one is support and tracking, the other is just incompetent in all areas if management.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  I don't know - in my experience as a programmer, when I work for somebody that's never worked as a programmer, they tend to estimate based on how long they wish something would take (which is usually an hour, two max). Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    And about how much small differences in assumptions and what was written in the ticket can impact development times.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    My experience with the > Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete. Is that they had huge egos and thought they could do everything in much less time than I could, or would just "put in the time to make sure it was done when it had to be" So nah, I prefer not having ex programmers as my manager.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      I have my supervisor and my lead I work under. My lead fortunately is very good and understanding of these things, but he also is kind of like that as well. My supervisor has absolutely no clue and just wants updates; thats all.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  What if.. your boss doesn't know how to do your job, BUT he knows the requirements around it? E.g. I am an amateur coder. Anyone who has typed 3 pages of code without looking up on a book or a website, is x100 better than me. If someone decides to make me the leader of coders, I won't tell them "I command you to use this syntax over that paremeter (?)" (coz I'm like Jon Snow.. I know nothing), but I WILL tell them to a) take daily backups/use version control, b) write comments on your code, c) do daily huddles, d) sit in pairs and review each other's code, e) some bright ideas/suggestions that THEY will make, f) I will bust my ... and try to study as many books/blogs/resources to learn the area (and managing coders better), g) I will talk to as many coders (young and old) as I can to understand them and their needs better. Does that make me a good coder? Hell no! I didn't mention "read Java" in any of my aformentioned example. Will this make me a good manager? Well I have managed OTHER teams in & around IT.. why not coders? They are people too!
dandanua 6y ago
On the other hand, if your boss thinks he can do your job (and do it even better than you), while in fact he can't – you will get the worst nightmare.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Is worst nightmare the new normal? Various levels of management often handwave away a task because they understand its function at a high level. True quality management requires a deeper understanding of what it is you're managing. I understand the function of creating, launching, and orbiting a satellite geosynchronously to do GPS so it's easy, right? Yea, not so much. I'm a firm believer that you need to understand everything at least one layer deeper than high level functional descriptions so you can start to reason about the difficulty or amount of skill needed to accomplish something. You understand the real problems (even if only at the surface) and know where opportunity lies. With a pure functional perspective many current managers have, you simply can't reasonably manage and plan and are instead a glorified resource scheduler with whims.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  I'll take it up a notch: all of the above + doesn't lift a finger and finds faults at everything you do. Add a bit of colonial superiority complex and its recipe for a job from hell.
  - Sileni 6y ago
    And focuses most of their time and energy into brown nosing. Zero respect in either direction and an adversarial relationship by design any time you need resources from the company/higher-ups. /shudder
- devoutsalsa 6y ago
  Another nightmare is needing your boss' help & not getting it because your boss simply chooses not to help. Early in my dev career I ended up w/ an smart, unhelpful manager. They were the only person in the company w/ Scala experience, and I needed to touch a Scala service as a fairly green developer. I asked my boss for help, and was denied. I later found out that my boss had recommended against hiring me during my interview, and I was still placed on their team. I did not like that job & quit after a few months.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
Plenty of previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218
- mgh2 6y ago
  It is interesting to see new perspectives though, I am glad HN allows this after some time. Time changes everything.
nobleach 6y ago
My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead. With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having that role. With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas. I love knowing that our CEO is one heck of an inspiring guy but I don't want him meddling in engineering. I'm sure he's smart enough that he could figure it out, but that would be a waste of his talent. Right now, his brilliance is evident in the people he's put into leadership. They're all experts of their domain. This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding)
- realityking 6y ago
  My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them. The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.
- caturopath 6y ago
  > With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas...This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding) I think you're missing one thing here that makes it a little more analogous to your boss: not only should the CEO and your boss be good at their own jobs (e.g. securing funding), they should be good at their reports' jobs as well (just like yours is). Expertise that is 3+ layers down the org chart is completely irrelevant, of course, as you point out. There are executive situations where there's a lot of specialized knowledge one level below where this doesn't quite work, but that should garner lots of extra attention.
korginator 6y ago
Clickbaity and utterly misleading title. I expected very different content, but I agree with the gist of the article, in that the boss must be highly competent at *his* job, know what he's talking about and stay grounded in reality.
- korginator 6y ago
  The title of the post was changed after I submitted this comment. Earlier it was something like "if your boss could do your job, you're usually happier".
codegeek 6y ago
The boss "should" be able to do most of your job BUT they Should not need/want to. Good bosses understand the word "delegation" and that is what it takes to build a real team and company. I am a boss and I can do most of my team's work (whether efficient or not) but I don't want to because I have higher priority things to do to get the most out of my time. For example, I can code but I don't (well mostly). I have a team of developers. I focus more on customers (existing and prospective). But then again, I have customer support folks who help with daily requests so that I am not answering every support question myself. Can I ? You bet. Would I ? Not if I want to scale my company further. If shit hits the fan, sure I will talk to a customer but I trust my team to take care of them before it gets to me.
- postalrat 6y ago
  Is your work really higher priority or is it just your job?
- p-sharma 6y ago
  > For example, I can code Not saying that this is true in your case but I have seen this too often that managers think they can code just because they did it 10 years ago. It's surprisingly hard to write good code when you are not in practice.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  The part that really matters is that you can empathize with the work that is being done. The more distance you have between you and actually ever doing that kind of task, the less that empathy is. It’s the same as with customers — if you never do the user studies, you will not understand even if you once did.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
I couldnt agree more. A previous boss held a company wide meeting and everyone laid out their yearly goals. When he got to his it was something like establish channel partnerships. Very wishy washy and difficult to measure. I knew almost at that moment that I wasnt going to be at the company at the end of that year. He had decided his job was now to manage rather than do the job the rest of us were doing. At a certain point that may be effective but we were not at that point.
notahacker 6y ago
Since two of the measures of boss competence are entirely employee-rated the causality is likely to run both ways. i.e. regardless of their actual technical skill in your field and management abilities as assessed by others you are less likely to appraise your boss as competent at their own job and capable of doing your job if you're unhappy about the work they have asked you to do.
skeeter2020 6y ago
I think the conclusions miss the mark slightly and focus on a symptom of good bosses: they care about tasks from a state of understanding what is required to do them well, they have empathy for the challenges, and respect for the talent in completing them. Obviously the easiest way to get to this perspective is to experience it first-hand, hence the correlation between those who could do the job and being good managers of the job, but I don't see this as a requirement, just a common path. I also don't see this a refutation that we shouldn't hire good engineers into management, rather we shouldn't do this blindly and as the single criteria. My best managers were all top quartile engineers but probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover, and this inevitable consumes focus, effort and time that your best engineers don't want to allocate. I'm a relatively new engineering manager (~3 years) and wrote about the traits of a good development manager from my perspective here: https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20200204-four_qualities.html https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20200204-four_qualit...
- geoduck14 6y ago
  I like what you wrote because it makes me feel better about my own short comings. But is it actually true?
  - random314 6y ago
    Very often when folks describe the ideal manager, they are describing themselves.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I am fairly confident I would agree with myself, so this makes sense. At the very least our scheduling would start being based on reality, not what we’d like it to be.
- skohan 6y ago
  > probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified. From my perspective, as a relatively new technical manager who also spent years as an engineer working with technical managers, it's not only about empathy but also about having a thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate intuition around the subject matter. When I was working as an engineer, what I often found frustrating about working with non-technical managers is that they often work on the wrong set of parameters. Discussions often revolve around details which are not really important to the success of the project, or are relevant to the work, and often the team is led down a more difficult path than is necessary because requirements are set in the wrong terms. I think it's possible to compensate to some degree with empathy and people skills, but it's hard to compete with having the experience and speaking the language.
whydoineedone 6y ago
I certainly feel this way. There are too many MBA-types who aren't really competent at the low-level technical work they manage and don't really even have an understanding of it. It's hard for me not to be resentful about it. I know that's my own ego talking but it's the truth. I changed my career trajectory to avoid folks like that
sokoloff 6y ago
The more junior you are, the more likely it is that not only can your boss do your job, they can do it better than you can. The more senior you become, the less likely that is to be the case. How many CEOs could do all of the CFO, COO, CTO, and General Counsel's jobs? Zero. How many programming team leads can do the junior programmer's job? Basically/hopefully all of them.
- notacoward 6y ago
  The more senior you become, the more you should focus on being one of the leaders yourself instead of staying in individual-contributor mode. If that means you outstrip your own boss's expertise it might mean less personal satisfaction for you (been there done that) but can still improve satisfaction for the team as a whole.
- speby 6y ago
  This ... it is a total fantasy to think that the leader(s) of a company are somehow aware of all of the work that is entailed by every job in the company. For really small companies, or junior employees with a line manager, that may be true. But as you said, the more senior you become, things completely change. There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    The comment said that your boss can likely do your job, not that everyone more senior than you can.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible. Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of small business owners every month.
    - 6y ago
staunch 6y ago
Steve Jobs was probably the best team builder in tech (and maybe business) history with Apple v1, NeXT, and then Apple v2 and he learned this lesson well. "We went through that stage at Apple where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to be a big company, let’s go out and hire professional management.’ We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all. Most of them were Bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything. If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q
- kmonsen 6y ago
  I do think you can get the worst managers that way as well, and jobs at some points was one of the worst. You do need empathy and ways of handling underperformers that is not screaming at them hoping things will get better.
j_walter 6y ago
This is no surprise really. Any major company promotes managers from within unless they have a lot of industry experience. A bank manager would have a hard time being a manager at any FANNG company (on the engineering side at least) no matter how good they are with people...you have to have at least some in depth understanding of what the company and department does. The best engineers don't usually make the best managers either because they have a hard time giving up control. Good managers let their staff do their jobs and give them the tools needed to excel (including mentoring and coaching).
- yeswecatan 6y ago
  I was actually looking forward to giving up some control as I became a manager. Unfortunately, we haven't hired anybody to fill the day to day void I left so I'm still doing my old job + now managing a small team.
  - vsgzusnex 6y ago
    Then maybe your job right now should be hiring?
    - yeswecatan 6y ago
      It should be. Our recruiters haven't found any good for months.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        Get a linkedin login and start looking. Seems like recruiting either are focused on other teams, or don't have enough context. Both of those can be helped by you doing some lead generation.
      - aszen 6y ago
        what are u looking for exactly, a good place to attract talented developers is to post jobs on some slack workspaces, many programming languages/frameworks have dedicated slack work spaces where enthusiast developers like to hang out. i find that people in smaller communities have richer technical skills and often are easier to work with
hinkley 6y ago
Like the Senate, you often need someone who can break ties. A team with an even number of technical people can get deadlocked on a decision. If the boss can’t or won’t step in, it can make for a miserable experience.
- jrockway 6y ago
  If I've learned anything from watching the Senate, it's that 51/49 doesn't drive forward progress. Those 49 will do everything in their power to undermine the 51. If you find your team deadlocked on decisions and you think the way forward is to find a tie-breaking vote, I have bad news for you.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Work is not a democracy but some difficult decisions have to be. I think a lot of the time the arrow points the other way. A boss who can’t or won’t make decisions when pushed to do so also creates an environment where deciding is difficult. Often all it takes is a qualitative comment that one could mistake for leadership, and the guy who won’t be accountable for any decisions is not leading anybody.
    - jrockway 6y ago
      Yeah. Making a decision is the first step, but the life of the decision after it's made is vitally important. You can look at Congress getting stuff passed with split votes, but you can also see the other side digging in to undermine the decision. The Affordable Care Act is an example; it passed, it was implemented, but the Republicans are in court every month with a new challenge. I think you want to aim for consensus building that doesn't have half of the stakeholders spending 100% of their time to get your decision reversed, basically. Maybe it's impossible to build a consensus, and you have to act. That's the value in the tie-breaking vote, and that's what Congress does. But we shouldn't try to model getting things done at work as an epic battle between Blue and Red. That level of polarization is toxic. Maybe Congress can't fix that problem, because they represent 328,000,000 people, but we can aim for something better in a smaller group.
crispyambulance 6y ago
Of course people are happier when they're lead by AN ACTUAL LEADER rather than by some a-hole who just "manages tasks" PM-BOK style! I swear, some of the articles in HBR should just be sub-titled: "STUFF YOUR MAMMA TAUGHT YOU BUT YOU FORGOT WHILE GETTING YOUR MBA"
- sitkack 6y ago
  The M in MBA stands for Monkey or Money, or both.
wly_cdgr 6y ago
Lol. DUH
Hotple 6y ago
Emotional labor can be really taxing, and I think it's sometimes underrepresented as a stressor in people's lives.
subsubzero 6y ago
Having had some absolutely horrible managers in tech the worst usually are the ones with lower technical expertise. The reason being is mainly related to understanding scope of work and the complexities of said projects. That being said I also have had other really bad managers who were star IC's that were promoted to mgmt as they really had no where else to go in their career. These managers usually are clueless on dealing with people and other teams.
- caturopath 6y ago
  Given the right support, I've seen lower-knowledge managers really do well. I think a lot of the worse situations I've seen were when someone didn't realize their technical judgement was inapplicable or rusty, and that they needed to defer to their experts. This is tricky, of course -- for low-level managers with typical engineer IC reports especially, it's super common for them not to have a single report whose judgement they can trust.
vdddv 6y ago
very little information given on who is behind that site. One name, linking to one twitter account with very little on it
nashashmi 6y ago
Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise who share their knowledge and help others grow. It’s missing key words
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  +1 Star ICs who went into management but can't leave tech could end up micromanaging or just being an aloof unhelpful resource.
oytis 6y ago
From my personal experience, when people wish their manager was more technically capable, it indicates some management failure. I am currently managed by a person who although has a technical background but for a long time is only doing management, so definitely can't do my job. And it is totally fine, because he's not making any technical decisions, these are made by technically excellent people. Examples of management failures that I have seen on the other hand involve product managers and/or people with sales attitude playing product designers or solution engineer's roles. That doesn't end well and creates a lot of conflict between the management and the technical people.
benja123 6y ago
From my experience you don’t need a manager to necessarily be an expert in their field, but it certainly does help. When a manager lacks the expertise then what it comes down to is how much a manager is, 1. Willing to work hard to gain the necessary knowledge to be effective in their job, 2. Listen to their subordinates on matters they are less knowledgeable about and displaying a deep interest in truly understanding it. What I have noticed is that if a non expert manager is not willing to do these two things what usually happens is they become yes men/women for upper management. They will agree to commitments that the team can’t necessarily meet (or in some cases will require them to work overtime), other times they will make the team cut corners or do things that are going to create a lot of problems down the road. When it comes to cleaning up the mess that was created, they have already moved onto to their next role leaving the clean up to their old reports and the next manager. A manager that is an expert in the field they work in can do just as much damage as a non expert manager when they micro manager everything leaving little opportunities for growth.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
airhead969 6y ago
I think we should deconflict managers from leaders. Managers are people who facilitate employees' productivity and HR matters, whereas leaders trail-blaze priorities, philosophy, and mentor towards the actual work. The issue is trying to make a senior leader into both a leader and a manager, when these are very different skillsets and both take a great deal of time. IMO, it's better to do like Google by having managers that aren't micromanaging tasks but are there to provide assistance. tl;dr: Let the leaders lead and the managers manage. It's nice when one person can do both well, but that's an unreasonable expectation for the amount of work involved.
LegitGandalf 6y ago
Not only that, but if tech matters to the company, and it increasingly does these days, the broader organization really needs to have some technical savvy in order to avoid a bunch of anti-patterns that are running wild in non-tech savvy organizations: * Setting bad expectations with stakeholders and customers * Taking on bad opportunities, committing the organization to unnecessary technical debt for no monetary gain * Fracturing teams across competing opportunities * Top down decrees issued from abstraction that causes organizational thrashing * Decisions made in abstraction with no understanding of the stubborn technical constraints that block fruition
datavirtue 6y ago
At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers who were by far the least pretentious managers. Everyone else was under someone from the encient GE Taylorist philosophy of "a good manager can run anything." Very painful uphill battle on anything because you literally had to translate everything into a message that informed them of how it was going to make them look good and advance their career. They simply don't understand or care about the work/product/customer. You could literally build amazing shit with a lot of support from colleagues etc and it didn't interest them because they had no foundation to recognize the potential. If you did manage to have one or two of your managers (I had five-ish) that did see the impact potential the rest of the hierarchy or "matrix" would smother it. Not to mention the clueless (horizontal) scrum masters.
fallingfrog 6y ago
Part of the problem is that a manager brought in without any relevant experience will often see their job as an exercise in making numbers bigger- they will attempt to cut costs and increase revenue in the short term without understanding which costs are really important or what the revenue is based on. This leads to brief increases in profit margins followed by customers fleeing to the competition, which the manager responds to with another round of cost cutting. Even worse, the lack of deep understanding means that the manager cannot distinguish good ideas from bad ones, and often cannot distinguish talent from bluster, leading to poor hiring decisions and directionless leadership. Everyone knows that putting a untrained business major in charge of a squadron of soldiers would end badly. He might be able skate by until they got into combat, maybe, but after that they wouldn’t listen to him for long. But for some reason we think that putting an mba in charge of an engineering team is a good idea.
poxwole 6y ago
Duh!
loopz 6y ago
What's the contrary point? Employees most happy being led by clueless, ignorant, inactive managers who throw them under the bus?
amznbyebyebye 6y ago
Wow news just in, employees are happy with competent managers. What. A. Surprise.
cwkoss 6y ago
In Japanese, 'Jyozu', the word for "good at doing ___", is the same as the word for "likes to do ___". I think the idea that these two distinct English concepts are in fact the same is very interesting. Perhaps a significant effect is that people with deep expertise tend to be much more passionate about their job, because without passion they could not have developed deep expertise.
zora_goron 6y ago
I wonder if part of this includes a possible correlation between deep expertise and enthusiasm/passion for the subject matter, which is passed on throughout the team.
Spooky23 6y ago
It’s fairly obvious but surprising coming from HBR. If you’re in a leadership position, you generally get there by being a subject matter expert, a professional manager (ie money person) or an attorney. Being able to walk a mile in someone’s shoes means a lot.
jonplackett 6y ago
‘Employees happier working for people with little expertise’ is a ridiculous statement so I’m not sure how this could come as any news to anyone.
toolslive 6y ago
combine this with Putt's law, and you understand hell. "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand." Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management. have fun ;)
dalu 6y ago
Captain Obvious sends his regards
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 - Jan 2017 (238 comments)
jordache 6y ago
I think this sentiment only applies to line level tech managers, where it's likely conceivable for that manager to be close to the work done by subordinates. If you got higher in the org, the focus of managers become more strategic and process oriented, with stronger alignment with the business side of things.
Jerry2 6y ago
Personally, I would never work for a manager that had no skills other than "management" skills. I've been in a few organizations where every manager is hired from the outside and installed and they have no expertise in the area or the product itself. I've quit those companies quickly.
ozzy6009 6y ago
Xenophon (c. 430 – 354 BC): 1. “Leaders must always set the highest standard. In a summer campaign, leaders must always endure their share of the sun and the heat and, in winter, the cold and the frost. In all labors, leaders must prove tireless if they want to enjoy the trust of their followers.” 2. "There is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt by those he leads, if, whatever he may have to preach, he shows himself best able to perform."
w0mbat 6y ago
I think there is actually a U-shaped curve here. Working for an expert engineer is fun because their expectations are in line with reality, and they don't compel you to solve problems in stupid ways or in the wrong order, because they know how things should work. In any case they understand when to help and when to delegate to you. Working for a bad engineer is the worst. They criticize smart or elegant solutions because they differ from the stupid way they would have done it. They try to dictate how everything is done because they think they know how, when all they really know is how to fuck things up. Working for a smart person from a completely different discipline is fun. Say if you are programming CGI special effects for a movie director. They have respect for your different expertise and defer to you when needed. They find joy in your work because to them it's a kind of magic. They don't tell you to solve problems in stupid ways or the wrong order because it's not their area. It's fun that they request impossible tasks sometimes, because working out how to get close to the impossible dream they are imagining is how you get to do your best most innovative work. Working for a inexperienced person from a different field is also fun. Although they don't know much, they know that, and won't dictate how your job should be done. They will still have appreciation of your expertise. They probably have unrealistic ideas about how long things take, and what is possible, but as long as they are willing to be guided, the project can still turn out OK. Their lack of knowledge of what's possible or how things normally work often leads them to come up with crazy new ideas, and working out how to make those real is my favorite thing.
florigator123 6y ago
Isn't this obvious? Just think about the converse: "employees are less happy when led by people who don't know anything about the matter at hand." Doesn't strike me as very insightful.
maxrev17 6y ago
True. Non technical managers can get in the sea. They're protecting their asses 99 percent of the time. Those who can, do.
ljw1001 6y ago
People also prefer people of their own race, gender, age group, etc. It would be remarkable if they didn’t prefer people of the same educational and work experience.
- bad_username 6y ago
  > People also prefer people of their own race, gender, age group Citation needed.
siliconc0w 6y ago
Deep expertise is absolutely crucial to properly scope projects, get the right requirements from stakeholders, understand level of effort and understand dependency trees. Basically ensuring that the objectives and work are well defined and the right engineers are working on the right pieces of it. I've seen projects fail for O(years) because the managers are not sufficiently technical to do this properly.
likeabbas 6y ago
Is anyone else so jaded because of bad managers that they don’t want to be managed? That’s how I feel. I’ve seen great engineer manager projects and tasks themselves, and the only use for a manager was to advocate for the promotion

691 points by mgh2 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

I was personally taught by the store manager of a supermarket how to sweep the floor and of course that built respect for him and the organization. (e.g. he knew how to do every little task like sweep the floor, cut meat in the deli, bake bread, etc.) The (now retied) director of the art museum at Cornell could be seen out in his suit passing out pamphlets for an exhibition together with students promoting clubs and concerts. Go to the exhibition and he'll personally give a talk about the art that will help you appreciate anything from a suit of Samurai armor to Mark Lombardi's conspiracy diagrams. It's nice to see the top guy, who performs like a top guy, doing the simple work.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
When I was in my teens, I got my first "real" job. It was working at a service station. The station was a part of a chain of dozens. The owner was a well-known local multimillionaire. For whatever reason, he happened to be at my station on my first day at work. He and I spent over an hour pumping gas, checking oil, doing an oil change, patching tires, and so forth. I learned a lot more than simply how to work at a service station that day. I continued working at that station for over a year. Never saw the guy again. As I recall, when I started he had stores over half-a-dozen states.
- musingsole 6y ago
  I love this story and the owner is exemplifying the moral behavior I'd want to if I were in that place... However, > Never saw the guy again. It doesn't scale. If you have the knack to build a company like that, eventually you won't be able to touch the front lines of what your company is doing. Hopefully, having that type of leadership at the top creates emulation all the way down, but still, it rings of "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain"
  - Layke1123 6y ago
    I disagree. If you are a leader in a field, and you have forgotten or no longer can do the work at the very lowest levels (for example, even something simply like mopping), you have lost an expertise that made you valuable in the first place.
  - hashkb 6y ago
    The legend scales infinitely. You don't have to pump every gallon of gas, or write every line of code. But if everyone knows that you can, will, and often do...
    - musingsole 6y ago
      > The legend scales infinitely. I think that's truer than you mean. The legend can scale, but the reality doesn't. Unfortunately I'm more interested in the latter.
      - hashkb 6y ago
        I know what I mean (-: At a certain point, you've got to stop pumping the gas. You want the company to outlive you. Gas needs to get pumped after you're gone. You fade into the background and replace yourself; others carry on your legacy. You cash out and ski six days a week or whatever. Edit: some legends are bullshit. Scale that up and it's called "toxic culture".
        musingsole 6y ago
        Yeah...you meant what you meant. I mean your words apply to things like Jesus.
        hashkb 6y ago
        That's a different kind of legend. Point taken, but I don't think that many companies I worked at we're cults. Half, tops.
      - 6y ago
afarrell 6y ago
There is a dichotomy here. If an individual contributor is unclear whom they report to or what the product strategy is, then seeing the CTO contribute to numpy is not comforting. As you say: > It's nice to see the top guy, who performs like a top guy, doing the simple work.
alchemism 6y ago
A 'good' sea captain will also exhibit this trait and step in to perform tasks of necessity. Since safety at sea comes in large part from 'simple work' being done rigorously, it is heartening to see the top man wiping down a slick deck to prevent the chance of accidents.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Don't forget the pirates/privateers of the caribbean. Captain was elected and removed at will by the crew. They freed slaves and distributed "wages" according to the level of contribution. The crews were diverse as hell. And they established a republic in Nassau...hundreds of years before the United States was formed. Of course, the companies (ships crew) robbed people and could be murderous at times, but the same could be said of "legitimate" less egalitarian companies of the time.
Wistar 6y ago
One day a few years ago as I was walking into the Kirkland, WA Costco, I noticed a familiar-looking older guy pushing a line of shopping carts in from the parking lot. It was James Sinegal, then CEO of Costco.
MarkLowenstein 6y ago
Joel Spolsky on his sergeant major, 3 paragraphs. One of those anecdotes that will stick with you forever. https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadership/ https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadershi... (Not the original source, but the most readable I found.)
sitkack 6y ago
Totally an aside, but I saw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi 's work (Vatican Bank Scandal) at the Portrait Gallery in DC, and it is absolutely fascinating.

helge9210 6y ago

"If Your Boss Could Do Your Job" Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department. My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.

matthewmcg 6y ago
It’s hard to see this happening with the rate structures that most firms use. Clients don’t want to pay partner level rates for junior associate work.
cameronbrown 6y ago
Then that boss is failing to scale his/her team properly. It's not really a point of pride if one person can singlehandedly replace all their reports, imo.
Supermancho 6y ago
> My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed. If your boss can do your work, has the time to do your work (eg there isn't enough work), the work doesn't need to be done in parallel, and can do similar quality work, and is willing to do that work, you're not needed. That's the takeaway, without oversimplification, which makes sense.
- markild 6y ago
  Agreed. If not, you could just as well have said "If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed." It's actually an interesting point that. Oversimplified a bit, I feel there are two different ways that people measure their worth in the workplace. There is "no one else can do what I do" and then there's "I make sure that everything I do can be done by someone else". Personally I much prefer the latter.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed. I can program in ASM, since I did it in college. That's a different assertion from "if a colleague can do your job, you're not needed". ASM programmers are still needed. Also, there's the whole "making a baby in 1 month with 9 wombs doesn't work".

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I don't mind if my boss can't do my job. I mind if my boss can't do my job AND tells me how I should do it. The major difference there is one is support and tracking, the other is just incompetent in all areas if management.

commandlinefan 6y ago
I don't know - in my experience as a programmer, when I work for somebody that's never worked as a programmer, they tend to estimate based on how long they wish something would take (which is usually an hour, two max). Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  And about how much small differences in assumptions and what was written in the ticket can impact development times.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  My experience with the > Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to time are far more realistic about how long something might take to complete. Is that they had huge egos and thought they could do everything in much less time than I could, or would just "put in the time to make sure it was done when it had to be" So nah, I prefer not having ex programmers as my manager.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    I have my supervisor and my lead I work under. My lead fortunately is very good and understanding of these things, but he also is kind of like that as well. My supervisor has absolutely no clue and just wants updates; thats all.
HenryBemis 6y ago
What if.. your boss doesn't know how to do your job, BUT he knows the requirements around it? E.g. I am an amateur coder. Anyone who has typed 3 pages of code without looking up on a book or a website, is x100 better than me. If someone decides to make me the leader of coders, I won't tell them "I command you to use this syntax over that paremeter (?)" (coz I'm like Jon Snow.. I know nothing), but I WILL tell them to a) take daily backups/use version control, b) write comments on your code, c) do daily huddles, d) sit in pairs and review each other's code, e) some bright ideas/suggestions that THEY will make, f) I will bust my ... and try to study as many books/blogs/resources to learn the area (and managing coders better), g) I will talk to as many coders (young and old) as I can to understand them and their needs better. Does that make me a good coder? Hell no! I didn't mention "read Java" in any of my aformentioned example. Will this make me a good manager? Well I have managed OTHER teams in & around IT.. why not coders? They are people too!

dandanua 6y ago

On the other hand, if your boss thinks he can do your job (and do it even better than you), while in fact he can't – you will get the worst nightmare.

Frost1x 6y ago
Is worst nightmare the new normal? Various levels of management often handwave away a task because they understand its function at a high level. True quality management requires a deeper understanding of what it is you're managing. I understand the function of creating, launching, and orbiting a satellite geosynchronously to do GPS so it's easy, right? Yea, not so much. I'm a firm believer that you need to understand everything at least one layer deeper than high level functional descriptions so you can start to reason about the difficulty or amount of skill needed to accomplish something. You understand the real problems (even if only at the surface) and know where opportunity lies. With a pure functional perspective many current managers have, you simply can't reasonably manage and plan and are instead a glorified resource scheduler with whims.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
noisy_boy 6y ago
I'll take it up a notch: all of the above + doesn't lift a finger and finds faults at everything you do. Add a bit of colonial superiority complex and its recipe for a job from hell.
- Sileni 6y ago
  And focuses most of their time and energy into brown nosing. Zero respect in either direction and an adversarial relationship by design any time you need resources from the company/higher-ups. /shudder
devoutsalsa 6y ago
Another nightmare is needing your boss' help & not getting it because your boss simply chooses not to help. Early in my dev career I ended up w/ an smart, unhelpful manager. They were the only person in the company w/ Scala experience, and I needed to touch a Scala service as a fairly green developer. I asked my boss for help, and was denied. I later found out that my boss had recommended against hiring me during my interview, and I was still placed on their team. I did not like that job & quit after a few months.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

Plenty of previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218

mgh2 6y ago
It is interesting to see new perspectives though, I am glad HN allows this after some time. Time changes everything.

nobleach 6y ago

My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead. With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having that role. With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas. I love knowing that our CEO is one heck of an inspiring guy but I don't want him meddling in engineering. I'm sure he's smart enough that he could figure it out, but that would be a waste of his talent. Right now, his brilliance is evident in the people he's put into leadership. They're all experts of their domain. This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding)

realityking 6y ago
My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them. The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.
caturopath 6y ago
> With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas...This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding) I think you're missing one thing here that makes it a little more analogous to your boss: not only should the CEO and your boss be good at their own jobs (e.g. securing funding), they should be good at their reports' jobs as well (just like yours is). Expertise that is 3+ layers down the org chart is completely irrelevant, of course, as you point out. There are executive situations where there's a lot of specialized knowledge one level below where this doesn't quite work, but that should garner lots of extra attention.

korginator 6y ago

Clickbaity and utterly misleading title. I expected very different content, but I agree with the gist of the article, in that the boss must be highly competent at *his* job, know what he's talking about and stay grounded in reality.

korginator 6y ago
The title of the post was changed after I submitted this comment. Earlier it was something like "if your boss could do your job, you're usually happier".

codegeek 6y ago

The boss "should" be able to do most of your job BUT they Should not need/want to. Good bosses understand the word "delegation" and that is what it takes to build a real team and company. I am a boss and I can do most of my team's work (whether efficient or not) but I don't want to because I have higher priority things to do to get the most out of my time. For example, I can code but I don't (well mostly). I have a team of developers. I focus more on customers (existing and prospective). But then again, I have customer support folks who help with daily requests so that I am not answering every support question myself. Can I ? You bet. Would I ? Not if I want to scale my company further. If shit hits the fan, sure I will talk to a customer but I trust my team to take care of them before it gets to me.

postalrat 6y ago
Is your work really higher priority or is it just your job?
p-sharma 6y ago
> For example, I can code Not saying that this is true in your case but I have seen this too often that managers think they can code just because they did it 10 years ago. It's surprisingly hard to write good code when you are not in practice.
ironmagma 6y ago
The part that really matters is that you can empathize with the work that is being done. The more distance you have between you and actually ever doing that kind of task, the less that empathy is. It’s the same as with customers — if you never do the user studies, you will not understand even if you once did.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

I couldnt agree more. A previous boss held a company wide meeting and everyone laid out their yearly goals. When he got to his it was something like establish channel partnerships. Very wishy washy and difficult to measure. I knew almost at that moment that I wasnt going to be at the company at the end of that year. He had decided his job was now to manage rather than do the job the rest of us were doing. At a certain point that may be effective but we were not at that point.

notahacker 6y ago

Since two of the measures of boss competence are entirely employee-rated the causality is likely to run both ways. i.e. regardless of their actual technical skill in your field and management abilities as assessed by others you are less likely to appraise your boss as competent at their own job and capable of doing your job if you're unhappy about the work they have asked you to do.

skeeter2020 6y ago

I think the conclusions miss the mark slightly and focus on a symptom of good bosses: they care about tasks from a state of understanding what is required to do them well, they have empathy for the challenges, and respect for the talent in completing them. Obviously the easiest way to get to this perspective is to experience it first-hand, hence the correlation between those who could do the job and being good managers of the job, but I don't see this as a requirement, just a common path. I also don't see this a refutation that we shouldn't hire good engineers into management, rather we shouldn't do this blindly and as the single criteria. My best managers were all top quartile engineers but probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover, and this inevitable consumes focus, effort and time that your best engineers don't want to allocate. I'm a relatively new engineering manager (~3 years) and wrote about the traits of a good development manager from my perspective here: https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20200204-four_qualities.html https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20200204-four_qualit...

geoduck14 6y ago
I like what you wrote because it makes me feel better about my own short comings. But is it actually true?
- random314 6y ago
  Very often when folks describe the ideal manager, they are describing themselves.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I am fairly confident I would agree with myself, so this makes sense. At the very least our scheduling would start being based on reality, not what we’d like it to be.
skohan 6y ago
> probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is justified. From my perspective, as a relatively new technical manager who also spent years as an engineer working with technical managers, it's not only about empathy but also about having a thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate intuition around the subject matter. When I was working as an engineer, what I often found frustrating about working with non-technical managers is that they often work on the wrong set of parameters. Discussions often revolve around details which are not really important to the success of the project, or are relevant to the work, and often the team is led down a more difficult path than is necessary because requirements are set in the wrong terms. I think it's possible to compensate to some degree with empathy and people skills, but it's hard to compete with having the experience and speaking the language.

whydoineedone 6y ago

I certainly feel this way. There are too many MBA-types who aren't really competent at the low-level technical work they manage and don't really even have an understanding of it. It's hard for me not to be resentful about it. I know that's my own ego talking but it's the truth. I changed my career trajectory to avoid folks like that

sokoloff 6y ago

The more junior you are, the more likely it is that not only can your boss do your job, they can do it better than you can. The more senior you become, the less likely that is to be the case. How many CEOs could do all of the CFO, COO, CTO, and General Counsel's jobs? Zero. How many programming team leads can do the junior programmer's job? Basically/hopefully all of them.

notacoward 6y ago
The more senior you become, the more you should focus on being one of the leaders yourself instead of staying in individual-contributor mode. If that means you outstrip your own boss's expertise it might mean less personal satisfaction for you (been there done that) but can still improve satisfaction for the team as a whole.
speby 6y ago
This ... it is a total fantasy to think that the leader(s) of a company are somehow aware of all of the work that is entailed by every job in the company. For really small companies, or junior employees with a line manager, that may be true. But as you said, the more senior you become, things completely change. There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  The comment said that your boss can likely do your job, not that everyone more senior than you can.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales, tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal). It's impossible. Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of small business owners every month.
  - 6y ago

staunch 6y ago

Steve Jobs was probably the best team builder in tech (and maybe business) history with Apple v1, NeXT, and then Apple v2 and he learned this lesson well. "We went through that stage at Apple where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re going to be a big company, let’s go out and hire professional management.’ We went out and hired a bunch of professional management; it didn’t work at all. Most of them were Bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to DO anything. If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you cannot learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting - you know what the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able to do as good job as them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q

kmonsen 6y ago
I do think you can get the worst managers that way as well, and jobs at some points was one of the worst. You do need empathy and ways of handling underperformers that is not screaming at them hoping things will get better.

j_walter 6y ago

This is no surprise really. Any major company promotes managers from within unless they have a lot of industry experience. A bank manager would have a hard time being a manager at any FANNG company (on the engineering side at least) no matter how good they are with people...you have to have at least some in depth understanding of what the company and department does. The best engineers don't usually make the best managers either because they have a hard time giving up control. Good managers let their staff do their jobs and give them the tools needed to excel (including mentoring and coaching).

yeswecatan 6y ago
I was actually looking forward to giving up some control as I became a manager. Unfortunately, we haven't hired anybody to fill the day to day void I left so I'm still doing my old job + now managing a small team.
- vsgzusnex 6y ago
  Then maybe your job right now should be hiring?
  - yeswecatan 6y ago
    It should be. Our recruiters haven't found any good for months.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Get a linkedin login and start looking. Seems like recruiting either are focused on other teams, or don't have enough context. Both of those can be helped by you doing some lead generation.
    - aszen 6y ago
      what are u looking for exactly, a good place to attract talented developers is to post jobs on some slack workspaces, many programming languages/frameworks have dedicated slack work spaces where enthusiast developers like to hang out. i find that people in smaller communities have richer technical skills and often are easier to work with

hinkley 6y ago

Like the Senate, you often need someone who can break ties. A team with an even number of technical people can get deadlocked on a decision. If the boss can’t or won’t step in, it can make for a miserable experience.

jrockway 6y ago
If I've learned anything from watching the Senate, it's that 51/49 doesn't drive forward progress. Those 49 will do everything in their power to undermine the 51. If you find your team deadlocked on decisions and you think the way forward is to find a tie-breaking vote, I have bad news for you.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Work is not a democracy but some difficult decisions have to be. I think a lot of the time the arrow points the other way. A boss who can’t or won’t make decisions when pushed to do so also creates an environment where deciding is difficult. Often all it takes is a qualitative comment that one could mistake for leadership, and the guy who won’t be accountable for any decisions is not leading anybody.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Yeah. Making a decision is the first step, but the life of the decision after it's made is vitally important. You can look at Congress getting stuff passed with split votes, but you can also see the other side digging in to undermine the decision. The Affordable Care Act is an example; it passed, it was implemented, but the Republicans are in court every month with a new challenge. I think you want to aim for consensus building that doesn't have half of the stakeholders spending 100% of their time to get your decision reversed, basically. Maybe it's impossible to build a consensus, and you have to act. That's the value in the tie-breaking vote, and that's what Congress does. But we shouldn't try to model getting things done at work as an epic battle between Blue and Red. That level of polarization is toxic. Maybe Congress can't fix that problem, because they represent 328,000,000 people, but we can aim for something better in a smaller group.

crispyambulance 6y ago

Of course people are happier when they're lead by AN ACTUAL LEADER rather than by some a-hole who just "manages tasks" PM-BOK style! I swear, some of the articles in HBR should just be sub-titled: "STUFF YOUR MAMMA TAUGHT YOU BUT YOU FORGOT WHILE GETTING YOUR MBA"

sitkack 6y ago
The M in MBA stands for Monkey or Money, or both.

wly_cdgr 6y ago

Lol. DUH

Hotple 6y ago

Emotional labor can be really taxing, and I think it's sometimes underrepresented as a stressor in people's lives.

subsubzero 6y ago

Having had some absolutely horrible managers in tech the worst usually are the ones with lower technical expertise. The reason being is mainly related to understanding scope of work and the complexities of said projects. That being said I also have had other really bad managers who were star IC's that were promoted to mgmt as they really had no where else to go in their career. These managers usually are clueless on dealing with people and other teams.

caturopath 6y ago
Given the right support, I've seen lower-knowledge managers really do well. I think a lot of the worse situations I've seen were when someone didn't realize their technical judgement was inapplicable or rusty, and that they needed to defer to their experts. This is tricky, of course -- for low-level managers with typical engineer IC reports especially, it's super common for them not to have a single report whose judgement they can trust.

vdddv 6y ago

very little information given on who is behind that site. One name, linking to one twitter account with very little on it

nashashmi 6y ago

Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise who share their knowledge and help others grow. It’s missing key words

nine_zeros 6y ago
+1 Star ICs who went into management but can't leave tech could end up micromanaging or just being an aloof unhelpful resource.

oytis 6y ago

From my personal experience, when people wish their manager was more technically capable, it indicates some management failure. I am currently managed by a person who although has a technical background but for a long time is only doing management, so definitely can't do my job. And it is totally fine, because he's not making any technical decisions, these are made by technically excellent people. Examples of management failures that I have seen on the other hand involve product managers and/or people with sales attitude playing product designers or solution engineer's roles. That doesn't end well and creates a lot of conflict between the management and the technical people.

benja123 6y ago

From my experience you don’t need a manager to necessarily be an expert in their field, but it certainly does help. When a manager lacks the expertise then what it comes down to is how much a manager is, 1. Willing to work hard to gain the necessary knowledge to be effective in their job, 2. Listen to their subordinates on matters they are less knowledgeable about and displaying a deep interest in truly understanding it. What I have noticed is that if a non expert manager is not willing to do these two things what usually happens is they become yes men/women for upper management. They will agree to commitments that the team can’t necessarily meet (or in some cases will require them to work overtime), other times they will make the team cut corners or do things that are going to create a lot of problems down the road. When it comes to cleaning up the mess that was created, they have already moved onto to their next role leaving the clean up to their old reports and the next manager. A manager that is an expert in the field they work in can do just as much damage as a non expert manager when they micro manager everything leaving little opportunities for growth.

deleted 6y ago

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airhead969 6y ago

I think we should deconflict managers from leaders. Managers are people who facilitate employees' productivity and HR matters, whereas leaders trail-blaze priorities, philosophy, and mentor towards the actual work. The issue is trying to make a senior leader into both a leader and a manager, when these are very different skillsets and both take a great deal of time. IMO, it's better to do like Google by having managers that aren't micromanaging tasks but are there to provide assistance. tl;dr: Let the leaders lead and the managers manage. It's nice when one person can do both well, but that's an unreasonable expectation for the amount of work involved.

LegitGandalf 6y ago

Not only that, but if tech matters to the company, and it increasingly does these days, the broader organization really needs to have some technical savvy in order to avoid a bunch of anti-patterns that are running wild in non-tech savvy organizations: * Setting bad expectations with stakeholders and customers * Taking on bad opportunities, committing the organization to unnecessary technical debt for no monetary gain * Fracturing teams across competing opportunities * Top down decrees issued from abstraction that causes organizational thrashing * Decisions made in abstraction with no understanding of the stubborn technical constraints that block fruition

datavirtue 6y ago

At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers who were by far the least pretentious managers. Everyone else was under someone from the encient GE Taylorist philosophy of "a good manager can run anything." Very painful uphill battle on anything because you literally had to translate everything into a message that informed them of how it was going to make them look good and advance their career. They simply don't understand or care about the work/product/customer. You could literally build amazing shit with a lot of support from colleagues etc and it didn't interest them because they had no foundation to recognize the potential. If you did manage to have one or two of your managers (I had five-ish) that did see the impact potential the rest of the hierarchy or "matrix" would smother it. Not to mention the clueless (horizontal) scrum masters.

fallingfrog 6y ago

Part of the problem is that a manager brought in without any relevant experience will often see their job as an exercise in making numbers bigger- they will attempt to cut costs and increase revenue in the short term without understanding which costs are really important or what the revenue is based on. This leads to brief increases in profit margins followed by customers fleeing to the competition, which the manager responds to with another round of cost cutting. Even worse, the lack of deep understanding means that the manager cannot distinguish good ideas from bad ones, and often cannot distinguish talent from bluster, leading to poor hiring decisions and directionless leadership. Everyone knows that putting a untrained business major in charge of a squadron of soldiers would end badly. He might be able skate by until they got into combat, maybe, but after that they wouldn’t listen to him for long. But for some reason we think that putting an mba in charge of an engineering team is a good idea.

poxwole 6y ago

Duh!

loopz 6y ago

What's the contrary point? Employees most happy being led by clueless, ignorant, inactive managers who throw them under the bus?

amznbyebyebye 6y ago

Wow news just in, employees are happy with competent managers. What. A. Surprise.

cwkoss 6y ago

In Japanese, 'Jyozu', the word for "good at doing ___", is the same as the word for "likes to do ___". I think the idea that these two distinct English concepts are in fact the same is very interesting. Perhaps a significant effect is that people with deep expertise tend to be much more passionate about their job, because without passion they could not have developed deep expertise.

zora_goron 6y ago

I wonder if part of this includes a possible correlation between deep expertise and enthusiasm/passion for the subject matter, which is passed on throughout the team.

Spooky23 6y ago

It’s fairly obvious but surprising coming from HBR. If you’re in a leadership position, you generally get there by being a subject matter expert, a professional manager (ie money person) or an attorney. Being able to walk a mile in someone’s shoes means a lot.

jonplackett 6y ago

‘Employees happier working for people with little expertise’ is a ridiculous statement so I’m not sure how this could come as any news to anyone.

toolslive 6y ago

combine this with Putt's law, and you understand hell. "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand." Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion." with incompetence being "flushed out of the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that technically competent people remain directly in charge of the actual technology while those without technical competence move into management. have fun ;)

dalu 6y ago

Captain Obvious sends his regards

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 - Jan 2017 (238 comments)

jordache 6y ago

I think this sentiment only applies to line level tech managers, where it's likely conceivable for that manager to be close to the work done by subordinates. If you got higher in the org, the focus of managers become more strategic and process oriented, with stronger alignment with the business side of things.

Jerry2 6y ago

Personally, I would never work for a manager that had no skills other than "management" skills. I've been in a few organizations where every manager is hired from the outside and installed and they have no expertise in the area or the product itself. I've quit those companies quickly.

ozzy6009 6y ago

Xenophon (c. 430 – 354 BC): 1. “Leaders must always set the highest standard. In a summer campaign, leaders must always endure their share of the sun and the heat and, in winter, the cold and the frost. In all labors, leaders must prove tireless if they want to enjoy the trust of their followers.” 2. "There is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt by those he leads, if, whatever he may have to preach, he shows himself best able to perform."

w0mbat 6y ago

I think there is actually a U-shaped curve here. Working for an expert engineer is fun because their expectations are in line with reality, and they don't compel you to solve problems in stupid ways or in the wrong order, because they know how things should work. In any case they understand when to help and when to delegate to you. Working for a bad engineer is the worst. They criticize smart or elegant solutions because they differ from the stupid way they would have done it. They try to dictate how everything is done because they think they know how, when all they really know is how to fuck things up. Working for a smart person from a completely different discipline is fun. Say if you are programming CGI special effects for a movie director. They have respect for your different expertise and defer to you when needed. They find joy in your work because to them it's a kind of magic. They don't tell you to solve problems in stupid ways or the wrong order because it's not their area. It's fun that they request impossible tasks sometimes, because working out how to get close to the impossible dream they are imagining is how you get to do your best most innovative work. Working for a inexperienced person from a different field is also fun. Although they don't know much, they know that, and won't dictate how your job should be done. They will still have appreciation of your expertise. They probably have unrealistic ideas about how long things take, and what is possible, but as long as they are willing to be guided, the project can still turn out OK. Their lack of knowledge of what's possible or how things normally work often leads them to come up with crazy new ideas, and working out how to make those real is my favorite thing.

florigator123 6y ago

Isn't this obvious? Just think about the converse: "employees are less happy when led by people who don't know anything about the matter at hand." Doesn't strike me as very insightful.

maxrev17 6y ago

True. Non technical managers can get in the sea. They're protecting their asses 99 percent of the time. Those who can, do.

ljw1001 6y ago

People also prefer people of their own race, gender, age group, etc. It would be remarkable if they didn’t prefer people of the same educational and work experience.

bad_username 6y ago
> People also prefer people of their own race, gender, age group Citation needed.

siliconc0w 6y ago

Deep expertise is absolutely crucial to properly scope projects, get the right requirements from stakeholders, understand level of effort and understand dependency trees. Basically ensuring that the objectives and work are well defined and the right engineers are working on the right pieces of it. I've seen projects fail for O(years) because the managers are not sufficiently technical to do this properly.

likeabbas 6y ago

Is anyone else so jaded because of bad managers that they don’t want to be managed? That’s how I feel. I’ve seen great engineer manager projects and tasks themselves, and the only use for a manager was to advocate for the promotion