5 ms·

Ask HN: Do you often feel like your superiors are not better/smarter than you?

• mgsurti 5y ago
  yes
• perilunar 5y ago
  No. I've never had a boss that was smarter than me, but I've had plenty that were more knowledgeable, experienced, or wiser. Don't think of bosses/managers as 'superiors', but as colleagues.
  • aristofun 5y ago
    So you never had a boss that were less knowledgeable, experienced, or wiser?
    • perilunar 5y ago
      Never all three at once! There's always been a good reason they were my manager. But I never treat managers like they're the boss — always as an equal.
• fiftyacorn 5y ago
  The issue is often not realising that they have different skills and priorities from stakeholders that may not make immediate sense to you
  • aristofun 5y ago
    Have you ever felt this way or you always realize these things?
• deanmoriarty 5y ago
  I felt it often. In many cases, I stay for their network. Most of my bosses were always way more connected than myself, and working for them and making them successful leveraging what I could do better than them (tech/analytical skills) made it possible for me to ride their tail and get pulled in nice future opportunities as they moved forward in their career, even across different companies, and decided to bring me along. Many times with minimal/bogus interview processes since I came "highly recommended by the VP". It has probably been what defined my career in terms of success. In some other cases, I also worked with bosses that were just better than me under any professional dimension you could imagine: technical skills, soft skills, business acumen, wisdom, experience, ...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• _benj 5y ago
  I've felt that too until I once decided to take a look at what would it be like to be in their shoes. Now I have a huge admiration towards my PM and engineering manager. Writing code by itself doesn't make money, and keeping people content and productive is not an accident either! So yeah, different people do different things and usually better/smarter is kind of like comparing if an apple is better than a pen. They are just different.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Yes, but so what? He has to deal directly with the owner of the company, heads of other departments, any HR issues, etc and I don't. He can keep his money and position.
• CRConrad 5y ago
  > [W]hat makes you continue working for/with them? Nothing. Except money.
• zn44 5y ago
  I'm a boss (founder & CTO) and I consider my reportees often equal or superior to me on many aspects of our work. The main reason i'm in my possition is willingness and confidence to take the risk and start a business living of savings.
  • aristofun 5y ago
    This is pretty obvious but still great explanation of the business owner position. But i'm curious more about bottom-middle management level. In most of the tech companies i know they don't bear any additional risks.
    • zn44 5y ago
      Fair I guess on that note I've promoted people to managers that other didn't considered lesser or equal from technical stand point. Usually reason for that promotions were either better product/business sense, more clear ambitions and a bit of luck for joining early enough. I've observed that feeling that the middle manager is not great relates to whatever subordinate is great at, let's say one is great architect and knows everything about aws and manager doesn't. But the subordinate doesn't event realise strengths of the manager in understanding underlying business value, managing stakeholders, and enough technical knowledge to make right tradeoff to deliver business impact. One successful experiment we did in our team was to share majority off manager project responsibilities with IC developers for specific projects. The resulting comment from IC to manager was: 'wow I honestly thought you just slack off all day, now I understand how difficult your work is'
• dingusthemingus 5y ago
  I dont really think of my higher up colleagues as smart or dumb, i think that some of them have relevant experience and some dont really, and different managers have different personalities which is what impacts trying to work together to solve a problem. For example, some managers like to give you their proposed plan without wanting any input, these people require pushing back in some situations, you could call it poor emotional intelligence, other managers are much more open to suggestions considering me and the underlings will be doing the work, even though managers inital plan is often correct as previous experience justifies their proposed solution. But yea i dont really doubt the intelligence of people really unless they continue to repeat mistakes and fail to remedy those mistakes.
• joshxyz 5y ago
  privately? of course the narcissistic me is better. publicly? oh dear im cool with them thinking they're better. they are superiors for a reason. they have bigger picture of things than me, and have more responsibilities than me. im just a cog in the machine doing the bare minimum to survive.