6 ms·

Any chance you can provide some examples for issues you've encountered "behind the scenes"?

tibbar 5y ago
Not GP, but one example is protecting developers from pressure from higher up. When you’re a manager, you’re going to get lots of explicit or implicit questions like “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?” And you know that the new dev has been on boarding and that docs aren’t so good and that his velocity is actually reasonable, and you basically stand in the gap between your engineers and the sharks in upper management. That’s what it was like for me, anyway. I’m an IC again now…
- delusional 5y ago
  Isn't that exactly what the OP is saying though. That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not that the manager is bad because he's an idiot. It's that what the system asks of the manager doesn't actually make anything better.
  - extr 5y ago
    The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them that they're building the right things...I would be asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - q-big 5y ago
      > When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.
      - gmadsen 5y ago
        at a certain size, it is inevitable. you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone. There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy. its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling. Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates. small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        "shh" - The management
      - cloverich 5y ago
        That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
        > I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult. Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.
  - mylons 5y ago
    i totally agree with you. i think if you were a small product focused company, you could conceivably have engineers with a PM, and cut it off at that. why a PM? because talking to the customer and getting that feedback is a must, and potentially offloading that to someone specifically as their role sounds like a good separation of labor.
    - learc83 5y ago
      If I had my way, I’d get rid of the PM title and call them Customer Advocates. It’s fine for non technical customer liaisons to have input, but putting non technical people in charge of a product doesn’t tend to work well in my experience.
  - GabeIsko 5y ago
    Yeah, I think it's not so much the middle management that's the problem, but as you get higher and higher up a large company, and more abstracted from the actual work being done, there are a lot of demands for leadership. But our culture (at least in the US) kind of assumes that founders are special, ultra-people on the basis of them founding a company and providing jobs for everyone. In my actual experience, most of them are just characters ranging from the eccentric to the idiotic. It does take a lot of vision and leadership to successfully run a large company. Unfortunately, I would argue, we tolerate a lot of unsuccessful companies.
  - cle 5y ago
    No it's not fake work, someone has to watch the organizational health, to make sure business goals can be met. Managers report up to other managers because one person can only do so much, and can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.
    - sigstoat 5y ago
      > can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people. indeed. i can't figure out what sort of organizations all of these "omg get rid of middle management" folks have worked for. if you've got piles of middle management who only have a few reports each, well, sure, that's not great because now they've got too much time on their hands to pester you. but the other direction is no good, either. i've seen a VP with 45 direct reports before. he didn't get much done, and shed bodies as fast as he could hire new ones. he didn't know anything about any of his people, and they didn't bother trying to take their problems to him, they just quit.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    ...sort of. I'm in this role myself, and I think a lot of middle management positions could at least in theory be eliminated. But it would require 'Developer Z' from the above example to have those uncomfortable conversations with management himself. Would that be a stressful distraction from the work he needs to accomplish? Almost certainly. Could it be a net savings for the company? Yes, iff the right processes/culture were in place. Since taking this position I've started to think of middle managers as human lubrication on the gears of bureaucracy. The better the gears fit together, the fewer of us are needed. Unfortunately, we're not really incentivised to make ourselves useless, so designing better gears isn't something a lot of us spend time on. And I don't know how one could properly incentivise a whole class of mid-seniority people to work themselves out of a job.
    - tracerbulletx 5y ago
      If you've ever worked as a software developer in a small company you might have found yourself being both a developer and directly reporting to what constitutes upper management at a small company, often the owner or president of the company. I was in this situation early on in my career and managing the business side absolutely becomes a whole job, but also I think I did my best work and had a bigger impact of any job I had after because I was directly owning the outcomes of software I was writing. (Of course doing both well is incredibly challenging and often ends up resulting in poor software quality, or poor engagement with management) But it's pretty exhilarating if you can pull it off and maintain a high standard of quality.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not, though. On the management side, you quickly learn that teams range from proactive (will get the job done without having to ask twice) to the most mind-bogglingly slow group of people you've ever worked with. If you're not constantly asking questions to understand each situation further, the latter group will abuse their lack of oversight to no end. It doesn't make sense if you've always been responsible and ethical yourself, and you've always been surrounded by responsible and ethical people. But once you get into management, you realize that you can't count on everyone being honest like yourself. A small but troublesome minority of employees will take full advantage of any slack you give. It doesn't mean you should make the situation bad for your high performers (common mistake), but it does mean that you do need to ask questions to understand what's going on when things are falling behind. In the above example, the next management move would be to understand why the onboarding was so slow and to allocate some resources to fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Something that wouldn't happen if management hadn't started digging in to understand.
- scotty79 5y ago
  > “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?” Is it protecting developers though? Or rather protecting higher ups from direct consequences of their crassness and cluelessness? If in absence of middle manager, the upper manager said something like that to me he would have my resignation next day on his desk, along with a request for a raise and strongly worded demand to accept one of those documents.
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    maybe it can be worded nicer, but this attitude seems myopic. Business people need to do business. Accounting does not operate on the swe/self declared tech artisan mindset of taking offense to any questions regarding timelines. just give them the information they want. If they don't like the truth, that is a different issue. They are asking you, because you have more intimate knowledge of the situation.
  - woofcat 5y ago
    Maybe you're a super in demand developer in a super hot job market. However for lots of people they don't have the option of quitting on the spot over someone asking a very direct question. So yes the Manager is protecting them, and helping set expectations for the higher ups. Replace higher up with Customer and you get the same system. Customer demands something unreasonable, that doesn't get filtered to the team that is working on that feature as it's just a distraction to them. Let them do the job and execute on the roadmap as planned.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      I was just directly told that I was specifically hired to do this project that is behind schedule and important and they have no idea how to make it go faster (because they are bugging me) so they don't have another person that could do my job and they can't afford delay it even further to look for a person to replace me. If there's a better moment to negotiate, I don't know what it might be. Would hearing this be distracting for me? Sure it would be. But it's not me who would get to pay for my distractions. So it's 100% of protecting higher ups not developers.
jasondigitized 5y ago
Budget cuts / pressure. Justifying headcount. Justifying value of the team. VIP requests for stupid reports / features / meetings. Questions about schedule, scope, etc. Politics. Stupid meetings. Stupid emails. Good managers will shield you from all of this. A good manager will let you work and create the perception that everything is ok above him, when in reality its a series of constant battles and high stakes poker.
GuB-42 5y ago
Endless negotiations with higher ups, customers,... Finding a way to fill the gap when the guy who everyone relies on just left. Find some work to do when things are slow, and make rushes more manageable. Take estimates from different people, all unreliable, the availability for their teams, and make a somewhat realistic planning. Convert developer time into money and plan a budget. Find the correct methodology and customize it (doing things "by the book" never works). The more I work as a developer, the more I appreciate the work of good managers, and the less I want to do it.
- fouric 5y ago
  > good managers And that's the key - good managers. Now, I think that it's pretty hard for most people to identify good vs bad managers, and that's why a lot of people who aren't sensitive to the difference get into the mindset of "management is a bunch of toxic leeches who don't add any value to the company". Interestingly enough, it's also pretty hard for most people to identify good an bad developers - but most people aren't developers. It's far easier for those that are. This raises an interesting question - is it harder for managers to identify bad managers than it is for developers to identify bad developers? What about the ease of developers identifying bad managers vs managers identifying bad developers? I wouldn't be surprised if it's harder to recognize good/bad managers - management is all about abstracting away the stuff under you for the next level up, after all. But, I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem comes down to something else other than identification - maybe bad managers are more prone to keep bad managers around than bad programmers are to keep other bad programmers around... It's at times like this that I wish that I had more experience in the corporate world...
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
I just moved back to IC from manager. Communication between teams on feature alignment (read: tons of meetings), planning my team's sprint workload, dealing with other manager's politics/bullshit, dealing with Directors political bullshit, etc. It's a huge time sink away from actual engineering.
Ironlikebike 5y ago
I'm not the OP but I'll describe a "behind the scenes" situation I dealt with. I inherited a team of seven working on a project. They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value). He'd been running the project for a long time by the time I inherited the team. One of the upper level folks gave me a call on Thursday and said, "In the operations call on Wednesday I'm going to propose killing that project because it's gone off the rails. We can use the money elsewhere. Just giving you a heads up". I spent the weekend figuring out how to pivot the majority of the staff into other projects, use staffing as-needed to develop features for business need, and provide a minimal maintenance budget. I called the guy who wanted to kill it on Monday, presented the plan, and he said he'd sign off on it. When I told the lead that the project will need to change he was outraged. He accused me of abandoning free software blah blah blah. I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do. Save the day by investing your free time into making things work, then collect outrage anyway. Management in a nutshell! Great anecdote. > They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value). I've dealt with someone similar. It's strange how certain people can work their way into management while actively fighting against the company's mission. Of course, it doesn't work out well for themselves, the company, or the team they manage.
- rtlfe 5y ago
  > I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team Why not tell them?
  - 5y ago

Not GP, but one example is protecting developers from pressure from higher up. When you’re a manager, you’re going to get lots of explicit or implicit questions like “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?” And you know that the new dev has been on boarding and that docs aren’t so good and that his velocity is actually reasonable, and you basically stand in the gap between your engineers and the sharks in upper management. That’s what it was like for me, anyway. I’m an IC again now…

delusional 5y ago
Isn't that exactly what the OP is saying though. That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not that the manager is bad because he's an idiot. It's that what the system asks of the manager doesn't actually make anything better.
- extr 5y ago
  The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them that they're building the right things...I would be asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - q-big 5y ago
    > When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.
    - gmadsen 5y ago
      at a certain size, it is inevitable. you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone. There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy. its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling. Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates. small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      "shh" - The management
    - cloverich 5y ago
      That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      > I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult. Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.
- mylons 5y ago
  i totally agree with you. i think if you were a small product focused company, you could conceivably have engineers with a PM, and cut it off at that. why a PM? because talking to the customer and getting that feedback is a must, and potentially offloading that to someone specifically as their role sounds like a good separation of labor.
  - learc83 5y ago
    If I had my way, I’d get rid of the PM title and call them Customer Advocates. It’s fine for non technical customer liaisons to have input, but putting non technical people in charge of a product doesn’t tend to work well in my experience.
- GabeIsko 5y ago
  Yeah, I think it's not so much the middle management that's the problem, but as you get higher and higher up a large company, and more abstracted from the actual work being done, there are a lot of demands for leadership. But our culture (at least in the US) kind of assumes that founders are special, ultra-people on the basis of them founding a company and providing jobs for everyone. In my actual experience, most of them are just characters ranging from the eccentric to the idiotic. It does take a lot of vision and leadership to successfully run a large company. Unfortunately, I would argue, we tolerate a lot of unsuccessful companies.
- cle 5y ago
  No it's not fake work, someone has to watch the organizational health, to make sure business goals can be met. Managers report up to other managers because one person can only do so much, and can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.
  - sigstoat 5y ago
    > can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people. indeed. i can't figure out what sort of organizations all of these "omg get rid of middle management" folks have worked for. if you've got piles of middle management who only have a few reports each, well, sure, that's not great because now they've got too much time on their hands to pester you. but the other direction is no good, either. i've seen a VP with 45 direct reports before. he didn't get much done, and shed bodies as fast as he could hire new ones. he didn't know anything about any of his people, and they didn't bother trying to take their problems to him, they just quit.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  ...sort of. I'm in this role myself, and I think a lot of middle management positions could at least in theory be eliminated. But it would require 'Developer Z' from the above example to have those uncomfortable conversations with management himself. Would that be a stressful distraction from the work he needs to accomplish? Almost certainly. Could it be a net savings for the company? Yes, iff the right processes/culture were in place. Since taking this position I've started to think of middle managers as human lubrication on the gears of bureaucracy. The better the gears fit together, the fewer of us are needed. Unfortunately, we're not really incentivised to make ourselves useless, so designing better gears isn't something a lot of us spend time on. And I don't know how one could properly incentivise a whole class of mid-seniority people to work themselves out of a job.
  - tracerbulletx 5y ago
    If you've ever worked as a software developer in a small company you might have found yourself being both a developer and directly reporting to what constitutes upper management at a small company, often the owner or president of the company. I was in this situation early on in my career and managing the business side absolutely becomes a whole job, but also I think I did my best work and had a bigger impact of any job I had after because I was directly owning the outcomes of software I was writing. (Of course doing both well is incredibly challenging and often ends up resulting in poor software quality, or poor engagement with management) But it's pretty exhilarating if you can pull it off and maintain a high standard of quality.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not, though. On the management side, you quickly learn that teams range from proactive (will get the job done without having to ask twice) to the most mind-bogglingly slow group of people you've ever worked with. If you're not constantly asking questions to understand each situation further, the latter group will abuse their lack of oversight to no end. It doesn't make sense if you've always been responsible and ethical yourself, and you've always been surrounded by responsible and ethical people. But once you get into management, you realize that you can't count on everyone being honest like yourself. A small but troublesome minority of employees will take full advantage of any slack you give. It doesn't mean you should make the situation bad for your high performers (common mistake), but it does mean that you do need to ask questions to understand what's going on when things are falling behind. In the above example, the next management move would be to understand why the onboarding was so slow and to allocate some resources to fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Something that wouldn't happen if management hadn't started digging in to understand.
scotty79 5y ago
> “you have X headcount now, why are we behind on this project? Developer Z was specifically hired for this - is he just goofing off?” Is it protecting developers though? Or rather protecting higher ups from direct consequences of their crassness and cluelessness? If in absence of middle manager, the upper manager said something like that to me he would have my resignation next day on his desk, along with a request for a raise and strongly worded demand to accept one of those documents.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  maybe it can be worded nicer, but this attitude seems myopic. Business people need to do business. Accounting does not operate on the swe/self declared tech artisan mindset of taking offense to any questions regarding timelines. just give them the information they want. If they don't like the truth, that is a different issue. They are asking you, because you have more intimate knowledge of the situation.
- woofcat 5y ago
  Maybe you're a super in demand developer in a super hot job market. However for lots of people they don't have the option of quitting on the spot over someone asking a very direct question. So yes the Manager is protecting them, and helping set expectations for the higher ups. Replace higher up with Customer and you get the same system. Customer demands something unreasonable, that doesn't get filtered to the team that is working on that feature as it's just a distraction to them. Let them do the job and execute on the roadmap as planned.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    I was just directly told that I was specifically hired to do this project that is behind schedule and important and they have no idea how to make it go faster (because they are bugging me) so they don't have another person that could do my job and they can't afford delay it even further to look for a person to replace me. If there's a better moment to negotiate, I don't know what it might be. Would hearing this be distracting for me? Sure it would be. But it's not me who would get to pay for my distractions. So it's 100% of protecting higher ups not developers.

jasondigitized 5y ago

Budget cuts / pressure. Justifying headcount. Justifying value of the team. VIP requests for stupid reports / features / meetings. Questions about schedule, scope, etc. Politics. Stupid meetings. Stupid emails. Good managers will shield you from all of this. A good manager will let you work and create the perception that everything is ok above him, when in reality its a series of constant battles and high stakes poker.

GuB-42 5y ago

Endless negotiations with higher ups, customers,... Finding a way to fill the gap when the guy who everyone relies on just left. Find some work to do when things are slow, and make rushes more manageable. Take estimates from different people, all unreliable, the availability for their teams, and make a somewhat realistic planning. Convert developer time into money and plan a budget. Find the correct methodology and customize it (doing things "by the book" never works). The more I work as a developer, the more I appreciate the work of good managers, and the less I want to do it.

fouric 5y ago
> good managers And that's the key - good managers. Now, I think that it's pretty hard for most people to identify good vs bad managers, and that's why a lot of people who aren't sensitive to the difference get into the mindset of "management is a bunch of toxic leeches who don't add any value to the company". Interestingly enough, it's also pretty hard for most people to identify good an bad developers - but most people aren't developers. It's far easier for those that are. This raises an interesting question - is it harder for managers to identify bad managers than it is for developers to identify bad developers? What about the ease of developers identifying bad managers vs managers identifying bad developers? I wouldn't be surprised if it's harder to recognize good/bad managers - management is all about abstracting away the stuff under you for the next level up, after all. But, I also wouldn't be surprised if the problem comes down to something else other than identification - maybe bad managers are more prone to keep bad managers around than bad programmers are to keep other bad programmers around... It's at times like this that I wish that I had more experience in the corporate world...

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

I just moved back to IC from manager. Communication between teams on feature alignment (read: tons of meetings), planning my team's sprint workload, dealing with other manager's politics/bullshit, dealing with Directors political bullshit, etc. It's a huge time sink away from actual engineering.

Ironlikebike 5y ago

I'm not the OP but I'll describe a "behind the scenes" situation I dealt with. I inherited a team of seven working on a project. They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value). He'd been running the project for a long time by the time I inherited the team. One of the upper level folks gave me a call on Thursday and said, "In the operations call on Wednesday I'm going to propose killing that project because it's gone off the rails. We can use the money elsewhere. Just giving you a heads up". I spent the weekend figuring out how to pivot the majority of the staff into other projects, use staffing as-needed to develop features for business need, and provide a minimal maintenance budget. I called the guy who wanted to kill it on Monday, presented the plan, and he said he'd sign off on it. When I told the lead that the project will need to change he was outraged. He accused me of abandoning free software blah blah blah. I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team by working 32 hours on my weekend and finding them other work to do. Save the day by investing your free time into making things work, then collect outrage anyway. Management in a nutshell! Great anecdote. > They were led by a very strong personality who led the project based on his principles (he was interested in funneling as much corporate money into "free software" as possible while resisting delivery of business value). I've dealt with someone similar. It's strange how certain people can work their way into management while actively fighting against the company's mission. Of course, it doesn't work out well for themselves, the company, or the team they manage.
rtlfe 5y ago
> I didn't get a chance to tell him about how I saved his job and the jobs of everyone else on the team Why not tell them?
- 5y ago