4 ms·

Yup as a manager you don’t do much, sort of like being a corporate lawyer. The company keeps you on payroll to delegate responsibility. The best teams I’ve wor

Yup as a manager you don’t do much, sort of like being a corporate lawyer. The company keeps you on payroll to delegate responsibility. The best teams I’ve worked for were more self organizing. When you have great engineers this is very effective and a wonderful work environment.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It all depends on the role. My immediate manager is good ( and likely the best manager I had so far ). But he actively cuts through red tape for us and deals with the usual corporate idiocy on our behalf. I actually declined a job offer partially because of him ( no friends at other place to vouch for the place ). I don't know how much other managers do, but he does a lot. Not just for us, but for the company.
rowanajmarshall 5y ago
Although, most companies can't or won't hire great engineers, because great engineers are hella expensive and hard to hire.
- ip26 5y ago
  Even more simply, all engineers are not great engineers, and somebody is employing the ones that aren’t great.
  - wittycardio 5y ago
    Go even further and conclude that most engineers are shit , which is why managers have jobs in the first place. The best teams are highly self driven and self organizing
- bb88 5y ago
  What's worse, is if you happen to hire a great engineer, you have to keep the pay raises and bonuses coming to that star engineer. Otherwise, he'll move on and take the %30 pay raise with a new job. The punishment/reward metric is skewed toward punishment in most companies.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Not my experience at all. I worked as a manager of small to large development teams for 8+ years and my conclusion is that great developers can be cheap, and bad developers are always expensive (because of their negative productivity/impact).
dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
> Yup as a manager you don’t do much Not doing your job well if this is the case. Quality managers do everything `codezero` mentioned above (hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship) along with being a corporate therapist and much more. A lazy manager looks like the ER where they only handle shit when people come to them with blood and guts, a quality manager is regularly assessing the daily/weekly situation and anticipating obstacles or implementing fixes so engineering can run an unimpeded race. They're essentially the emotional chaos buffer for engineering, the goal being engineers come to work and feel the autonomy, freedom, and energy to execute well.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  Hard disagree. A well-managed team can manage itself. If you can go on a month-long vacation and don't need to set up any special delegation of tasks first, it's a well-managed team. If you're constantly dealing with crises, that's a huge management failure.
  - rybosworld 5y ago
    It sounds like your suggesting that every team is made of high-performers. In my experience, it's only high-performers that can self-manage.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Nope not true. I worked 8+ years managing small to large teams. Doing very little work. And my teams were routinely outcompeting much larger teams. For example, a customer told me that my team of 15 routinely outcompeted a 75 person team at his company. I did it by clearly defining objectives, assigning responsibilities, and getting out of their way. The only key thing I had to do beyond that was to gently remind developers to focus on priority #1 when they got distracted and drifted off track.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

It all depends on the role. My immediate manager is good ( and likely the best manager I had so far ). But he actively cuts through red tape for us and deals with the usual corporate idiocy on our behalf. I actually declined a job offer partially because of him ( no friends at other place to vouch for the place ). I don't know how much other managers do, but he does a lot. Not just for us, but for the company.

rowanajmarshall 5y ago

Although, most companies can't or won't hire great engineers, because great engineers are hella expensive and hard to hire.

ip26 5y ago
Even more simply, all engineers are not great engineers, and somebody is employing the ones that aren’t great.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  Go even further and conclude that most engineers are shit , which is why managers have jobs in the first place. The best teams are highly self driven and self organizing
bb88 5y ago
What's worse, is if you happen to hire a great engineer, you have to keep the pay raises and bonuses coming to that star engineer. Otherwise, he'll move on and take the %30 pay raise with a new job. The punishment/reward metric is skewed toward punishment in most companies.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Not my experience at all. I worked as a manager of small to large development teams for 8+ years and my conclusion is that great developers can be cheap, and bad developers are always expensive (because of their negative productivity/impact).

dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago

> Yup as a manager you don’t do much Not doing your job well if this is the case. Quality managers do everything `codezero` mentioned above (hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship) along with being a corporate therapist and much more. A lazy manager looks like the ER where they only handle shit when people come to them with blood and guts, a quality manager is regularly assessing the daily/weekly situation and anticipating obstacles or implementing fixes so engineering can run an unimpeded race. They're essentially the emotional chaos buffer for engineering, the goal being engineers come to work and feel the autonomy, freedom, and energy to execute well.

drewcoo 5y ago
Hard disagree. A well-managed team can manage itself. If you can go on a month-long vacation and don't need to set up any special delegation of tasks first, it's a well-managed team. If you're constantly dealing with crises, that's a huge management failure.
- rybosworld 5y ago
  It sounds like your suggesting that every team is made of high-performers. In my experience, it's only high-performers that can self-manage.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Nope not true. I worked 8+ years managing small to large teams. Doing very little work. And my teams were routinely outcompeting much larger teams. For example, a customer told me that my team of 15 routinely outcompeted a 75 person team at his company. I did it by clearly defining objectives, assigning responsibilities, and getting out of their way. The only key thing I had to do beyond that was to gently remind developers to focus on priority #1 when they got distracted and drifted off track.