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Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. I would posit a guess tha

• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? I guess a manager could make the same claim that devs are making his life miserable.
  • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    The power dynamic is completely different. Managers have the ability to hire/fire, guide technical decisions (usually for the worse) and set the tone for the team since its "their" team. The team itself has very little recourse over a bad manager.
    • ForHackernews 4y ago
      They can quit. I promise you as a manager I spend at least half my time trying to keep developers happy and engaged because losing even one of them will cost the team way, way more in productivity than indulging somebody who wants to implement a perhaps-overengineered solution. I don't know how it is everywhere, but in my neck of the woods good developers are hard to recruit and expensive to lose - they have a lot of leverage and they know it.
      • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
        I've met devs who don't have the self-confidence to leave their current job under a terrible manager because they don't want to go through the equally terrible interview loops. They're stuck in some kind of purgatory.
  • user3939382 4y ago
    Actually I've developed the wisdom to realize that 90% of people are not good at what they do for a living. They don't have that job because they're talented at it, they have it because they needed a job.
  • Koshkin 4y ago
    But the worst thing ever is when a bad dev gets promoted to the position of a dev manager or a tech lead. Armed with “knowledge” and “experience,” and now with a degree of authority, they would put their weight on everything they touch. The damage will be immense (but no one would care).
    • sidlls 4y ago
      So now we’re including actual engineers in this perpetual rant against management, now? Is it only engineers whose sole job is to write code given a spec who are valuable? At what level of seniority is a job “useless” or worse?
  • Goronmon 4y ago
    Isn’t that true for everything though? More bad devs exist than good one? It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a large number of users in this community have actually worked in a bubble of tech outside the norm where most devs were actually pretty solid overall. A developer who is truly incompetent (not just mediocre) would have a very hard time even getting hired at a FAANG or similar, let alone stick around very long.
    • aprdm 4y ago
      Be careful with the echo chamber you Want to believe in vs what it is. There’s plenty of incompetent people at FAANG or in HN.
  • PakG1 4y ago
    Yeah, it goes both ways. Worse is when someone thinks that they're this magical unicorn that is always right when they're in fact more often wrong and correspondingly makes trouble for everyone else. They make you out to be the enemy when you're not. It's horrible when that person is a manager. But it's also horrible when that person is a developer. Or any other role. I've managed people that you just have to let go, after trying every method known to man, you can't fix their fundamental psychology and neuroticism. Some people are just broken and organizations unfortunately are not equipped to deal with that (would be nice if every organization could have an in-house psychiatrist, but that's not the reality we have). I will concede this though. When that bad person is a manager, EVERYONE on the team can suffer, the entire culture can suffer. When that person is just a team member, others on the team can usually figure out how to just avoid that person so that the problem can be compartmentalized. Better still, a good manager will not tolerate the bullshit because they know that it can poison the team if not handled properly. When that person is a manager, there's no avoiding the problem and team policies and culture will be poisoned accordingly so that the best people leave and nothing good is left.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    But a manager is something you progress into. How did bad people progress into it?
    • felizuno 4y ago
      This is actually pretty consistent across companies: being the most senior person around when the last manager leaves. Sometimes it's a senior dev, sometimes a PM, heck I've seen it be somebody from the UX org. The path of least resistance is a quick promotion from within. As many of us have experienced this leaves us with a non-zero amount of managers who are both unqualified and uninterested in their role, but accept it for status (you're supposed to get promotions after X years right?) and pay reasons.
    • zuppy 4y ago
      what people don't undertand (and that included me, when I did the change) is that being a manager is a totally different job than being a developer. you can be an extremely good developer, but be a lousy manager. there are different skills needed for those roles and not all of them are transferable. when you transition from a senior developer, you don't transition into a senior manager, you start from zero. it helps to be a good dev, but it's not a guarantee for success.
    • johnbellone 4y ago
      This is a common misconception and it is exactly how "bad people" progress into a role where they aren't a match. It is an entirely different role. Most engineering managers come from an engineering background and rely on the learned experiences of that job in order to be successful.
  • 015a 4y ago
    Its true, but I think the impact is what matters. Even a below average dev produces output; it may be substantially less than a great dev, it may not be of the highest quality, they may require more hands-on reviews and mentorship from other devs on the team, but its still producing output. In comparison, a bad manager can invert the productive output of a team or individuals on that team; high attrition rates, high quiet-quitting rates, prioritizing the wrong things, interrupting work such that little gets done, not playing defense, etc etc etc. The "old" saying (well, I've heard it said a few times) is: bad software (probably) won't kill your business. There's a litany of examples to this effect. However, bad management will, with increasingly leveraged effects the further that bad management is from the line worker.
    • t43562 4y ago
      Bad developers write code that has a negative impact on team prouctivity. e.g. by insisting on a wildly overcomplicated implementation or writing poor tests and being aggressive to anyone that questions them, or being highly negative about some decision or other to the point where the team are not sure if that person is in charge or their manager is. They can also pester everyone with mountains of trivia in PRs and refuse to change anything in their own and so on and on. My own boss says "the main thing is to hire nice people - everything else can be improved" and that changed my perspective a lot. I think he's right. A bad EM can do more damage of course. :-)
  • julik 4y ago
    Bad devs do not have reports they would have authority over. Bad EMs do.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rco8786 4y ago
  That’s silly. Managers exist on the same spectrum as any other role. Most are about average. Some are better, some are worse. Same with engineers themselves. These articles are undoubtedly written by people who have never been managers themselves, and frankly just don’t have any idea what the job is for. Which is fine - everyone starts that way. But to then assume the job is useless is classic sign of imaturity. > Nobody is saying that the functions of these roles aren't necessary That’s literally the premise of the article posted.
  • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
    • droopyEyelids 4y ago
      I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity. What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
      • halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
        And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
      • 015a 4y ago
        I think what you're describing isn't inexperience or immaturity; its idealism in the idea that competent people should hold power. The world may not work like that, but it isn't immature to fight for it.
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
• UncleMeat 4y ago
  There are oodles of terrible managers. There are oodles of terrible everything and we definitely remember the bad experiences more than the good experiences. Especially since a lot of what a good manager does (deflect distractions, ensure consistent prioritization, hire people who don't suck) makes it seem like nothing is actually happening. A very large number of people really are saying that these roles aren't necessary. Larry Page famously fired all of the managers at Google at one point in the past. I regularly see people say that zero management at all would be preferable, both for startups and megacorps. Heck, the article itself is about this very idea.
• dahart 4y ago
  Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. This applies to managers and to engineers. Turn your argument around and ask what happens when good managers have to deal with crappy engineers, because there are a lot of crappy engineers too. (And note especially that engineers can be bad on many axes. It’s possible for people with excellent technical skills to bring negative value to the organization due to poor attitude or poor communication, among other things.) Do you want good managers to judge you and assume that you’re a bad engineer just because they’ve had to manage some other bad engineers? Bad engineers also taint the role and lead to a certain earned reputation. But if everyone projects their worst fear on the role, then we’re all stuck making assumptions, being pessimistic, and missing the good people because we’re blinded by our stuck ideas incorrectly generalizing individual people to their roles. If we can’t stop to see the good things and what does work, then functioning together is difficult and it drags down the team. What value do you see in good management, and what makes a good manager in your experience?
• fsloth 4y ago
  'more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do' This is quite hyperbolical. A person can have a life experience of "mostly bad manager", but that does not mean "most managers are bad" or that "most people have experienced bad management". I've been 16 years as a professional software engineer. I would not describe anyone to whom I was a direct report as "bad manager". Quite contrary, I've been quite happy with most of them. This does not mean a life without conflict or misunderstanding, of course. Statistically, bad management is of course a non-neglible problem, but the above makes the situation sound hopelessly pathological.
• paxys 4y ago
  I'd wager the percent of terrible managers is the same as that of terrible engineers. We all have worked with such coworkers at some point in our careers. Yet no one ever turns around and says "the engineering role is bullshit", simply because that would invalidate their own careers.
  • tayo42 4y ago
    Eningeers get tons of actually effective training and schooling. Alot of people probably spent at least 4 years in school learning a science where there are right and wrong answers. It's easy to evaluate engineers. Most managers seemed to get to that role by accident, or because they knew the right person. I think there's way more underperforming managers. Managers aren't going to school for years, even when they do the degree they come out with feels useless.
• malcolmgreaves 4y ago
  I’ve had to work with a lot more terrible engineers than terrible manages. A lot of the time, what makes someone good or terrible in their role is maturity and professionalism.
• awillen 4y ago
  I'm a PM, and I've had to live through a fair number of god awful engineers. It's miserable to work with them, too. I don't malign the profession because I've had bad experiences. Engineers should be smart enough to know that experiencing a bad manager, or even a few bad managers doesn't mean that " people who live in these roles are overall bad, don't know how to effectively execute these tasks and present an aura of superiority over the technical roles when they're providing very little value at all." That's just being irrational and salty.
• mk81 4y ago
• ansre 4y ago
  > I would posit a guess that most, if not all, engineers on HN have had to live through at least one terrible manager that has soured/tainted the position. FWIW, all my engineering managers have been great. > Oh please, there's a reason why those comments exist - because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" I guess that's just your experience? Just because you've had a few bad apples doesn't mean all engineering managers are terrible. > present an aura of superiority Sounds like you're just projecting your experience onto other folks.
• bumby 4y ago
  >because more terrible managers exist than those "good ones" that you allude do. The irony is that I've heard the same said about engineers. It's easy to take the cynical point of view, but probably not wise or accurate. Like the OP, in my experience the people making those types of claims tend to have an overly simplistic view of the problem.
• WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I don’t know. I think what some people complain about here when they talk about bad management has nothing to do with management. Most seems to complain they have to do reporting which is not fun. While that’s generally true I wouldn’t call that bad management. I had a relatively bad (inexperienced and overwhelmed would be truer) manager once when I was still doing engineering years ago. I know he was bad because I had to do a significant part of his job for him notably regarding smoothing interpersonal issues in the team and cross-team communication in the org. I don’t see most people here complaining they have to do too much management.