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> Surprising your manager unpleasantly never leads to good outcomes for you... Not quite 'my' manager directly, but a client's PM. They had a ... PM/PO type p

> Surprising your manager unpleasantly never leads to good outcomes for you... Not quite 'my' manager directly, but a client's PM. They had a ... PM/PO type person who was quite insistent that we had to have feature X by date Y. Slightly aggressive, but... sure. Between that insistence (over weeks) and the date Y... that person left and a new person started. 4 days before a walk through (where new items were demonstrated to stakeholders, and company owners), I sent the completed functionality over to the new PM (he'd been there a few weeks, but obviously still... new). "looks good" he replied. I checked that he'd at least watched the video I'd sent over. Demo happens and I show the functionality, with the "this is vital to have" from the previous PM. Silence. Then "we didn't know that was being worked on". Behind the scenes I was somewhat thrown under the bus, even though I had jira tickets, paper trail, video evidence and assorted other info. "Lowercased is ... subverting the process" and I made a whole team look bad. Even though... they all had signed off on what I was delivering. But behind the scenes, new PM had told people "feature X won't happen" (i have no idea why that was said) but apparently I made a lot of people look bad, because I'd delivered something they said wasn't going to happen. So so so weird...

groby_b 4y ago
Well, yes. Shitty management still exists. And the power imbalance is always there. I'm not saying not surprising your manager guarantees good outcomes, I'm just saying surprising them guarantees bad outcomes. The lesson I've drawn for myself from similar incidents is "know all the stakeholders, and talk to them". Consulting/client work makes it extra hard, because stakeholders just keep coming out of the woodwork :(
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  The power imbalance fascinates me - why should it exist at all? Do as I say or else? Why not, credible mission, great story telling, compelling vision, a well argued rationale. I mean. If we paid everyone UBI, then every compmay would look a lot like the Linux Kernel (insert preferred less shouty FOSS project here)
  - setr 4y ago
    Because communication is inefficient. If you have to produce a well-reasoned argument, and successfully convince all peers that your argument is in fact well-reasoned, and comprehensive, and handles all concerns of all involved or potentially involved, and that all opposing arguments do not meet these criteria… it will take ages to get all stakeholders in agreement, and even when you do, you get a horse designed by committee (a camel). Projects with no owner consistently end up in the same rut — always planning but never doing. Bikeshedding. So you need the owner. But for someone to own the project/task, he needs to be in charge of it — he needs power. For what is power if not the ability to make a decision and have others follow through on it? In arenas without defined power relationships, but manage to produce useful work, it’s usually the case that the power relationships still exist; they’ve just been made implicit. You see this in geopolitics, in your high school group projects, in Valve, etc. Determined not by corporate hierarchy, but instead charisma, money, social networks, physical/military strength, etc. Most of which is reflected by the corporate hierarchy anyways. Businesses just make it explicit, and consider it valuable enough to attach higher pay. You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs. But in my head, a resource-managers role is primarily to make his team more efficient — by optimizing processes, clearing blockers, umbrella’ing against shit from on high, reporting upwards, to guide the overall direction of all involved — not to dictate the every individual activities of his underlings. Also the Linux Kernel clearly has a power hierarchy, and while that power hierarchy doesn’t dictate what you work on, it does dictate whether your work can hold any value (by getting included into mainline). The difference just ends up being in the fact that it really doesn’t cost anyone anything for you to continuously do work that’s ultimately rejected every time, whereas for a business it obviously does (in the format of your salary). Obviously you can fork if you want and make it perhaps valuable… but you can exit the hierarchy just as well in business by quitting.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      > You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs Maybe. Supply and demand is always at play. If any manager can make 100 developers more 10% more efficient, but only a few people who have any ability to be a developer at all, then the developers are worth more. Numbers are relative to supply - my company has discovered we have to get ICs better raises than their manager at the lower levels as our great developers were becoming managers. We can get managers from lots of different entry level areas, but not enough engineers.
- lowercased 4y ago
  I'm not sure how much more I could have communicated. "Feature X is done and i'm going to show it on thursday". "OK looks good". Behind the scenes, without telling me, telling other stakeholders "feature X is not being done". Demo feature X. "Whoah, you really blindsided us and made people look like they don't know what they're doing". Had this been, say, 5 weeks ahead of time, yeah, maybe. This was ... 3 days? Monday afternoon to Thursday afternoon - maybe you could count that as 4. This had grown to the point where I wasn't allowed to directly talk to the major stakeholders. This demo meeting was the time to talk to them, for a dog and pony show only. 18 months earlier we had more regular (still in a group) communication, but it was possible to talk directly. As this grew, my own ability to talk directly to people was layered with middlemen, which exacerbated this sort of problem (had happened before, but never for something this 'important'). What's... funny about all this is that the earlier PM had made this feature of paramount important, but it turns out ... no one is using it. EDIT: both at the time, and now, I looked at it as "mistake". we're human and things happen. but it was framed as "lowercased was hiding information, working in secret". this was not the case.

groby_b 4y ago

Well, yes. Shitty management still exists. And the power imbalance is always there. I'm not saying not surprising your manager guarantees good outcomes, I'm just saying surprising them guarantees bad outcomes. The lesson I've drawn for myself from similar incidents is "know all the stakeholders, and talk to them". Consulting/client work makes it extra hard, because stakeholders just keep coming out of the woodwork :(

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
The power imbalance fascinates me - why should it exist at all? Do as I say or else? Why not, credible mission, great story telling, compelling vision, a well argued rationale. I mean. If we paid everyone UBI, then every compmay would look a lot like the Linux Kernel (insert preferred less shouty FOSS project here)
- setr 4y ago
  Because communication is inefficient. If you have to produce a well-reasoned argument, and successfully convince all peers that your argument is in fact well-reasoned, and comprehensive, and handles all concerns of all involved or potentially involved, and that all opposing arguments do not meet these criteria… it will take ages to get all stakeholders in agreement, and even when you do, you get a horse designed by committee (a camel). Projects with no owner consistently end up in the same rut — always planning but never doing. Bikeshedding. So you need the owner. But for someone to own the project/task, he needs to be in charge of it — he needs power. For what is power if not the ability to make a decision and have others follow through on it? In arenas without defined power relationships, but manage to produce useful work, it’s usually the case that the power relationships still exist; they’ve just been made implicit. You see this in geopolitics, in your high school group projects, in Valve, etc. Determined not by corporate hierarchy, but instead charisma, money, social networks, physical/military strength, etc. Most of which is reflected by the corporate hierarchy anyways. Businesses just make it explicit, and consider it valuable enough to attach higher pay. You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs. But in my head, a resource-managers role is primarily to make his team more efficient — by optimizing processes, clearing blockers, umbrella’ing against shit from on high, reporting upwards, to guide the overall direction of all involved — not to dictate the every individual activities of his underlings. Also the Linux Kernel clearly has a power hierarchy, and while that power hierarchy doesn’t dictate what you work on, it does dictate whether your work can hold any value (by getting included into mainline). The difference just ends up being in the fact that it really doesn’t cost anyone anything for you to continuously do work that’s ultimately rejected every time, whereas for a business it obviously does (in the format of your salary). Obviously you can fork if you want and make it perhaps valuable… but you can exit the hierarchy just as well in business by quitting.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    > You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs Maybe. Supply and demand is always at play. If any manager can make 100 developers more 10% more efficient, but only a few people who have any ability to be a developer at all, then the developers are worth more. Numbers are relative to supply - my company has discovered we have to get ICs better raises than their manager at the lower levels as our great developers were becoming managers. We can get managers from lots of different entry level areas, but not enough engineers.
lowercased 4y ago
I'm not sure how much more I could have communicated. "Feature X is done and i'm going to show it on thursday". "OK looks good". Behind the scenes, without telling me, telling other stakeholders "feature X is not being done". Demo feature X. "Whoah, you really blindsided us and made people look like they don't know what they're doing". Had this been, say, 5 weeks ahead of time, yeah, maybe. This was ... 3 days? Monday afternoon to Thursday afternoon - maybe you could count that as 4. This had grown to the point where I wasn't allowed to directly talk to the major stakeholders. This demo meeting was the time to talk to them, for a dog and pony show only. 18 months earlier we had more regular (still in a group) communication, but it was possible to talk directly. As this grew, my own ability to talk directly to people was layered with middlemen, which exacerbated this sort of problem (had happened before, but never for something this 'important'). What's... funny about all this is that the earlier PM had made this feature of paramount important, but it turns out ... no one is using it. EDIT: both at the time, and now, I looked at it as "mistake". we're human and things happen. but it was framed as "lowercased was hiding information, working in secret". this was not the case.