4 ms·

Interesting read. One point that sticks out: if you are an executive over a function, you need to have enough depth in the function to know when you're being f

by tomrod 4y ago

Interesting read. One point that sticks out: if you are an executive over a function, you need to have enough depth in the function to know when you're being fed a line versus receiving competency from your reports. One concept that can be a two-edged sword here is being "managed up" -- which many treat as an adversarial/cloak-and-dagger relationship with execs with a positive spin. In my thought, keeping this under control requires domain competency.

lazide 4y ago
It is essentially impossible to manage something if the person doesn’t understand the thing being managed - and by understand, I mean ‘knows how it works to to the point they can know when it’s bullshit, and when it’s real’. It doesn’t require being GOOD at the thing they are managing (anymore than it requires being a fast linebacker to be able to make someone fast and teach them how to be a good linebacker), but being decent sure helps. Sometimes being really good at the thing can make it nearly impossible to be a manager of others doing it, because while they’re good at the skill they don’t actually understand it. It comes naturally to them, so they never had to figure it out. Just like someone who is a fast linebacker may just be and is unable to explain to anyone how they do it. A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need to be managing managers, ensuring decision making and prioritization is occurring in a way that produces the desired results, and setting the overall culture within an organization. Many times where problems occur is when someone gets promoted to a level where they are now over people who are doing things they don’t understand, or when skill sets and day to day work shifts out from under them and they lose that competency. ‘Managing up’ can be a cynical ploy for a middle manager to get what they want while not actually doing what the execs want. It can also be the process of ensuring the important details the executive needs are there, and they aren’t having their time wasted if a bunch of fluff that doesn’t matter to them. Which one it is depends a lot on the culture and how good the executive/VP and middle manager are.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  This is a popular idea among many people with domain expertise (in this case, developers), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. Businesses are collections of people and need to succeed as such. The whole point of hiring people is to grow the skills available to the business. If you know enough to micro-manage all your staff, you’re either not very senior or you hired poorly (or both). Management is more complicated than just fact-checking and BS-detection. In fact if you’re significantly worried about detecting BS by your staff, you already have a management problem.
  - lazide 4y ago
    It is a requirement for every CEO that I’ve seen that they understand all core business functions, to the degree I’m stating. A CEO that can’t understand how the companies finances are structured and how it makes it’s money is going to be blind to the core machinery of the business. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies operations work is going to make bad optimizations that will hurt it’s ability to serve customers with it’s core products. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies customer support and public facing relations work is likely to tank the companies public image. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies Sales work is going to be scammed by them or destroy the companies revenue producing channels accidentally. I can point you to dozens of high profile examples of this. None of this is micro management level. It’s ‘are the books making sense and congruent with the actual day to day operating status of the business’. It’s ‘are we competent and effective at producing our core products’. It’s ‘when someone needs help, they get it effectively and at a cost to us that makes sense’. To judge those requires knowledge and understanding of those areas. The reality is that no one individual knows all these things well enough to run a large corporation well, which is why the board of directors in a properly managed company will be performing oversight on many of these functions. Especially financial, as that’s the most tempting target if someone gets desperate. And you’re right - a good manager or leader isn’t worried about BS (for long), but I never said they would be - I said they could tell the difference. Good fences make good neighbors, after all, and if folks know you can tell, there is no point trying. None of that is micromanaging. If you get a reputation as someone who can’t tell the difference and/or doesn’t care, a lot of people you wouldn’t expect will try. That’s what causes problems.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. The solution is to have people under them to oversee the other areas that are not the CEO's expertise. Now how do you achieve that? I don't know. When one of those people moves on how do you replace them? I don't know, but promote from within would seem to be wise, since this hypothetical organization has a low tolerance for BS.
  - drc500free 4y ago
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
I have been in a couple of orgs now where this was, in my view, a big problem because of ripple effects. Let's say you're on Team A. You're making a thing. You do a little research, and your thing has this gigantic dependency that you hadn't initially considered, but it's work that for whatever reason Team A can't do. You don't have the resources or there's politics or something. But you're in luck! You manager asked around, and it turns out Team B made a thing that solves that gigantic dependency. Yay! So you have a meeting with Team B, and they are weirdly evasive about their thing. Whatever, they gave you what you needed, and you spend a sprint or two integrating their thing with your thing. Except it's just not working as advertised. It just isn't. So you grab some time with a Team B engineer, just the two of you, and they admit that their thing was never really finished. The deadline from upper management was unreasonable, so they got it good enough to be demoable, and then called it quits because the next unreasonable feature demand was already on deck. This of course enabled by the fact that none of the managers had enough depth to know what was bullshit. (Or maybe they had a vested interest to their managers to sell it anyway, and so on until at some point the management chain loses the ability to smell bullshit.) Well, shit. At this point you're up the creek because your manager already made an unreasonable commitment based on the advertised capabilities of Team B's thing. What do you do? Well, you sort of half-implement what you can, make it demoable, let your boss sell it up. Just like Team B did when they discovered Team C's thing was half-implemented. If you are thinking about a big software company that keeps putting out shit products, now you know why.
- endtime 4y ago
  I don't think this is why Google puts out mediocre products, FWIW. I think it's more that when something turns out after 6 months to be a bad idea, everyone's incentives are to spending another 12-18 months launching (or "landing") it so they can get promoted (and then change teams). Failing responsibly after 6 months isn't rewarded. (From what I'm told, Meta is better about this.)
  - endtime 4y ago
    I'm surprised this comment for downvoted. I'd love to understand what about it people didn't like, if anyone feels like replying.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
This was a big reason for me continuing to do open-source work, while I managed my development team. My managers actually deliberately tried to interfere with my technical competence. I'm an ornery cusshound, though, so it didn't work.

by tomrod 4y ago

lazide 4y ago

It is essentially impossible to manage something if the person doesn’t understand the thing being managed - and by understand, I mean ‘knows how it works to to the point they can know when it’s bullshit, and when it’s real’. It doesn’t require being GOOD at the thing they are managing (anymore than it requires being a fast linebacker to be able to make someone fast and teach them how to be a good linebacker), but being decent sure helps. Sometimes being really good at the thing can make it nearly impossible to be a manager of others doing it, because while they’re good at the skill they don’t actually understand it. It comes naturally to them, so they never had to figure it out. Just like someone who is a fast linebacker may just be and is unable to explain to anyone how they do it. A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need to be managing managers, ensuring decision making and prioritization is occurring in a way that produces the desired results, and setting the overall culture within an organization. Many times where problems occur is when someone gets promoted to a level where they are now over people who are doing things they don’t understand, or when skill sets and day to day work shifts out from under them and they lose that competency. ‘Managing up’ can be a cynical ploy for a middle manager to get what they want while not actually doing what the execs want. It can also be the process of ensuring the important details the executive needs are there, and they aren’t having their time wasted if a bunch of fluff that doesn’t matter to them. Which one it is depends a lot on the culture and how good the executive/VP and middle manager are.

snowwrestler 4y ago
This is a popular idea among many people with domain expertise (in this case, developers), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. Businesses are collections of people and need to succeed as such. The whole point of hiring people is to grow the skills available to the business. If you know enough to micro-manage all your staff, you’re either not very senior or you hired poorly (or both). Management is more complicated than just fact-checking and BS-detection. In fact if you’re significantly worried about detecting BS by your staff, you already have a management problem.
- lazide 4y ago
  It is a requirement for every CEO that I’ve seen that they understand all core business functions, to the degree I’m stating. A CEO that can’t understand how the companies finances are structured and how it makes it’s money is going to be blind to the core machinery of the business. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies operations work is going to make bad optimizations that will hurt it’s ability to serve customers with it’s core products. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies customer support and public facing relations work is likely to tank the companies public image. A CEO that doesn’t understand how the companies Sales work is going to be scammed by them or destroy the companies revenue producing channels accidentally. I can point you to dozens of high profile examples of this. None of this is micro management level. It’s ‘are the books making sense and congruent with the actual day to day operating status of the business’. It’s ‘are we competent and effective at producing our core products’. It’s ‘when someone needs help, they get it effectively and at a cost to us that makes sense’. To judge those requires knowledge and understanding of those areas. The reality is that no one individual knows all these things well enough to run a large corporation well, which is why the board of directors in a properly managed company will be performing oversight on many of these functions. Especially financial, as that’s the most tempting target if someone gets desperate. And you’re right - a good manager or leader isn’t worried about BS (for long), but I never said they would be - I said they could tell the difference. Good fences make good neighbors, after all, and if folks know you can tell, there is no point trying. None of that is micromanaging. If you get a reputation as someone who can’t tell the difference and/or doesn’t care, a lot of people you wouldn’t expect will try. That’s what causes problems.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. The solution is to have people under them to oversee the other areas that are not the CEO's expertise. Now how do you achieve that? I don't know. When one of those people moves on how do you replace them? I don't know, but promote from within would seem to be wise, since this hypothetical organization has a low tolerance for BS.
- drc500free 4y ago

VyseofArcadia 4y ago

I have been in a couple of orgs now where this was, in my view, a big problem because of ripple effects. Let's say you're on Team A. You're making a thing. You do a little research, and your thing has this gigantic dependency that you hadn't initially considered, but it's work that for whatever reason Team A can't do. You don't have the resources or there's politics or something. But you're in luck! You manager asked around, and it turns out Team B made a thing that solves that gigantic dependency. Yay! So you have a meeting with Team B, and they are weirdly evasive about their thing. Whatever, they gave you what you needed, and you spend a sprint or two integrating their thing with your thing. Except it's just not working as advertised. It just isn't. So you grab some time with a Team B engineer, just the two of you, and they admit that their thing was never really finished. The deadline from upper management was unreasonable, so they got it good enough to be demoable, and then called it quits because the next unreasonable feature demand was already on deck. This of course enabled by the fact that none of the managers had enough depth to know what was bullshit. (Or maybe they had a vested interest to their managers to sell it anyway, and so on until at some point the management chain loses the ability to smell bullshit.) Well, shit. At this point you're up the creek because your manager already made an unreasonable commitment based on the advertised capabilities of Team B's thing. What do you do? Well, you sort of half-implement what you can, make it demoable, let your boss sell it up. Just like Team B did when they discovered Team C's thing was half-implemented. If you are thinking about a big software company that keeps putting out shit products, now you know why.

endtime 4y ago
I don't think this is why Google puts out mediocre products, FWIW. I think it's more that when something turns out after 6 months to be a bad idea, everyone's incentives are to spending another 12-18 months launching (or "landing") it so they can get promoted (and then change teams). Failing responsibly after 6 months isn't rewarded. (From what I'm told, Meta is better about this.)
- endtime 4y ago
  I'm surprised this comment for downvoted. I'd love to understand what about it people didn't like, if anyone feels like replying.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

This was a big reason for me continuing to do open-source work, while I managed my development team. My managers actually deliberately tried to interfere with my technical competence. I'm an ornery cusshound, though, so it didn't work.