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My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-directed. He can't understand techni

• roncesvalles 4y ago
  He's around so that your skip has to manage 1 person instead of 2.
• telotortium 4y ago
  Are they planning on hiring more reports?
• bitlad 4y ago
  Atleast your manager doesn't do anything. I have seen managers who do stuff and ruin the work that people have done.
  • amanj41 4y ago
    "But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous"
  • paxys 4y ago
    Exactly. A manager sitting by and letting their reports do whatever they want is hardly a worst case scenario. So many are actively sabotaging the work their team does.
• lordnacho 4y ago
  Chesterton's Manager?
  • yoyohello13 4y ago
    Underrated comment. Many people believe their manager does nothing... until they become a manager and realize all the BS their manager protected them from on the daily.
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      So the idea isn't the manager is incompetent but his managers are so bad they are a net negative and cause so much disruption that a full time employee is required to deal with it.
      • roughly 4y ago
        Alternatively: The broader organization has requirements around accounting, planning, forecasting, resource allocation, etc. that are orthogonal to the engineer's job but critical to the company for legal, regulatory, and financial reasons, and managers exist in part to handle that stuff so that the engineer does not need to.
      • setr 4y ago
        It’s the peers and stakeholders that are the problem; no one knows what they need, and everyone knows what they want, and if they aren’t responsible for the work they’ll always try to include everything and declare it a must-have. And you’ll get those who escalate over nothing, people actively working against you (because they disagree with the project goals and got overridden, or wanted to own it themselves), people who are necessary but apathetic / busy, people who are angry about something else but take it out wherever they get the chance to, changing requirements and sudden timeline shifts/deadlines because of events outside of your control… etc At least when there’s someone with strict authority involved, these things can be resolved pretty quickly — everyone defaults to authority. But that’s rare; most projects involve multiple domains, each with authority over their dominion, and opinions on what the others need to be doing (and all trying to minimize their own responsibility and risks, by both simplifying the project, but also offloading it onto their peers). Ultimately coordination between parties is inherently a bitch.
      • red-iron-pine 4y ago
• MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  I'm beginning to think that making more money by becoming a better developer is hard, and that managing, while difficult in a totally different way, is less hard. At least for the money.
  • nickpeterson 4y ago
    I think people often convince themselves that becoming a manager is a path for those who couldn’t hack it. In reality it’s a completely different set of problems. If you’re a decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very good chance you’d be better in management or sales than writing code.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo cult activities mostly involving power point presentations and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend went towards satisfying the VP’s appetite for reporting when engineers were very understaffed they focused on expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring ICs. some of this management can be useful but often a lot of it is not, at best. As organizations age companies become mostly about advancing careers of middle management and the things the company actually does become secondary.
      • nickpeterson 4y ago
        I think the role of managers should be facilitating productivity. If things are in peoples way, help them.
        • rqtwteye 4y ago
          In reality in most larger companies managers mainly do reporting. There is not much emphasis on productivity.
          • 4y ago
• Gigachad 4y ago
  My manager isn’t a programmer but uses ChatGPT to educate himself on a topic and attempts to read the code to see what’s happening before asking one of us if anything is still unclear.
  • nickpeterson 4y ago
    You know, summarizing what code does in regular English via ChatGPT would be an interesting thing. Does it already do that?
    • drc500free 4y ago
      It definitely can do this, though obviously it can details wrong here and there. For example: Describe what this code does in clear english: from datetime import datetime import pytz utcmoment_naive = datetime.utcnow() utcmoment = utcmoment_naive.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc) # print "utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive) # python 2 print("utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive)) print("utcmoment: {0}".format(utcmoment)) localFormat = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" timezones = ['America/Los_Angeles', 'Europe/Madrid', 'America/Puerto_Rico'] for tz in timezones: localDatetime = utcmoment.astimezone(pytz.timezone(tz)) print(localDatetime.strftime(localFormat)) ChatGPT Response: This Python code does the following: 1. Imports two modules, datetime and pytz. 2. Gets the current time in UTC using the datetime module and assigns it to a variable named 'utcmoment_naive'. 3. Uses the pytz module to create a timezone-aware datetime object and assigns it to a variable named 'utcmoment'. 4. Prints the values of the 'utcmoment_naive' and 'utcmoment' variables. 5. Defines a date format to be used for printing local date and time. 6. Defines a list of three timezones. 7. Loops over the list of timezones and converts the UTC time to the local time in each timezone using the 'astimezone' method of the 'datetime' object and the 'pytz.timezone' method. 8. Prints the local time in each timezone in the specified date format. Overall, this code gets the current time in UTC, converts it to the local time in three different timezones, and prints the local time in each timezone in a specified format.
      • nickpeterson 4y ago
• drums8787 4y ago
  My manager is blissfully absent.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  It is definitely possible they indeed don't do anything. Fwiw though - a decade ago when I was a sysadmin I had a manager that I was certain never did anything. And then he was replaced. And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/ Not saying it's the case with your manager. But managers have duties roles and priorities I for one hadn't always appreciated.
  • voidfunc 4y ago
    The only bad managers I've ever really had are the ones that don't realize they're responsible just as much as their reports when shit goes sideways. To that point, I've had technical and non-technical managers and it doesn't matter, we can speak a different language but as long as we realize we're on the same boat and heading in more or less the same direction things are great. This requires trust, understanding of goals not implementation, and empathy. Almost every bad manager I've had basically lacked at least two of those last three things if not all three. I will say, the one big advantage of a technical manager is they can often be used as a good rubber duck for logistics around changes. Should we do {A, B, C} or {X, Y, Z}? You can get into the technical with them and explain the intricate trade-offs of the decision and how that might impact things. Their technical and political knowledge of the situation can give very good clarifying answers.
  • tsegratis 4y ago
    Gotta agree with this Enabling people to be fully self directed and successful is a rare skill. Often it is done by diminishing their own importance; putting you on a good path and then getting out of your way; and giving you all the glory For many, they could be a dream manager ;)
  • ghaff 4y ago
    And a lot of that stuff is inevitable at larger companies, so you either go your own way or be prepared to deal with it as part of your job requirements without a manager shielding you.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    > And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/ Over years I've noticed like 80% of those is because other managers are terrible and it so happens that the dept. I'm in takes some of the fallout of their mess.
• swyx 4y ago
  well look, I already told you, I deal with the customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills. I'm good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
  • kubb 4y ago
    Nah, he's really horrible at dealing with people lol.
• toast0 4y ago
  As a fully self-directed engineer, what I'm looking for from a manager is benign neglect.
• kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
• nicoburns 4y ago
  If you think your manager doesn't do anything he's probably one of the good ones. Possibly not one of the great ones. But still, often one of the best things those who manage can do is get out of the way and allow their reports to do their jobs properly.
• jmull 4y ago
  If your work is getting done, things aren't falling apart, and he leaves you alone, then he's doing a great job, whatever he does. At the very least his presence will keep other managers from meddling.
• optimalsolver 4y ago
  "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." - Futurama
  • Godel_unicode 4y ago
    This quote has, pound for pound, provided more comfort to terrible leaders than any other. It’s also just not true, good leadership is very obvious.
    • red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Good leadership is only obvious in conflict or chaos. When everything is simple, it's easy for shit managers to look like good ones.
      • Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Maybe you’ve never experienced good management? Good managers are significantly different in very obvious ways even in the absence of conflict. A good managers job is not just helping you navigate chaos.
• anuragvohraec 4y ago
  Generally managers are hired to act us buffer between higher order management and employee. HOM don't want to micro manage employees, but they want responsibility, which lower rank employee (the one who do actual work) tend to carry the least. While most workforce would come defensive, that they work responsibily, but indeed most don't. So they higher this manager who do micro manage employee on HOM behalf. The minute most employee gets a good offers, they will fly like its none of there responsiblity, so HOM higher this buffer manager to manage this minute but important aspect for successful project delivery.