15 ms·

Managers, stop distracting employees

393 points by rustoo 4y ago

deterministic 4y ago
30+ years of experience here working for companies in 5 different countries. Both as a manager, a director, a CEO, and as a developer. The truth is that most managers are incompetent. It’s that simple. Most of them think that it is their job to make all the decisions. Nope wrong. Or that they need to interrupt people all the time to get status reports or whatever. Nope. Wrong again. No cookie. I actually blame the companies they work for. Being a manager is something you need to be trained to do well. And yet companies promote and hire managers who have never received even the most basic training on how to be a manager. A few still succeed despite their lack of training. But those ones are rare. Look at the military. They train their leaders before putting them in charge of soldiers. They know how crucial it is to have well trained managers (officers) in charge. For some reason companies don’t get this.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Pretty much each piece of advice here can easily be replaced with software. I think "manager as supervisor" is frankly dead. It just hasnt stopped moving yet. For me a great thing to learn from software development is daily integration builds - whatever work is being done, build it as the complete sellable product every day. This way you will get good at making the saleable product
- nine_zeros 4y ago
  Supervisory management actively impedes work. Managers should be planners, resource allocators and stakeholder communicators. They should work to bring their team into alignment with their org's goals and their company's goals. By attempting to be a supervisor, it sets the wrong incentives within the team. This is also the reason why penalizing performance reviews don't work. It causes lower morale within the time and nobody really feels aligned with the company. Everyone is out there looking out for themselves.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    >>> Managers should be planners, resource allocators and stakeholder communicators. They should work to bring their team into alignment with their org's goals and their company's goals. But there are either better ways to do these things, or they still require coercive (supervisory) activity. So planning. yeah it's important. Have a clear goal and work out what you need to achieve it. Frankly the new intern can achieve most of that in one day, and all the senior team can easily do it. And prioritise it. The hard part is where you have multiple parts in parallel. Sometimes people think they are some Moriarty style genius who can direct each part to develop and land with precision six months in the future. Total bill ox. If you aren't doing daily integrations you aren't co-ordinating and so you aren't "planning". Yeah there is a function of logistics - but that's spreadsheets and gaming out scenarios - not a "management task" but certainly a "management input" - and if instead of giving it solely to managers you just published it to the whole org such logistics would be available to increase discussion and awareness (ie the workers would understand the plan better and not need managers) Resource allocators - pretty much as above - plans, resource budget all different sides of same coin. Aligning goals ... that's incentives. That's easy - pay me. Otherwise ... looks a lot like coercion.
    - mhss 4y ago
      > But there are either better ways to do these things, or they still require coercive (supervisory) activity. I wish there were a consistent answer to this, but part of the reason management is hard (and I won't deny there's plenty of useless managers) is that people is very variable and you need to adjust your approach depending on the organization composition. > So planning. yeah it's important. Have a clear goal and work out what you need to achieve it. Frankly the new intern can achieve most of that in one day, and all the senior team can easily do it. And prioritise it. There are plenty of teams and situation where this is hardly "easy", particularly at very large companies. Relative priorities are not always clear, many teams demanding your team's attention and understanding what is "best" for the company and company goals, the team and individuals is non-trivial. You need to align all of those. It requires constant communication (hence why managers spend time on meetings, reading presentations, reading roadmaps from other teams, 1:1s with their team to understand their personal goals, etc); > and if instead of giving it solely to managers you just published it to the whole org such logistics would be available to increase discussion and awareness (ie the workers would understand the plan better and not need managers) Even in organizations where the information is open and all documentation, meeting notes, spreadsheets, etc; are open people struggle to understand and some just want the summary (I'd say most); they don't want to know how the sausage is made outside maybe have an understanding of the process (and some not even that). > Aligning goals ... that's incentives. That's easy - pay me. Otherwise ... looks a lot like coercion. Maybe is that easy for you. A lot of people want something else from their careers and as a manager you have to align what the organization wants with what the individual(s) and teams want as much as is reasonable to maximize their satisfaction (retention, performance, etc; is better if you achieve this).
- volkk 4y ago
  > I think "manager as supervisor" is frankly dead. sorta. as someone who is an EM, so i guess take the bias with a grain of salt, the difference between a really good EM, and someone who warms a seat is astounding. the really good ones have strong opinions, can coach well on a variety of topics (e.g effective communication, organizational thinking), and understand the technicals at least from a level of where you can see how your direct reports are doing. they also understand the economics/business of a company and can foresee which teams are dead-ends so they can offer good advice to direct reports to grow careers. the ones who warm seats are glorified project managers. no real advice beyond "should we do standups, when are retros" and basics like running a board, or taking notes during meetings. usually pretty disconnected from the day to day, no strong opinions on the actual hard stuff, just topical high level advice. plenty of those in the field, and its unfortunate because its not a hard science, so they tend to BS their ways into these positions and make a lot of money. either way, managers aren't going anywhere and no amount of code will automate them away.
  - dalyons 4y ago
    I agree and further - After ~20 or so years in tech (including being a manger myself for awhile) I would guess about 70% of EMs industry wide are your “seat warmers”. They’re not necessarily harmful or bad people, just kind of useless. These days I have learned to pretty much ignore what they say and chart my own path to making things happen.
    - SamuelAdams 4y ago
      Unfortunately in corporate America there are many people who are simply coasting towards retirement. It’s quite difficult to motivate someone when they only have three years left.
      - dalyons 4y ago
        im not sure if its that in tech - mostly people are pretty motivated. I think there's just more need for manager roles (HR stuff, 1/1s, communication, coordination, etc) than there exists willing talented candidates. So the bar gets naturally lowered and we end up with a lot of mediocre seat warmers.
kevinventullo 4y ago
I think this advice is subsumed by the more general heuristic that managers should basically understand and be able to do their direct reports’ jobs. If they understand the importance of focus and flow state, they will also understand the cost of interruptions.
- lfciv 4y ago
  One thing I love about the company I'm currently at is that pretty much every eng manager does some level of IC work. Meaning they all have some pulse on the codebase beyond higher level planning.
roflyear 4y ago
I used to run Teams reports on our employees to figure out how much $$$ was going into meetings. I found that some of the least productive employees spent 60-80% of their time in meetings (high Teams usage), and I suspect it wasn't because of the meetings that they were not productive, but that they had a lot of meetings because they were not able to be productive: it made them feel good.
flashgordon 4y ago
Ok so just to be clear is there a reason these guys aren't writing articles where s/manager/leader? Yet another manager bashing article while leadership is sublime! How about "leaders, give your managers space to do their effing jobs without having to constantlu sell your Kool aid?"
wuliwong 4y ago
This article seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised it got traction on HN. Are there managers here that felt there was some new/interesting content in this article? Maybe the scarier notion is that this was upvoted by the reports of managers that are not heeding this advice?
- opmelogy 4y ago
  I consider this like drinking water. It's a no brainer that you should drink water, but some people need reminders because mentally they are getting caught up in other stuff.
omginternets 4y ago
Every time I read an article from HBR, I find myself wondering (a) how the content isn’t obvious to anyone with a working nervous system, and (b) what value its core readership can possibly bring to a company. But this one really takes the cake. My respect for the “academic” field of business has somehow managed to fall below rock-bottom.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  If you're a brand like HBR, you need people to mindlessly link to uncontroversial articles. Particularly from LinkedIn where this kind of thing lives. Nobody will pick a fight about this, but thousands of people will like it and re-post it.
  - omginternets 4y ago
    This is a good articulation of the problem. It’s effectively business-class shovelware. But my concern is less about the people writing or publishing this drivel than about the people who consume every drop of it, hoping for some “insight” into “strategic thinking”. Before anyone accuses me of attacking a straw man, I have personally met dozens of such people. What pains me the most is that there is something out there that can give them what they want; a classic liberal-arts education would actually teach them to think with some rigor. But they’re stuck. They can’t think well enough to dig themselves out of this hole of mediocrity, and it’s an unsettling mix of tragic and repulsive. So in true HBR form, if you find yourself reading “thought leaders” or looking to improve your “strategic thinking”, please — for all our sakes - read a book. (NYT bestseller doesn’t count.)
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >than about the people who consume every drop of it but but but, how can you become a thought leader if you don't slurp up this kind of content to regurgitate on your own blog as if it was your original thought and then relentlessly post about it on $theSocials?
    - itronitron 4y ago
nuancebydefault 4y ago
So, suppose a manager profiles an employee using metrics software, and subjectively concludes from the outcome that the employee is not performing well. What are they going to do subsequently? Admit the deed of profiling and ask the employee to level up? How will the employee feel, motivated?
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
After being in a large company for ten years, I’m convinced that managers and companies don’t want productivity from their employees, what they want is alignment and legibility. Alignment being: we both agree on what you should be working on, and legibility being: are we on track, or do we need management intervention to ensure completion? Emails, status meetings, stand ups, pop ins, IMs, while detrimental to achieving objectives, satisfies management desires.
- LanceH 4y ago
  There are a lot of people who prefer proof of work over work.
- jack_riminton 4y ago
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  - bytehowl 4y ago
    I thought execs had to do all the cunty things they do because "it's their legal duty to maximize profits for the shareholders"? But suddenly it's OK to sacrifice productivity for the sake of power-tripping? Shouldn't he have been fired on the spot?
  - tester457 4y ago
    > "I want to see people and I want to see people jump through hoops for me". Nauseating.
- greatpostman 4y ago
  When I was younger I always assumed all the tracking had value. After a decade of working, it’s all a facade. And all these people are constantly trying to be managers which explodes the amount of documentation
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Some tracking has value. Last year I did some testing. Its results were recorded for posterity. A year later, for god only knows what reason, production environment differed slightly from testing environment a tiny little bit. Records allowed for a relatively quick follow up with vendor and resolution. But it goes back.. how do you know something will be important?
deleted 4y ago
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Waterluvian 4y ago
I remember an experience many moons ago where there was some "emergency" situation and our manager was just insufferable. Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update or to offer futile advice. I could palpably feel their anxiety and helplessness. I remember it reminding me of the trope of a parent in an ER on a hospital TV show. Obviously there was a lot of pressure put on them from above. I am sympathetic. Years later, a very similar experience happened with a different manager. But they handled it very differently. They called a meeting, led us through understanding the situation and us working out what the solution should be. They got our feedback on how long we thought it would take and then said they'd come by for an update in half that time. And that was it. I was so impressed.
- eastbound 4y ago
  You gained seniority. I have employees who don’t take a support case with a customer waiting with the straightest path, instead they take the opportunity to refactor code, so I check on them all the time; Others who refactor the code after delivering the bugfix, and those I leave them alone.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - slgurtman 4y ago
    This is a result of always having the refactoring put on hold for feature development. Eventually engineers realize the only way to address tech debt is to refactor as part of a feature or bug fix. This doesn’t happen when developers have trust they’ll be allowed to refactor although sometimes it’s a case of learned behavior from previous employment.
    - mk89 4y ago
      > This doesn’t happen when developers have trust they’ll be allowed to refactor although sometimes it’s a case of learned behavior from previous employment. To my surprise, this is not always true. Some engineers do things because they have fun, even senior ones, and they will keep on refactoring things until there is a hard stop. Best is to never generalize. It may depend from team to team, etc.
Eumenes 4y ago
[flagged]
29athrowaway 4y ago
Who is more important? An efficient manager that has 5 reports, or an inefficient manager with 10 reports? How about a very inefficient manager with 30 reports who now needs 2 levels of management to manage that team? Distracted employees are inefficient, create the perception of busyness and the opportunity to require more headcount, making bad managers more important. Many large organizations are just bad managers trying to look bigger. Those managers do not want efficiency, because they need inefficiency to justify their organization size and their role.
scarface74 4y ago
My first job out of college was working at the backup site of a state lottery as a computer operator. Nothing ever happened all three years i was there to need it. But we were told by our manager at the time that while shit is hitting the fan and you may have all sorts of people breathing down your neck, focus on the people you need to coordinate with and politely tell other people that you are following the checklist and you will give them updates at the appropriate time. This was in the mid 90s. I have followed the same m.o. through out my career. I have been on all sides as a psuedo-manager, software architect, hybrid developer/sysadmin, consultant, etc.
thenerdhead 4y ago
Many managers fail to bring out the energy in the people they “lead”. Some people are energized by autonomy in their job, some relatedness to others or the work itself, and some competency in their skills or career progression. Work is getting more personalized every year and modern management cannot be a one sized fits all approach anymore.
abvdasker 4y ago
Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as many unnecessary meetings — particularly with external teams — as possible so that engineers can focus on what they're paid to do: building stuff. The best managers I've ever had spent a significant amount of their time just interfacing with product managers and designers to cut down on bullshit that distracts engineers from doing their jobs.
- icedchai 4y ago
  This only works if the EM is both somewhat technical and actually communicates well with their reports. "Shielding" and leaving out key, important details will eventually result in pissing off your reports even more than useless meetings.
  - serial_dev 4y ago
    It's a hard balance. One of my managers had the goal of "shielding" the engineers, which in practice meant that everything went through him (at each step losing nuance), we never knew why something was important (we didn't know what we wanted to solve and why it was valuable for the company), why something was the most important task at a time (why not work on something else), we didn't know who to ask about it (felt like learned helplessness), we didn't know how deadlines came to be (where they just made up or was there a really good reason).
deleted 4y ago
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mkolodny 4y ago
When a remote, international company gets very large, it can be just about impossible to find a time where everyone can meet. Even in time-sensitive situations, I prefer asynchronous communication methods like email and voice memos. That way everyone can catch up as soon as they get a chance, no matter what time-zone they're in.
punnerud 4y ago
Leadership = A leader standing in front of a ship guiding In Norwegian: Lederskap = "Leder" is the same as leader + "skap" that translate to closet, the more right place for a leader?
_448 4y ago
I once worked for a startup co-founded by people who created DirectX at Microsoft. There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. Hence this book was available in the library of the startup where I worked. These is a very interesting statement in that book on the topic of what a manager's responsibility should be in a team. And this is what it said: "A manager's responsibility is to remove any roadblocks from the path of an engineer. If an engineer is coming down a hallway and there is a chair in the path blocking that engineer, then it is the manager's responsibility to remove the chair from the path so that the engineer is not troubled." :)
- myself248 4y ago
  This is exactly right. Years ago, very early in my career, I rotated among a few teams at the company, and even then, one manager stood out as different from the others. I straight-up asked him if he had a philosophy or something, and this is what he said: "Yeah, my job as a manager has three parts. First, get the right people for the job. Second, get them the resources they need. Third, get everything else out of their way." Decades later, this still rings true. That team was the most productive I've ever seen.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    That I very cool to hear. Only once have I had a manager with that philosophy and mindset. He left my place of work recently and as a result I’m leaving too. Good managers are rare as leprechaun gold. It’s a world of difference from the manager I had at my first job out of university who was more interested in their own job security and didn’t give a shit about his reports.
- sigstoat 4y ago
  > There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. what's the title? the number of books on programming with directx sort of drowns out the search results.
  - 4y ago
rqtwteye 4y ago
Reminds me of my first startup in the US. When things got difficult, we had daily 30 minute status meetings. Then things still didn't go fast enough so everybody had to attend 2 30 minute status meetings every day. It was just nuts. I tried to tell upper management that probably nothing important will change every day and even less likely in half a day but no luck.
- sli 4y ago
  Yeah, I've been there, too. Daily standups start out as standups but then turn into 1-2 hour long meetings first thing in the morning. Consequentially, those meetings had negative effects on productivity, because the entire team would be stuck there on the call while the manager talks to one person at length. Usually the same one person, at that. I don't miss that place at all.
JeffeFawkes 4y ago
I'm a relatively new team lead (this is my second year with the title officially, though I did TL responsibilities prior) and my entire goal is to be the antithesis of the type of manager mentioned in the article. My best managers were ones that let me focus and removed roadblocks, so I try to do the same. Ideally, my team has zero to one meetings per day (stand-up inclusive); I'd rather them focus on development than get caught up in unnecessary meetings. As a result, I'm often in meetings instead (which is fine) and then can give my appropriate teammates the outcomes of those chats. Everything else should be offline / async where possible, and I try to prefix those slack messages with a priority level so they can tell at a glance whether a given message can be safely ignored until a break between work items. So far my team seems to love this arrangement, but I'm curious if anyone has advice on the long term effects of this approach.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  Seems very similar to how things are run where I'm at. I've been here 10 years now and I think it's been a very good way to do things for us. Now that I'm more senior I do get called into more meetings. But still it's usually not more than 2-3 per week and almost all of those are 30 minutes, or an hour tops, and very efficient. Most of the other meetings my boss does and relays info to us through issue tracker or mail/chat. Like you, he spends a lot of his time in meetings. In some cases he'll forward the invite and let us know he might ask us to join to answer one or two specific questions. In those cases we do just that. While not interruption-free, since we're aware the disruption of the 2-5 minute diversion is minimal. We do have a longer weekly team meeting where we go through all issues being worked on and upcoming work. This might be an hour or two depending. We're office-based though, and noticed during the pandemic that some extra follow-up was needed. So my boss would usually do a quick call at the end of the day every other day or so to follow up each of us, and also for the social bit.
ljm 4y ago
I worked in one place where the CEO monitored us on Slack, and also via a/v cameras which were everywhere. He had the entire working space covered and he'd sit in his office (which had a TV and PS4 in the corner) sat behind a desk with half a dozen monitors feeding back audio and mic from the office, like a spy operation. If he saw us chatting even a little bit he'd tell us on slack to get back to work. His idea of running his business was to run a CIA sting operation on his staff. Every now and then he'd bring one of us in and promote us but the promotion meant nothing. I got 'head of frontend' in 3 weeks.
einichi 4y ago
That not holding meetings without an agenda is something that apparently needs to actually be said is cause for despair.
rcdwealth 4y ago
[dead]
shsbdncudx 4y ago
Maybe this is counter-zeitgeist, but managers are just people like you and me. As you get “higher” up the org, you get further and further away from action/result. But you can see more. The narrative around “why don’t managers just let people get their work done without annoying them” is comes down to a lack of leadership. Both from the manager, and from the direct report. This is the missing ingredient that few managers and almost nobody on the ground “gets”. The manager needs you to step up and lead, so that they can manage. They just generally can’t articulate this because the manager and you both think you’re not in a leadership role. But you are, everyone is. That’s your path to not being distracted by your manager.
gorgoiler 4y ago
Here’s a good example of what happens when you incentivize quantity over quality: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/cannot-set-up-automatic-forwarding-on-outlookcom/036e4d1b-94a5-4dc4-b850-6f0c1595d7ca https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ca... It’s the classic support response of “try clearing your browser cache, delete all cookies, update to the latest versions of all software and drivers, then reboot your PC” when the questions was “why doesn’t outlook.com let me forward my emails any more?”. I’m pretty cynical of most peoples motivation these days. Your local coffee shop’s point-of-sale asks if you’d like to round up to the nearest dollar with the change going to charity? Sounds like someone’s Q2 goal was to improve community relations. As soon as they get that promotion, will they maintain the charity thing? Probably not. Another classic is the endless A/B testing to pursue growth metrics. Reddit can’t show you this video of a man calling his dog “f**king hilarious!” but if you sign in with the app and lie about your age it will. Or maybe it just “looks better” in the app, or some other carrot? One day they’ll just get the stick out and www.reddit.com will have a popup saying “we are now blocking 50% of IP addresses from web access to make you just use the damn app”. And don’t get me started on “we are experiencing high volumes of calls right now, please hold for the next available etc.” As if there’s anything unpredictable about call centre statistics! Whenever I hear this message, all I’m hearing is “in order to maximise productivity from our agents, this call centre deliberately understaffs to maintain 100% capacity throughout the working day… sorry!”. The idea of an agent taking a break due to a lull in calls is anathema. Tracking and being led by metrics is nothing if you don’t have a principled, moral, qualitative reason to be doing so in the first place.
cratermoon 4y ago
Biggest distraction I see in companies that want to act like they have a mature software engineering culture but don't actually have one is to focus on the process. This can range from sticking with traditional waterfall to voodoo agile with "scrum" and daily standups that are really just status meetings for PMs. Often I see companies using Jira or whatever and PRs for being really particular about how work is logged and tracked. Moving stuff through the stages and merging PRs quickly becomes the goal, because to management it looks like stuff is getting done. Actually releasing working features to production is, at best, an afterthought. All that process and ceremony distracts programmers from doing the job of, you know, programming.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  I completely agree with you. I have said it multiple times but I believe mismanagement through busy bodies and incompetence is actively and systematically impacting software engineering as an entire industry.

393 points by rustoo 4y ago

30+ years of experience here working for companies in 5 different countries. Both as a manager, a director, a CEO, and as a developer. The truth is that most managers are incompetent. It’s that simple. Most of them think that it is their job to make all the decisions. Nope wrong. Or that they need to interrupt people all the time to get status reports or whatever. Nope. Wrong again. No cookie. I actually blame the companies they work for. Being a manager is something you need to be trained to do well. And yet companies promote and hire managers who have never received even the most basic training on how to be a manager. A few still succeed despite their lack of training. But those ones are rare. Look at the military. They train their leaders before putting them in charge of soldiers. They know how crucial it is to have well trained managers (officers) in charge. For some reason companies don’t get this.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

Pretty much each piece of advice here can easily be replaced with software. I think "manager as supervisor" is frankly dead. It just hasnt stopped moving yet. For me a great thing to learn from software development is daily integration builds - whatever work is being done, build it as the complete sellable product every day. This way you will get good at making the saleable product

nine_zeros 4y ago
Supervisory management actively impedes work. Managers should be planners, resource allocators and stakeholder communicators. They should work to bring their team into alignment with their org's goals and their company's goals. By attempting to be a supervisor, it sets the wrong incentives within the team. This is also the reason why penalizing performance reviews don't work. It causes lower morale within the time and nobody really feels aligned with the company. Everyone is out there looking out for themselves.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  >>> Managers should be planners, resource allocators and stakeholder communicators. They should work to bring their team into alignment with their org's goals and their company's goals. But there are either better ways to do these things, or they still require coercive (supervisory) activity. So planning. yeah it's important. Have a clear goal and work out what you need to achieve it. Frankly the new intern can achieve most of that in one day, and all the senior team can easily do it. And prioritise it. The hard part is where you have multiple parts in parallel. Sometimes people think they are some Moriarty style genius who can direct each part to develop and land with precision six months in the future. Total bill ox. If you aren't doing daily integrations you aren't co-ordinating and so you aren't "planning". Yeah there is a function of logistics - but that's spreadsheets and gaming out scenarios - not a "management task" but certainly a "management input" - and if instead of giving it solely to managers you just published it to the whole org such logistics would be available to increase discussion and awareness (ie the workers would understand the plan better and not need managers) Resource allocators - pretty much as above - plans, resource budget all different sides of same coin. Aligning goals ... that's incentives. That's easy - pay me. Otherwise ... looks a lot like coercion.
  - mhss 4y ago
    > But there are either better ways to do these things, or they still require coercive (supervisory) activity. I wish there were a consistent answer to this, but part of the reason management is hard (and I won't deny there's plenty of useless managers) is that people is very variable and you need to adjust your approach depending on the organization composition. > So planning. yeah it's important. Have a clear goal and work out what you need to achieve it. Frankly the new intern can achieve most of that in one day, and all the senior team can easily do it. And prioritise it. There are plenty of teams and situation where this is hardly "easy", particularly at very large companies. Relative priorities are not always clear, many teams demanding your team's attention and understanding what is "best" for the company and company goals, the team and individuals is non-trivial. You need to align all of those. It requires constant communication (hence why managers spend time on meetings, reading presentations, reading roadmaps from other teams, 1:1s with their team to understand their personal goals, etc); > and if instead of giving it solely to managers you just published it to the whole org such logistics would be available to increase discussion and awareness (ie the workers would understand the plan better and not need managers) Even in organizations where the information is open and all documentation, meeting notes, spreadsheets, etc; are open people struggle to understand and some just want the summary (I'd say most); they don't want to know how the sausage is made outside maybe have an understanding of the process (and some not even that). > Aligning goals ... that's incentives. That's easy - pay me. Otherwise ... looks a lot like coercion. Maybe is that easy for you. A lot of people want something else from their careers and as a manager you have to align what the organization wants with what the individual(s) and teams want as much as is reasonable to maximize their satisfaction (retention, performance, etc; is better if you achieve this).
volkk 4y ago
> I think "manager as supervisor" is frankly dead. sorta. as someone who is an EM, so i guess take the bias with a grain of salt, the difference between a really good EM, and someone who warms a seat is astounding. the really good ones have strong opinions, can coach well on a variety of topics (e.g effective communication, organizational thinking), and understand the technicals at least from a level of where you can see how your direct reports are doing. they also understand the economics/business of a company and can foresee which teams are dead-ends so they can offer good advice to direct reports to grow careers. the ones who warm seats are glorified project managers. no real advice beyond "should we do standups, when are retros" and basics like running a board, or taking notes during meetings. usually pretty disconnected from the day to day, no strong opinions on the actual hard stuff, just topical high level advice. plenty of those in the field, and its unfortunate because its not a hard science, so they tend to BS their ways into these positions and make a lot of money. either way, managers aren't going anywhere and no amount of code will automate them away.
- dalyons 4y ago
  I agree and further - After ~20 or so years in tech (including being a manger myself for awhile) I would guess about 70% of EMs industry wide are your “seat warmers”. They’re not necessarily harmful or bad people, just kind of useless. These days I have learned to pretty much ignore what they say and chart my own path to making things happen.
  - SamuelAdams 4y ago
    Unfortunately in corporate America there are many people who are simply coasting towards retirement. It’s quite difficult to motivate someone when they only have three years left.
    - dalyons 4y ago
      im not sure if its that in tech - mostly people are pretty motivated. I think there's just more need for manager roles (HR stuff, 1/1s, communication, coordination, etc) than there exists willing talented candidates. So the bar gets naturally lowered and we end up with a lot of mediocre seat warmers.

kevinventullo 4y ago

I think this advice is subsumed by the more general heuristic that managers should basically understand and be able to do their direct reports’ jobs. If they understand the importance of focus and flow state, they will also understand the cost of interruptions.

lfciv 4y ago
One thing I love about the company I'm currently at is that pretty much every eng manager does some level of IC work. Meaning they all have some pulse on the codebase beyond higher level planning.

roflyear 4y ago

I used to run Teams reports on our employees to figure out how much $$$ was going into meetings. I found that some of the least productive employees spent 60-80% of their time in meetings (high Teams usage), and I suspect it wasn't because of the meetings that they were not productive, but that they had a lot of meetings because they were not able to be productive: it made them feel good.

flashgordon 4y ago

Ok so just to be clear is there a reason these guys aren't writing articles where s/manager/leader? Yet another manager bashing article while leadership is sublime! How about "leaders, give your managers space to do their effing jobs without having to constantlu sell your Kool aid?"

wuliwong 4y ago

This article seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised it got traction on HN. Are there managers here that felt there was some new/interesting content in this article? Maybe the scarier notion is that this was upvoted by the reports of managers that are not heeding this advice?

opmelogy 4y ago
I consider this like drinking water. It's a no brainer that you should drink water, but some people need reminders because mentally they are getting caught up in other stuff.

omginternets 4y ago

Every time I read an article from HBR, I find myself wondering (a) how the content isn’t obvious to anyone with a working nervous system, and (b) what value its core readership can possibly bring to a company. But this one really takes the cake. My respect for the “academic” field of business has somehow managed to fall below rock-bottom.

lordnacho 4y ago
If you're a brand like HBR, you need people to mindlessly link to uncontroversial articles. Particularly from LinkedIn where this kind of thing lives. Nobody will pick a fight about this, but thousands of people will like it and re-post it.
- omginternets 4y ago
  This is a good articulation of the problem. It’s effectively business-class shovelware. But my concern is less about the people writing or publishing this drivel than about the people who consume every drop of it, hoping for some “insight” into “strategic thinking”. Before anyone accuses me of attacking a straw man, I have personally met dozens of such people. What pains me the most is that there is something out there that can give them what they want; a classic liberal-arts education would actually teach them to think with some rigor. But they’re stuck. They can’t think well enough to dig themselves out of this hole of mediocrity, and it’s an unsettling mix of tragic and repulsive. So in true HBR form, if you find yourself reading “thought leaders” or looking to improve your “strategic thinking”, please — for all our sakes - read a book. (NYT bestseller doesn’t count.)
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >than about the people who consume every drop of it but but but, how can you become a thought leader if you don't slurp up this kind of content to regurgitate on your own blog as if it was your original thought and then relentlessly post about it on $theSocials?
  - itronitron 4y ago

nuancebydefault 4y ago

So, suppose a manager profiles an employee using metrics software, and subjectively concludes from the outcome that the employee is not performing well. What are they going to do subsequently? Admit the deed of profiling and ask the employee to level up? How will the employee feel, motivated?

vegetablepotpie 4y ago

After being in a large company for ten years, I’m convinced that managers and companies don’t want productivity from their employees, what they want is alignment and legibility. Alignment being: we both agree on what you should be working on, and legibility being: are we on track, or do we need management intervention to ensure completion? Emails, status meetings, stand ups, pop ins, IMs, while detrimental to achieving objectives, satisfies management desires.

LanceH 4y ago
There are a lot of people who prefer proof of work over work.
jack_riminton 4y ago
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- bytehowl 4y ago
  I thought execs had to do all the cunty things they do because "it's their legal duty to maximize profits for the shareholders"? But suddenly it's OK to sacrifice productivity for the sake of power-tripping? Shouldn't he have been fired on the spot?
- tester457 4y ago
  > "I want to see people and I want to see people jump through hoops for me". Nauseating.
greatpostman 4y ago
When I was younger I always assumed all the tracking had value. After a decade of working, it’s all a facade. And all these people are constantly trying to be managers which explodes the amount of documentation
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Some tracking has value. Last year I did some testing. Its results were recorded for posterity. A year later, for god only knows what reason, production environment differed slightly from testing environment a tiny little bit. Records allowed for a relatively quick follow up with vendor and resolution. But it goes back.. how do you know something will be important?

deleted 4y ago

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Waterluvian 4y ago

I remember an experience many moons ago where there was some "emergency" situation and our manager was just insufferable. Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update or to offer futile advice. I could palpably feel their anxiety and helplessness. I remember it reminding me of the trope of a parent in an ER on a hospital TV show. Obviously there was a lot of pressure put on them from above. I am sympathetic. Years later, a very similar experience happened with a different manager. But they handled it very differently. They called a meeting, led us through understanding the situation and us working out what the solution should be. They got our feedback on how long we thought it would take and then said they'd come by for an update in half that time. And that was it. I was so impressed.

eastbound 4y ago
You gained seniority. I have employees who don’t take a support case with a customer waiting with the straightest path, instead they take the opportunity to refactor code, so I check on them all the time; Others who refactor the code after delivering the bugfix, and those I leave them alone.
- deleted 4y ago
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- slgurtman 4y ago
  This is a result of always having the refactoring put on hold for feature development. Eventually engineers realize the only way to address tech debt is to refactor as part of a feature or bug fix. This doesn’t happen when developers have trust they’ll be allowed to refactor although sometimes it’s a case of learned behavior from previous employment.
  - mk89 4y ago
    > This doesn’t happen when developers have trust they’ll be allowed to refactor although sometimes it’s a case of learned behavior from previous employment. To my surprise, this is not always true. Some engineers do things because they have fun, even senior ones, and they will keep on refactoring things until there is a hard stop. Best is to never generalize. It may depend from team to team, etc.

Eumenes 4y ago

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29athrowaway 4y ago

Who is more important? An efficient manager that has 5 reports, or an inefficient manager with 10 reports? How about a very inefficient manager with 30 reports who now needs 2 levels of management to manage that team? Distracted employees are inefficient, create the perception of busyness and the opportunity to require more headcount, making bad managers more important. Many large organizations are just bad managers trying to look bigger. Those managers do not want efficiency, because they need inefficiency to justify their organization size and their role.

scarface74 4y ago

My first job out of college was working at the backup site of a state lottery as a computer operator. Nothing ever happened all three years i was there to need it. But we were told by our manager at the time that while shit is hitting the fan and you may have all sorts of people breathing down your neck, focus on the people you need to coordinate with and politely tell other people that you are following the checklist and you will give them updates at the appropriate time. This was in the mid 90s. I have followed the same m.o. through out my career. I have been on all sides as a psuedo-manager, software architect, hybrid developer/sysadmin, consultant, etc.

thenerdhead 4y ago

Many managers fail to bring out the energy in the people they “lead”. Some people are energized by autonomy in their job, some relatedness to others or the work itself, and some competency in their skills or career progression. Work is getting more personalized every year and modern management cannot be a one sized fits all approach anymore.

abvdasker 4y ago

Not only should managers not distract their reports, I view a primary responsibility of any engineering manager as proactively shielding their reports from as many unnecessary meetings — particularly with external teams — as possible so that engineers can focus on what they're paid to do: building stuff. The best managers I've ever had spent a significant amount of their time just interfacing with product managers and designers to cut down on bullshit that distracts engineers from doing their jobs.

icedchai 4y ago
This only works if the EM is both somewhat technical and actually communicates well with their reports. "Shielding" and leaving out key, important details will eventually result in pissing off your reports even more than useless meetings.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  It's a hard balance. One of my managers had the goal of "shielding" the engineers, which in practice meant that everything went through him (at each step losing nuance), we never knew why something was important (we didn't know what we wanted to solve and why it was valuable for the company), why something was the most important task at a time (why not work on something else), we didn't know who to ask about it (felt like learned helplessness), we didn't know how deadlines came to be (where they just made up or was there a really good reason).

deleted 4y ago

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mkolodny 4y ago

When a remote, international company gets very large, it can be just about impossible to find a time where everyone can meet. Even in time-sensitive situations, I prefer asynchronous communication methods like email and voice memos. That way everyone can catch up as soon as they get a chance, no matter what time-zone they're in.

punnerud 4y ago

Leadership = A leader standing in front of a ship guiding In Norwegian: Lederskap = "Leder" is the same as leader + "skap" that translate to closet, the more right place for a leader?

_448 4y ago

I once worked for a startup co-founded by people who created DirectX at Microsoft. There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. Hence this book was available in the library of the startup where I worked. These is a very interesting statement in that book on the topic of what a manager's responsibility should be in a team. And this is what it said: "A manager's responsibility is to remove any roadblocks from the path of an engineer. If an engineer is coming down a hallway and there is a chair in the path blocking that engineer, then it is the manager's responsibility to remove the chair from the path so that the engineer is not troubled." :)

myself248 4y ago
This is exactly right. Years ago, very early in my career, I rotated among a few teams at the company, and even then, one manager stood out as different from the others. I straight-up asked him if he had a philosophy or something, and this is what he said: "Yeah, my job as a manager has three parts. First, get the right people for the job. Second, get them the resources they need. Third, get everything else out of their way." Decades later, this still rings true. That team was the most productive I've ever seen.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  That I very cool to hear. Only once have I had a manager with that philosophy and mindset. He left my place of work recently and as a result I’m leaving too. Good managers are rare as leprechaun gold. It’s a world of difference from the manager I had at my first job out of university who was more interested in their own job security and didn’t give a shit about his reports.
sigstoat 4y ago
> There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. what's the title? the number of books on programming with directx sort of drowns out the search results.
- 4y ago

rqtwteye 4y ago

Reminds me of my first startup in the US. When things got difficult, we had daily 30 minute status meetings. Then things still didn't go fast enough so everybody had to attend 2 30 minute status meetings every day. It was just nuts. I tried to tell upper management that probably nothing important will change every day and even less likely in half a day but no luck.

sli 4y ago
Yeah, I've been there, too. Daily standups start out as standups but then turn into 1-2 hour long meetings first thing in the morning. Consequentially, those meetings had negative effects on productivity, because the entire team would be stuck there on the call while the manager talks to one person at length. Usually the same one person, at that. I don't miss that place at all.

JeffeFawkes 4y ago

I'm a relatively new team lead (this is my second year with the title officially, though I did TL responsibilities prior) and my entire goal is to be the antithesis of the type of manager mentioned in the article. My best managers were ones that let me focus and removed roadblocks, so I try to do the same. Ideally, my team has zero to one meetings per day (stand-up inclusive); I'd rather them focus on development than get caught up in unnecessary meetings. As a result, I'm often in meetings instead (which is fine) and then can give my appropriate teammates the outcomes of those chats. Everything else should be offline / async where possible, and I try to prefix those slack messages with a priority level so they can tell at a glance whether a given message can be safely ignored until a break between work items. So far my team seems to love this arrangement, but I'm curious if anyone has advice on the long term effects of this approach.

magicalhippo 4y ago
Seems very similar to how things are run where I'm at. I've been here 10 years now and I think it's been a very good way to do things for us. Now that I'm more senior I do get called into more meetings. But still it's usually not more than 2-3 per week and almost all of those are 30 minutes, or an hour tops, and very efficient. Most of the other meetings my boss does and relays info to us through issue tracker or mail/chat. Like you, he spends a lot of his time in meetings. In some cases he'll forward the invite and let us know he might ask us to join to answer one or two specific questions. In those cases we do just that. While not interruption-free, since we're aware the disruption of the 2-5 minute diversion is minimal. We do have a longer weekly team meeting where we go through all issues being worked on and upcoming work. This might be an hour or two depending. We're office-based though, and noticed during the pandemic that some extra follow-up was needed. So my boss would usually do a quick call at the end of the day every other day or so to follow up each of us, and also for the social bit.

ljm 4y ago

I worked in one place where the CEO monitored us on Slack, and also via a/v cameras which were everywhere. He had the entire working space covered and he'd sit in his office (which had a TV and PS4 in the corner) sat behind a desk with half a dozen monitors feeding back audio and mic from the office, like a spy operation. If he saw us chatting even a little bit he'd tell us on slack to get back to work. His idea of running his business was to run a CIA sting operation on his staff. Every now and then he'd bring one of us in and promote us but the promotion meant nothing. I got 'head of frontend' in 3 weeks.

einichi 4y ago

That not holding meetings without an agenda is something that apparently needs to actually be said is cause for despair.

rcdwealth 4y ago

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shsbdncudx 4y ago

Maybe this is counter-zeitgeist, but managers are just people like you and me. As you get “higher” up the org, you get further and further away from action/result. But you can see more. The narrative around “why don’t managers just let people get their work done without annoying them” is comes down to a lack of leadership. Both from the manager, and from the direct report. This is the missing ingredient that few managers and almost nobody on the ground “gets”. The manager needs you to step up and lead, so that they can manage. They just generally can’t articulate this because the manager and you both think you’re not in a leadership role. But you are, everyone is. That’s your path to not being distracted by your manager.

gorgoiler 4y ago

Here’s a good example of what happens when you incentivize quantity over quality: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/cannot-set-up-automatic-forwarding-on-outlookcom/036e4d1b-94a5-4dc4-b850-6f0c1595d7ca https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ca... It’s the classic support response of “try clearing your browser cache, delete all cookies, update to the latest versions of all software and drivers, then reboot your PC” when the questions was “why doesn’t outlook.com let me forward my emails any more?”. I’m pretty cynical of most peoples motivation these days. Your local coffee shop’s point-of-sale asks if you’d like to round up to the nearest dollar with the change going to charity? Sounds like someone’s Q2 goal was to improve community relations. As soon as they get that promotion, will they maintain the charity thing? Probably not. Another classic is the endless A/B testing to pursue growth metrics. Reddit can’t show you this video of a man calling his dog “f**king hilarious!” but if you sign in with the app and lie about your age it will. Or maybe it just “looks better” in the app, or some other carrot? One day they’ll just get the stick out and www.reddit.com will have a popup saying “we are now blocking 50% of IP addresses from web access to make you just use the damn app”. And don’t get me started on “we are experiencing high volumes of calls right now, please hold for the next available etc.” As if there’s anything unpredictable about call centre statistics! Whenever I hear this message, all I’m hearing is “in order to maximise productivity from our agents, this call centre deliberately understaffs to maintain 100% capacity throughout the working day… sorry!”. The idea of an agent taking a break due to a lull in calls is anathema. Tracking and being led by metrics is nothing if you don’t have a principled, moral, qualitative reason to be doing so in the first place.

cratermoon 4y ago

Biggest distraction I see in companies that want to act like they have a mature software engineering culture but don't actually have one is to focus on the process. This can range from sticking with traditional waterfall to voodoo agile with "scrum" and daily standups that are really just status meetings for PMs. Often I see companies using Jira or whatever and PRs for being really particular about how work is logged and tracked. Moving stuff through the stages and merging PRs quickly becomes the goal, because to management it looks like stuff is getting done. Actually releasing working features to production is, at best, an afterthought. All that process and ceremony distracts programmers from doing the job of, you know, programming.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
I completely agree with you. I have said it multiple times but I believe mismanagement through busy bodies and incompetence is actively and systematically impacting software engineering as an entire industry.