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This doesn't say much about "talent scarcity", it's more along the lines of how different managerial styles map to different talent "markets". In reality, ther

This doesn't say much about "talent scarcity", it's more along the lines of how different managerial styles map to different talent "markets". In reality, there is no talent scarcity, there's just poor management that has optimized for executive salaries and middle-managerial busy work. Paying your managers/executives more than your engineers, forcing wfo, open office plans, agile... all chase away top talent of which there is plenty. The shortage is actually of healthy, creative, non-toxic, fairly compensated work places. Deliver that and the talent is easy to hire and retain.

danielovichdk 3y ago
I wholeheartedly concur. Thanks for putting it into writing.
yamtaddle 3y ago
I think a lot of the friction is upper-middle or middle-but-anxiously-trying-to-claim-upper-middle (in a class sense—income's related to, but not identical to, class, in this analysis, following Fussell) management not wanting their reports to have equal or greater standing, in social status terms. Probably this treating programmers as a status-threat dates to the merging of high-status analyst and low-status programmer into a single role, way back in the 80s—there was little threat with a few upper-middle or near-upper-middle analysts running around, but increase the total number of people in programming and merge "analyst" and "programmer" and now there are too many, and no-one to be "under" them in status, and what's the point of status if you don't have inferior people to lord it over? If there's nobody you can credibly boss around or tell to take care of some bullshit for you, and expect them to just say "yes" and do it without pushing back? Nobody to do the actual work while you're "working" at the golf course or goofing off in your private office! Clearly, that would be a threat—why, they might all get dragged down to bottom-tier status, if there's no one under them!
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  One bit of corpo-speak that I have seen cropping up to address this is relabeling "managed by" as "supported by", as in, "team X will be supported by person Y." It may not work overnight, but I would like to see a shift in the culture of a manager "managing" like a king manages his kingdom and the peasants within, to "supporting", like a coordinator. But I fear that we will fall back to the ape mentality of hierarchies and end up twisting the words to fit our predetermined outcomes.
  - jdgoesmarching 3y ago
    I’m a program manager my role is very close to this. People are confused when I give them my title and explain that I don’t have direct reports, but I “manage” our team about as much our director does. That means handling administrative tasks, organizing work, stakeholder management, or any of the other million tasks involved in running a successful team that developers shouldn’t need to worry about. It’s very easy to conflate prioritizing and planning with telling people what to do, and sadly in many orgs that is the case. However, those tasks and everything else falling under the “management” umbrella should not imply a hierarchy. It’s just a different type of work to be done by people with different skill sets. I don’t know if that reality will ever be embraced by my fellow business bros, but that simple mindset has made me a better manager than any class, book, or course I’ve experienced.
    - runamok 3y ago
      I read the concept recently of a people manager vs. a process manager. A program manager from my experience is a bit of both but mostly process.
  - esafak 3y ago
    If you don't mind being part of the "support staff" you can have the job!
  - realjhol 3y ago
    You can't change human nature. Hierarchy is inevitable. All you'll do is replace explicit hierarchy for a covert implicit hierarchy, because most people are natural minions who will look for someone to take charge.
friendly_deer 3y ago
I note that there two pervading ethea on HN, both exemplified in the parent comment: 1) Poor management (broadly defined) creates misaligned incentives, busy work, etc. that "gets in the way" of good talent executing well. 2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid relative to the IC's who "Do the work." These two ideas, though, are in contradiction. Management deserves higher pay exactly because poor management can destroy value so quickly and easily. The problem is identifying, within the "company system," good management from bad management.
- opportune 3y ago
  There are a lot of other factors at play: A lot of less experienced employees don’t understand what managers do. There is also a certain personality I’d call “the geeky engineer” who thinks the same way. Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example need micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to make sure they don’t go off track, get stuck without telling anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first week playing with something speculative that may help). A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don’t mean that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily. Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for career growth. This is also true of ICs though. Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad EMs.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. From my vantage point as an engineer it also seems like what qualifies as "good management" is hard to pin down because not only is it difficult to quantify in the first place, but it also varies between teams and organizations… a management style that worked in one team and company might fly like a rock elsewhere. If that's true, it'd make vetting managers challenging even if the business in question is trying to vet them as well as they do engineers.

danielovichdk 3y ago

I wholeheartedly concur. Thanks for putting it into writing.

yamtaddle 3y ago

I think a lot of the friction is upper-middle or middle-but-anxiously-trying-to-claim-upper-middle (in a class sense—income's related to, but not identical to, class, in this analysis, following Fussell) management not wanting their reports to have equal or greater standing, in social status terms. Probably this treating programmers as a status-threat dates to the merging of high-status analyst and low-status programmer into a single role, way back in the 80s—there was little threat with a few upper-middle or near-upper-middle analysts running around, but increase the total number of people in programming and merge "analyst" and "programmer" and now there are too many, and no-one to be "under" them in status, and what's the point of status if you don't have inferior people to lord it over? If there's nobody you can credibly boss around or tell to take care of some bullshit for you, and expect them to just say "yes" and do it without pushing back? Nobody to do the actual work while you're "working" at the golf course or goofing off in your private office! Clearly, that would be a threat—why, they might all get dragged down to bottom-tier status, if there's no one under them!

polygamous_bat 3y ago
One bit of corpo-speak that I have seen cropping up to address this is relabeling "managed by" as "supported by", as in, "team X will be supported by person Y." It may not work overnight, but I would like to see a shift in the culture of a manager "managing" like a king manages his kingdom and the peasants within, to "supporting", like a coordinator. But I fear that we will fall back to the ape mentality of hierarchies and end up twisting the words to fit our predetermined outcomes.
- jdgoesmarching 3y ago
  I’m a program manager my role is very close to this. People are confused when I give them my title and explain that I don’t have direct reports, but I “manage” our team about as much our director does. That means handling administrative tasks, organizing work, stakeholder management, or any of the other million tasks involved in running a successful team that developers shouldn’t need to worry about. It’s very easy to conflate prioritizing and planning with telling people what to do, and sadly in many orgs that is the case. However, those tasks and everything else falling under the “management” umbrella should not imply a hierarchy. It’s just a different type of work to be done by people with different skill sets. I don’t know if that reality will ever be embraced by my fellow business bros, but that simple mindset has made me a better manager than any class, book, or course I’ve experienced.
  - runamok 3y ago
    I read the concept recently of a people manager vs. a process manager. A program manager from my experience is a bit of both but mostly process.
- esafak 3y ago
  If you don't mind being part of the "support staff" you can have the job!
- realjhol 3y ago
  You can't change human nature. Hierarchy is inevitable. All you'll do is replace explicit hierarchy for a covert implicit hierarchy, because most people are natural minions who will look for someone to take charge.

friendly_deer 3y ago

I note that there two pervading ethea on HN, both exemplified in the parent comment: 1) Poor management (broadly defined) creates misaligned incentives, busy work, etc. that "gets in the way" of good talent executing well. 2) Management, who "doesn't really do anything," is overpaid relative to the IC's who "Do the work." These two ideas, though, are in contradiction. Management deserves higher pay exactly because poor management can destroy value so quickly and easily. The problem is identifying, within the "company system," good management from bad management.

opportune 3y ago
There are a lot of other factors at play: A lot of less experienced employees don’t understand what managers do. There is also a certain personality I’d call “the geeky engineer” who thinks the same way. Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example need micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to make sure they don’t go off track, get stuck without telling anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first week playing with something speculative that may help). A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don’t mean that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily. Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for career growth. This is also true of ICs though. Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad EMs.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. From my vantage point as an engineer it also seems like what qualifies as "good management" is hard to pin down because not only is it difficult to quantify in the first place, but it also varies between teams and organizations… a management style that worked in one team and company might fly like a rock elsewhere. If that's true, it'd make vetting managers challenging even if the business in question is trying to vet them as well as they do engineers.