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Having worked at a lot of companies, I think this advice is hit-or-miss. I'd say as often as not, a good engineer is more knowledgeable than their manager in m

Having worked at a lot of companies, I think this advice is hit-or-miss. I'd say as often as not, a good engineer is more knowledgeable than their manager in most respects, including the people dynamics. Ask your manager for help is often the nuclear option, because there's such a wide-range of outcomes when a manager tries to intervene -- maybe they misunderstand your message, maybe they fumble the delivery, maybe they forgot, etc. Even if the manager does intervene it could be neutral or negative "Hey I got you some 'resources' who know nothing about the project that's due this month to help out." Miscommunication is particularly common when there's a language and culture barrier at play. Also, what? IIRC most engineering teams miss most goals most of the time. I guess if it's agreed in advance something is a "hard commitment" then yes let the manager know early you're not going to make it happen. But also the manager should be even more responsible and should be asking for periodic updates on all goals if not receiving them. Also there's something really offputting about the "get it done" phrase/mentality for public companies. Delivering faster is not one of Meta's (or google's) top 50 priorities. Their priorities all need to be "This time, build a product that's going to be around in 10 years that will reflect well on our brand." Hustling is not only not a part of that equation, constantly feeling "under the gun" is antithetical to the kind of "Let's take a step back and do it right, even if it's twice as expensive and takes twice as long" approach they need.

cushychicken 3y ago
This highlights how lots of managers are just plain not good at their jobs. I'd say that in many startups, MOST managers are not good at their jobs, as they are freshly promoted ICs who have to figure out a new role.
- thrashh 3y ago
  Most people are not great at their jobs. We’re all on a bell curve.
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    I suspect good management, as plotted on a curve, does not follow a Bell curve. I'd suspect it's bimodal, and the "bad" peak is much higher than the good one. Ay least, that's how my own experience maps.
    - c4mpute 3y ago
      Same. I think bad management are people who got into management because it pays better, it is necessary for career advancement or social status. Those people do management because that is what they have to do to get their personal goal, money, promotions, fame. Good managers are people who do it because they like it and they excel at it. Some might have started doing management for different reasons, but stayed because they discovered it to be their thing. That is the reason for that bimodal distribution and why it looks as it does. I think tons of jobs that pay very well, make you famous, etc. actually don't have a bell-curve-distribution for the same reasons.
      - thrashh 3y ago
        What professions start with experienced people out of the bat? People just take what opportunities they can get or they choose to study some field hoping that they like it. And often, a few years in, they learn that they hate their job.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        There is a reason that many organizations have a leveling guidelines that you have to perform at the next level before getting promoted to it.
        lucumo 3y ago
        I've found that that's mostly a fig leaf. It was the primary reason I left places. When I asked how to get the promotion and got that response, I got the promotion by moving to another company. And of course I performed well in the new role, because it never was about performance. It was about people not expecting juniors to grow so quickly to medior, or about not having a free "promotion slot" this year, or it's just not a priority, or other organizational stuff.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Wouldn't startups have way less of these issues ? I'm imagining a team of 10 with 3 dev, one "manager" and the other people being business related. Lacking resources would be something coming up naturally in every day conversations, whether a goal will tough to meet or not as well, and the manager's role also get a lot reduced as the political aspects are that more local and constrained. "Get It Done" becomes a different beast once your manager is just one of the 4 layers separating you from the actual decision makers and their goal is just to become the bigger fish in the ocean.
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    Maybe, but I sort of doubt it. IC -> mgmt transitions are a messy thing, and I've never personally experienced working at a startup where anyone had enough time to help the new manager get their bearings effectively. (I include myself in that group of people who made the IC->mgmt transition, and flailed.)
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      Good point. I kinda assume startups that have neither experienced managers/leaders nor self sustaining engineers gotta fail fast and we don't hear much about them. I've mostly seen a mixed of both, with either senior staff supporting a youngish business team, or an experienced leader team pulling in youngish staff. The most intersting one was 4 old farts in the office next to us executing on their ideas like they'd play a jazz piece, there was clear tension, they were pretty loud, and the manager guy appeared more like riding a rodeo that playing the HR drone. But they looked crazy efficient.
charlie0 3y ago
"Also there's something really offputting about the 'get it done' phrase/mentality for public companies." This really resonates with me. I work at a larger company and sometimes get pressure to finish work faster. I don't know why I should, what I'm working on is clearly not critical to the company. At lot of this "work faster" is just there to meet arbitrary and questionable scrum practices. The only thing the manager cares is that I got x mount of story points done this sprint.
- WalterSear 3y ago
  > The only thing the manager cares is how much more work they can get out of you to show to their managers.
  - JauntyHatAngle 3y ago
    *appear to get out of you Which is why shit, unmaintainable code often goes unpunished
    - charlie0 3y ago
      Yes, there's a lot of technical debt in the codebase.
- ido 3y ago
  I don't know why I should, what I'm working on is clearly not critical to the company. Isn't it better to get more done than less (at the same amount of time), even if it's not critical? The only case where it's puzzling is if you're left twiddling your thumbs after you're done, rather than get more work.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Better for who? You’re advocating for finishing work faster so that you can be given more work faster? Sound like something to pitch to owners, not salaried workers
YZF 3y ago
The problem is when it takes x10 longer is x10 more expensive and sucks. The trick is to align both the short term and the long term. Deliver that short term faster, and deliver it in a form that aligns and/or informs the long term. I was curious about the history of the iPod so was reading up on it. Apple took 8 months from zero to announcement and the product was available one month later. That was Nov 2001. The iPod touch still sells today. There's lots of details under that but you don't really see that kind of execution any more IMO.
- XorNot 3y ago
  The iPod really wasn't a technically complex product though - no more so then anything else at the time. The original iPod was "just" a hard drive with an LCD on it. The big innovation was the wheel interface, and the quality of the plastic packaging/housing. Apple's big value proposition was realizing they could put premium-looking styling on a product and that would then justify the price point to add capability - at the time the whole point of the iPod was "it's got enormous storage". It literally was just a laptop HDD in a housing though. Which is to say: Apple's timeline for that is a pretty standard consumer product timeline. If they'd taken much longer then that you'd have to wonder what they were wasting their time on. EDIT: Like it's worth considering that Apple probably owes a lot of it's success to the specific finish and chemical formulation of the plastic they use, more then any specific technical merits of a lot of their products - building a plastic gadget that felt as good as an iPod did was a heck of an achievement, just not in the area people think.
  - YZF 3y ago
    I wouldn't trivialize the iPod effort. Zero to a finished, manufacturable, product. There's software. There was coordination with a bunch of external vendors. And, sure as you say aspects of design and materials. I've seen many software projects of smaller scope that get stuck or lose direction.
dan-robertson 3y ago
Taking the example from the OP, do you really think it would be better to slowly come to agreement over 12 meetings or to have some more senior person say a few words to skip the ego soothing or whatever in those meetings? Your second two paragraphs seem to imply that you think the former is better. Do you think that (and why)? My best guesses are that I’m misunderstanding what you wrote, you’re thinking of a different example, or you’re imagining some hidden cost to the actions taken to ‘get it done’. In my opinion the latter choice seems obviously better, both for the company that gets more productive employees, and for the people who would have been in those meetings because I think sitting in pointless meetings and having some task on the back burner for ages as you go through the meetings is not pleasant. Perhaps there’s some world where you’re expected to sit in the office for exactly N hours per day and so pointless meetings are a way to work fewer hours. But imo even if the choice is an hour of tedious meeting vs an hour of working, the work feels preferable to me.
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  > Taking the example from the OP, do you really think it would be better to slowly come to agreement over 12 meetings or to have some more senior person say a few words to skip the ego soothing or whatever in those meetings? That's not the opposite though.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    I don’t understand what you mean. Did I do a bad job of representing the scenario in the original article? Those were the outcomes from the article as I understood it, where one is caused by ‘try to do it by yourself’ and the other by ‘get help’.
    - adamnemecek 3y ago
      Taking time to do things right is not the same as more meetings with more stakeholders.
      - 3y ago
elromulous 3y ago
Just wanted to say, that is an excellent username.
Nimitz14 3y ago
> maybe they misunderstand your message, maybe they fumble the delivery, maybe they forgot This sounds like a you problem. Maybe your communication skills are lacking? > Their priorities all need to be "This time, build a product that's going to be around in 10 years that will reflect well on our brand." Lol I couldn't disagree more. I believe this sort of mindset leads to analysis paralysis.

cushychicken 3y ago

This highlights how lots of managers are just plain not good at their jobs. I'd say that in many startups, MOST managers are not good at their jobs, as they are freshly promoted ICs who have to figure out a new role.

thrashh 3y ago
Most people are not great at their jobs. We’re all on a bell curve.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  I suspect good management, as plotted on a curve, does not follow a Bell curve. I'd suspect it's bimodal, and the "bad" peak is much higher than the good one. Ay least, that's how my own experience maps.
  - c4mpute 3y ago
    Same. I think bad management are people who got into management because it pays better, it is necessary for career advancement or social status. Those people do management because that is what they have to do to get their personal goal, money, promotions, fame. Good managers are people who do it because they like it and they excel at it. Some might have started doing management for different reasons, but stayed because they discovered it to be their thing. That is the reason for that bimodal distribution and why it looks as it does. I think tons of jobs that pay very well, make you famous, etc. actually don't have a bell-curve-distribution for the same reasons.
    - thrashh 3y ago
      What professions start with experienced people out of the bat? People just take what opportunities they can get or they choose to study some field hoping that they like it. And often, a few years in, they learn that they hate their job.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        There is a reason that many organizations have a leveling guidelines that you have to perform at the next level before getting promoted to it.
        lucumo 3y ago
        I've found that that's mostly a fig leaf. It was the primary reason I left places. When I asked how to get the promotion and got that response, I got the promotion by moving to another company. And of course I performed well in the new role, because it never was about performance. It was about people not expecting juniors to grow so quickly to medior, or about not having a free "promotion slot" this year, or it's just not a priority, or other organizational stuff.
makeitdouble 3y ago
Wouldn't startups have way less of these issues ? I'm imagining a team of 10 with 3 dev, one "manager" and the other people being business related. Lacking resources would be something coming up naturally in every day conversations, whether a goal will tough to meet or not as well, and the manager's role also get a lot reduced as the political aspects are that more local and constrained. "Get It Done" becomes a different beast once your manager is just one of the 4 layers separating you from the actual decision makers and their goal is just to become the bigger fish in the ocean.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  Maybe, but I sort of doubt it. IC -> mgmt transitions are a messy thing, and I've never personally experienced working at a startup where anyone had enough time to help the new manager get their bearings effectively. (I include myself in that group of people who made the IC->mgmt transition, and flailed.)
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    Good point. I kinda assume startups that have neither experienced managers/leaders nor self sustaining engineers gotta fail fast and we don't hear much about them. I've mostly seen a mixed of both, with either senior staff supporting a youngish business team, or an experienced leader team pulling in youngish staff. The most intersting one was 4 old farts in the office next to us executing on their ideas like they'd play a jazz piece, there was clear tension, they were pretty loud, and the manager guy appeared more like riding a rodeo that playing the HR drone. But they looked crazy efficient.

charlie0 3y ago

"Also there's something really offputting about the 'get it done' phrase/mentality for public companies." This really resonates with me. I work at a larger company and sometimes get pressure to finish work faster. I don't know why I should, what I'm working on is clearly not critical to the company. At lot of this "work faster" is just there to meet arbitrary and questionable scrum practices. The only thing the manager cares is that I got x mount of story points done this sprint.

WalterSear 3y ago
> The only thing the manager cares is how much more work they can get out of you to show to their managers.
- JauntyHatAngle 3y ago
  *appear to get out of you Which is why shit, unmaintainable code often goes unpunished
  - charlie0 3y ago
    Yes, there's a lot of technical debt in the codebase.
ido 3y ago
I don't know why I should, what I'm working on is clearly not critical to the company. Isn't it better to get more done than less (at the same amount of time), even if it's not critical? The only case where it's puzzling is if you're left twiddling your thumbs after you're done, rather than get more work.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Better for who? You’re advocating for finishing work faster so that you can be given more work faster? Sound like something to pitch to owners, not salaried workers

YZF 3y ago

The problem is when it takes x10 longer is x10 more expensive and sucks. The trick is to align both the short term and the long term. Deliver that short term faster, and deliver it in a form that aligns and/or informs the long term. I was curious about the history of the iPod so was reading up on it. Apple took 8 months from zero to announcement and the product was available one month later. That was Nov 2001. The iPod touch still sells today. There's lots of details under that but you don't really see that kind of execution any more IMO.

XorNot 3y ago
The iPod really wasn't a technically complex product though - no more so then anything else at the time. The original iPod was "just" a hard drive with an LCD on it. The big innovation was the wheel interface, and the quality of the plastic packaging/housing. Apple's big value proposition was realizing they could put premium-looking styling on a product and that would then justify the price point to add capability - at the time the whole point of the iPod was "it's got enormous storage". It literally was just a laptop HDD in a housing though. Which is to say: Apple's timeline for that is a pretty standard consumer product timeline. If they'd taken much longer then that you'd have to wonder what they were wasting their time on. EDIT: Like it's worth considering that Apple probably owes a lot of it's success to the specific finish and chemical formulation of the plastic they use, more then any specific technical merits of a lot of their products - building a plastic gadget that felt as good as an iPod did was a heck of an achievement, just not in the area people think.
- YZF 3y ago
  I wouldn't trivialize the iPod effort. Zero to a finished, manufacturable, product. There's software. There was coordination with a bunch of external vendors. And, sure as you say aspects of design and materials. I've seen many software projects of smaller scope that get stuck or lose direction.

dan-robertson 3y ago

Taking the example from the OP, do you really think it would be better to slowly come to agreement over 12 meetings or to have some more senior person say a few words to skip the ego soothing or whatever in those meetings? Your second two paragraphs seem to imply that you think the former is better. Do you think that (and why)? My best guesses are that I’m misunderstanding what you wrote, you’re thinking of a different example, or you’re imagining some hidden cost to the actions taken to ‘get it done’. In my opinion the latter choice seems obviously better, both for the company that gets more productive employees, and for the people who would have been in those meetings because I think sitting in pointless meetings and having some task on the back burner for ages as you go through the meetings is not pleasant. Perhaps there’s some world where you’re expected to sit in the office for exactly N hours per day and so pointless meetings are a way to work fewer hours. But imo even if the choice is an hour of tedious meeting vs an hour of working, the work feels preferable to me.

adamnemecek 3y ago
> Taking the example from the OP, do you really think it would be better to slowly come to agreement over 12 meetings or to have some more senior person say a few words to skip the ego soothing or whatever in those meetings? That's not the opposite though.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I don’t understand what you mean. Did I do a bad job of representing the scenario in the original article? Those were the outcomes from the article as I understood it, where one is caused by ‘try to do it by yourself’ and the other by ‘get help’.
  - adamnemecek 3y ago
    Taking time to do things right is not the same as more meetings with more stakeholders.
    - 3y ago

elromulous 3y ago

Just wanted to say, that is an excellent username.

Nimitz14 3y ago

> maybe they misunderstand your message, maybe they fumble the delivery, maybe they forgot This sounds like a you problem. Maybe your communication skills are lacking? > Their priorities all need to be "This time, build a product that's going to be around in 10 years that will reflect well on our brand." Lol I couldn't disagree more. I believe this sort of mindset leads to analysis paralysis.