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Yes. I hate this article. It presupposes "the norm" doesn't need anything special and everyone else is "difficult." But supporting people is the manager's job.
by coffeefirst 3y ago
Yes. I hate this article. It presupposes "the norm" doesn't need anything special and everyone else is "difficult."
But supporting people is the manager's job. You can't do that if you pathologize literally everything messy or nuanced.
Some of these categories are people learning to estimate for the first time, or responding to pressure to say "yes" to impossible things by saying "yes" to impossible things. Also notably absent is any mention of air cover. There's usually a reason people get burned out or start sounding the alarm about a project. But rather than get to the bottom of that and help with the root causes, in every single of one of these cases he assumes the problem is basically their personalities.
- commandlinefan 3y ago> everyone else is "difficult." Programmers find themselves in the position of "managing" the most difficult possible sort of subordinate - the computer itself. It doesn't care what you want. It doesn't care about your deadlines. It does _exactly_ what you told it to do, and if you told it the wrong thing, it will do that anyway and it's entirely your problem to figure out which part was wrong. No "people manager" could put up with such an obstinate employee, but doing so is literally our job description, and occasionally we have to report back up that we still haven't figured out why the computer is being "difficult" - and then we get blamed for that difficulty.