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It's a hard problem because there are no good answers. > We need more trust and fewer metrics / games. Except, at scale when dealing with a lot of people, the
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
It's a hard problem because there are no good answers.
> We need more trust and fewer metrics / games.
Except, at scale when dealing with a lot of people, there are plenty of people who are willing to abuse that trust.
I made this mistake early on in my career as a manager. I gave an important piece of work to one of the very senior engineers who I managed. Over the course of a month, he repeatedly said "trust me" regarding the status of his project. When 6 weeks went by and he finally showed it, it was in such a state that it was essentially unusable. We ended up throwing the whole thing out. Furthermore, he left for another job about two months after that, leaving his work in a shitty state.
I made plenty of mistakes there, but I also learned a valuable lesson, "trust but verify". Until someone shows me concrete evidence of what they've done, I really have nothing to go by.
To be clear, I'd love to be able to "have more trust and fewer metrics". But at the end of the day, it's really hard to give people the freedom to, say, hole up for months at a time while they say "trust me".
- osigurdson 3y agoManagers need to have the capacity to understand the work being done. Get into (I assume) code, and see what is happening. If you can’t do this, it is impossible to be an effective leader. You can be an effective people manager without this capability but you cannot be trusted to ensure the work will get done.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoTotally agree. To be clear, I am technical, and I definitely was able to evaluate the work being done once it was delivered. My mistake (among many) was letting the work go too long without any visible progress. That's why I get annoyed when people just lament about the problems with things like OKRs and KPIs, while totally disregarding the problems these things were designed to solve and pretending that if managers just had a more "trusting" mindset that a million Higgs and Wiles would be free to blossom.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI don't know what to think about a 'senior' engineer that doesn't reflexively keep his manager in the loop.
- osigurdson 3y agoI don’t understand the “once it was delivered” aspect. Why not ask people to commit whatever they have and then you can see if it is going in the right direction (or not). If you can’t do this yourself, at some point you need to be able to trust (yes trust) someone who can. You could not formulate OKRs or KPIs that would have solved this problem.
- rfrey 3y agoThat's exactly the "verify" your parent was talking about. Unless you happen to have a situation where your project includes regular submission of work artifacts -- which describes a lot of modern software, sure, but is far from universal -- monitoring the work regularly is at odds with the "trust" you mentioned above. I've often seen managers who attempt to monitor like this accused of micromanaging.
- finite_depth 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]