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Managers 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 impossibl
by osigurdson 3y ago
Managers 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]