2 ms·

I've worked in both, top-down and bottom-up + as a manager. I think both have their merits, and different people want/need different styles. For me, it was fun

I've worked in both, top-down and bottom-up + as a manager. I think both have their merits, and different people want/need different styles. For me, it was fun to be able to drive my own backlog, do my own discoveries, talk with stakeholders and feel like I really owned the product as well. Now I work as an IC again at a more top-down place where I work fully remote and only 4 days a week. It's honestly quite nice to not have to talk to anyone and just wake up at 6am, have my task assigned, get it done and then go focus on my hobby projects/go hiking/exercise/spend time with my girlfriend. I don't have to be online 24/7 and I have maybe 2-3 meetings a week. The org sets the direction and we decide how to implement it. It works for me because in many ways I drive the requirements by telling the org what I need to execute properly. I can also still drive infrastructure improvements, and the org. is mature enough to prioritize them. I still grow, just in a different direction than I did as a manager. I get the chance to really focus on the technical parts of a solution.

uoaei 3y ago
> The org sets the direction and we decide how to implement it. This is key. "Good" managers can manage the expectations of the org to enforce this kind of relationship if the org wants to be pushy or micromanage-y. They insulate their team to create a real sense of agency and ownership. It's nice that your org makes your manager's job easy in this regard. "Bad" managers are the opposite, they just dump the poorly-defined, poorly-justified demands onto their ICs. When they can't figure out why things aren't going well, they call for many hours of meetings with their ICs to hash out in detail how the implementation should proceed, which typically ends up being nothing more than the manager trying different ways of convincing their ICs to do it the way they already imagine it should go.

uoaei 3y ago

> The org sets the direction and we decide how to implement it. This is key. "Good" managers can manage the expectations of the org to enforce this kind of relationship if the org wants to be pushy or micromanage-y. They insulate their team to create a real sense of agency and ownership. It's nice that your org makes your manager's job easy in this regard. "Bad" managers are the opposite, they just dump the poorly-defined, poorly-justified demands onto their ICs. When they can't figure out why things aren't going well, they call for many hours of meetings with their ICs to hash out in detail how the implementation should proceed, which typically ends up being nothing more than the manager trying different ways of convincing their ICs to do it the way they already imagine it should go.