7 ms·

I didn't write any reply to the original, but enjoyed reading it, and this one too - but as someone who's been on both sides of the IC/Senior Management divide,

• gumballindie 3y ago
  Tech companies need tech leads not managers, or managers with a solid technical background. Otherwise it ends up in a mediocre show of power and power games such as those described by the author. Sitting on your bottom and holding meetings all day long and discussing processes for the sake of processes has no place in tech. Tech companies need to understand that.
  • swiftcoder 3y ago
    You can't be an effective tech lead in most (large) companies without at least passable ability to manage all of your dev team, your counterparts in product, and your management chain in general. As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet.
    • gumballindie 3y ago
      > As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet. And thats how it should be - folks with a technical background doing the management of technical people and work. How can you even manage that which you dont understand? Ticking boxes and measuring output is not management, that can be delegated to a script and graph charts. To manage the delivery of a technical project you need to understand the technology behind it - in an equal amount to how well you understand communicating with business stakeholders and balancing business and tech needs. And no, taking a udemy course in programming python doesnt mean you have tech experience, equally taking a udemy course in agile doesnt make you a manager.
      • jt2190 3y ago
        > How can you even manage that which you dont understand? Unless you’re an expert at literally everything, there is something in your life that you have to manage that you have no expertise in. The typical way these things are managed is through measuring outcomes rather than focusing on how the work is performed. Tools include setting goals and milestones, auditing, cost bidding, reputation, etc.
        • philwelch 3y ago
          The best managers are the ones who do develop expertise in everything they have to manage. For example, the US Navy requires anyone commanding a nuclear-powered ship to be trained as nuclear engineers.
          • jt2190 3y ago
            Even on a nuclear submarine, there is a ton of stuff that isn’t “the reactor and propulsion system”, and there are a lot of activities that must be managed, starting with extremely basic things like “Do we have sufficient food and water?”
            • philwelch 3y ago
              Yes, and that's expected to be something that's fully understood by any naval commander. My point is that, contrary to the MBA mentality of expecting managers to be intellectual mediocrities and never expecting them to gain expertise in anything hard or technical, the Navy actually does require hard technical expertise from commanding officers. Nuclear reactors are a lot more complicated than being able to count how much food and fresh water you have. This nonsense about "measuring outcomes rather than focusing on how the work is performed" is cope for incompetent leadership.
              • deleted 3y ago
                [deleted]
              • 3y ago
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ludicity 3y ago
  Very fair. The funny thing is that I'm pretty jaded, and people tell me that I've got the wrong read. Then I see comments like this where people say "This is so obviously true that it's crazy it bears mentioning". I suspect that it actually is surprising for some people, but based on the emails I get, it's mostly cathartic because so many engineers spend time being told by management that they're imagining all of this. Because, as you've said, it's super hard to find good managers.
• npteljes 3y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I think that people are looking at waste in a wrong way. It's relatively easy to point out inefficiencies in a working system. What's harder is organizing a working system. Energy and attention are finite on many levels, and this is true on the organizational level too. Let's pick an example of a computer game. Games are usually riddled with performance problems, in fact, I think that it's hard to find a well-optimized game. Yet many of these inefficient games provide good fun for a lot of people. As it turns out, engine efficiency is not a top priority for a game, there's much more to it, like the game design, level design, and the context of the game, which is marketing, timing the release, setting the price, and so on.
• ljm 3y ago
  Good management and leadership is also hard to quantify because it's a bidirectional relationship. The best manager in the world is going to struggle with a direct report who doesn't want to play ball, but will do a fantastic job with those who nurture the relationship or are trying to find their feet in their career. A poor manager isn't going to succeed with either of those people. I find the author's dry sense of humour quite amusing, and I feel for them because I've been there. Most of us have been there I expect. I would say that feeding this mindset is likely to lead to burnout in the long term. A lot of these issues are as inevitable as they are utterly confounding and at some point in your career I think you need to find that sweet spot where you can do your best work without having to push back too hard against the organisation. If you can manage to find that peace of mind then you're golden, and if you're lucky you can stay in a positive mindset or at least delay the onset of Jaded Greybeard Syndrome.
  • kmac_ 3y ago
    Every talented junior and mid hits this wall at some point. This is where a new mindset and new skills have to be acquired: moving with the whole company in the same direction and improving it from the inside. Pointing out inefficiencies is important, but more important is how you do it and to who. It's easy to complain, it's hard to act accordingly.
    • vsareto 3y ago
      But why should any of us bother picking up new skills and adjusting mindsets if the author has to fight for a raise after saving the company $500k? Secondarily, why should the author continue to fix things like this when they don't benefit, but others responsible are also not facing any consequences?
      • kmac_ 3y ago
        Well, this is an internal driver. A person has it or not. (Just like technicall skills but in a different area.)
        • 3y ago
• lapcat 3y ago
  > You think it's hard trying to find good programmers? Try finding good managers. There's an ambiguity in the word "good": it can mean skilled, but it can also mean ethical. Personal ambition and greed can turn any organization dysfunctional, even if everyone is highly skilled. And you can't really blame individuals within a company for wanting to make as much money as they can, because that's more or less the point of the company itself. As far as management is concerned, smart ethical people who are inexperienced will eventually become better at their jobs through experience, though this may involve a lot of trial and error. But in a certain important sense, smart unethical people will never become "better" at their jobs. By the way, I personally don't think it's hard to find good (skilled) programmers. Companies make hiring a lot harder than it needs to be. Despite my years of documented excellence and my success as a self-employed indie developer, I'm essentially unhireable by most companies, because I'm not good at, or indeed willing to devote myself to, jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Perhaps this is an ethics problem too. Everyone seems very concerned about candidates who lie about their résumés. But for some strange reason, companies are exclusively focused on trying to evaluate the skills of candidates rather than evaluating their ethics. Here's a thought on this subject: companies practically demand that job candidates lie to them about the reasons they left their previous job. The truth is that a lot of people quit because their previous manager was an idiot or an asshole, but nobody is allowed to say that in a job interview, otherwise you'd be immediately rejected as someone who has a "bad attitude" and is not a "team player". In other words, playing along, having a "good" attitude, means lying.
  • nobodyandproud 3y ago
    It's not just intelligence and ethics but a strong-enough personality and verbal skills--yes, I'm projecting here. I can't overstate how difficult it is to say "no" in the moment, and do so in a way that doesn't make you a problem and target in senior management's eyes.
  • kcplate 3y ago
    > jumping through the arbitrary flaming hoops they set up to keep people out. Amen. Having HR set up some bullshit criteria and resume robot to presort your candidates, then subject the ones who fall through that sieve to stupid gotcha programming questions is an amazing way to develop the attitude that it’s “hard to find good programmers”
• kunley 3y ago
  "It is really, really hard to organize a large group of people towards any common purpose" Well, one very healthy rule to organize people is that people are responsible for their mistakes, which has a long-term effect of having less mistakes instead of having them covered under the carpet and still biting.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • darkerside 3y ago
    It all comes down to defining what is and isn't a mistake. A mistake at the team level may be an organization win and vice versa. And the instant you change the incentives to fix this, you are upsetting someone else's apple cart.
    • kunley 3y ago
      I'd talk about a common sense definition of a mistake, but common sense is so undervalued nowadays, that I don't even know how to start conversation about it. By the way, can you give a concrete example of a team mistake being org-level win? I rather think that incompetence is always a loose.
• randomdata 3y ago
  > Try finding good managers. Is that necessary? I know 'Agile' isn't cool anymore, but at the heart of the Agile Manifesto is a suggestion that every contributor on the team should share in the management role rather than having a dedicated manager. Granted, it also suggests you need motivated people.
  • ryanklee 3y ago
    The amount and kind of work that managers do cannot be distributed across a scrum team. It's literally impossible and attempts to do so would be abusive and would tank productivity.
  • timmg 3y ago
    > Is that necessary? Yes, it is. First, you can't expect everyone on the team to have all context on everything. That would be an incredible waste of everyone's time. Second, even if everyone did, in most cases the individuals would disagree on priority -- someone needs to be the final arbiter. In practice, few people will make the "best decisions". They will often rationalize what they want. A leader needs to be there to "check" those decisions.
  • ljm 3y ago
    Every contributor can share the product or delivery management role, sure, but it doesn't really follow that 1:1s, career discussions and compensation reviews are also handled by the team, and those are important functions served by a manager.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      Career and compensation discussions would be had with what the 12 Principles refers to as the "business people". In a traditional organization structure the manager would act as a liaison between the business people and the development team, but it is suggested that the developers should talk to the business people directly (and daily!).
      • ljm 3y ago
• MrRolleyes 3y ago
  [dead]
• gibsonf1 3y ago
  It seems like Tesla and Spacex prove it’s quite possible to do at scale.
  • randallsquared 3y ago
    Assuming by "it" here you mean > to organise a large group of people towards any common purpose, let alone profitably, let alone efficiently, especially in something so relatively new and little-understood as tech ...I don't think those are good examples. The very sympathetic recent bio of Musk details a lot of dysfunction in those organizations, and they largely achieve anyway by leaning on The Mission, working people harder, driving burnout, and then discarding them.
    • api 3y ago
      That story of mission driven burnout happens a whole lot in human history. During the race to the moon in the 60s I recall reading about the epidemic of broken marriages and families around the space program due to overwork and burnout. A troubling question I often ask is: is it possible to do big things in a healthy balanced way? Or is greatness intrinsically a “Moloch” that demands human sacrifice? (That imagery was inspired by the 20s film Metropolis that touches on this question a little.) If the latter is true then I don’t think this bodes well for the future of our species. It means we either die in the fire of our own striving or we die quietly in mediocrity, but either way we die. There’s never a lasting positive outcome. BTW Elon Musk himself looks an awful lot like a victim of his own burnout culture. I suppose you can give him credit for taking his own medicine.
      • fnimick 3y ago
        I think it's not possible to do big things at the pace a vicious capital market demands in a healthy balanced way. Would you say Monet didn't do great things because he only produced on average about 3 paintings per year?
        • api 3y ago
• boredumb 3y ago
  Managing people is easy if you are personable and have the ability to adapt to culture and the people that comprise it. (managing 5 people is different than managing 20 people, which is different than managing 20 people in a different target industry) Being a good manager also means shielding groups from other groups and making yourself the filter so you aren't wasting productive peoples times in endless meetings that are generally for other groups to show they are working to the wider company. You also have to provide a non-technical analysis of the internal state of the product/teams/tech to people outside your team. Those are the two hard things, everything else should be figuring out how you can make your team operate at it's highest levels without burning people out and hating their job.
  • ZeroSolstice 3y ago
    Just an observation but its seems like your points run counter to each other. If I'm reading your idea correctly managing / leading 5, 10, 100, 1000, etc people appears to be (4) things: 1. Shielding the group 2. Provide non-technical analysis of the group/state of product 3. Remove road blocks 4. Provide resources The industry that you are operating in seems to be adapted to the (4) principals you laid out.
• jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  The Grug Brained Developer got submitted up yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38076886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38076886 I felt like there was so much on-sides violence against developers in the comments. Where-as the I Saved submission was was such a great post about an org rotting out, about how jumbled stuff gets. So much of this chaos & madness is organizational far more than it is individual, imo. Having a broader picture and context is hard. Having specific insight for squads facing specific issues is hard. I agree so much, it's really really hard to maintain a large org, on so many levels (including technical levels).
• mschuster91 3y ago
  The problem is that there is no sort of ownership, both literal and metaphysical. For hundreds, thousands of years, people worked hard in small shops and farms (leaving the issue of slavery aside to keep the point short), delivered good services to their neighbors with whom they went to church and pub with, and they ended up with getting something in return to pass down to their children. These days? The utter majority of workers are just another instantly-replaceable gear in a gearbox of madness, working for people on the other side of the globe no less - the exception are the few tradespeople and small shopkeepers that survived industrialization and Walmart/Amazon, and startups up until 100-ish people where the employee stock grant issues tend to get stopped.