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> Good tech leaders generally don’t command: they inspire. Ding ding ding! You win the prize. The way I always put this to people is that "if dictating worke

> Good tech leaders generally don’t command: they inspire. Ding ding ding! You win the prize. The way I always put this to people is that "if dictating worked, there'd be a lot more dictators in the world." > Good tech leaders influence, guide, and grow people. They are honest and authentic. > The management style I have seen work the best is when people act in a real, genuine and sincere ways that are true to who they are as individuals and avoid manipulative behavior. They can still be hard chargers. They can still be abrasive. But they generally have a great degree of self-honesty and consideration to others to go along with their ambition. The best managers I've ever had never told me to do anything. At my last position (from which I was unfortunately laid off a few months ago) as a senior staff engineer at a ~100 person startup with a ~30 person engineering org, my manager, the CTO, raised this to an art form. I joked with our other senior staff engineer (whom I hired) that our manager never said anything but "Figure it out." Once, after an eng all hands meeting, I Slacked my colleague and said "Well, if that wasn't peak $CTO-NAME, I don't know what is. I'm pretty sure what I just heard was the 25 minute version of 'figure it out.'" "Figure it out" is a great message when you have a talented group of engineers working with you. They're experts at what they do, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten hired. "Figure it out" gives them room to get shit done, and it also goes a long way toward validating any concerns they might express. It's almost magical, really. I worked there for almost a year, and I what I just wrote here for all of you is the absolute most valuable thing I learned in all that time. As a leader, telling smart, curious, and deeply technical people to "figure it out" will get you everything you ever dreamed of and more. The only problem is that if you're not careful, you can end up talking too much, which leads to the other half of the lesson: shut the fuck up. Literally just stop talking, and leave some space in the conversation that you're not filling up with words. It's best if you can stop talking right as you've sketched out the barest outlines of a big idea, or told a good story, or you've just got something that's conceptually interesting to drop in the other person's lap. Once you do that, "figure it out" + interesting idea + "shut the fuck up" is just like weaponized nerd sniping.

supertofu 3y ago
I recently quit a dev job because the project manager micromanaged everything (among other reasons). In that job I was treated as a set of hands to execute someone else's vision and nothing more. No one ever said to me "figure it out", even though that is my number one skill as a developer, and that is the part of my job that I love the most. Thank you for sharing this anecdote. It has helped me understand the management style I prefer.
siva7 3y ago
Those kind of leaders are very rare. There are not enough available on the market
- happytiger 3y ago
  Only because the current management culture doesn’t understand, encourage or do anything to create them. Generally it’s very difficult to survive as a good manager in most large enterprises as the culture is toxic. And that culture is because of poor leadership at the top — CEO culture in American companies is divested of human sensitivity and deeply entrenched in exploitative ethos. “You got to do what you got to do.” It’s simply not true and many founder lead companies prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies don’t have to be run the way they do. But that’s the collective belief of the Harvard Business reading crowd. The wage issues, environmental externalities, and people’s failing faith in the economically-driven society that has been so successful for so long reveals a system out of balance. These are all management and leadership failures, be it inside of corporations or government. Few workers inside of the system glow about their bosses or the effectiveness of their leadership teams. And many that do only do so because of the contrast to terrible leadership they have experienced. So I agree with you that there is a dearth of good leadership. What can we do about it? It’s certainly much better than it was 20 years ago.
jrgoff 3y ago
I would add to this the importance of listening to be part of this approach. I used to work at a company with a couple thousand engineers. My team was 20 or so people at the time and our dev environment was constantly breaking. It was not unusual for me to spend more than a full day each week trying to get my dev environment working and unable to do any development on what I was supposed to be doing. And that was common across the whole team. We had 1 to 2 senior engineers working close to full time on improving the situation, communicating with the team who maintained the dev environment and finding workarounds for our requirements, but often in a week or two those workarounds would stop working as the devops team made more changes. To be fair, the devops team was actively working towards creating a new dev ecosystem and our team had some dev needs that were not needed for most (maybe any?) of the rest of engineering. So they kept breaking our workarounds, we would be told we shouldn't be doing things that way anyway so it wasn't their fault, but also there wasn't an officially supported way to do what we absolutely needed to do to do our work. Eventually the situation got escalated up the chain and the director came to our site to look into the situation. I was hopeful that that would lead to some improvements but when he was introduced to the team and gave a little speech it basically boiled down to "back in my day engineers would get their hands dirty and figure things out, maybe as a company we've become too lazy and expect other teams to fix things for us" - i.e. "you guys need to stop being lazy and figure it out yourselves". We were pissed. Fortunately the management chain was able to get him to understand the situation and he assigned one of the main devops guys to work with us to make sure our needs were met going forward. He never even apologized to us, I think he just decided it would be better to disappear and let things settle (we worked in a satellite city and he was at the main office so this was the only time many of us had ever interacted with him).
- supertofu 3y ago
  I can't understand why people don't apologize when they are wrong. It's not like people forget what you have said if you never admit your fault. Especially when you are a leader, admitting fault only makes people like you more.

supertofu 3y ago

I recently quit a dev job because the project manager micromanaged everything (among other reasons). In that job I was treated as a set of hands to execute someone else's vision and nothing more. No one ever said to me "figure it out", even though that is my number one skill as a developer, and that is the part of my job that I love the most. Thank you for sharing this anecdote. It has helped me understand the management style I prefer.

siva7 3y ago

Those kind of leaders are very rare. There are not enough available on the market

happytiger 3y ago
Only because the current management culture doesn’t understand, encourage or do anything to create them. Generally it’s very difficult to survive as a good manager in most large enterprises as the culture is toxic. And that culture is because of poor leadership at the top — CEO culture in American companies is divested of human sensitivity and deeply entrenched in exploitative ethos. “You got to do what you got to do.” It’s simply not true and many founder lead companies prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies don’t have to be run the way they do. But that’s the collective belief of the Harvard Business reading crowd. The wage issues, environmental externalities, and people’s failing faith in the economically-driven society that has been so successful for so long reveals a system out of balance. These are all management and leadership failures, be it inside of corporations or government. Few workers inside of the system glow about their bosses or the effectiveness of their leadership teams. And many that do only do so because of the contrast to terrible leadership they have experienced. So I agree with you that there is a dearth of good leadership. What can we do about it? It’s certainly much better than it was 20 years ago.

jrgoff 3y ago

I would add to this the importance of listening to be part of this approach. I used to work at a company with a couple thousand engineers. My team was 20 or so people at the time and our dev environment was constantly breaking. It was not unusual for me to spend more than a full day each week trying to get my dev environment working and unable to do any development on what I was supposed to be doing. And that was common across the whole team. We had 1 to 2 senior engineers working close to full time on improving the situation, communicating with the team who maintained the dev environment and finding workarounds for our requirements, but often in a week or two those workarounds would stop working as the devops team made more changes. To be fair, the devops team was actively working towards creating a new dev ecosystem and our team had some dev needs that were not needed for most (maybe any?) of the rest of engineering. So they kept breaking our workarounds, we would be told we shouldn't be doing things that way anyway so it wasn't their fault, but also there wasn't an officially supported way to do what we absolutely needed to do to do our work. Eventually the situation got escalated up the chain and the director came to our site to look into the situation. I was hopeful that that would lead to some improvements but when he was introduced to the team and gave a little speech it basically boiled down to "back in my day engineers would get their hands dirty and figure things out, maybe as a company we've become too lazy and expect other teams to fix things for us" - i.e. "you guys need to stop being lazy and figure it out yourselves". We were pissed. Fortunately the management chain was able to get him to understand the situation and he assigned one of the main devops guys to work with us to make sure our needs were met going forward. He never even apologized to us, I think he just decided it would be better to disappear and let things settle (we worked in a satellite city and he was at the main office so this was the only time many of us had ever interacted with him).

supertofu 3y ago
I can't understand why people don't apologize when they are wrong. It's not like people forget what you have said if you never admit your fault. Especially when you are a leader, admitting fault only makes people like you more.