6 ms·

> Managers who are the sort of people who don't value helping your colleagues or being curious/concerned enough about potential security problems, are most like

> Managers who are the sort of people who don't value helping your colleagues or being curious/concerned enough about potential security problems, are most likely the sort of people who won't pick up on any of that being a valuable use of your time during one on ones or in standups either. This is not a "sort of people" problem. This is a metrics problem. It's not only developers who are evaluated by using useless metrics that don't track the value you add to an organization. Low-level managers are too. Low-level managers need to evaluate the people assigned to them, they need to evaluate them objectively, and they need to give an unbiased and objectively verifiable score. This means something they can measure, such as metrics or verifiable goals. If low-level managers cannot do this, they will need to answer why they gave X and Y this score whereas poor little Z who outworked them both was scored lower. Not being able to objectively justify a score is a problem that no manager wants to have, as this is a major liability. Hence the bullshit metrics and absurd goals. They need something on paper to back up their decisions. A manager might be fully aware that you unblocked half your team members throughout the year with critical help, and that you are the go-to guy to solve critical issues. But if your team members close twice the tickets you did, they will have trouble justifying you are contributing as much as them.

gradstudent 2y ago
> But if your team members close twice the tickets you did, they will have trouble justifying you are contributing as much as them. The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: one who cannot justify their decisions except via reference to made up metrics.
- passwordoops 2y ago
  >the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager Well then it means the vast, vast, vast majority of companies with a coherent corporate structure are shit. Welcome to reality
- Arainach 2y ago
  Unfortunately, a lot of things boil down to metrics, even at companies with great engineering cultures. If you have four L4 engineers on the team, all of whom are performing at the level described in the career profile as L5, but only budget to promote two of them, how do you pick which two? What if they have different managers, all of whom sincerely believe their report is the one delivering essential value? If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This system is soul crushing but it exists all over the industry.
  - alextingle 2y ago
    > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? Easy. You quit, and find a better job. That practice is so toxic that it's sufficient to condemn the organisation as unworthy of any buy-in whatsoever. Just leave.
    - jart 2y ago
      Nah you make sure X% of your team is staffed with losers. It's a nutty system I know. But I'd imagine that's how things worked at companies that have stack ratings. Managers probably traded low performers like baseball cards.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      In defense of stack ranking, it does solve a very common problem -- managers who never fire people who deserve to be let go. This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people. You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).
      - convolvatron 2y ago
        companies need to do much better about letting managers go. I get it, they are hard to find. and those that actually have any engineering management skill at all are even harder to find. and every time you hire a new one you're taking a risk that they'll be a absolutely terrible manager. a terrible manager can cause a huge swath of destruction. but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  I've had experience with internal "support" that marks tickets as closed without actually fixing the problem. Sometimes the reason for closing suggests they haven't even read the email that opened the ticket. Think something like "Tool $X is missing on machine $Y. Please can you install it, according to $POLICY it is meant to be on all prod machines." Then the ticket gets closed with "The policy is correct. $X must be on all prod machines, we cannot change this." Without installing the tool. Then when the annual anonymous "rate your satisfaction with these services" survey came round, they wondered why the ratings were so bad - I made sure in the open text feedback not to go after the poor employee but to raise concerns about the performance of the team manager. I won't take credit for it, but I'm told things at $COMPANY have got better since.
- dogleash 2y ago
  > a shit manager This isn't about a singular individual, it's about a group of professionals. You have to deploy systems thinking. If you give a cohort a tool that allows and incentives them to do worse at their job, the average person in that group will perform worse. I like my boss; I have also built a skillset and frugalness where I don't worry about working for someone I don't respect ever again. But I still care about what's going on at large and trends. I don't want downward pressure on the average. Not only will that slowly seep into effecting me, I also care about the lives of the people at points in their career where they don't have employment opportunities that allow them to avoid bad management.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. It's not about being "easy". It's about being objective, verifiable, and demonstratably unbiased. It's about justifying how you rank the performance in a way that's impossible to refute. > But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: It's not, and frankly this "shit manager" accusation is an infantile remark that screams a failure to understand what it means to perform well.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
It becomes an interesting contradiction : there's no such thing as a good unbiased and objective metric on this. So good managers (that do their job properly) are bad managers (that get fired for it). And bad managers are good managers...
- pxc 2y ago
  Recent-ishly on HN: https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management.html https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management...
Brian_K_White 2y ago
A manager can absolutely describe any value as simply as you just did.
jimberlage 2y ago
One thing that is always on the table - if you see a person picking up valuable work and they don't have a ticket for it - you as a manager can create that ticket. Now you may need to coach the person on how to do that themselves (can we make the ticket making process more lightweight? Can we make a heuristic like just put story points for the time you've already spent on it plus a buffer for after-the-fact work?) But managers who really want documentation and truly think people are doing underappreciated work can always make it themselves.

gradstudent 2y ago

> But if your team members close twice the tickets you did, they will have trouble justifying you are contributing as much as them. The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: one who cannot justify their decisions except via reference to made up metrics.

passwordoops 2y ago
>the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager Well then it means the vast, vast, vast majority of companies with a coherent corporate structure are shit. Welcome to reality
Arainach 2y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of things boil down to metrics, even at companies with great engineering cultures. If you have four L4 engineers on the team, all of whom are performing at the level described in the career profile as L5, but only budget to promote two of them, how do you pick which two? What if they have different managers, all of whom sincerely believe their report is the one delivering essential value? If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics. This system is soul crushing but it exists all over the industry.
- alextingle 2y ago
  > If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? Easy. You quit, and find a better job. That practice is so toxic that it's sufficient to condemn the organisation as unworthy of any buy-in whatsoever. Just leave.
  - jart 2y ago
    Nah you make sure X% of your team is staffed with losers. It's a nutty system I know. But I'd imagine that's how things worked at companies that have stack ratings. Managers probably traded low performers like baseball cards.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    In defense of stack ranking, it does solve a very common problem -- managers who never fire people who deserve to be let go. This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people. You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).
    - convolvatron 2y ago
      companies need to do much better about letting managers go. I get it, they are hard to find. and those that actually have any engineering management skill at all are even harder to find. and every time you hire a new one you're taking a risk that they'll be a absolutely terrible manager. a terrible manager can cause a huge swath of destruction. but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.
red_admiral 2y ago
I've had experience with internal "support" that marks tickets as closed without actually fixing the problem. Sometimes the reason for closing suggests they haven't even read the email that opened the ticket. Think something like "Tool $X is missing on machine $Y. Please can you install it, according to $POLICY it is meant to be on all prod machines." Then the ticket gets closed with "The policy is correct. $X must be on all prod machines, we cannot change this." Without installing the tool. Then when the annual anonymous "rate your satisfaction with these services" survey came round, they wondered why the ratings were so bad - I made sure in the open text feedback not to go after the poor employee but to raise concerns about the performance of the team manager. I won't take credit for it, but I'm told things at $COMPANY have got better since.
dogleash 2y ago
> a shit manager This isn't about a singular individual, it's about a group of professionals. You have to deploy systems thinking. If you give a cohort a tool that allows and incentives them to do worse at their job, the average person in that group will perform worse. I like my boss; I have also built a skillset and frugalness where I don't worry about working for someone I don't respect ever again. But I still care about what's going on at large and trends. I don't want downward pressure on the average. Not only will that slowly seep into effecting me, I also care about the lives of the people at points in their career where they don't have employment opportunities that allow them to avoid bad management.
chipdart 2y ago
> The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. It's not about being "easy". It's about being objective, verifiable, and demonstratably unbiased. It's about justifying how you rank the performance in a way that's impossible to refute. > But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: It's not, and frankly this "shit manager" accusation is an infantile remark that screams a failure to understand what it means to perform well.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

It becomes an interesting contradiction : there's no such thing as a good unbiased and objective metric on this. So good managers (that do their job properly) are bad managers (that get fired for it). And bad managers are good managers...

pxc 2y ago
Recent-ishly on HN: https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management.html https://yosefk.com/blog/advantages-of-incompetent-management...

Brian_K_White 2y ago

A manager can absolutely describe any value as simply as you just did.

jimberlage 2y ago

One thing that is always on the table - if you see a person picking up valuable work and they don't have a ticket for it - you as a manager can create that ticket. Now you may need to coach the person on how to do that themselves (can we make the ticket making process more lightweight? Can we make a heuristic like just put story points for the time you've already spent on it plus a buffer for after-the-fact work?) But managers who really want documentation and truly think people are doing underappreciated work can always make it themselves.