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I hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.

by Lammy 2y ago

geodel 2y ago
Btw how do you know your current manager is not doing that.
- Lammy 2y ago
  I don't. That's why I said hope :)
  - ohyes 2y ago
    You’ll know when he ends every meeting with “dummies, get back to work”
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
dumbness is ranking intelligence, which is a positive trait, dumbness is just a metric for how often intelligence fails. Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons. You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.
JamesBarney 2y ago
Almost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes. In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"
- whstl 2y ago
  I am a manager and I don't mentally stack rank my reports. That's not out of respect or anything, but because they're all good. I hired and mentored them, and they all passed probation. Sure there are junior devs who are just starting, but they're getting paid less, so they're pulling their weight proportionately. They're not worse.
strken 2y ago
I'm not a manager and I don't stack rank people, but I am 100% capable of knowing when one of my co-workers or predecessors is a fucking moron. The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like // @ts-nocheck // obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it? async function upsertWidget() { try { // await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... }) // 20 line block of commented-out useless code // pretend this went on much longer let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c }) if (!result.ok) { result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun if (!result.ok) { result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating } } // notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently // also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript return result } catch (error) { return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object } } function doSomething() { const widget = await upsertWidget() } ...except even worse, because instead of createWidget the name was something far less descriptive, the nesting was deeper and involved loops, there were random assignments that made no goddamn sense, and the API calls just went to an unnecessary microservice that was only called from here and which literally just passed the data through to a third party with minor changes. Those minor changes resulted in an internal API that was actually worse than the unmodified third party API. I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.
- spike021 2y ago
  Isn't that a problem with your code review process? Why is that person's code making it to production? So again, maybe they're a bad employee but it seems like nothing's done to even try and minimize the risks they present.

I hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.

by Lammy 2y ago

I hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.

geodel 2y ago

Btw how do you know your current manager is not doing that.

Lammy 2y ago
I don't. That's why I said hope :)
- ohyes 2y ago
  You’ll know when he ends every meeting with “dummies, get back to work”

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

dumbness is ranking intelligence, which is a positive trait, dumbness is just a metric for how often intelligence fails. Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons. You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.

JamesBarney 2y ago

Almost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes. In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"

whstl 2y ago
I am a manager and I don't mentally stack rank my reports. That's not out of respect or anything, but because they're all good. I hired and mentored them, and they all passed probation. Sure there are junior devs who are just starting, but they're getting paid less, so they're pulling their weight proportionately. They're not worse.

strken 2y ago

I'm not a manager and I don't stack rank people, but I am 100% capable of knowing when one of my co-workers or predecessors is a fucking moron. The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like // @ts-nocheck // obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it? async function upsertWidget() { try { // await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... }) // 20 line block of commented-out useless code // pretend this went on much longer let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c }) if (!result.ok) { result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun if (!result.ok) { result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating } } // notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently // also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript return result } catch (error) { return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object } } function doSomething() { const widget = await upsertWidget() } ...except even worse, because instead of createWidget the name was something far less descriptive, the nesting was deeper and involved loops, there were random assignments that made no goddamn sense, and the API calls just went to an unnecessary microservice that was only called from here and which literally just passed the data through to a third party with minor changes. Those minor changes resulted in an internal API that was actually worse than the unmodified third party API. I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.

spike021 2y ago
Isn't that a problem with your code review process? Why is that person's code making it to production? So again, maybe they're a bad employee but it seems like nothing's done to even try and minimize the risks they present.