5 ms·
I disagree. Sports gives lots of great examples... the all-time greats almost always fail as coaches. But great coaches often come from the ranks of the less su
by rented_mule 2y ago
I disagree. Sports gives lots of great examples... the all-time greats almost always fail as coaches. But great coaches often come from the ranks of the less successful players and get more out of the greats. I've seen the same over and over in software engineering.
Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.
Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.
- tsunamifury 2y agoCompletely false. Almost every NBA player is what you would call a high performer by any metric. And most coaches come from the player base. You wrote a lot here and got the metaphor entirely wrong at a base level. The NBA is a tournament of entirely high performers.
- rented_mule 2y agoPlease look for a little more nuance, I promise that it's there. Almost every NBA player is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many NBA players are not high performers when compared to other NBA players. Almost every professional software engineer is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many professional software engineers are not high performers when compared to the rest of the profession. Why is Steph Curry's salary more than 25x some of his teammates' salaries? The same for LeBron James? There is a distribution of performance within the top level of any profession. Why call out performance at all, in the context of coaching / managing / growth, if it's not relative to others at the same level?
- tsunamifury 2y ago100% no nuance and not comparable. There are millions of engineers and maybe 1000 players in the NBA at any given moment. It’s entirely not comparable if you understand anything about how scale is different. But you don’t. Like most on this forum these days it’s low Level Randos commenting with little insight or knowledge