15 ms·

Mistakes as a new manager

347 points by Sharpie4679 2y ago

eastbound 2y ago
List is toi short. I’d add: Posture. Everyone wants to be the benevolent manager, especially if there is enough money for everyone, and especially in these times where collaboration and positive management are touted. But you have to keep a carrot and a leash on the employees. My first employees got a 33% raise the first year things were good. Long story short: None of them are here anymore and we’re still scrambling to recover from the mess they’ve created by being lazy. Now people struggle to get a few percent salary increase. It eats me to my core, but I want them to get my product out.
- chasd00 2y ago
  heh i will say being a parent helps with being a manager. You really understand the carrot/stick balance as a parent.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    true! I'm not really kidding when I "joke" that being a father of three has helped shape my management style. The value systems and overall approach are really similar :)
    - kansface 2y ago
      What is your management stick?
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  I have to admit I initially hired a few Papered Posers, and it was a mistake to pay them 2.4x higher than market rate to ensure the project would reach conclusion on schedule. The lessons we learned: 1. "Manage or be managed...": your first lesson is people will try to manipulate those in positions of authority regardless of competency. i.e. the idea of "goodwill" being the true core product can escape the irrationally ambitious/sycophantic. 2. No amount of money can make someone care about company projects. The worker may be interested in the project, or is simply there for the wrong reasons. Remember you want to keep employees content, but a "kingdom of kings" is unsustainable. 3. People can postpone something until tomorrow indefinitely. Thus, pay very close attention to projected deliverable times. 4. Fire someone for being unproductive according to a defined workmanship-standard as soon as possible. It will notify the rest of staff you are not there to play games, and stupid behavior will have consequences. Mostly effective with Jr staff using ChatGPT to try and BS the world like any other con. 5. Delegation? Just initially run trial contracts with potential staff first for each project deliverable. Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime, or a second chance to be unaccountable for their behavior. 6. Entrenched incompetence: organizations have their own emergent structure, and it will usually drift back to the same dysfunctional patterns/designs. 7. Redacted 8. try to leave things slightly better than when you arrived. 9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle". Best regards, =3
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    You may wish to talk to someone to evaluate whether the company you work for might be completely dysfunctional-- none of that list sounds like it's coming from a healthy place. > 9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle". This is usually not the case at a FAANG, for whatever it's worth. Multiple people I know have voluntarily moved back to IC from management positions. It's not that unusual for senior devs to try managing and figure out that they don't like it (whether or not they're good at it) and then move back into being a highly regarded IC.
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      My personal experience with titles has always been complicated. By the time a corporation has reached FAANG scale, they become boring and ultimately immutable out of necessity. I find it sad many folks dream of joining that drudgery, inventing nothing, and gambling on asinine business plans. =3
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    >> Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime "On time" can be achieved by over estimating. As a hypothetical, dev A estimates that a project will take a year and completes it in 6 months. Dev B estimates 1 month for the same project and completes it in 3. Companies that focus too much on things being "on time" ultimately get the "nothing is worth doing" corporate culture.
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      Actually, sometimes it means hiring rank amateurs, and training them to reliably complete tasks like a real business. Understanding the time constraint would be lower for Jr, and thus the equivalent pay scale will be less lucrative... but it is up to individuals to decide their own work ethics. Using PERT deliverable/vertices redundancies is often necessary for projects no one has seen before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_... Note, the simple system uses probabilistic time estimates of key deliverables, considers redundancy, and explicitly mitigates teams that introduce liabilities. If it put people on the moon, than I figured it was good enough for most of my ridiculous projects. Have a great day =3 Rule #17: "Always listen to the person that signs your paycheck. Everyone has an opinion, but some opinions are more profitable than others"
- Bjartr 2y ago
  How were things good if there was a mess?
otteromkram 2y ago
> "Where’s my dopamine?" I'm not in management, but couldn't OP become a working manager? Might depend on the size of their team and demands of the new role, but I've worked with managers who wear their IC hat on occasion and thought it was a positive value-add for the group as a whole.
- 98codes 2y ago
  Every manager I've ever had that couldn't let go of their IC hat also had a pile of manager hat work that wasn't ever getting done.
  - throwaway984393 2y ago
    [dead]
  - justsomeshmuck 2y ago
    What sort of manager work was ignored?
- icedchai 2y ago
  For small teams (like, 5 people max) that may make sense. It really depends on the organization. With some orgs, you're going to meetings all day and there's no time to focus.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    for these IC/leaders a big mistake is taking on critical path work, then blocking everyone else.
  - sumedh 2y ago
    > With some orgs, you're going to meetings all day and there's no time to focus. Let's be honest here, some of those meetings could have been done over chat conversation.
    - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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TripleChecker 2y ago
Delegation was one I struggled with a lot in the early days. Even as the CEO, I was reluctant to give up my customer service responsibilities of manning the inboxes. Eventually, I understand that even if someone handled it only 80-90% as well, that would be much better for the company than having me do it.
- chasd00 2y ago
  Delegation is so hard, i struggle constantly and I'm technically a "Sr. Manager". When the project is up against deadline pressure, it's so tempting to do something yourself that only takes you a day vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. Inevitably you become the bottleneck when a wave of escalations or other management tasks come down the pipe but there's a pile of actual work you decided to take on yourself half done too.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    I moved up to Director this year, and explicitly called out that if I needed to give up any more direct interaction with ICs and "contact time" with the real builders I had probably topped out. I've mitigated this a lot with an awesome team of leads and managers, and a (hopefully good kind of) lazy, non-prescriptive management style.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. If that is happening more than twice in a 6 month period you need to do a post-mortem on your management style, something is wrong. Spinning on a task is already a bad sign pointing at a problem that can be solved at the management level.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    Sounds like there are some fundamental process/team issues going on. If a team cannot be trusted to deliver, superman always coming in to save the day shouldn't be the solution.
nineteen999 2y ago
"Mistakes I made as a new manager which you won't necessarily make because all humans are different"
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Everyone is different, yes, but people are >99% similar. We all go through the same developmental stages, perhaps at different times, and we exhibit millions of the same psychological biases.
- anotheracc88 2y ago
  The mistakes are common. Almost tropes. It would be like golf swing or skiing mistakes. Every instructor knows em.
localghost3000 2y ago
This misses the single biggest mistake every new manager makes: avoiding hard conversations with your reports. If you start managing folks you were recently in the trenches with this can be VERY hard. These are your comrades after all! You want them to like you. It’s all very natural. Sadly it is the single biggest cause for dissatisfaction I’ve seen on a given team. Being unwilling to give honest, direct feedback results in underperforming teams and unhappy reports. It’s counterintuitive but very important to get right as a manager. The big “AHA!!” moment for me was when I realized you need to speak to behaviors and outcomes not character. So instead of “you’re sloppy” you say something like “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”. Involving them in the solution and explaining why it matters. It makes all the difference and folks ironically respect and like you more for it.
- steerpike 2y ago
  100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.
  - anotheracc88 2y ago
    Indeed. Purposefully stay off the critical path! Do coding that helps you keep up with what people are talking about. Not coding that is urgent!
    - ad_hockey 2y ago
      I made that mistake as a new manager by picking up a small but important task in an area I knew well. I thought it would help unblock the team, but I didn't realise I was about to go into three days of back to back meetings. After the third stand-up in a row of reporting zero progress I sheepishly reassigned the ticket to someone else, and didn't make that mistake again. Refactors, doc fixes, low priority bug fixes, and tech debt are all fair game for managers to pick up. I do think it's important to keep your hand in.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
binarymax 2y ago
I’ve got a good hack for the dopamine: PowerPoint and excel. Go to town on making kick ass presentations and reports. “Ship” those to the org during meetings and all hands. It’s not the same as code for customers, but it helps. Also, if you have time, code non critical things that will never be a dependency for anything else.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  I build internal tools, do BS support requests and push little initiatives that align with my core values. Like get a dozen people in-person for a technical watch party - cheap, easy, super rewarding.
- starky 2y ago
  Agreed, my go to when feeling like I haven't produced real work in awhile is to document processes, especially if there is something I've noticed has been done poorly or been asked about a couple times recently.
ryoshu 2y ago
Delegation -> This is 1000% the hardest thing to do. You need to let go and trust your people. Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well. Quality over quantity -> Yes. The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job. Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well. Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for. You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well. It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
  - ad_hockey 2y ago
    Agreed. "Where's my dopamine" is the right way to describe it. As an IC I could find a bug, craft a test that reproduces it, write a fix, see the test go green, see the PR get approved and land... I'd get a little dopamine ping at each step. As a manager I'd have days where I had constructive 1:1s in the morning and maybe made a decision on some strategic or resourcing problem in an afternoon meeting. Of course I recognised that the work was not only valuable, but higher impact than just fixing a bug. But the direct hit in the pleasure receptors just wasn't there. I'd finish a day a like that and instead of feeling happy with my work, I'd just feel exhausted and not looking forward to the next day. After a few years as a manager I switched back to the IC track. I sometimes wonder if my experience means I'm just hard-wired to be an IC, or if with more time and practice you can train yourself to get the dopamine feedback from management activities.
brap 2y ago
I joined a new team as a manager and after 3 years was kindly asked to step down and become an IC. While there are many external factors to blame, I decided to do an honest postmortem with myself so I thought about these things a lot. As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough. You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter. As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you. You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep. Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.
- exitb 2y ago
  > if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    Turning this person into a manager is a major fail. Typically their only move is to quit, and everyone loses.
- thanksgiving 2y ago
  > You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter. I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction. They call this "managing up" or something like that.
hnlurker22 2y ago
New era manager mistake. Ask ChatGPT about time estimates and pretend you know that because you are an expert, then use that to micromanage people. Mistake is a nice word. I consider that to be pure evil
dowager_dan99 2y ago
Most of these are pretty accurate, but there's good news: giving a sh!t about your people will likely get you 80% of the way to being a good manager. If you genuinely care about them, their work and progression you're already aligned with the key aspects. You can learn & figure out the rest. It might be hard and very unpleasant at times, and stressful, but building the teams that build software is the most rewarding accomplishment of my life. I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.
- alsetmusic 2y ago
  > giving a sh!t about your people One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.
wavemode 2y ago
> As an individual contributor (IC), your work spoke for itself; people could easily see it. Plain and simple. As a manager, it’s less black and white, and surprisingly, for many new managers, part of your job now involves managing how others see you. This doesn't only apply to managers. Even as an individual software engineer, the more you move up (if moving up is something that matters to you), the more you have to play politics. Your work can't possibly "speak for itself", since the people it's speaking to (the managers with power over your career) don't speak code.
toolslive 2y ago
It's important to know exactly what you are managing: a team? a project? a service? a product? "Engineering manager" is an ambiguous term here.
urbandw311er 2y ago
I’ve been an IC, a manager, a CEO and now even an IC again. This advice is all really sound and easily digestible. Many thanks to the author for sharing it.
purpleidea 2y ago
The worst is having a manager who thinks he's great, but is actually disloyal and shit. Not sure how best to deal with that situation other than to ignore and eventually move on... If they'd be willing to admit their failing and improve, that would be awesome. Asking for a friend.
Daub 2y ago
As a (former) manager of a department in a design school, I defined three managerial imperatives: 1. Get rid of old, dead wood. Given that our program is scaffolded, with each course building upon the preceding, A single low performing lecturer can bring down the quality of an entire program. Don’t trust student feedback when identifying such people. They favour nice lecturers over effective ones. Getting rid of low performing team members in a university can be a low process. It can sometimes be quicker to find programs they would be happier/more productive in, and engineer a transfer. 2. Hire effective new blood. Well duh, I hear you say. Finding good new hires can be a difficult task. For those who I really wanted to hire, I did my research on who they were and what they might want, and tried to show them that I was willing to build a nest for them. 3. Have a vision of what the department should be. This vision requires constant maintenance and should always consider input from the team.
- bearjaws 2y ago
  #2 is considered taboo, but IMO if a team is full of people who are checked out, it may be time to make huge changes. People become jaded and start to tell you all the ways we can't do something, or it will take too long. They often don't realize what tools are at their disposal to help make change easier, and instead insist there is only one good path to a solution... Fresh talent really helps get people excited again, after the initial shock of layoffs. Not to mention new talent always comes in excited for an opportunity.
the_clarence 2y ago
Reading the comments here just makes me feel like managers are useless. This role doesn't have to exist. It's just fluff.
- jimberlage 2y ago
  I worked at a company that emulated Valve’s hyper-flat structure on their engineering team, with 1 manager having 50 direct reports. That’s as close to a management-less structure as I can think of, since your manager can’t attend meetings or do 1:1s anymore. It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy. Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day. About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else. People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping. 1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer. The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.) Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    I have an opposite experience in one of my last gigs where hired management batted 50% mishire rate where people just didn’t do anything at all or worse shipped something that needn't to even exist of quality so bad that the project had to be scrapped. This was allowed to drag on for years. Last I heard he eventually got rid of most of them when the company fell on hard times and had to do a bunch of layoffs. By that point the damage was already done and most good people have left or quite quit. Imo it’s a common misconception that management doesn’t know who low performers are. In most cases they know even if the team is large, they just choose to ignore it for whatever political reasons
iLoveOncall 2y ago
On "Where’s my dopamine?", while I'm not a manager but just a tech lead, so still working as an IC for most of the time, I do get satisfaction from eliminating repetitive work for people in my team and optimizing process. It's great to be able to tell your teammates that the meeting is canceled because you just sent an email explaining that you prepared everything for next sprint and here's a 5 lines summary.
mikhmha 2y ago
What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago. I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again. Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare. Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability. OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!
- epalm 2y ago
  About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Just write the daily standup in a list, and keep this list. It will be succint and task-level.
blindriver 2y ago
Another mistake: Thinking your former coworkers are still your friends.
- smokel 2y ago
  I don't agree. Trust allows for a lot of things to go a lot smoother. Sure, good friendships can end, but one can also be honest with good friends.
ChiMan 2y ago
The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way. Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work. Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.
- YZF 2y ago
  I hate the term IC. Its often used in a semi-derogatory context. Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager. Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
  - acedTrex 2y ago
    In what context is IC every used in any derogatory fashion? In my experience "Manager" or "People Leader" is far far more derogatory.
    - YZF 2y ago
      It implies the persons' leverage is limited to only what they personally do. That's obviously false. A non-manager engineer can have broad scope in putting in a proper architecture, in mentoring others, in cross-team communications. I would go as far as saying there's virtually no engineer whose impact is limited to themselves. They have a harder job since they need to affect change without having official authority to affect change. The term's very existence it puts people in a certain bin. Why is a CEO not also an "individual contributor"? They're an individual. They contribute. It's just newspeak. I've never thought of management positions in an organization to reflect something derogatory. But maybe to some.
mindvirus 2y ago
It is cynical, but quality over quantity is bad advice if you want to grow your career as a manager. It's a real failure mode. Not being aggressive about growing your headcount will hold you back. Pretty much all managers are evaluated on amount of headcount when it comes to promotions, especially if you're not tied to P&L.
- deleted 2y ago
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Gunseng 2y ago
I find it hard to take anything seriously where "imposter syndrom" is mentioned. That said, I think having full time managers at all is a mistake. This was discussed in detail in this podcast: https://37signals.com/podcast/everybody-works/ https://37signals.com/podcast/everybody-works/
interludead 2y ago
"Is my team shipping? Are they happy?" is a simple yet powerful metric for success. If more managers internalized this, I suspect we’d see healthier teams and better products.
drewr 2y ago
> For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case). Your job as a manager is still to ship things -- only now it's to ship more than you ever could alone. You get the privilege and responsibility to steward the skills of two or more engineers and shape the entire part of a business. The dopamine is harder won and often more rewarding. Management is difficult and exhausting but it's anything but unfulfilling. Let's not start new managers off telling them what they can't do but what they can do. Ironically, as a manager of software engineers you should still be very engaged with the team's code. How else will you understand your capacity and understand what gaps you need to fill? Run the test suite, review designs, read PRs, ask questions, give praise for attention to detail. You will keep the bar high on the team and advocate for their work more effectively within the organization.
Chengdavid 2y ago
[dead]

347 points by Sharpie4679 2y ago

List is toi short. I’d add: Posture. Everyone wants to be the benevolent manager, especially if there is enough money for everyone, and especially in these times where collaboration and positive management are touted. But you have to keep a carrot and a leash on the employees. My first employees got a 33% raise the first year things were good. Long story short: None of them are here anymore and we’re still scrambling to recover from the mess they’ve created by being lazy. Now people struggle to get a few percent salary increase. It eats me to my core, but I want them to get my product out.

chasd00 2y ago
heh i will say being a parent helps with being a manager. You really understand the carrot/stick balance as a parent.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  true! I'm not really kidding when I "joke" that being a father of three has helped shape my management style. The value systems and overall approach are really similar :)
  - kansface 2y ago
    What is your management stick?
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
I have to admit I initially hired a few Papered Posers, and it was a mistake to pay them 2.4x higher than market rate to ensure the project would reach conclusion on schedule. The lessons we learned: 1. "Manage or be managed...": your first lesson is people will try to manipulate those in positions of authority regardless of competency. i.e. the idea of "goodwill" being the true core product can escape the irrationally ambitious/sycophantic. 2. No amount of money can make someone care about company projects. The worker may be interested in the project, or is simply there for the wrong reasons. Remember you want to keep employees content, but a "kingdom of kings" is unsustainable. 3. People can postpone something until tomorrow indefinitely. Thus, pay very close attention to projected deliverable times. 4. Fire someone for being unproductive according to a defined workmanship-standard as soon as possible. It will notify the rest of staff you are not there to play games, and stupid behavior will have consequences. Mostly effective with Jr staff using ChatGPT to try and BS the world like any other con. 5. Delegation? Just initially run trial contracts with potential staff first for each project deliverable. Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime, or a second chance to be unaccountable for their behavior. 6. Entrenched incompetence: organizations have their own emergent structure, and it will usually drift back to the same dysfunctional patterns/designs. 7. Redacted 8. try to leave things slightly better than when you arrived. 9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle". Best regards, =3
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  You may wish to talk to someone to evaluate whether the company you work for might be completely dysfunctional-- none of that list sounds like it's coming from a healthy place. > 9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle". This is usually not the case at a FAANG, for whatever it's worth. Multiple people I know have voluntarily moved back to IC from management positions. It's not that unusual for senior devs to try managing and figure out that they don't like it (whether or not they're good at it) and then move back into being a highly regarded IC.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    My personal experience with titles has always been complicated. By the time a corporation has reached FAANG scale, they become boring and ultimately immutable out of necessity. I find it sad many folks dream of joining that drudgery, inventing nothing, and gambling on asinine business plans. =3
- osigurdson 2y ago
  >> Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime "On time" can be achieved by over estimating. As a hypothetical, dev A estimates that a project will take a year and completes it in 6 months. Dev B estimates 1 month for the same project and completes it in 3. Companies that focus too much on things being "on time" ultimately get the "nothing is worth doing" corporate culture.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    Actually, sometimes it means hiring rank amateurs, and training them to reliably complete tasks like a real business. Understanding the time constraint would be lower for Jr, and thus the equivalent pay scale will be less lucrative... but it is up to individuals to decide their own work ethics. Using PERT deliverable/vertices redundancies is often necessary for projects no one has seen before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_... Note, the simple system uses probabilistic time estimates of key deliverables, considers redundancy, and explicitly mitigates teams that introduce liabilities. If it put people on the moon, than I figured it was good enough for most of my ridiculous projects. Have a great day =3 Rule #17: "Always listen to the person that signs your paycheck. Everyone has an opinion, but some opinions are more profitable than others"
Bjartr 2y ago
How were things good if there was a mess?

otteromkram 2y ago

> "Where’s my dopamine?" I'm not in management, but couldn't OP become a working manager? Might depend on the size of their team and demands of the new role, but I've worked with managers who wear their IC hat on occasion and thought it was a positive value-add for the group as a whole.

98codes 2y ago
Every manager I've ever had that couldn't let go of their IC hat also had a pile of manager hat work that wasn't ever getting done.
- throwaway984393 2y ago
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- justsomeshmuck 2y ago
  What sort of manager work was ignored?
icedchai 2y ago
For small teams (like, 5 people max) that may make sense. It really depends on the organization. With some orgs, you're going to meetings all day and there's no time to focus.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  for these IC/leaders a big mistake is taking on critical path work, then blocking everyone else.
- sumedh 2y ago
  > With some orgs, you're going to meetings all day and there's no time to focus. Let's be honest here, some of those meetings could have been done over chat conversation.
  - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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TripleChecker 2y ago

Delegation was one I struggled with a lot in the early days. Even as the CEO, I was reluctant to give up my customer service responsibilities of manning the inboxes. Eventually, I understand that even if someone handled it only 80-90% as well, that would be much better for the company than having me do it.

chasd00 2y ago
Delegation is so hard, i struggle constantly and I'm technically a "Sr. Manager". When the project is up against deadline pressure, it's so tempting to do something yourself that only takes you a day vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. Inevitably you become the bottleneck when a wave of escalations or other management tasks come down the pipe but there's a pile of actual work you decided to take on yourself half done too.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  I moved up to Director this year, and explicitly called out that if I needed to give up any more direct interaction with ICs and "contact time" with the real builders I had probably topped out. I've mitigated this a lot with an awesome team of leads and managers, and a (hopefully good kind of) lazy, non-prescriptive management style.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. If that is happening more than twice in a 6 month period you need to do a post-mortem on your management style, something is wrong. Spinning on a task is already a bad sign pointing at a problem that can be solved at the management level.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Sounds like there are some fundamental process/team issues going on. If a team cannot be trusted to deliver, superman always coming in to save the day shouldn't be the solution.

nineteen999 2y ago

"Mistakes I made as a new manager which you won't necessarily make because all humans are different"

Ferret7446 2y ago
Everyone is different, yes, but people are >99% similar. We all go through the same developmental stages, perhaps at different times, and we exhibit millions of the same psychological biases.
anotheracc88 2y ago
The mistakes are common. Almost tropes. It would be like golf swing or skiing mistakes. Every instructor knows em.

localghost3000 2y ago

This misses the single biggest mistake every new manager makes: avoiding hard conversations with your reports. If you start managing folks you were recently in the trenches with this can be VERY hard. These are your comrades after all! You want them to like you. It’s all very natural. Sadly it is the single biggest cause for dissatisfaction I’ve seen on a given team. Being unwilling to give honest, direct feedback results in underperforming teams and unhappy reports. It’s counterintuitive but very important to get right as a manager. The big “AHA!!” moment for me was when I realized you need to speak to behaviors and outcomes not character. So instead of “you’re sloppy” you say something like “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”. Involving them in the solution and explaining why it matters. It makes all the difference and folks ironically respect and like you more for it.

steerpike 2y ago
100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.
- anotheracc88 2y ago
  Indeed. Purposefully stay off the critical path! Do coding that helps you keep up with what people are talking about. Not coding that is urgent!
  - ad_hockey 2y ago
    I made that mistake as a new manager by picking up a small but important task in an area I knew well. I thought it would help unblock the team, but I didn't realise I was about to go into three days of back to back meetings. After the third stand-up in a row of reporting zero progress I sheepishly reassigned the ticket to someone else, and didn't make that mistake again. Refactors, doc fixes, low priority bug fixes, and tech debt are all fair game for managers to pick up. I do think it's important to keep your hand in.

throwaway984393 2y ago

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binarymax 2y ago

I’ve got a good hack for the dopamine: PowerPoint and excel. Go to town on making kick ass presentations and reports. “Ship” those to the org during meetings and all hands. It’s not the same as code for customers, but it helps. Also, if you have time, code non critical things that will never be a dependency for anything else.

dowager_dan99 2y ago
I build internal tools, do BS support requests and push little initiatives that align with my core values. Like get a dozen people in-person for a technical watch party - cheap, easy, super rewarding.
starky 2y ago
Agreed, my go to when feeling like I haven't produced real work in awhile is to document processes, especially if there is something I've noticed has been done poorly or been asked about a couple times recently.

ryoshu 2y ago

Delegation -> This is 1000% the hardest thing to do. You need to let go and trust your people. Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well. Quality over quantity -> Yes. The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job. Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well. Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for. You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,

dowager_dan99 2y ago
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well. It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
- ad_hockey 2y ago
  Agreed. "Where's my dopamine" is the right way to describe it. As an IC I could find a bug, craft a test that reproduces it, write a fix, see the test go green, see the PR get approved and land... I'd get a little dopamine ping at each step. As a manager I'd have days where I had constructive 1:1s in the morning and maybe made a decision on some strategic or resourcing problem in an afternoon meeting. Of course I recognised that the work was not only valuable, but higher impact than just fixing a bug. But the direct hit in the pleasure receptors just wasn't there. I'd finish a day a like that and instead of feeling happy with my work, I'd just feel exhausted and not looking forward to the next day. After a few years as a manager I switched back to the IC track. I sometimes wonder if my experience means I'm just hard-wired to be an IC, or if with more time and practice you can train yourself to get the dopamine feedback from management activities.

brap 2y ago

I joined a new team as a manager and after 3 years was kindly asked to step down and become an IC. While there are many external factors to blame, I decided to do an honest postmortem with myself so I thought about these things a lot. As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough. You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter. As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you. You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep. Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.

exitb 2y ago
> if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  Turning this person into a manager is a major fail. Typically their only move is to quit, and everyone loses.
thanksgiving 2y ago
> You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter. I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction. They call this "managing up" or something like that.

hnlurker22 2y ago

New era manager mistake. Ask ChatGPT about time estimates and pretend you know that because you are an expert, then use that to micromanage people. Mistake is a nice word. I consider that to be pure evil

dowager_dan99 2y ago

Most of these are pretty accurate, but there's good news: giving a sh!t about your people will likely get you 80% of the way to being a good manager. If you genuinely care about them, their work and progression you're already aligned with the key aspects. You can learn & figure out the rest. It might be hard and very unpleasant at times, and stressful, but building the teams that build software is the most rewarding accomplishment of my life. I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.

alsetmusic 2y ago
> giving a sh!t about your people One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.

wavemode 2y ago

> As an individual contributor (IC), your work spoke for itself; people could easily see it. Plain and simple. As a manager, it’s less black and white, and surprisingly, for many new managers, part of your job now involves managing how others see you. This doesn't only apply to managers. Even as an individual software engineer, the more you move up (if moving up is something that matters to you), the more you have to play politics. Your work can't possibly "speak for itself", since the people it's speaking to (the managers with power over your career) don't speak code.

toolslive 2y ago

It's important to know exactly what you are managing: a team? a project? a service? a product? "Engineering manager" is an ambiguous term here.

urbandw311er 2y ago

I’ve been an IC, a manager, a CEO and now even an IC again. This advice is all really sound and easily digestible. Many thanks to the author for sharing it.

purpleidea 2y ago

The worst is having a manager who thinks he's great, but is actually disloyal and shit. Not sure how best to deal with that situation other than to ignore and eventually move on... If they'd be willing to admit their failing and improve, that would be awesome. Asking for a friend.

Daub 2y ago

As a (former) manager of a department in a design school, I defined three managerial imperatives: 1. Get rid of old, dead wood. Given that our program is scaffolded, with each course building upon the preceding, A single low performing lecturer can bring down the quality of an entire program. Don’t trust student feedback when identifying such people. They favour nice lecturers over effective ones. Getting rid of low performing team members in a university can be a low process. It can sometimes be quicker to find programs they would be happier/more productive in, and engineer a transfer. 2. Hire effective new blood. Well duh, I hear you say. Finding good new hires can be a difficult task. For those who I really wanted to hire, I did my research on who they were and what they might want, and tried to show them that I was willing to build a nest for them. 3. Have a vision of what the department should be. This vision requires constant maintenance and should always consider input from the team.

bearjaws 2y ago
#2 is considered taboo, but IMO if a team is full of people who are checked out, it may be time to make huge changes. People become jaded and start to tell you all the ways we can't do something, or it will take too long. They often don't realize what tools are at their disposal to help make change easier, and instead insist there is only one good path to a solution... Fresh talent really helps get people excited again, after the initial shock of layoffs. Not to mention new talent always comes in excited for an opportunity.

the_clarence 2y ago

Reading the comments here just makes me feel like managers are useless. This role doesn't have to exist. It's just fluff.

jimberlage 2y ago
I worked at a company that emulated Valve’s hyper-flat structure on their engineering team, with 1 manager having 50 direct reports. That’s as close to a management-less structure as I can think of, since your manager can’t attend meetings or do 1:1s anymore. It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy. Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day. About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else. People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping. 1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer. The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.) Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  I have an opposite experience in one of my last gigs where hired management batted 50% mishire rate where people just didn’t do anything at all or worse shipped something that needn't to even exist of quality so bad that the project had to be scrapped. This was allowed to drag on for years. Last I heard he eventually got rid of most of them when the company fell on hard times and had to do a bunch of layoffs. By that point the damage was already done and most good people have left or quite quit. Imo it’s a common misconception that management doesn’t know who low performers are. In most cases they know even if the team is large, they just choose to ignore it for whatever political reasons

iLoveOncall 2y ago

On "Where’s my dopamine?", while I'm not a manager but just a tech lead, so still working as an IC for most of the time, I do get satisfaction from eliminating repetitive work for people in my team and optimizing process. It's great to be able to tell your teammates that the meeting is canceled because you just sent an email explaining that you prepared everything for next sprint and here's a 5 lines summary.

mikhmha 2y ago

What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago. I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again. Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare. Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability. OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!

epalm 2y ago
About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Just write the daily standup in a list, and keep this list. It will be succint and task-level.

blindriver 2y ago

Another mistake: Thinking your former coworkers are still your friends.

smokel 2y ago
I don't agree. Trust allows for a lot of things to go a lot smoother. Sure, good friendships can end, but one can also be honest with good friends.

ChiMan 2y ago

The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way. Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work. Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.

YZF 2y ago
I hate the term IC. Its often used in a semi-derogatory context. Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager. Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
- acedTrex 2y ago
  In what context is IC every used in any derogatory fashion? In my experience "Manager" or "People Leader" is far far more derogatory.
  - YZF 2y ago
    It implies the persons' leverage is limited to only what they personally do. That's obviously false. A non-manager engineer can have broad scope in putting in a proper architecture, in mentoring others, in cross-team communications. I would go as far as saying there's virtually no engineer whose impact is limited to themselves. They have a harder job since they need to affect change without having official authority to affect change. The term's very existence it puts people in a certain bin. Why is a CEO not also an "individual contributor"? They're an individual. They contribute. It's just newspeak. I've never thought of management positions in an organization to reflect something derogatory. But maybe to some.

mindvirus 2y ago

It is cynical, but quality over quantity is bad advice if you want to grow your career as a manager. It's a real failure mode. Not being aggressive about growing your headcount will hold you back. Pretty much all managers are evaluated on amount of headcount when it comes to promotions, especially if you're not tied to P&L.

deleted 2y ago
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Gunseng 2y ago

I find it hard to take anything seriously where "imposter syndrom" is mentioned. That said, I think having full time managers at all is a mistake. This was discussed in detail in this podcast: https://37signals.com/podcast/everybody-works/ https://37signals.com/podcast/everybody-works/

interludead 2y ago

"Is my team shipping? Are they happy?" is a simple yet powerful metric for success. If more managers internalized this, I suspect we’d see healthier teams and better products.

drewr 2y ago

> For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case). Your job as a manager is still to ship things -- only now it's to ship more than you ever could alone. You get the privilege and responsibility to steward the skills of two or more engineers and shape the entire part of a business. The dopamine is harder won and often more rewarding. Management is difficult and exhausting but it's anything but unfulfilling. Let's not start new managers off telling them what they can't do but what they can do. Ironically, as a manager of software engineers you should still be very engaged with the team's code. How else will you understand your capacity and understand what gaps you need to fill? Run the test suite, review designs, read PRs, ask questions, give praise for attention to detail. You will keep the bar high on the team and advocate for their work more effectively within the organization.

Chengdavid 2y ago

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