6 ms·

I don't understand the shit 'managers' get on here. I've been in this industry for 15+ years and with one or two rare exceptions every manager has been great.

• deleted 2y ago
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• steveBK123 2y ago
  Genuinely unique experience for you probably. I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good. This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.
  • ketzo 2y ago
    The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
    • bb88 2y ago
      I like the old wisdom about apples personally: "One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch".
    • hnthrow90348765 2y ago
      The economic cards seemed more stacked against workers, so resentment for managers builds more quickly than the opposite direction. Management who resents their workers can also fire them. Workers who resent their managers must go find another job. And offshoring/nearshoring for workers happens more than managers. Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?
      • bb88 2y ago
        A lot of women complained about the "boys only club" in the 70s/80s/90s. While things have gotten better for women, there is still a lot of "club" going on.
        • joquarky 2y ago
          > "boys only club" in the 70s/80s/90s > things have gotten better If you read up on humanity, you'll likely find that it would be a bad idea to put money on any wager that this will end.
      • fatnoah 2y ago
        > Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers? For FAANG, most front-line manager roles have a leetcode style coding round, though it may be easier and/or weighted less heavily than for an IC.
    • BoorishBears 2y ago
      Maybe it's because this isn't about looking at other people's toupees? At the least a bad manager can make the place you spend a majority of your waking hours a worse place to be, and at their worse they can permanently harm the trajectory of your career or even your mental (and by proxy physical) health. Some analogies are limited by the weight their original context conveys. I wouldn't let a surgeon get away with "the ethics board will only talk about this heinous thing I did, when most of the time they don't see me at all".
  • segmondy 2y ago
    Do the break down for developers.
    • johnfn 2y ago
      A manager can put you on PIP, have you fired, and make your life miserable for months to years. What can an engineer do? Write some bad code that is a little annoying to refactor?
      • razeh 2y ago
        In finance a bad engineer can bankrupt the firm.
        • sudosysgen 2y ago
          If a bad engineer bankrupts the firm, it's much more the fault of many others.
        • mrcsharp 2y ago
          A finance institution with no code review processes is one deserving to go bankrupt.
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          I'd love to hear how a single IC can do this.
    • steveBK123 2y ago
      Developers get marked to market quite quickly in annual reviews, if not sooner. Junk PRs, bad code, tons of bugs, acting like a jerk - it catches up fast. I've seen devs walked out the door in first 90 days of probationary period, or cut in their first annual review. For a manager there is a longer leash as the things they can impact are harder to measure with long and variable lags. So it can take 3 years easily for an obviously bad manager to be dealt with.
  • jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    My career hasn't been as long but it's been 50% good 50% bad roughly - of the bad ones, one was a sycophant to a narcissistic product owner but didn't directly cause me any trouble, while the other two were promoted developers who tried to force their will on developers while also playing political games to try and preserve themselves.
• wnolens 2y ago
  Unique experience. I've had mostly useless managers in my 15y career, downright toxic ones in my 3y AWS stint.
  • lolinder 2y ago
    What makes your experience representative and theirs unique? How are you measuring this?
  • amrocha 2y ago
    You chose to work in a toxic company, of course you had toxic managers.
• aprilthird2021 2y ago
  I've also had all good managers who helped me move up levels, etc. across 3 companies for about 5 years. I think you're right about the side effects, and it's sad to see. It reflects, in my mind, an acknowledgment from these companies that they won't grow as much in the future as people right now think they will
• ta2234234242 2y ago
  There was that comic about org charts a decade ago: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.
• newsclues 2y ago
  A lot of managers can be automated. Few are making creative decisions that can be replaced by a computer, and smaller teams of managers.
  • malfist 2y ago
    The primary output of managers is not "making creative decisions" in fact that's probably not anywhere close to the top line.
    • nine_zeros 2y ago
      And because they are only doing administration and reviews, they are even lesser required.
      • vkou 2y ago
        Yes, you can always push that admin and coordination and communication work down to the ICs. I'm sure you'll be thrilled to get that added to your plate.
        • nine_zeros 2y ago
          Are you talking about the same admin and coordination required to keep 10 layers of management updated? Easy enough to solve, just remove a few layers.
          • vkou 2y ago
            Sure, and while if you want it to stick, you'll have to get rid of the CEO and the shareholders, too. Those 10 layers of management work for them, not you. That's why they exist.
            • nine_zeros 2y ago
              Yes, and that's why they are removing the 10 layers. It's not working for them any longer either.
• disambiguation 2y ago
  One or two rare exceptions over 15 years must account for several bad years, no? As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.
• Myrmornis 2y ago
  My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks). Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.
  • naijaboiler 2y ago
    imagine comparing management at a small research lab to a multi-national corporation. Such unfounded hubris.
    • frozenport 2y ago
      Imagine actually wanting to work at Amazon
      • bravetraveler 2y ago
        Ahead of the game, soon we'll only be able to spend Bezos Bucks. Company Towns walked so the Company Country could innovate edit: I've enjoyed two managers since I started working ~2008. The rest were either harmful or generally ineffective, unfortunately. We can get along well... but I know the job's not for me. It's like HR, for the business. Contrary to GP, career development has yet to meaningfully happen within the same business. I have to move to advance, so I do.
    • sgarland 2y ago
      Imagine refuting the idea that people are incapable of self-management.
    • qmmmur 2y ago
      If you view the university as one large company pushing research forward on many fronts then it is about the same
• protocolture 2y ago
  Look to give you the benefit of the doubt there are some experiences you probably just havent had.
• deleted 2y ago
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• rsynnott 2y ago
  Yeah, I’ve been working in the industry about 20 years, and I’ve had one bad manager experience (and also a couple of not-great experiences where I didn’t really _have_ a manager). Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.
• Clubber 2y ago
  I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day is without taking any time to understand those team dynamics and which processes fit in those dynamics. It's like a coach that calls nothing but pass plays for a run centric team and makes the 180lb guy play lineman and the 300lb guy play defensive back while thinking 20% turnover is good. No higher understanding of software development what so ever. For me and my teams, they've mostly been a burden. A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role. I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since. Here's a decent summary of how we got here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4
  • donnachangstein 2y ago
    > I've had mostly bad managers. Most of them maybe wrote code for a year or two and think they understand team dynamics and how to build software. They then burden a good running team with whatever cult processes of the day One of the most incompetent women I've ever worked with, a sociopath and pathological liar who to my knowledge never wrote a single line of code, is now a senior manager at Google inflicting pain on some unknown team. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
    • Clubber 2y ago
      >Don't hate the player, hate the game. Oh, I can hate both. :) The (possibly) good news is now the free money train is gone, companies will actually have to pay attention to how their teams are working. The bad news is they might just chop off heads regardless of ability.
• Waterluvian 2y ago
  I’ve experienced so many kinds in 12 years including those who were incredible to work with and those who contributed nothing, and a bunch in between.
• rawgabbit 2y ago
  You should count your lucky stars. I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior. Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.
• darkr 2y ago
  > IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with That’s the point, surely
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  You don't quit companies, you quit managers. I've fortunately had great ones who balanced being into my development with making sure the job was being done. But that's not a universal experience, sadly. I work in games so you can find plenty of horror stories on what happens under bad management without me giving second hand stories of other teams I worked next to being raked in the coals. I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.