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Most of the managers that I have come across are not worth the paper on which their job description is printed. I am talking about the middle level managers her

by g123g 14y ago

Most of the managers that I have come across are not worth the paper on which their job description is printed. I am talking about the middle level managers here. There is some adhoc planning going on at this level but most of the time it is dictated by what is being conveyed from the top. This takes care of all the planning, task assignment work. If the manager has capable team members then all that is required is to just tell them that they are now going to work on project X. After that it is the responsibility of those team members to manage the work. All that the so called managers do is check periodically about how it is going. Recruitment of engineers is again completely left to senior engineers. Once 3 senior engineers say yes to a candidate, the manager just has to complete the formalities. So there is no contribution in building better teams. There is no technical input from the managers as this takes lot of time and is somehow beneath them. With agile processes, the team manages their work flow on a day to day basis. So the manager role is reduced even further. All they work on is performance review once a year. It is more of a give and take as the manager and his manager don't have any realistic idea of an individual's contribution. I think time has come to cull the managers rank and just have 1 manager for 100 developers with developers organizing themselves in self-managing teams. The managers just get too much credit and money for doing essentially nothing.

greendot 14y ago
That sounds like a rather sad state of affairs. What kind of company do you work at anyway?
- g123g 14y ago
  I work for a large software company with about 11,000 employees.
pmichaud 14y ago
I think you have an unrealistic view of how well a large team of engineers can "self organize." It's hard to keep track of the 10,000ft view when that's your job, it's nearly impossible when you're in the thick of code, in some subsection of the overall application.
edderly 14y ago
I agree that traditional businesses often have too many managers. However, my perspective is that well functioning teams do not require day to day involvement with the manager. Consequently the manager may appear to add less value. It is a tricky balance, I've worked for good managers and seen them lose track of things as their team grows either as a product of being successful or pressure to grow. There are also bad managers who are wasteful (of people) or are just skimming off the efforts of their team and not adding a lot of value. From the top of the organization it is probably quite difficult to tell the difference.
Spooky23 14y ago
Sounds like you work at a horrible place and are a little naive. No group of 100 people is going to naturally just take care of themselves. A hierarchy will develop, and folks will take on management roles on an adhoc basis. Managers should be working at a level of abstraction up from the folks doing the work. Usually in a big project, folks end up specializing on a specific area and have a hard time grasping the "big picture" in their heads. As one of those useless manager people, I'd say that my job is about understanding what's going on, course-correcting when what's happening isn't consistent with what we need to do, and figuring out how to get more productivity out of folks. As a "technical" manager, I stay close enough to understand what is happening, but don't do alot of hands on anymore. When things are good, 80% of my job is keeping BS away from the folks I'm responsible for. When things are not so good, it's all about triage and finding solutions to whatever is wrong.
swedegeek 14y ago
I have been wanting to write a much more ranty version of the OP for a really long time. Yes, there are and always will be bad managers out in the world. But it makes me laugh when the immediate reaction people have is to just get rid of all the managers, because developers are all clearly rock stars, way smarter than managers in all ways, and can perfectly self-organize themselves. Really? I would love to see such a group in action. I imagine they must exist, but I also strongly believe people hear the myths of such teams much more than they actually have experienced such a thing themselves. Meanwhile, I'm going to head back to figuring out to get a QA member to stop being so toxic to our overall efforts, make sure a developer properly knows the expectations on how to interact with the rest of the team, sort out the next 3-6 months of priorities with the executive team accounting for all internal department requests and our lengthy product roadmap, help a lead dev resolve an issue with a really smart developer who has taken twice as long as expected on a straightforward task, find time to look through a whole bunch of resumes that are likely nowhere near where what we're seeking in candidates, and then make sure all the right people receive updates to all of those activities. We'll see what tomorrow brings. To be clear, I absolutely love my job. It's extremely rewarding to see even one of those items get checked of the list in a given day, or the not-always-well-communicated but good-intentioned appreciation that a single member of my team sends my way after helping him remove an obstacle or provide some sort of useful feedback. It's definitely a much different type of challenge from when I was a full-time dev, but I honestly get at least as much out of the experience as I did solving problems with code. I can't point people at a team of 100 developers that operate like a herd of unicorns, negating their 1 bumbling manager. However, I can provide examples of teams that perform really quite well and have competent managers who deserve at least a bit of credit in their teams' successes.
temp453463343 14y ago
I think 100 is a bit much. A the place I work we have one manager for about 30-40 people. He's managing about a dozen projects. Why is he effective? 0 - He knows he's not working on each project day to day, so meetings and decisions are not very top down and are mostly done by consensus. 1 - He's got about 20 years of experience, so he can provide technical input and bring in ideas from other projects. If we hit a problem he'll throw out ideas that have come across in previous projects. He's not a super coder or a math genius and technically isn't super strong (which can make it frustrating to explaining things to him) but he can quickly bounce ideas off of us. 2 - Since he's very familiar with a lot of people (both because he manages a large group and because he has the years of experience) if our team gets stuck or we are not sure of something he knows exactly who to bring in from outside the project to help. 3 - All the above could apply to anyone with enough experience. What makes HIM the manager is he's exceptionally good at dealing with clients. In part this is from experience and in part because he has a natural knack for it. By no means do I think he's the best manager ever. He has plenty of problems - but a the end of the day I have to say he's very effective in getting things done and getting the teams the help they need.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
When did commenting on HN become so predictable? Yes, there are bad managers, just like there are bad everything-elses. Small companies don't need management, but the larger a company gets, the more important communication gets or everybody goes off in their own direction. You can't accomplish big things if everybody is rowing to a different rhythm. Further, there is a limit to how many people a person can effectively manage directly. Most bad organizations I've see put way too many direct reports on managers, forcing the manager to be flighty and generic. Finally, engineers put very little importance on personal interactions, but business is run on those personal interactions. Just like there are bad places to work as a developer, there are bad places to work as a manager. And they often (but not always) overlap.
g123g 14y ago
One other disadvantage of having too managers is that it leads to a reduction in organization productivity. Each team reporting to a manager eventually becomes a silo. A team only works on the tasks assigned to it by its direct manager only. This results in some teams which are overburdened, while the team sitting next to them doesn't know what to do with their time. The managers are too busy in their daily meetings to figure out what is happening on the floor. This causes lot of resentment in the teams. If a project gets assigned to a manager and the best resources to work on this project are on some other team, it is really tough to pull them in to work on this project. This results in reduced overall efficiency as teams have been artificially divided to create a reporting structure for the manager. I understand that some of you would not have seen this type of manager in your work life. But I am speaking from my own experience and recognize that there are managers which are very good. But I have seen too many of them coasting along, doing little real work while increasing the organizational inefficiencies.

by g123g 14y ago

greendot 14y ago

That sounds like a rather sad state of affairs. What kind of company do you work at anyway?

g123g 14y ago
I work for a large software company with about 11,000 employees.

pmichaud 14y ago

I think you have an unrealistic view of how well a large team of engineers can "self organize." It's hard to keep track of the 10,000ft view when that's your job, it's nearly impossible when you're in the thick of code, in some subsection of the overall application.

edderly 14y ago

I agree that traditional businesses often have too many managers. However, my perspective is that well functioning teams do not require day to day involvement with the manager. Consequently the manager may appear to add less value. It is a tricky balance, I've worked for good managers and seen them lose track of things as their team grows either as a product of being successful or pressure to grow. There are also bad managers who are wasteful (of people) or are just skimming off the efforts of their team and not adding a lot of value. From the top of the organization it is probably quite difficult to tell the difference.

Spooky23 14y ago

Sounds like you work at a horrible place and are a little naive. No group of 100 people is going to naturally just take care of themselves. A hierarchy will develop, and folks will take on management roles on an adhoc basis. Managers should be working at a level of abstraction up from the folks doing the work. Usually in a big project, folks end up specializing on a specific area and have a hard time grasping the "big picture" in their heads. As one of those useless manager people, I'd say that my job is about understanding what's going on, course-correcting when what's happening isn't consistent with what we need to do, and figuring out how to get more productivity out of folks. As a "technical" manager, I stay close enough to understand what is happening, but don't do alot of hands on anymore. When things are good, 80% of my job is keeping BS away from the folks I'm responsible for. When things are not so good, it's all about triage and finding solutions to whatever is wrong.

swedegeek 14y ago

I have been wanting to write a much more ranty version of the OP for a really long time. Yes, there are and always will be bad managers out in the world. But it makes me laugh when the immediate reaction people have is to just get rid of all the managers, because developers are all clearly rock stars, way smarter than managers in all ways, and can perfectly self-organize themselves. Really? I would love to see such a group in action. I imagine they must exist, but I also strongly believe people hear the myths of such teams much more than they actually have experienced such a thing themselves. Meanwhile, I'm going to head back to figuring out to get a QA member to stop being so toxic to our overall efforts, make sure a developer properly knows the expectations on how to interact with the rest of the team, sort out the next 3-6 months of priorities with the executive team accounting for all internal department requests and our lengthy product roadmap, help a lead dev resolve an issue with a really smart developer who has taken twice as long as expected on a straightforward task, find time to look through a whole bunch of resumes that are likely nowhere near where what we're seeking in candidates, and then make sure all the right people receive updates to all of those activities. We'll see what tomorrow brings. To be clear, I absolutely love my job. It's extremely rewarding to see even one of those items get checked of the list in a given day, or the not-always-well-communicated but good-intentioned appreciation that a single member of my team sends my way after helping him remove an obstacle or provide some sort of useful feedback. It's definitely a much different type of challenge from when I was a full-time dev, but I honestly get at least as much out of the experience as I did solving problems with code. I can't point people at a team of 100 developers that operate like a herd of unicorns, negating their 1 bumbling manager. However, I can provide examples of teams that perform really quite well and have competent managers who deserve at least a bit of credit in their teams' successes.

temp453463343 14y ago

I think 100 is a bit much. A the place I work we have one manager for about 30-40 people. He's managing about a dozen projects. Why is he effective? 0 - He knows he's not working on each project day to day, so meetings and decisions are not very top down and are mostly done by consensus. 1 - He's got about 20 years of experience, so he can provide technical input and bring in ideas from other projects. If we hit a problem he'll throw out ideas that have come across in previous projects. He's not a super coder or a math genius and technically isn't super strong (which can make it frustrating to explaining things to him) but he can quickly bounce ideas off of us. 2 - Since he's very familiar with a lot of people (both because he manages a large group and because he has the years of experience) if our team gets stuck or we are not sure of something he knows exactly who to bring in from outside the project to help. 3 - All the above could apply to anyone with enough experience. What makes HIM the manager is he's exceptionally good at dealing with clients. In part this is from experience and in part because he has a natural knack for it. By no means do I think he's the best manager ever. He has plenty of problems - but a the end of the day I have to say he's very effective in getting things done and getting the teams the help they need.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

When did commenting on HN become so predictable? Yes, there are bad managers, just like there are bad everything-elses. Small companies don't need management, but the larger a company gets, the more important communication gets or everybody goes off in their own direction. You can't accomplish big things if everybody is rowing to a different rhythm. Further, there is a limit to how many people a person can effectively manage directly. Most bad organizations I've see put way too many direct reports on managers, forcing the manager to be flighty and generic. Finally, engineers put very little importance on personal interactions, but business is run on those personal interactions. Just like there are bad places to work as a developer, there are bad places to work as a manager. And they often (but not always) overlap.

g123g 14y ago

One other disadvantage of having too managers is that it leads to a reduction in organization productivity. Each team reporting to a manager eventually becomes a silo. A team only works on the tasks assigned to it by its direct manager only. This results in some teams which are overburdened, while the team sitting next to them doesn't know what to do with their time. The managers are too busy in their daily meetings to figure out what is happening on the floor. This causes lot of resentment in the teams. If a project gets assigned to a manager and the best resources to work on this project are on some other team, it is really tough to pull them in to work on this project. This results in reduced overall efficiency as teams have been artificially divided to create a reporting structure for the manager. I understand that some of you would not have seen this type of manager in your work life. But I am speaking from my own experience and recognize that there are managers which are very good. But I have seen too many of them coasting along, doing little real work while increasing the organizational inefficiencies.