Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Right now I am 36. I had a team- and tech-lead position for the first time in my carreer back when I was 28. All other programmers loved me (except 2 slackers who hated being asked for statuses, even if it was twice a month). QA was much better than before, frontenders were happy to receive clear directions and tasks while having some freedom in choosing designs. The devs from other teams loved interacting with me, I almost always had something interesting to share on how I do things, people were learning from me.

Things were swell. It was an extremely positive environment.

But I got demoted 7 or so months later simply because the other managers hated me. I didn't talk about charts showing increased amount of tickets per sprint resolved, about increased productivity, about how to make people more efficient via some BS measures that never really work (except maybe in a Chinese factory or in a pyramid-scheme marketing organization?). I knew how to make my people efficient and I was doing it. On the managerial meetings I was bored to tears and eventually I just told everybody in the room (including the CEO) -- "People. Why are we here on this meeting? I only see this as an excuse for everybody to congratulate themselves on how awesome you are. Speaking of which (at this point I pointed at 2 other managers) the only thing you ever managed to do was impede me by imposing waiting in inter-team communication for weeks while your devs are telling me they are idle and have nothing to do -- and you're also criticising my managerial techniques no matter the fact that in this 150+ people organization my team is the only one not behind schedule". Or something like that.

Needless to say, I got demoted -- and left the place -- shortly after.

Thinking of it 8 years later, I'd absolutely do the same but I'd use even more brutal language.

Management needs less BS. It doesn't deserve its current breed of slackers who licked bottoms most of their conscious lives to get to such a position and then they figured they'll unofficially retire at 40 while officially leeching salaries into their 60s (read: show up at the job but practially do nothing).

As any human system, inertia and credentialism are a huge problem. This has to change.

This is just my perspective. I've been in (increasingly) challenging engineering leadership roles over the past 5 or so years.

When I first started, I felt exactly like you do. That my job was to enable and empower my engineering team to build awesome product and that all the "management" stuff was a huge waste of time.

I received some advice from my boss that I was missing 50% of the job. You're being paid and expected to do the engineering leadership side on top of being the interface with the company for progress and business objectives. Any talented engineer with a modicum of people skills can usually do a halfway decent job of leading a small team to build a product, but it takes some business acumen to understand how your team fits into the bigger operating environment of your business.

That was the skill they expected you to bring to the table, and you not only despised it, you blew up at them in a meeting.

Granted, that company may very well have had a terrible meeting process and been looking at all the wrong KPIs for how things should work. But knowing how to positively influence that process inside the environment and doing so in a political way that preserves culture and existing team dynamics is crucial.

I hope you give that type of role another shot. The world needs better engineering leaders that can help businesses understand the value of a strong engineering culture.

Appreciate the feedback, thank you.

I had a pretty good idea on what was expected of me even back then. Truth be told, I would have cultivated the more business-oriented skills with time if the management environment wasn't so full of self-congratulatory practices and people patting themselves on the back -- while all of them know perfectly well they contributed no more than $500 to their employer's bottom line at the end of the month.

I plan on doing a small business of mine so I have no choice -- I will learn everything necessary from this point of view with time.

But in that particular environment I didn't care about helping those people at all. They were all there because the job was stable, well-paid and expected almost nothing of them. The CEO was an idiot who bought a very cheap "success lingo" all the time. These people didn't want any changes; that meant they had to work more which was the exact thing they were strongly against (and were sabotaging everyone who tried to introduce a more positive change like myself and one girl who was leading team of designers and frontenders).

Thank you for your kind words. Even being strongly dismissive of my own abilities (which IMO is important if one wants to always evolve and improve himself) I believe I would indeed be a valuable addition to a managerial roster but quite frankly, I don't want to be involved in politics and fighting with people who despise change.

I had to trick my brain into just enjoying it as a strange engineering discipline. I like to go through life imagining everything as a system to be programmed, so to me, business politics was just a different type of system in a programming language I had yet to learn.

Now I like to think that I can bend those systems to my will as well. :)

Good luck with your small business endeavors.

You often hear the idea that all business cares about is the "bottom line". I don't think that's true. IME, all businesses care about is ego with a heavy correlation to the bottom line. IME management doesn't care if they are making money, as long as they look like they are making money. Often the best way to look like you are making money is to make money, but sometimes it's easier to manipulate data sets...

That's exactly my point. "Fake till you make it" was their motto... for their entire carreers (lol).

So they resort to success/motivational lingo without ever doing anything, hoping their BS is gonna blind the higher management until they retire.

Although I was never demoted (I left), I completely see where you're coming from.

When I was a manager, I stripped away red-tape and created an environment which I felt gave engineers room for self-improvement - particularly if I could see that they were smart and ambitious and needed to be stretched. Since then I've been freelancing, however a few of my ex-colleagues from way back have told me that I was one of the best managers they'd had. The simple reason for this was that I'd concentrated on making sure they enjoyed their job.

Perhaps they were just being nice, but I know I've had similar experiences. The managers that I've enjoyed working with have always been the type that would remove menial work (this doesn't include hoarding all of the opportunities for high-level decision making which is a massive red-flag) and help you find opportunities to learn or explore the kind of work you're passionate in.

Non-technical managers often see somebody that's good at what they do as a resource that must be overseen and exploited for as much work output as possible. Bean-counting ensues and that person finds that they have next to no autonomy which causes them to resent their job and eventually leave.

>> Non-technical managers often see somebody that's good as a resource that must be overseen and endlessly exploited for as much work output as possible. Bean-counting ensues.

This is probably a highly subjective opinion, but IMO such people lack emotional intelligence -- not only technical expertise, or any idea on WHAT does it mean to actually work if you will.

I know this is less than flattering statement but it has been my face-to-face experience with such people. They were completely unable to execute casual human interaction outside of work, and I believe both phenomena (that plus the un-empathic view on their subordinates) are tightly linked together.

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