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Comment by kator | Hacker News Reader

I always say management is they easiest job because you only have four things to do, and I'm sure your team has more than that to do:

1) Provide Air Cover

2) Provide resources

3) Provide direction

4) Get the F* out of the way

Don't over think it. Empower your teams, trust them. They'll make mistakes just like you do. It's not how bad you F* Up it's how well you recover.

Originality in mistakes is the best I can ask for. Let's learn, progress and do better together.

I've been in tech for 35 years, if you think you've seen it all, you haven't and neither have I, so let's figure it out together and get some S*t done.

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I think a lot of the difficulty of management is not in the description of you duties, but rather the difficulty in finding the "right" thing to do, which is very difficult when it comes to soft skills, which almost always lack any quantitative way to measure directly, and must be inferred from secondary and indirect metrics.

Wow, that sounds like a lazy shitty manager.

Every engineering team has problems they can't deal with on their own, either because it's out of scope, it's high-level organization, or whatever. A GOOD manager spends a significant chunk of their week ACTIVELY fixing problems. Not getting-the-fuck-out-of-the-way!! They should help clear the way. They should help fill gaps in the team, plan, or execution. Talk to other teams and see if everyone's on the same page. Make sure everyone agrees on priorities. Make sure your team's work integrates with what everyone else is doing. Be aware of everything going on around you (esp with other orgs, etc) so you know how it all fits together and your team doesn't waste time.

Don't just listen and nod during 1:1s and then give some off-the-cuff suggestions. Don't just "get out of the way". And you don't need nearly that much Air Cover when you're team is aligned with the rest of the company, so make sure THAT happens instead of trying to "protect" the folks that happen to report to you.

If a great team's manager can't point to what they ACTIVELY DID to get the team to success, they're disposable.

Sad truth is that coding and problem solving and getting your hands dirty is low status work. I've had managers that new the application they were responsible for, and could speak coherently about technical things.

I've had managers who couldn't demo the apps that their team worked on.

Which one is better to work for as an engineer? The technically savvy one. Which one has higher stature and seems to be more highly regarded by his superiors? The non technical one.

In other words, that "lazy shitty manager" is probably playing the game better.

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