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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

There were a lot of failures in the Rick story "on all sides" as POTUS would say. This author seems to identify with Rick and frames this type of developer as gifted, but taken advantage of. At the end of the day, we all have to manage our own careers. And in this field that especially includes "managing your manager". Whatever process you find yourself in, you have to be able to push back and say: "I'm working on X, if you want me to work on Y, what do you want first? What's the priority?"

If you find yourself in the pitiable position of fielding calls from Sales, Marketing, and Support, you need to get out of that situation by appealing to the CEO/CTO or someone. You have to have a buffer between these groups and development. If this doesn't exist or you can't get it, go elsewhere.

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That's not really the point. The point is that the company is patting themselves on the back for firing someone who, by their own description, sounds like they could've provided a ton of value with better management (and even did, at first.) There's nobody who should be patting themselves on the back in this story. It's a story of a bunch of incompetent managers and a programmer that couldn't manage himself, and evidently someone high up in the company that's proud of this somehow.

If you treat your stars like cows, they become dogs.

If you stop feeding your milk cows and expecting higher output, eventually they stop producing at all.

>There were a lot of failures in the Rick story "on all sides" as POTUS would say.

Nope, there weren't. That's what management is for. Everything that happened, since they didn't attempt any change, is their fault and their only.

Naw, at the very least Rick was guilty of hubris and naïveté. I came in after a Rick left once, that guys ignorance and poor decisions hobbled that company for years. Icarus is not held in high regard, by anyone.

Yes. How dare Rick be human; to be missing traits which are typically obtained by teaching, not by osmosis. The story of Icarus is, one, completely fictional, and two, a parable used for teaching such traits.

If you are in technology, either you become responsible for learning on your own or you get left behind.

I’m not just referring to learning the latest new and shiny JavaScript Framework. I learned the hard way that technical skills will only take you so far. I had to learn the soft skills.

You are responsible for your own career though. By being the one subject matter expert and not doing documentation, it meant that he would probably never be put on new projects using new technologies and probably his own technical skills became outdated. So when he did get fired, he found it harder to find another job (been there done that - didn’t get fired but came close).

So it doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is, he was the one ultimately harmed by it.

And in this field that especially includes "managing your manager".

Managers get paid to have people skills. Programmers get paid to code. If you really are some genius, you may be able to write good code and also be more talented than your manager at people stuff such that you can manage your own boss with some seriously tricksy Machiavellian maneuvering. But, saying that is necessary is suggesting that all managers are incompetent dolts who cannot possibly do their job and, also, should not be expected to.

How would you feel about someone saying "Managers should be better at running the company than the CEO and it is their responsibility to somehow steer the ship to success in spite of an incompetent, alcoholic CEO routinely making stupid decisions"?

I'm really surprised how much pushback my comment about "managing your manager" has gotten here. I'll respond to your post in particular.

If you really are some genius, you may be able to write good code and also be more talented than your manager at people stuff such that you can manage your own boss with some seriously tricksy Machiavellian maneuvering.

Well, no, you aren't required to have better soft skills, or be decietful/conniving, to manage up as they say. Also as an aside, writing "good" code has very little to do with being a working programmer, sadly.

In my world view, managing up is better described as "standing up for oneself". Does your boss know the trouble you've had with the build, test, and deployment environments? Does your boss know that Senior Person X doesn't respond to emails or other queries in a timely manner? Does your boss remember they said to do task X before assigning you task Y? Does your boss intend for you to stay late every night for a week to accomplish X and Y or are you just assuming that? Do they remember you stayed late 3 nights last week? Managers are people, they forget things. I am advocating for keeping your activities and challenges front of mind for them. One must obviously must be engaged and delivering, for any of this to be effective.

I don't disagree with you that this is a good thing to do --if you know how to do it. I think you are getting pushback because your framing implicitly suggests it is Rick's fault he got fired and it does so in a way that implicitly absolves management of their role in this debacle.

Maybe your intent is more "Oh, gosh, if you find yourself in Rick's shoes, don't just let bad management crap on you like this and then railroad and scapegoat you." But that isn't what it sounds like you are saying.

From the company's perspective, though, at the end of the day the buck stops with the manager.

Yes it's important to manage up, but that's for your own benefit more than anyone else's. From the company's perspective, they pay the manager to handle you, not the other way around.

When you see a problem at your company, speak up. When you have a problem with your manager, try to help them. Things go much better if you take an active approach to your work problems than a passive one.

> Whatever process you find yourself in, you have to be able to push back and say: "I'm working on X, if you want me to work on Y, what do you want first? What's the priority?"

I asked an ex-manager that once when I had 2 important issues to deal with. His response : "They're both important dude, get going on them."

I don't know how to respond to that. Assholes will be assholes I suppose.

The way to respond to that is to say that time and resources are limited, he can choose which one he would like to prioritize. If he doesn't say you will pick one to work on and begin on the other afterward. If he doesn't like the one you worked on first, he should have chosen differently. You can physically only work on one thing at a time. They choose or you choose. You have the power.

> If he doesn't like the one you worked on first, he should have chosen differently.

And that, gives him power to fuck me over in my reviews if he doesn't like me. Logic didn't work on these assholes. I was told point blank in a conversation, "In this company, perception is reality.". So if someone "thinks" you were wrong, you were. Facts were not something people cared about.

If you are aware of the Gervais principle, this is a classic "heads I win, tails you lose" scenario. He covered his ass, and if things went wrong, fingers would be pointed at me.

"managing your manager" is great in theory, but a lack of managing up doesn't absolve management of their primary responsibility to do that job themselves. Their direct reports already have primary responsibilities to do the work, expecting them to also do yours is a little bit much.

Managers who want their reports to develop the skills to "manage up" have a responsibility to help them develop those skills and should not simply expect them.

Managing up is not a thing that managers expect. Managing up is something you learn in order to protect yourself from managers that can't manage. It's the skill of learning to enforce boundaries and stand up to bullies: a basic life skill for dealing with a hostile world. Your manager by definition is not in a position to teach you those skills when they are the one in need of being controlled.

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