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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I find this GDC talk more concise and comprehensive, on the same topic:

So They Made You a Lead, Now What?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98rF3bllao

this feels incredibly familiar. either youre promoted to a lead, given no training, and fired or demoted when you dont succeed, or you're slowly just "recognized" as the lead without any overt assertion from management. The latter is the worst, because after a few month or even a year there is a tacit communal agreement among leadership that you're secretly the lead without ever defining what that is. pretty soon you're charged with everything from random powerpoint presentations to some midlevel managers incident/action reports with no real idea why its happening other than you're a 'subject matter expert.'

It has a scarring effect ive found, anecdotally. Ive spent 12 years as a systems administrator in various contexts (traditional, devops, contract, etc..) and I've already declined a leadership role on the pretext that its just going to be system administration with the expectation with added clerical ditch-digging for the real management team.

this feels incredibly familiar. either youre promoted to a lead, given no training, and fired or demoted when you dont succeed

I don't see any difference between not getting any leadership training and not getting technical training throughout your career.

When I want to learn a new technology, I don't wait for the company to train me. I train myself. When I got thrust into leadership (see a previous comment to this story), I started training myself.

"you're slowly just "recognized" as the lead without any overt assertion from management" can't you just ask for official recognition or find a new job that is a better fit for what you actually do? there are billions of jobs in software, if you have the skills to should be able to do so

A well run organization should also be mandating regular bi annual meetings between employees and managers for goal setting. Both as an employer and as an employee you want to know what each others expectations are, so you should be following up on this continually. It's crucial for job satisfaction on both ends.

I think you may have meant semi-annual (every 6 months). In my opinion, every 3 to 6 months is a good checkpoint for a more formal evaluation, but that ongoing communication should take place through regular meetings every 1-2 weeks.

Yes :)

I'm not impressed by this. It presents all the standard management cliches (set expectations, have empathy, learn to delegate) without ever addressing the real, valid conflicts that are so common.

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