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Comment by jakevoytko | Hacker News Reader

A Dick-style manager is a sign that you've already hired some B and C quality employees. Theoretically the only bad hire could be the manager, but I've never seen a company with just one sub-par employee. If people don't get work done, bad managers overreact. Terrible managers will also take the opportunity to overreact when everything is going smoothly. They check on tasks constantly. They run extra meetings so that you need to have something new to report within a 5 hour timespan. They play "Gotcha!" style games. They create a butts-in-seats environment of fear to keep employees working at all times.

In some environments, a close eye is required on an employee or two. Never everybody. When Dick appears, he is a sign that a company is already trending downhill.

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I once worked at a company whose culture slogan was "by hackers, for hackers." They're renouned for hiring top-notch programmers, and they really do. Ironically, since hackers don't understand management, they tended to evaluate managers only on their technical skills, not (much) on their people or organizational skills. As an added bonus, the company was in a protected industry and their first product (created in startup mode when they were really small) was a game-changer, so they were wildly successful. So they basically had the attitude "we're really successful, therefore we don't have any big problems or need to make any big changes."

Their second product was a much larger engineering effort than the first, probably 4x as many engineers working on it. I had friends working on it, they had lots of stories about poor management. In the end, it was many years late and over budget, and a year or two after the financial crisis hit, the launch partner pulled out, and the company now had a reputation of not delivering, so nobody else would touch them. (Protected industries are generally conservative, they were lucky to find one customer willing to take a chance.)

tl;dr: good hackers don't know much about management, so when left to choose managers, they're likely to choose bad ones.

> "we're really successful, therefore we don't have any big problems or need to make any big changes."

That sounds almost the exact opposite of almost every decent hacker I've known.

This sounds a lot like a concentrated, high-speed version of what I read happened with Sun. I have only read articles here and there about it though; anybody know a good analysis of Sun's problems?

It's not really like Sun. Sun couldn't accept that it had lost the hardware game a decade before its demise. It had great kit, it was just the market was so vanishingly small that it was never going to support the mothership. It had also lost the will to give "mavericks" the freedom to do their thing. It was firing them a decade out.

"Management" at Sun was pretty tight. It's just that it didn't require that sort of management.

When Dick appears, he is a sign that a company is already trending downhill.

you're wise beyond your years.

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