Ask: What Are You Experiences as a Manager at Small, Medium, and Large Companies | Hacker News Reader

Ask: What Are You Experiences as a Manager at Small, Medium, and Large Companies

23 pointsapohn5 comments

I’ve seen a number of threads on HN discussing the positives and negatives of being an IC at different sized companies. Could people who have had experiences being engineering or data science managers talk about your experience and the pro/cons of different sized companies? What are the types of of orgs where you actually can help employees grow, be a part of the decision making process, and actually be more than just a direct conduit for the stuff that comes from above?

My contribution: I've worked as technical data science team manager at two very large companies. It's the usual big company stuff like politics, bureaucracy, dotted-line reporting, an endless number of “working” groups, etc, and spending 20+ hours/week in meetings to try and keep up with everything that affects your life/team as a manager. One of the places I worked as a manager was not a software company and one was a software company. From a sanity perceptive, the software company was better because more people understood that solving a business problem isn't just clicking a few buttons.

Are things better at medium or smaller companies? Can a manager actually do things like mentor, help set realistic deadlines, be a part of developing useful engineering strategy/execution, not have 50%+ of meetings be useless? What are your managerial experiences at different sized companies?

I've had experience working at both small, medium and large companies and "better" is subjective.

At larger organizations, mostly what you say is accurate with the bureaucracy and the pressure to deliver things impossibly quick.

At small/medium organizations, there was a lack of documentation and proper process. Everything moved quite rapidly but decisions were being made without prior consultation.

Mentorship can work in various forms (formal and informal) in both small and large companies. I've also come to believe that there are no realistic deadlines for anything other than if you set them yourself. With the entire organization moving at rapid pace, it almost requires senior leadership to accept take a step back and breathe a little.

Meetings are mostly useless but I found meetings at large organizations with a proper project manager, someone who is strong and keeps everyone on the ball, enforcing next steps etc. is such a critical component to not wasting time. That and having longer meetings/workshops to really talk through all the details as opposed to 30 minutes catch up everyday that involves multiple context switches.

In both small and large organizations, I've found that the productivity killer is trying to do too much that ends being nothing gets done at all.

>That and having longer meetings/workshops to really talk through all the details as opposed to 30 minutes catch up everyday that involves multiple context switches.

Thinking back on my experiences, this is a gem of an observation. Most people hate long meetings because they are just a lot of status updates with 2 or 3 people dominating the conversation.

>In both small and large organizations, I've found that the productivity killer is trying to do too much that ends being nothing gets done at all.

I'm curious about your thoughts on something I'm currently facing. When I was an IC at a medium sized organization, "trying to do too much" was typically manifested by over-committing/over-confidence in what could be delivered in the timeframe allotted. But for the most part everybody was generally aligned in the same way.

At the two large orgs where I've worked, I've seen a lot of extra work come from teams being motivated in completely different ways. One team is focused on blame-avoidance, another in gaming KPIs, one team wants to show off how awesome they are, one group is just tagging along for visibility reasons, etc. So there's an incredible amount of "too much work" that has very little to do with actual execution.

Have you seen the latter in medium or smaller organizations?

> Thinking back on my experiences, this is a gem of an observation. Most people hate long meetings because they are just a lot of status updates with 2 or 3 people dominating the conversation.

Agreed. I think meetings should strictly be for decision-making and everyone who's in it should have the power to say yes or no.

> At the two large orgs where I've worked, I've seen a lot of extra work come from teams being motivated in completely different ways. One team is focused on blame-avoidance, another in gaming KPIs, one team wants to show off how awesome they are, one group is just tagging along for visibility reasons, etc. So there's an incredible amount of "too much work" that has very little to do with actual execution.

I'm actually facing and faced the same thing with larger organizations.

In my experience with smaller companies, it happens but to a lesser degree. It might be the case that I haven't been in a toxic culture small/medium-sized company as I can definitely see no reason why it would differ from a larger organization.

My theory on larger organizations having this issue is that there's quite a lot of bloat and a lot of fear that if you're not doing anything, you will be restructured. Personally, I don't blame the teams who act and behave in this way - I would hold the senior leadership responsible for fixing the culture. Unfortunately, most are focused on business results as opposed to fixing softer things like culture. Someone needs to make it such that visibility and accountability are just irrelevant - everyone is in it together, succeed together and fail together.

What's been your experience?

PS. Just noticed you're in data science? Funny coincidence that I am as well.

>My theory on larger organizations having this issue is that there's quite a lot of bloat and a lot of fear that if you're not doing anything, you will be restructured. Personally, I don't blame the teams who act and behave in this way - I would hold the senior leadership responsible for fixing the culture. Unfortunately, most are focused on business results as opposed to fixing softer things like culture. Someone needs to make it such that visibility and accountability are just irrelevant - everyone is in it together, succeed together and fail together.

Everything you've said matches what I've seen. For the most part I don't blame the teams either, especially teams like Data Engineering/Database who get blamed for everything even though they are downstream of a lot of data providers.

>PS. Just noticed you're in data science? Funny coincidence that I am as well.

One small benefit (or curse, depends on how you look at it) being in a Data Science role is that I get visibility into a lot of the business stuff (e.g. corporate strategy) that Engineering groups (in the Engineering Org) can be isolated from. It's an interesting (also, sometimes seemingly insane) space to be in right now.

As always, your mileage may vary. My small companies may be very different from yours (I get the sense there's more variation in small companies than in large companies).

Small companies:

* Less bureaucracy (for better and worse. The lack of sexual harassment training? Definitely worse). * Typically less politics. This can definitely vary by company though. I've seen cases where someone was basically not fireable because he/she was a family friend of the CEO. * Smaller companies can suffer from a lack of good project management. Beware when this happens, because what you typically get is a very meeting heavy culture that's not effective and/or firefighting. * Freedom to make decisions * Fewer meetings (although you can easily spend half your week or more in meetings if you're not careful). These meetings are more often working group meetings where you're working on a project and less status quo meetings where you're there because it's a standard meeting.

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