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Comment by wisam | Hacker News Reader

Why do think is the reason that most managers in technology are bad? I tend to think of management as abstraction. A mid-level manager provides an abstraction of the work for high-level management and at the same time is provided an abstraction of the work by the low-level managers or engineers. Assuming that my understanding is right, are these abstractions leaky? is the lack of technical knowledge the reason why managers are bad?

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I think it's because most technology managers are too disconnected from the actual work, and don't understand what their employees actually do. Obviously, there are a few examples of tech leaders that remain hands on, but it seems that when most engineers transition into leadership, after 2-3 years, they've become so disconnected from anything hands on that they are just bad.

I'll give an example: a software development manager meets with the customer directly, without bringing a developer with him, because hey, this is an executive meeting and I'm an important manager, and I want to score points with this customer. He proceeds to commit his team to delivering a solution on an unrealistic timeline, and doesn't realize that the solution he committed to deliver won't work in the customer's environment because of $various_reasons. Now, his team of poor software engineers is faced with two impossible options: attempt to deliver an impossible outcome on an impossible timeline, or give the customer bad news. Of course, the manager doesn't want to take the blame for bad outcomes (only the credit for good ones), so he makes his engineers deliver the bad news to the customer. Ultimately, the customer is unhappy, and the developers are unhappy.

Most of the bad managers I've seen spend more time "managing up" and trying to score points with their managers than helping their employees succeed. The really good managers realize that they work for their employees, not the other way around, and are a heat shield, motivator, and advocate for their team, willing to fall on their sword if necessary to protect their most junior engineers.

I don't necessarily disagree with you but I think there is a second half to the problem. Half the managers are as you describer, but the other half are put in management positions on the basis of only technical ability and actually have no clue how to manage a team and in fact don't really care about doing that at all. Their passion is tech and will always be tech, but they are managing the team for status or career progression or whatever.

Yes, you're right, I think I described the one end of the spectrum where you have someone that chose to move into a management role because they never were that good at the hands on work, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have the brilliant genius hackers that think going into management will help them advance their career, not realizing that the skills that make them 10x engineers are not going to help them even be a 0.5x manager.

I agree with everything you wrote, and have found that by and large companies don’t reward the good managers you described. The lack of recognition gets exhausting and eventually those good managers either leave management or start focusing on managing up for their own sake.

It has made me extraordinarily picky about any future management positions I may pick up.

The thing with managers is that they have to understand the work being done well enough to make decisions about direction and resource allocation, while also having tons of people skills. In tech you either get a manager who doesn't have a technical background and just doesn't understand the thing they're managing, or you get someone with a technical background who stereotypically doesn't have the necessary people skills to manage well (it's a stereotype, but I find it to also be true, including about myself).

Part of it is also that as a programmer you learn to micromanage what the computer is doing, to be very precise with your instructions so the program won't fail. When managing people for the first time the instinct is to do the same: give very precise instructions even an idiot could follow. That's exactly the wrong approach to manage effectively (except for a few rare circumstances). That's why programmers tend to make bad managers who micromanage, they've been trained wrong by their prior work.

AFAIK many hospitals have a "MBA manager" and a "doctor manager" - I don't know exactly how they relate to one another (who's the "boss boss"), but the idea is that they each bring their part of superior skills to the table.

Would the same idea work for IT? Or, another idea would be, to take a look at how traditional (non-IT) engineering companies work (although the main difference between both medicine and engineering, and IT is that the former are both very high-risk industries that move much slower than IT).

Ive worked at places with a Product Manager and Engineering Manager, at the end of the day after adjusting for company “culture”, product etc what makes a difference is the individual

A good technical manager needs to be able to switch modes - from maker to manager - and back. A person can be a good technical manager even if they don't know the exact technology if they know how to ask good questions of multiple sources and listen (and synthesize) the answers. Nobody teaches this.

Great points, and I see the same thing in myself, which is why I don't want to be a manager - I'm great with technology, but I don't have the people skills to be a successful leader.

I think you may have a point.

Also, judging from own anecdotal experience, there is a strong tendency (at least in Norway, where I’ve spent most of my career) to promote someone from the engineering pool to management; the reasoning being that as you are a decent engineer, you’ll probably become a decent engineering manager.

Well, chances are you aren’t. At least not until you’ve made a lot of management gaffes. (Cough; I made the switch from decent, in some narrow fields excellent engineer to a decidedly mediocre -for the time being- manager this spring...)

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