Hacker News Reader

Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree with "Some of the best managers I know, especially in tech, are the ones that admit their teams are far better qualified to make those decisions than they are."

These people defer everything to their subordinates including major technical decisions. Then what the hell is their job!? To "people manage"?

As Steve Jobs said, "I don't hire managers. I hire amazing individual contributors, but the only reason they become managers is that they can't achieve their vision on their own."

Just to be clear, technical managers don't necessarily have to get mangled up in detailed work - they need to have a vision for what their team is going to do. It is a "pull" rather than "push". An ideal manager should be someone that their subordinates aspire to be and they have a leadership character that is worthy of following. They give room for their team to provide inputs and they're decisive when time comes.

View on HN

> These people defer everything to their subordinates including major technical decisions. Then what the hell is their job!? To "people manage"?

Imo, the idea that the job of a manager is to make decisions is extremely misguided (and old fashioned). It's their jobs to ensure that the right decisions are made. This is a very different thing.

I think you are on to something. Steve Jobs was like a "curator" from top to bottom and beginning to end. Though he could not code, draw, or design he certainly could lead (albeit in a quasi-abusive fashion at times) and his vision was shaped by Vitruvian theory.

"...Vitruvius believed that an architect should focus on three central themes when preparing a design for a building: firmitas (strength), utilitas (functionality), and venustas (beauty)..."

Interesting Ref - https://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/bodies/vitruvius/proportion....

>Though he [Steve Jobs] could not code

Right, I'm going to throw a MASSIVE [citation needed] here.

This is common knowledge. Did you think he was code reviewing Woz while they were working together? Jobs was the salesman, Woz was the engineer.

Since you couldn't be bothered to Google it yourself, here's an archive of Woz's personal website.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130208163637/http://www.woz.or...

>Then what the hell is their job!? To "people manage"?

Yes, absolutely. I work for a "people manager" with enough software development experience to ask the right leading questions when someone's stuck on a technical question. Never seen him make an overriding call on the "how," only the "what."

> with enough software development experience ...

^ this detail basically supports the initial point that domain experience is required..

Nevertheless, his role is to manage people and their careers, not to make technical decisions.

And the argument is that those with domain experience are better at managing the people - because they understand what and how those people need to to their job properly.

The problem then is knowing what constitutes a good "what" to decide upon. This can end up with them listening only to their favorite subordinate who may well be offering bad advice when other underlings know better.

Their job is similar to that of a Symphony Conductor. They should absolutely have intimate feedback with their immediate subordinates, but only really need a high level overview of what's happening and to have open dialogues with those that are more domain expert than they are.

Having said that, //never// used a computer? To my mind this is like hearing someone say they haven't ever cooked at all for themselves. Not even really basic simple things.

It makes you question just how sheltered and insulated from every-day life this individual is.

Right, but you wouldn’t want a conductor who has never listened to any music. You can have an expert orchestra, but if the conductor is just waving his arms around like he saw in a photo once, they’re just going to ignore the conductor and do their own thing.

Companies are made, overwhelmingly, of people. Managing those people is quite literally the definition of management.

What if I told you that you could be a charismatic influential leader of a tech company without knowing how to program. It's definitely not what the developers on hackernews want to hear but it's true. Yes you can be both. EQ is a thing.

I've worked for 6 tech companies. Only in 2 did the owner know how to code. Only one was the owner an ex professional coder. They were all charismatic to some degree. Although the less charismatic were more pleasurable to work for, for whatever reason.

If your employees are managers, then it's (sometimes) okay to have no domain experience in whatever it is your company does, because the people you're managing aren't doing that thing. You only have to understand how those people think, and those people think—at least part of the time—like managers.

The job of the team leads—those managers whose only subordinates are domain-worker leaf-nodes—to act as a translation layer between your thought process and their subordinate domain-workers' thought process. They need the experience. (And they're the only "managers" that most people on HN seem to think have any value, given HN's love of flat org-charts like those of Valve and old-Google.)

But to be clear, while "EQ is a thing", for team leads, it's not enough. And in certain sectors (mostly industries where people are promoted into management roles by seniority), that continues to apply all the way up the org-chart, since in those organizations, the middle-managements will be ex-workers and will share the workers' views. So you, as a CEO, can't can't make any top-down decrees that conflict with those views.

For an example: any manager in a hospital, all the way up to the CEO, cannot get away with walking in off a stint at an F500 with no previous hospital experience, and succeed solely because they have high EQ. They need to also understand—deeply and intuitively—that their whole organization is run by people who think saving people's lives is more important than making a profit, and that any changes intended to increase profit at the expense of lives-saved-per-day will either be left unimplemented by the people on the ground, fought, or result in low morale and staff leaving. (Usually all three!)

But there's a difference between not knowing how to program, and having never even used a computer!

Coding experience might give a leader more empathy for their employees, but the latter gives them an understanding of their customers and users.

Companies are also made of non-people systems, indeed the system is what distinguishes a company from just another collection of people. People don't need management so much as systems do. Management's job has to be to improve the system. You can optimize your people as much as you please, dealing with incentives, bonuses, punishments, team placements, making sure everyone is "doing their job", "getting along", etc., but none of that matters in the end for quality and efficient production if the system itself isn't stable.

Deming understood this, his management ideas that transformed countries have yet to break into software. https://maaw.info/DemingsRedbeads.htm is a starting point into the primacy of the system.

I'm sure it's possible. But in my experience, nontechnical people are generally not the best people to lead companies where the technology itself is a primary success factor. In such a business, I believe it is essential for top management to have an instinctive feel for the potentials and weaknesses of the technology.

Admittedly, such companies are a minority, perhaps a small minority, of what are called "tech companies". A lot of "tech companies" are simply applying relatively-well-understood technology to business problems. But when the mission of the business requires pushing the edges of what's possible, it needs leaders who understand what that means.

But Steve Jobs himself didn't do any of the engineering or design either, so...isn't he a people manager himself? And didn't he bring success to his company?

I think the point of discussion is about decision making. Steve wasn't involved in detail design, programming or engineering but he made decisions. It was his vision, not their subordinates'. He rallied support for his vision of personal computing.

When managers don't make decisions, and instead leave up to their staff to make decisions, what is their job then? "Managing"? Meaning, sitting down on 1:1s every week and act as a face of the team, do yearly reviews and assign safety training courses?

Intelligent and skilled workforce should not waste their time reporting to these people who have no vision or spine of their own.

> Then what the hell is their job!?

Their job is to let people do their job without interference from an "application architecture group" and pointy-haired bosses, as Joel Spolsky once pointed out: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

> These people defer everything to their subordinates including major technical decisions. Then what the hell is their job!? To "people manage"?

Their job is to shield their developers from the rest of the company, so that the developers can focus on development. That means pushing back on dumb feature requests, helping gather requirements, and going to bat for their team when a project blows its budget or its deadline.

Which leads us back to square one, because to do that efficiently they need experience. If they can't tell a dumb feature request from their ass, they're part of the problem.

It depends what role the manager plays. Some of the best managers I've ever had were not "tech people". Their job was to ensure that we had what we needed to do our jobs effectively, and that we were delivering the level of service upper management wanted.

Somebody once told me that the true definition of a great manager is someone who can clear a path for their team to be able to focus and do the best job they can, while protecting them from the political bullshit and stupid decisions being made around them. Someone who will fight for their team and nurtures their growth and productivity. You don't need to be a tech whiz to do that.

And even when I did have a tech whiz manager I could always learn and depend on for technical decisions, they were great managers in the aforementioned way first and foremost. That is the most important thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com