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Comment by magneticnorth | Hacker News Reader

I've been on the junior report side of this in my first job, and these points really resonate with me - it was the worst manager situation I've ever had, due to the situation-induced micromanaging and my having no one else in the same situation to validate how bad my experience was, or share a different perspective.

I switched teams as soon as I could, and I and that manager have both gone on to be reasonably successful - that manager has a lot of reports now who seem to really appreciate him, and I haven't had a bad manager since that situation. I think the bad manager-report scenario wasn't really about either of us nearly so much as it felt at the time.

It is validating to read this is an anti-pattern observed by a lot of people; it was hard not to take things personally at the time or blame the manager for how unhappy I was.

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Was the biggest issue just the micromanaging?

I've seen this several times when newly promoted managers are given 1 or 2 reports. Specifically individuals that are high conscientiousness, i.e. hard working, detail oriented, organized. Then they are promoted, and put into stressful position where there previous strengths can become liabilities and they spend all there time making sure their reports do the job in the same way they would have done it. And if they had more reports it would quickly break them of this micromanaging habit because they just don't have the time.

I found that more relaxed/laid back managers tend to do better with a 1-2 reports but then quickly start to run into issues as the team size grows and overwhelms their organizational abilities.

Yeah, I think that's about exactly it. He was micromanaging and also somewhat randomizing, asking me to switch focus often when he thought something else was higher priority, which doesn't work well for my work style in terms of actually getting things finished. And to my non-credit I didn't really communicate this issue to him at the time.

But I think he did figure it out much like you described, and is successfully managing (and not micromanaging) a high performing team today.

Once in a similar management dynamic, at my manager's request I compiled a presentation of several key points for a one-hour discussion, that my manager immediately hijacked for the first 15 minutes to lecture about why in the world I had started the numbered list of issues with the numeral zero rather than the numeral one. (It was a gating issue that was background to the others!)

So yes, I buy the hypothesis that 1:1 management grouping promotes non-ideal management behavior.

It's worth taking a moment to identify what's so bad about micromanaging -- which turns out to be a serious fail for multiple reasons.

First is the obvious day-to-day impact on the subordinate, who finds it exasperating to be second-guessed so much on little stuff, or to burn up so much time briefing the boss on things that don't deeply matter.

Second is the inability of both boss and manager to focus on the big picture. Ten tiny tweaks on a misconceived project measure up poorly vs. one bold decision to redefine (or kill!) that project.

The third factor is subtler but perhaps even more important. People grow by making a certain number of fixable -- or unfixable -- mistakes on their own and then figuring out what to do next. That's how we build up a full repertoire of tacit knowledge that lets us make good decisions going forward. If we're getting micro-calibrations all the time from someone else, our ability to have confidence in our own decision trees never takes shape.

I spent three years in my 20s working on a big U.S. company's expansion into Europe that had only middling results. Our targets were high and the bosses had only a faint idea of what initiatives we were trying. That meant there was unlimited room for learning by doing. I came out of that with an enduring sense of "Yeah, that usually works," or "No, you're going to add a week of redo to the project if you try that."

And no amount of micromanaging would have got me there.

I wholeheartedly agree with these impacts. I feel like the 3rd by far the most pernicious... more than the job itself, the employee learns the bad behavior and hopefully how to avoid/manage rather than repeat the pattern when they are in a position of power.

When something is bad, I like to frame it in the context of how it robs value from a situation... in this case micromanagement takes away agency from the reports. It sub-communicates a lack of trust and essentially poisons a relationship from being much more than transactional.

Having been in the position with a single person under me before, the biggest challenge was that we had just enough work to do that it was too much for one person but not so much work that I could easily fill this other person's time. I am sure this was bittersweet especially for someone new to industry.

I expect there would also be the effect of every time you need something from him, it was the first time, so he had to wing it or think on his feet.

With 4 people, you've got a good chance that you're at least the second person to ask the question.

In a situation where he's harping on you for something, it would be hard to tell if this is just how he is, or he's specifically picking on you. If everyone is getting the same grief, then it's just how he is, not how he is with you.

Additionally, how many times do you want to give the same speech? Either you give up on something, or you gather everyone and address it at once (at which point you are not necessarily the target).

Thanks for reading!

A big theme that my co-author and I write about is that process / incentive / team structure problems can easily masquerade as people problems. That is, it's common for someone to appear to be incompetent or a jerk as a person, when in reality a poorly designed system has incentivized them to behave in a certain way. This is one example.

I've experienced this with doctors, who apparently are incentiviced to "treat" many people fast, so they've relatively often given harmful or meaningless advice, they want to be done quickly.

I think those doctors are good people, it's a system problem: taking ones time (as a doctor) and looking for feedback the weeks after, to find out if they did right or not, isn't associated with any "reward" / kpi.

100%, this problem is endemic to human society. Generally most people are reasonably smart, are not assholes, are doing their best. But the incentives and team structures inherent to any organization make people behave in bad ways.

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