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Comment by x87678r | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that then I burnt out. When the manager does nothing but the crap, the manager is going to leave. The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

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This is why I decided to stopped doing engineering manager roles. Working on the crap stuff all the times is no fun. And the longer you do it the more your technical skills fall behind. I'm fine with the technical roles along with mentoring the new engineers.

"The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous.

The best managers I've ever worked for have all, without fail, worked daily to keep as much nonsense away from the team as possible. The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.

> The worst have either only been concerned with their personal advancement, or would just make the team basically fend for itself.

It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.

Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.

> It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.

And thus the rain of crap continues.

Curiously in your opinion who ended up being more successful?

I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.

> "The proper way" is not an objective thing and to present it as such is disingenuous.

I agree that it isn't objective, but how is believing it is disingenuous?

Management isn't math. It's not a science, and there are successful managers who push as much crap onto their directs as they can, and there are successful managers who take as much of that crap as they can to prevent it from reaching their teams.

>> The proper way is to distribute the crap evenly.

This is true of "crap work" (i.e. stupid bugs, wading through documentation) but not of the crap external to the team. Your job as the manager is to deal with it all. You can either work to slow it's generation or suck it down, but it's all on you.

Maybe it is different in Software engineering than in Hardware, but if you have a team developing hardware and they encounter a problem they cannot solve they have to turn to their manager. So the manager also gets technical crap/difficulties to solve. The 5% he cannot solve goes one level higher, so basically the higher you get, the more distille/purerd crap you get.

Software is more like turd production, than bridge building!

I feel the attempt itself is a little bit like trying to turn a turd into gold.

You don’t really make turds so much as glue together library turds.

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