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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a middle manager at a company that is fully and completely embracing remote work, and I feel as needed as ever. It’s the bad middle managers who only know how to provide “value” by instilling fear and managing presence who should be afraid.

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If managers treat their employees as "liabilities", employees will treat the company as a "liability" to their career.

my middle manager at Apple Inc in California purposefully instilled distrust between members of his group. It gave him control and he would do it repeatedly over different situations. At the same time, there was this vague message that if you wrote patent applications, you could possibly maybe be promoted, with a bonus, but there was no time allocated to do that. 1990s

My manager has been great during covid. He immediately scheduled a daily group meeting for 30 minutes and it made me feel more involved with my staff group than ever. Because we're all so spread out so whenever I visited the HQ I only ever met a few of them.

But our org is so confusing that he has very little to do with my daily tasks, I have other types of managers for that.

Daily 30-minute meetings sounds to me like the antithesis of good management. If you feel like you need 30 minutes of synchronous time per day from your team of engineers, you are not a good manager.

"Daily standups" that become status reports where people drone on for 5 or 10 minutes each are not good experiences. My best managers have been fellow engineers that understand this (and also understand what their reports are actually doing.)

That depends. A "daily group meeting" doesn't sound like a stand up or project management meeting. It sounds like 30 minutes a day to goof off with your work mates. A way to replicate the downtime you naturally have during an on site work day, a way to increase group cohesion by talking shit and playing games.

If that is the case, then they sound like a great manager.

> He immediately scheduled a daily group meeting for 30 minutes and it made me feel more involved

It's almost as if there's not a one-size-fits-all. Unlike your comment.

That's a bit unfair. Good management is partially about meeting the needs of the team. Some teams benefit from this sort of thing.

We do 30 minute daily “standup ups” where the “what I’m currently focused on” component lasts for 10 minutes. Our group discussions, that are IC led, that come out of challenges or successes folks are facing, make up the last 20 some days (otherwise we wrap).

Of the 8 hours a day of my work, it’s the least likely to be a waste of time. It’s a great way for our distributed team to stay connected, express interest in work streams, and have a laugh.

Work can be so much more than just optimizing productivity to the nth degree.

30 min a day? That is the opposite of effective management.

Some of them matter. Most of them don't. I would say you belong to about 1% of middler managers that actually matter.

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