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Comment by mattbuilds | Hacker News Reader

All these frameworks for managing people matter much less than creating a team of quality people. Think of it like sports. Sure a good manager or coach can get the most of the players on the team. They might even add tactics and play above their level. But when it comes down to it, what matters the most in the skill set of the players. The best coaching in the world isn’t going to help me and my friends beat a pro sports team. Same thing for teams inside companies. Strategy does matter, but quality matters much more.

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In my experience you have it right but backwards: These frameworks exist to help management manage teams without quality people. Scrum/agile is exactly the same thing. The stricter and more documented the process, the more fungible actual team-members are.

That's important in places like bodyshops and non-software business where no self-respecting engineer with options would want to work, and places where monotonous quality matters more than brilliance. Keep em as far as I'm concerned.

> Scrum/agile is exactly the same thing. The stricter and more documented the process

The Agile manifesto specifically says "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." If teams are forced to work in a certain way (e.g. scrum) then your organization isn't actually doing Agile.

Maybe. But "Scrum" and "Agile" are now mostly used exactly for what OP said. So it doesn't really matter what the original intention of the word was, unfortunately the meaning has changed.

I am tired of "you are doing Agile wrong" arguments. I hear it all the time. What's the point of a manifesto that only works when done perfectly right. A manifesto/process that isn't robust to imperfections has no role in a real world, which is always going to be imperfect

There's a difference between "doing something poorly" and "doing the exact opposite of something and claiming that you're doing it"

Agile is robust because it ISN'T a strict process.

> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - and we have mandatory processes and tools to control how those individuals interact

https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/

It's literally not a process yet you keep referring to it as one.

What's the point of defining something that only works when you follow the definition?

Are you really asking that?

The problem with most uppercase Agile implementations isn't that they are slightly off from the manifesto, but because they completely ignore what the manifesto is trying to say.

I’ll make sure to pull that one out next time someone tells me we have to implement agile in our origination. Ideally we could avoid making any changes at all.

The problem is that most management probably doesn't actually want Agile.

The goal of Agile is building the right thing for the customer, which is done by having the people who do the work talk to the customer (frequently!) to see what their needs are and how their needs are being met by what they have already.

The problem here is that this turns the organization from top-down to bottom-up. Those at the top of the company are now servant leaders who support those at the bottom, as opposed to people who give orders and tell those at the bottom what to do.

The real problem with Agile is that managers are rarely willing to give up that power.

Management doesn't care if it's agile or not - they want something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future. One huge problem is that a lot of times, what people think is what the customer wants isn't what they want or need. One way that happens is sales brings asks (in the form of solutions often) to product and it goes downhill from there. Obviously, the people doing the work aren't talking with customers in that case, but it's tough to talk to customers in an enterprise environment. If you're doing something for a small external client or an internal team it's fine.

In addition, customers aren't a monolith. When you reach sufficient size, you have competing priorities for customer needs and even some asks that work for one customer but break some sort of process for another. They can be mutually exclusive. This is also heavily predicated on the customer even knowing what they want. Everyone knows the famous Ford quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Agile is great but scaling it can be rough dependent on a lot of variables, so reducing it down to management probably doesn't like Agile due to inability to give up power (to me at least) is a bit too simple.

"Management [...] wants something that works and delivers economic value for customers and will help them continue to innovate and deliver EVA for them in the future."

You're confusing "owner" with "manager". Most managers just want to get promoted, which usually means increasing their HC/budget, making sure credit for a project's success is their's, failures are blamed on others, getting trendy internal projects, doing endless re-orgs (knowing they'll move on before any true costs/benefits are realized), etc. "Economic value for customers" is an afterthought at best.

(Speaking as a former very-large-company manager.)

I'm not confusing owner with manager - I'm thinking of things through the lens of the principal-agent relationship and of upper management's goals (which was what the OP was talking about) rather the middle management's.

> That's important in places like bodyshops and non-software business where no self-respecting engineer with options would want to work, and places where monotonous quality matters more than brilliance. Keep em as far as I'm concerned.

Based on my experience that is happening in a lot more places than what you listed. Doesn’t help that price tag of experienced devs pushed dramatically upwards in the recent years

Scrum is there for the people who’ve never read the Manifesto, and don’t want to.

I deeply disagree.

If you have a team of quality people but they're all running around in their own direction doing their uncoordinated thing, they add up to basically zero. While if they're all working towards the same thing in the same direction, their efforts reinforce each other so the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

The expertise of people on a team provides a ceiling for what they can accomplish, that's true. And so you need to make sure that if you've got a task to achieve by a certain date, that it's below their ceiling. The best manager can't raise that ceiling.

But you still absolutely need to manage them in order for them to get anywhere even close to that ceiling. And to go back to your sports metaphor, when an amazing coach replaces a terrible one on a sports team, it's astonishing the difference it makes -- you almost can't believe it's the same team. It's astonishing what happens when a sports team plays "as one" instead of each player doing their own thing no matter how great they are. But that simply doesn't happen organically. It requires a coach, the same as a great team of employees doesn't get there without a great manager.

So ultimately it's not that either matters more than the other. You need both individual expertise and management. Think of the total resulting effectiveness as a multiplication of those two values.

I actually agree with you a good amount. I was never saying that you don't need management, just that first you need quality people. I do think you can have a good team with poor managers that still preforms, but I can't think of any examples of great managers with bad teams that excel.

Well first I would say that a team of quality people wouldn't all run in their own direction. They would know they need to coordinate to achieve a goal. Quality doesn't just mean being good at programming, it means the whole process of delivering software.

The sports metaphor is starting to break down, but just to have a one more go. Sports is different because the top teams all have top 1000 players in the world. This won't really happen in software. So with software it's more about putting together the right team. One where people enhance the whole, and that's what I think the biggest role of management is about. It's helping coordinate quality people.

The thing I was speaking out against was that you could have a good manager with a good process and not great people. The idea that the process can hide the problems of the team is something I don't believe. It doesn't matter how you organize if thats the case, nothing of real value will get made.

I do like the idea that the total result is a multiplayer of the two values. I just think the team quality is a little more of a multiplier than the other :)

>Well first I would say that a team of quality people wouldn't all run in their own direction. They would know they need to coordinate to achieve a goal. Quality doesn't just mean being good at programming, it means the whole process of delivering software.

That's probably an optimistic view of even quality people. They're not magically going to know what their goal--presumably aligning with business interests--is. They may not know company priorities. They may personally be more invested in some aspects of the process than others.

As far as sports analogies, it probably varies by sport. Coaches are important in general but, if you put a really good basketball team with one or two superstars on the court, they'll probably play a given game pretty well on their own. The same is almost certainly not true of even the Superbowl-winning football team.

I don't think you're negating what GP is saying. I like how managing engineers seem to be associated with coaching competitive players in sport. I think it makes a lot of sense, you get the same kind of personalities (team players, solo players, etc.), you have to deal with the different people temperaments, life, etc.

If I learned anything watching "the playbook" on Netflix, is that great coaches don't seem to follow any kind of playbook at all. They're flexible, and managed to create strong relationships with their managees over time, while forcing them to be team players.

I agree with you but the sports metaphor undersells your point. Coaches usually don't matter all that much unless you are going from a truly terrible one. Bad management isn't like not a great coach, it like having a team where all the players are playing different sports, there is no score board, and people get paid based on how much the coach likes them.

You should watch "the playbook" on Netflix, I think coaches matter much much more than what you think, at least that's what I realized watching the documentary.

> I deeply disagree.

Wow, really? You must have never been part of a strong, productive team.

Strategy can matter a lot.

Tactics is mostly irrelevant.

Unfortunately the latter is much easier to change so leaders like to modify it constantly to seem like they are adding value. And since it’s mostly irrelevant it’s hard to prove that this is bad.

I was using tactics and strategy interchangeably, as in the sports sense. Probably should have been more clear, but I agree with your point. Also business is much more complicated than sports, where the rules are concrete. I was just using it as an example that what matters is using the talents of the team instead of a framework for management.

Yes but the MBA, Management Consulting, Agile Coaching industries are based on this not being true. So there will be an endless stream of propaganda to convince people otherwise.

Sounds like you have never worked in a bigger company.

Despite having great people, coordination challenges greatly increase over time. This is a good summary:

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/

Getting the right people on the bus is only one component. See Jim Collins' map for the others.

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts.html

> The best coaching in the world isn’t going to help me and my friends beat a pro sports team

No, but a good coach will start with you team, replace single player and get slightly better results. Replace another player and get better results. Rince and repeat until you and all your friends are long gone but your team plays in the NFL.

Being able to detect, attract, nurture and retain talents is exactly what the coach is doing on a daily basis.

In small companies, I agree with you. However, in a big company the quality of individual work doesn't matter much at all. Most of the time will be spent on communication, prioritization, compliance, and oversight overhead. On top of that you have everyone just performing for a promotion instead of what actually helps the company. Improvements to reduce any of this overhead will dominate how good the team is.

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