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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

My manager doesn't do almost anything. I wonder why they keep him around. He has like two reports and we're both fully self-directed. He can't understand technical issues, and whenever he proposes something, it's completely untenable due to his lack of understanding what's useful or possible.

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It is definitely possible they indeed don't do anything.

Fwiw though - a decade ago when I was a sysadmin I had a manager that I was certain never did anything.

And then he was replaced.

And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/

Not saying it's the case with your manager. But managers have duties roles and priorities I for one hadn't always appreciated.

The only bad managers I've ever really had are the ones that don't realize they're responsible just as much as their reports when shit goes sideways. To that point, I've had technical and non-technical managers and it doesn't matter, we can speak a different language but as long as we realize we're on the same boat and heading in more or less the same direction things are great. This requires trust, understanding of goals not implementation, and empathy.

Almost every bad manager I've had basically lacked at least two of those last three things if not all three.

I will say, the one big advantage of a technical manager is they can often be used as a good rubber duck for logistics around changes. Should we do {A, B, C} or {X, Y, Z}? You can get into the technical with them and explain the intricate trade-offs of the decision and how that might impact things. Their technical and political knowledge of the situation can give very good clarifying answers.

Gotta agree with this

Enabling people to be fully self directed and successful is a rare skill. Often it is done by diminishing their own importance; putting you on a good path and then getting out of your way; and giving you all the glory

For many, they could be a dream manager ;)

And a lot of that stuff is inevitable at larger companies, so you either go your own way or be prepared to deal with it as part of your job requirements without a manager shielding you.

> And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/

Over years I've noticed like 80% of those is because other managers are terrible and it so happens that the dept. I'm in takes some of the fallout of their mess.

>...because other managers are terrible...

It's interesting you should say this because this is one of the categories of Bullshit jobs as defined by David Graeber in his book. And incidentally only y'day I was listening to him on a podcast[1] speaking about BS jobs.

His favourite example is corporate lawyers. Companies are forced to hire them just because other companies have them and are in fear of getting sued. I hadn't thought of managers to fall in this category, which makes sense.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/srsly-wrong/id87229289...

Corporate lawyers are essentially same thing as nuclear weapons, a deterrent that shouldn't exists and just eats resources of both sides.

Same with the way patents are used really.

I listened to it and I want that hour of my life back...

While I agree with your assessment, the lifespan of such companies (lot of red tape) will get shorter and shorter.

Possibly.

One of the lessons I've learned though is that.. It's not all red tape and inefficiency. Big light bulb moment for me was realizing that users, customers, stakeholders, clients, etc, simply and validly may have different priorities and goals. That's not necessarily disfunction. We are not ants. But it's the manager's job, not sysadmin or coders, to resolve those different goals and help provide unambiguous and stable requirements to the team. This may not immediately be obvious as contributing value to a person building a server or coding a function. It certainly wasn't to me... Until it didn't happen anymore :-)

> And then he was replaced.

> And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/

Indeed, have experienced that. At my best job experience ever, there was zero politics or distractions, I could focus all day long on interesting and relevant technical problems. I was both very happy and extremely productive.

And then.. my manager left. Whoa! The following months were insane mudslinging and relentless politics thrown at us in the team, could barely get any work done. Left the company soon after.

Turns out our previous manager was absorbing and firewalling all that from us so we could be happy and productive.

A great manager is like a great security team. You'll never notice what they're doing until they're not there.

A good manager should protect you from the bullshit from above them, while making sure you are still known to exist and get recognition for your work from above.

A manager I respected, opened up to me and said his unstated role was that of a "shock absorber".

Take shocks coming down, going up, sideways and to keep the ride smooth for as long as possible.

I also saw him stand up for the team when needed.

He got kicked out of his job. Along with the whole team.

Atleast your manager doesn't do anything. I have seen managers who do stuff and ruin the work that people have done.

"But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous"

Exactly. A manager sitting by and letting their reports do whatever they want is hardly a worst case scenario. So many are actively sabotaging the work their team does.

If you think your manager doesn't do anything he's probably one of the good ones. Possibly not one of the great ones. But still, often one of the best things those who manage can do is get out of the way and allow their reports to do their jobs properly.

I'm beginning to think that making more money by becoming a better developer is hard, and that managing, while difficult in a totally different way, is less hard. At least for the money.

I think people often convince themselves that becoming a manager is a path for those who couldn’t hack it. In reality it’s a completely different set of problems. If you’re a decent developer with phenomenal soft skills, there is a very good chance you’d be better in management or sales than writing code.

In my experience quite a few managers are there to do cargo cult activities mostly involving power point presentations and planning for their managers. In the worst situation it seemed like the vast majority of effort and salary spend went towards satisfying the VP’s appetite for reporting when engineers were very understaffed they focused on expanding to new layers of management instead of hiring ICs.

some of this management can be useful but often a lot of it is not, at best. As organizations age companies become mostly about advancing careers of middle management and the things the company actually does become secondary.

I think the role of managers should be facilitating productivity. If things are in peoples way, help them.

In reality in most larger companies managers mainly do reporting. There is not much emphasis on productivity.

The sad part is they think that all the reporting and metrics, and the juking of the stats which goes along with it, is making things better. In reality it’s generally keeping things the same but with a pretty coat of paint.

My experience with good managers at large companies is they do a lot of work to make sure the rest of the company doesn’t get in the way of their developers. Which yes, mostly involves a lot of reporting and meetings with other people on the company. But it probably is more important for the productivity of their reports than what managers do at smaller companies, even if it seems like it accomplishes nothing.

I think they would spend their time better on improving processes and removing obstacles but that almost seems a taboo to point out. I have seen tons of scrum retrospectives that got ignored as soon as the problems were outside the reach of the immediate team. In the end you can do as much estimation and reporting as you want, but things still get done by doing them, not by talking about them

My own observation is that it's more important for managers to be well-organized, remember details, and keep track of things

Not sure if that's what you mean by soft skills, but I generally think of soft skills as things like ability to communicate well, navigate conflict, and apply emotional intelligence to people management

The "soft skills" as I understand them are more important for roles like team lead/staff, whereas the organizational skills (and maybe even a willingness to be unlikeable at times) are more important for management.

That's why I think a lot of engineers prefer the IC track (I personally think my organizational skills and focus don't qualify me for management, although I enjoy being a lead)

I think there are different kinds of manager positions. Some require excellent soft skills, some require excellent bean-counting skills, etc.

A bit like how there are different kinds of programmer positions.

> My own observation is that it's more important for managers to be well-organized, remember details, and keep track of things

It's interesting, I feel like this applies to a line manager. Once you get beyond that you can just hire to fill in your own weaknesses. If you're bad with organization, just hire a good project manager.

I guess that's how you end up with the Pareto principal. Even just moving from being a line manager to being a manager-of-managers is a different job that requires different skills, but the assumption is if you're a good line manager then the next step is to manage managers. There are probably plenty of people who there who would make fine directors but are bad managers so they don't get that chance. And then you have people who are good managers who end up as bad directors.

Yeah, in terms of actual skills it's weird that you have to climb the ladder because each role is so different from the previous role.

I'm sure there's some overlap, but not enough to really warrant the lower role being preparation for the higher role.

Your conclusion sounds an awful lot like the people in your first sentence are right. Anecdotally, this is what I’ve seen. As people progress on the engineering side and the work gets more demanding, increasingly people bail out and make the transition to management.

Management and Sales also don't usually end up on the on-call rotation. While there are exceptions, usually particularly key individuals, in general developers are at the bottom of the white collar company social ladder. Thus status conscious individuals will view management as an upgrade from development.

Being a good manager is in my experience just as hard if not harder. But, it's much easier to be a bad manager and keep your job.

Having been both, being a really good manager is hard in a very different set of ways.

Depending what itch you're trying to scratch, and what opportunities are available in your org, it might be just as rewarding to be a tech lead, feature lead, mentor, cross-team liaison, steering committee member, or possibly other roles rather than team lead / manager.

> tech lead, feature lead, mentor, cross-team liaison, steering committee member

All roles that young folks dream about becoming when they grow up.

Grandma: What do you want to be when you grow up, honey?

Granddaughter: A CROSS-TEAM LIASON!!! Yay!!!

I mean... the whole point is that that stuff is not a titled role. It's responsibility you can choose to take on as a senior IC that helps extend your reach, influence, and visibility into what is going on elsewhere in the company, making your voice that much more valuable and insightful when you're pulled into those meeting to talk long term technical direction and strategy.

I don't think it's too hard to imagine how to explain this in a way that might excite a child, but at the end of the day, they look to us for their cues on whether to be excited about Daddy's promotion, whether it's to "Team Lead" or "Staff Engineer".

> I mean... the whole point is that that stuff is not a titled role. It's responsibility you can choose to take on as a senior IC that helps extend your reach, influence, and visibility into what is going on elsewhere in the company, making your voice that much more valuable and insightful when you're pulled into those meeting to talk long term technical direction and strategy.

> I don't think it's too hard to imagine how to explain this in a way that might excite a child, but at the end of the day, they look to us for their cues on whether to be excited about Daddy's promotion, whether it's to "Team Lead" or "Staff Engineer".

I genuinely can’t tell if you’re serious or trolling.

Poe’s Law is in play, I guess.

Fwiw, the eyes of every child I have ever been around always glaze over whenever an adult whips out corporate speak. I think there is a good reason for this.

Yes, this.

The only time I'm OK with being in a manager role is in my own company. Working for someone else, you couldn't pay me enough to do that job. That's because I'm a dev to the core, that's where my interest and skills are. Being a manager is a different beast entirely and, while I can do it, I find it very unpleasant.

I think what I struggled with most in my time managing a small team was feeling that I lacked agency.

Particularly with "soft" objectives like improving morale, building team cohesiveness, helping people set/advance career goals, etc, I just didn't feel like I had a ton in terms of levers to pull and resources to draw on. And I lacked the experience and training to know how I could either advocate for those resources, or achieve the objectives in ways that wouldn't have a lot of cost and disruption attached. The leadership course I took was focused on personality type assessments, and conflict resolution as a very abstract kind of exercise ("try to see and validate all sides, practice non-violent communication") rather than a concrete, like, here's how to navigate when your direct report says they're quitting if they doesn't get a 20% raise, and upper management says lol no way.

Anyway, the pay scale at my org has equivalent IC roles at each manager grade, and in the end I've found I can have more of the type of influence and leadership that I desire by exerting soft power over the decision making processes in the areas that I most care about— which are mostly related to technical direction and strategy.

That is generally true. In most companies it’s way easier to get promoted to a certain salary level in the management track. From my experience the ceiling on the technical track is way lower than on the management track for people with similar levels of competence.

Chesterton's Manager?

Underrated comment. Many people believe their manager does nothing... until they become a manager and realize all the BS their manager protected them from on the daily.

So the idea isn't the manager is incompetent but his managers are so bad they are a net negative and cause so much disruption that a full time employee is required to deal with it.

Alternatively: The broader organization has requirements around accounting, planning, forecasting, resource allocation, etc. that are orthogonal to the engineer's job but critical to the company for legal, regulatory, and financial reasons, and managers exist in part to handle that stuff so that the engineer does not need to.

It’s the peers and stakeholders that are the problem; no one knows what they need, and everyone knows what they want, and if they aren’t responsible for the work they’ll always try to include everything and declare it a must-have. And you’ll get those who escalate over nothing, people actively working against you (because they disagree with the project goals and got overridden, or wanted to own it themselves), people who are necessary but apathetic / busy, people who are angry about something else but take it out wherever they get the chance to, changing requirements and sudden timeline shifts/deadlines because of events outside of your control… etc

At least when there’s someone with strict authority involved, these things can be resolved pretty quickly — everyone defaults to authority. But that’s rare; most projects involve multiple domains, each with authority over their dominion, and opinions on what the others need to be doing (and all trying to minimize their own responsibility and risks, by both simplifying the project, but also offloading it onto their peers).

Ultimately coordination between parties is inherently a bitch.

They could all be great managers and literal geniuses and it wouldn't matter. Each person you add to an org increases the number of connections and communications required to do something.

To get anything done I have to get Safety, and Compliance, and Marketing, and Sales, and Project Management, and Vendor Management, and Product Management, plus the Product Dev Team, plus any sister Dev Teams, plus QA involved. Also gotta check with Security, and confirm our Infra team can host it.

Inevitably these people will have their own things going on and may not be available. They will have to wrestle with their own complexity. This leads to meeting after meeting. Then there will be paperwork. A lot of it. Maybe I don't need most of those teams involved but I need sign-offs about that.

Plus each of those teams is there for a reason. If I ignore Compliance we get sued -- and each lawsuit is going to cost a lot more than the cost of those meetings. If Marketing isn't involved then the product launch will screw up and the offering won't go anywhere. If QA isn't there than the product will suck, or maybe screw up catastrophically.

Even if every single manager, every single C-level, every single team lead and Sr., is a bonified genius, it's still going to be a mountain of lame, pedantic work. If there was a way to ditch that then I'm sure, somewhere, one of these MIT Berkeley Disrupter-types would have done so, but the reality is that's how any org larger than like 100 people is going to work.

He's around so that your skip has to manage 1 person instead of 2.

well look, I already told you, I deal with the customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills. I'm good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Nah, he's really horrible at dealing with people lol.

If your work is getting done, things aren't falling apart, and he leaves you alone, then he's doing a great job, whatever he does. At the very least his presence will keep other managers from meddling.

As a fully self-directed engineer, what I'm looking for from a manager is benign neglect.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

- Futurama

This quote has, pound for pound, provided more comfort to terrible leaders than any other. It’s also just not true, good leadership is very obvious.

Good leadership is only obvious in conflict or chaos. When everything is simple, it's easy for shit managers to look like good ones.

Maybe you’ve never experienced good management? Good managers are significantly different in very obvious ways even in the absence of conflict.

A good managers job is not just helping you navigate chaos.

My manager isn’t a programmer but uses ChatGPT to educate himself on a topic and attempts to read the code to see what’s happening before asking one of us if anything is still unclear.

You know, summarizing what code does in regular English via ChatGPT would be an interesting thing. Does it already do that?

It definitely can do this, though obviously it can details wrong here and there. For example:

    Describe what this code does in clear english: 

    from datetime import datetime
    import pytz

    utcmoment_naive = datetime.utcnow()
    utcmoment = utcmoment_naive.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)

    # print "utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive) # python 2
    print("utcmoment_naive: {0}".format(utcmoment_naive))
    print("utcmoment:       {0}".format(utcmoment))

    localFormat = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"

    timezones = ['America/Los_Angeles', 'Europe/Madrid', 'America/Puerto_Rico']

    for tz in timezones:
        localDatetime = utcmoment.astimezone(pytz.timezone(tz))
        print(localDatetime.strftime(localFormat))

ChatGPT Response:

This Python code does the following:

  1. Imports two modules, datetime and pytz.
  2. Gets the current time in UTC using the datetime module and assigns it to a variable named 'utcmoment_naive'.
  3. Uses the pytz module to create a timezone-aware datetime object and assigns it to a variable named 'utcmoment'.
  4. Prints the values of the 'utcmoment_naive' and 'utcmoment' variables.
  5. Defines a date format to be used for printing local date and time.
  6. Defines a list of three timezones.
  7. Loops over the list of timezones and converts the UTC time to the local time in each timezone using the 'astimezone' method of the 'datetime' object and the 'pytz.timezone' method.
  8. Prints the local time in each timezone in the specified date format.

Overall, this code gets the current time in UTC, converts it to the local time in three different timezones, and prints the local time in each timezone in a specified format.

So you’re telling me if one writes a plug-in that integrates with source control checkins and provides these summaries plus an additional terser summary to nontechnical users, I wonder if companies would buy that?

Makes sense to me.

Add things like "summary of what each contributor did each week/month" at various levels of detail.

There is an evil and a less evil way to deploy this of course. I have had jobs where I had to provide monthly summaries of what I did this month. I would like to start with a chatgpt summary of all my commits and/or PR's over the month, before editing it, why not?

I mean Elon Musk would.

The obvious problem with this is that you'd be sending all your (presumably proprietary) source code directly to ChatGPT, i.e. OpenAI, i.e. Microsoft, with a dubiously vague license to use it to improve the ChatGPT product.

I can't think of a single company I or someone I know has worked at that has a security department/person that would allow this. Maybe very small businesses wouldn't care that much?

Obfuscate the code, send to ChatGPT, then find replace the strange names in the summary with the normal ones ;)

I absolutely do not envy any team who would steal our source code. No, it’s not bad and is rather self-documented, but the amount is huge and it’s all inter-connected. What use can they extract from it?

> I can't think of a single company I or someone I know has worked at that has a security department/person that would allow this. Maybe very small businesses wouldn't care that much?

Well there are lots of open source companies where this isn't a concern. Even outside that lots of businesses use GitHub as a code repository just fine, and the GitHub tools can read your code to eg scan for security vulnerabilities.

Correct

What did they do before ChatGPT? It's only been available for 3 months.

Mostly what he is trying to do is run queries on the database to export csvs. So mostly he would ask one of the devs to write a query and he would then save and tweak it himself. Now ChatGPT can mostly write these basic queries and cut down on the number of requests to devs.

Generally managers are hired to act us buffer between higher order management and employee. HOM don't want to micro manage employees, but they want responsibility, which lower rank employee (the one who do actual work) tend to carry the least. While most workforce would come defensive, that they work responsibily, but indeed most don't. So they higher this manager who do micro manage employee on HOM behalf. The minute most employee gets a good offers, they will fly like its none of there responsiblity, so HOM higher this buffer manager to manage this minute but important aspect for successful project delivery.

Are they planning on hiring more reports?

My manager is blissfully absent.

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