The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

Then they finally get it.

Now I have another link to help them understand why their management style isn't working they way they think it should. Thank you, Joel.

A few more Joel links like these two in my back pocket and I won't have to spend so much time explaining much of anything anymore. I can just go back to building stuff.

So, to that end, my management tips:

1. Make sure people are working on the right things. This is most important and where Joel's academia argument breaks down. The problem is that everybody in the company doesn't have a transparent view of everything in the company (past ~10 people).

To do this, you ask questions and provide information. "Why is this the most important thing?" "What about <some thing they may not know>?" Etc. ideally, you are proactively providing that information, but if your employees are always waiting for you to provide information, you are the bottleneck.

2. Cultivate communication. Make sure the rit people are talking to each other. Make sure the environment is sipuch that people not only want to, but are incentivized to talk to each other.

3. Be open about when you learn something new. Few people don't enjoy teaching the boss something new. Give people that opportunity.

4. (EDIT: Forgot one of the most important) Conflict resolution. At some point, two very smart people are going to disagree. Your job isn't to pick a winner (usually), but to make sure resolution happens.

I'm sure there are others (feel free to tell me!). FWIW, I don't think I'm being original here. For details on how to do many of these things, Joel's blog is not a bad place to start (though I really don't like the lunch thing at Fog Creek ;).

I like the post, but.. at the risk of sounding like I've thought about this for too long, Picard's management style wasn't of the tough "command and control" style described here.

Picard's crew had a significant amount of autonomy and a reasonable scope to question their direct superiors (although going too far up the chain usually seemed to backfire). The buck always stopped with the Captain and he set the crew's overall mission, aims and goals (with significant input and advice from his crew) but in terms of the day to day running of the ship (and even many of the crisis situations) he was not at the center of most decisions and relied heavily on his crew to do the right thing.

All this makes me realize that as much as being a sci-fi show, TNG was particularly good at demonstrating management styles and crew relationships (with many episodes dedicated entirely to these matters or contrasting them with those of other crews and civilizations).

I thought that it is totally obvious that the more intellectual and complex the task is, the less the hierarchical 'command and control' approach works. I think this is told in the first one hour in any course about management.

I once stated it here but state it again: the older I grow the less useful I find the posts of the great bloggers (Joel, pg, etc...). Their posts are usually good feel-good posts for us developers, but in their posts they overabstract and oversimplify everything (overabstraction can be also called 'architecture astronautism'), when what really matters are pretty much in the details (or at least cannot be communicated in such simple blog posts), and depend on hundreds of parameters, and I am sure they bacame successful because they have been taking care of the details in their everyday actions.

Steve Jobs is just an extreme example of this role - provide a common vision, explain the constraints and edit edit edit the great ideas coming at you. (nb editing is not the same as directing, something I tend to forget I my code reviews - an editor should accept a brilliant idea and change the other work to fit it in, a director, directs...)

    CEO is defining desirable outcomes, defines WHAT TO ACHIEVE
    Team members are defining HOW TO ACHIEVE 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, leaders need to make a culture and create a managament style THEIR way. Whatever works for them and their company, not attempt a copy/paste of another CEO.

Engineers can't adopt a designers management style overnight because they don't have the background to attain the respect their decisions will require.

Just like coders hate an MBA telling them to build the next facebook in 3 hours because it's "just a few pages and they all look the same anyway, how hard can it be?".

Working for a large multinational tech firm, I recently saw them launch online training across all the various disciplines. Much of the management material is about leadership, whereas non-managers are considered 'individual contributors'. Doesn't this seem to run entirely counter to the philosophy espoused here?

I imagine that this could work, but this would seem to scale even worse than the traditional model; four thousand engineers, all of them "bosses", does not a productive company make.

I think Google is a good example of a company that is (later than most) realizing the academic model only scales up to a certain point. They now seem to be moving towards a much more traditional Cpt Picard/Steve Jobs-run type of organization, from what I've gleaned.

If you've ever worked for someone who had a broad array of responsibility, was universally respected, displays humility, and available to help resolve problems, that's what Joel is talking about. A great professor tends to adopt this role -- which is probably where the university analogy came from.

The "catch" to this style is that you actually need to be respected, empathetic and humble. (Know-it-alls need not apply.) That usually comes with lots of experience.

The NY Giants won the SuperBowl as you note, with a famously dictatorial top-down coach [Tom Coughlin]; the NY Jets didn't even make the playoffs with a very horizontal come-as-you-are coach [Rex Ryan].

Interestingly, Coughlin didn't win any SuperBowls - he now has two - until he learned to loosen up. And by all appearances, the NY Jets won't win one until Ryan learn to tighten up.

Apologies for all the football references:) But I suspect Mr. Spolsky would understand very well.

He is over simplifying everything. And his extreme view ends demoting the "top" of an Organization's chart. Heck I won't want to start a company to just move furniture around.

And you can not have a binary classification for a CEO - Steve Jobs or not. In reality there will be lot of people who are perhaps very skillful, experienced and work very hard at the top. So their skill level might be closer to Steve Jobs than your average Joe. So you have to treat it like a spectra.

He makes a very fair comparison of developers and similar in a software company with that of a toothpaste company. But his fairness goes for a toss, when he compares the people at the "top". IMO just administrators should have no place being in a software product company in the first place.

He makes a good point, that its best for the organization that if all the brains are used rather than just one brain. But he goes to the other extreme to make this one point.

Experience does have a role after all. A fresh bright programmer might want to code everything up in the latest shiniest thing, if you _know_ that its a wrong decision. Then is it not your duty to explain him and convince him.

In such a situation, who has the luxury of acting like a university Chair, and setup a committee to take the right decision? :-)

So the comparison with university is wrong. I see another comment in this thread referring to 'architecture astronaut' in the context of this post. IMO, this is more of 'architecture polish' ... just skims the surface :-)

But to design a system whose secret lies in what’s unstated or not communicated to one another (in an explicit sense)—in order to exploit lower‐level initiative yet realize higher‐level intent, thereby diminish friction.

If this is the state of the art in tech companies, I'm very blessed to have a real durable competitive advantage.

A manager's job is to make the coffee so their secretary can prioritize their inbox.

This shouldn't be read as a sctrict methodology or recipe to copy. In programming, as Joel wrote, there are cheffs and there are McDonal's "burger flippers". That analogy also applies to managment.

Anyone who thinks command and control is a good idea with 2 other people has got bigger fish to fry than finer points of effective management.

I loved the swipe at the fake Steve Jobs's out there. I worked for one, although he wasn't young and it wasn't in Mountain View. He would cite Steve Jobs to defend defective practices. It was ridiculous.

It's a great essay, and I like Spolsky's management philosophy a lot, but I don't entirely agree. A business isn't academia. Businesses have to ship products and please their customers, and leaving these tasks to "the crowd" doesn't work. "The crowd", when we're talking about software engineers, produces brilliant chaos. That's great sometimes, and it can produce excellent products, but it's not good when you need focus or to meet a ship date. Sometimes a CEO or CTO needs to decide what gets worked on, how people do it, and to motivate people to make sure it happens.

Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree on a core question, and to look for a compromise. "Management fiat" shouldn't be used lightly, but it's not without purpose.

That said, I think Spolsky deserves a lot of props for pointing out that the managerial relationship is two-sided. A lot of companies and bosses don't figure this out until they face uncontrollable talent bleed, and even then there's a lot of self-deception (I've known some ineffective managers to become bitter about their best reports "abandoning" them, as if it were some ethical lapse, but never to own up to their role).