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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

If you think management jobs are "bullshit jobs", then I envy you: You must be working with remarkably well organised coworkers.

My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun, stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now. Then they present their super awesome new software architecture that they spent a month working on that doesn't solve any problems except implement the devs vision of a framework for inverse dependency injection or whatever they read a blog about last week.

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In my experience, managers are the ones pushing developers to skip tests, bug reports, etc.

Most of them are content to simply pile on new functionality, without any concept of polish, refinement, or how allocating time for technical work can speed up the delivery of that functionality.

Most of the time, this short-circuits:

  understanding importance of code quality/testing
  && willingness to allocate dedicated time to achieve code quality
  && having ability/position/power to withstand management's pressure on just deliveries

In over twenty years of my career, the value was "true" only twice.

also when that value becomes "true", pay tends to be below the average

fwiw, it was wayy below average for me the first time, and was wayy above average the second :)

Depends on the manager and on the developer.

I've seen "senior" developers that are very happy to skip writing tests (or write useless tests that basically just return true) even though their management was happy to allocate the time to do decent testing.

Managers shouldn't have to push testing and bug repro. That should come from your senior engineering staff

Of course I have been lucky with who I've gotten to work with, but it wasn't only that. When interviewing we'd select for people that came to the table with good product mindset, or at least seemed teachable.

The whole leadership chain from CEO down needs to make sure everyone understands and works towards the company's goals. If someone isn't that's just the normal course of productivity issue resolved in the normal way. Sometimes it's because someone isn't as good and engineer as you thought and is resistant to training, sometimes it's as you say they're unfocused on the mission, either way having a layer of people whose entire job is juggling these folks feels like putting fingers in holes in the dam.

That's who I mean by managers, btw. Just because someone has "manager" in their title doesn't mean they're this thing. Plenty of critical product managers I've worked with.

> My experience is that when managers stop doing their jobs, people start working on whatever is the most fun

If people aren't doing their jobs they should be fired - not have someone babysit them and the whole team so everyone just suffers.

All that ends up happening is introduce things like broken scrum and push to show cards getting down rather than real value.

Congrats. You've gone from 1 extreme to the other. No difference.

> stop doing boring stuff like testing if their code actually works if you leave the happy path, and ignore customer bug reports because they are too hard to reproduce right now.

It sounds like your hiring pipeline is broken if that's the behavior you observe. That's not how real Software Engineers work.

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