What Do We Owe Our Teams?

Interesting. It may be very possible the best management types work on refining their management skills -- not by writing blogs about it.

I'm curious if he ever mentions that rule number one for managers should be "to be humble."

Whatever the situation I think it's crucial you can trust your manager to be straight with you and give their unvarnished opinion of things if you ask them directly. That helps you trust they're communicating things accurately to you, which makes you feel more comfortable relying on them to provide you with the information instead of trying to seek it out some other way.

Say I have a spreadsheet where the rows are users and the columns are "has used feature X in the past 30 days". How do I go from that to "there are three clusters of users who tend to use these distinct subsets of features"?

Looking at it from this angle offers up a lot of interesting bullshit filter transforms of what he writes. Maybe it's taking too many liberties as an attempt to know this person's actual personality and/or the management philosophy he's trying to impart through this writing. But some of these thoughts are interesting in their own right and hagiography is boring. So, here are two more thoughts in a similar vein:

The "umbrellas, not funnels" idea: I agree that, at the higher levels of management, there's a lot of politics and other crap where it would be nice if employees could be shielded from it. But how do you actually make assessments in individual cases? For example, when some order comes down from above and is countermanded the next day due to corporate politics, how do you decide which order is irrelevant noise that your subordinates need to be "shielded from", and which order to pass along? You can only make that determination if you assume you know the higher-up bosses' jobs better than they do. You're also withholding vital information from your subordinates that would empower them to become political entities in their own right.

Or the "merchandize good work" idea: Let's use the word "credit grabbing" as a less flattering near synonym. Doing a lot of credit grabbing on behalf of your subordinates only sounds like a good idea in the head of a manager who assumes they can competently play the role of "assigner of credit" because they don't themselves suffer from the same blind spot problem. Say you're a middle manager and you delegate a task to an IC you manage. Unbeknownst to you, this is a task that requires coordination with another department, so your IC reaches out to an IC in that other department, and that latter person ends up having to do most of the work. You have a blind spot there: You can't see the work done by this other person who you don't manage, in a department you're not in, in relation to a task you may not know the particular mechanics of. Maybe your report even neglected to tell you about the contribution of this other person willfully, playing some politics of their own, and making you the instrument of their politics. Now you run around upper management doing credit grabbing on behalf of your report, and alienating the person who actually did most of the work. Maybe it would be better to institute a culture of no credit grabbing and no assigning blame? ...and maybe such a culture would have positive outcomes, even without making the assumption that managers are infallible (or need to be infallible to do their jobs)? ...just a thought.

When I try to picture the specific behaviours of someone who acts on that advice, I can't help but see the pattern of behaviour of someone who engages in power struggle selfishly. And all the reasoning he offers up, surrounding that behaviour, just sounds like a rationalization of that behaviour as noble and power-to-the-people-esque. ...a "righteous crusader" narrative to provide the ends that justify the means.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow

After that, they hired a CTO to bring talent in house. The CTO wanted to be cloud native and microservice based to sell access to the services to large health care providers for their own websites and mobile apps.

I was one of his first hires. I barely knew how to spell cloud then. But as we talked during the interview, he liked my ideas and hired me and said I seem like a smart guy and could figure it out.

We were once talking and he was going out of his way to be nice and give me feedback. He was in his late 40s. I finally just stopped him and told him that I’m a big boy, we have a lot to do and I don’t need a “shit sandwhich”. If I’m doing something wrong or have a stupid idea, just give it to me straight.

After about six months, we trusted each other to be honest. I could tell him “you know in your heart of hearts that won’t work and that’s a dumb idea”. He would tell me, “why are you coming to me with this.” He said I had admin access to our AWS account, the phone number to all of our vendors, etc and to come up with a design, a POC a budget and let him know.

I was an IC.

We got a lot of things done and buy the time Covid hit in April 2020, our site traffic increased by 400% and our scaling didn’t miss a step.

The company exited at 10x revenue 8 months after I left based partially on the impression their “agility” and scalability based on my designs working with my CTO.

It’s amazing what happens when you have a manager who can check his ego at the door and listen to their reports.

But that was at a 60 person company. I don’t say shit at BigTech. Like Kosh said “once the avalanche has started, the pebbles don’t have a vote.”

I worked on a POC of a vendor product that, frankly, sucked. No one wanted to buy the thing but few would speak up to say so. No one could understand where we would use it or why. UI was 20 years out of date, it used an esoteric OOP scripting language instead of SQL, it was slower than our existing system, and no one had ever heard of the thing before. Basically it repeated all the existing complaints about our current stack, worse.

CTO was IN LOVE and it was clearly not a POC but a matter of finding an excuse to buy it & tech lead to own it.

My teammate and I were two of the few tech guys DGAF enough to clearly communicated it was a bad product, to which the response was that it was getting bought and they really wanted us to run the project, lol. No thanks. We both left within a year.

So why? After I left I found out. The CTO was rather on the outs with our major business side stakeholder, and that guy had told him his buddy had this product we should really check out. So CTO saw it as - let me score some quick points by doing what the stakeholder says, and just minimize the blast radius of wherever we integrate it.

Take the 1:1 advice with direct reports:

> First, an honest closed-door conversation about her real concerns or goals. Is she unhappy with the company? Frustrated by my management style?...

Admirable intent, but there are so many written and un-written rules working against this.

Obviously, there are plenty of people who are. But there are also plenty who aren't.

I think at root we have twin problems. The very common ideology that personal financial incentives are the beginning and end of things. And the way people who hold that ideology (and those values) occupy so many positions of power.

But these are not universals throughout space and time. Paradigms change. And they change in part when we decide we want something else in the world.

> Depending on ICs to push cultural change up through the org isn't IMHO a reasonable strategy.

But I think the world is bigger than that. My point is there are more possibilities than "hope for an exec who works in contradiction to the dominant paradigm" and "expect lone ICs to change things". Just as an example, those weren't big factors in getting us the 40-hour work week.

In particular, you don't seem to have any understanding of what managerialism is or why I am talking about it specifically here. And there's nothing you mention here that I haven't been familiar with for at least a decade. So no, I am not looking for that term.