Team management tips: 10 more ways to kill a team | Hacker News Reader

Team management tips: 10 more ways to kill a team

dsebastien.net

14 pointsdSebastien5 comments

Are there any actually good resources on management?

Everything these days seems to be click bait/top 10 lists or corporate propaganda.

Yea, it's actually fairly simple:

1. Actually do something, aka figure out what the goals are and ask the right people if there is confusion during the sprint.

2. Know the product and related teams.

3. Don't micro-manage and otherwise fake productivity.

4. Take responsibility and some blame.

unfortunately management is not a deterministic science, which is why most online content is repetitive and very superficial, often giving advices like "talk about life". Every time you have to deal with people it's a unique problem because it has to do with so many variables like company culture, quality of roadmap, internal/external pressure, deadlines, internal/external stakeholder, coworkers...etc. All of this combined with the manager's personality and attitude makes it hard to give a recipe that fits in a blog post.

The sheer amount of variables for what makes a good manager in what situation is mind boggling.

I was a manager a while back, then back to an engineer at another company and now I’m an engineering manager at a new one. I think there are soft skills that have translated well across the roles but each business has needed a different managerial approach.

There might be really niche blogs out there about managing in certain environments but I can’t say I actively search them out.

it helps a lot to read everything because it gives you an idea of what scenario creates what type of problems, those tend to be fairly stable across different environments (like too much crunch time => burn out) and there are general guidelines that make sense (celebrating success etc). Otherwise we may end up repeating the errors and having to "reinvent the wheel" which isn't the best strategy with humans. But yeah if people are looking for a todo list called "being a great manager" it's going to be a hard one to find.

ps i also forgot local culture (i have worked in different countries and it has a HUGE factor in the equation)

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