Startup Skill Set #6: The Startup Manager | Hacker News Reader

Startup Skill Set #6: The Startup Manager

swombat.com

44 pointsrw14013 comments

One of the best definitions of management that I ever read was just four words: "allocation of scarce resources".

Resources are time, money, people, and it's not easy to make the decisions required to allocate them wisely. Strip away all the bullshit that managers do, and those four words should be left.

On behalf of everyone who has worked in a startup under a wannabe Steve Jobs or a do-it-yourself manager, let me thank you for this post. Far too many people forget that managing people is a valuable skill that is much more difficult to learn than it looks. A good manager is worth their weight in gold.

I'm often surprised at reading about some startup that says "We don't have any managers!" And then I ask them, who buys the coffee? Pays for the servers? Who issues offer letters? etc.

And almost always there's one or two people who are doing the annoying busywork that any organization needs to do. And that's great!

But sometimes, it is distributed down to the developers themselves. And this really sucks. Developers are highly skilled, super smart, highly motivated people whose expertise is bringing their giant brains to bear on hard problems. Trolling Amazon for coffee, etc. is a waste of their time.

My style of management is very much in support of developer happiness. I'm the guy that makes sure we have the best coffee, that our internet is superfast, and if your computer breaks, I've got a replacement waiting for you.

1/2 of a nice article.

Anyone here hire management consultants? Here are the issues that I've found:

1. Sometimes they are hired to solve a problem. For this case, they do not have to live with the mistakes that they made which arise after they're gone.

2. Sometimes they're hired for political cover. When they recommend tough medicine, the existing management team thinks they have confirmation about tough decisions, or worse, lessened guilt. Run, do not walk, from such teams.

I'm trying to think of a third reason why they get hired, and can't come up with one.

Worth pointing out I was talking about managers, not management consultants, which are a whole different kettle of fish.

Was your background not management consulting?

Sure, so? That doesn't mean that I'm conflating the two terms.

Do you think your background is interwoven in the article content and recommendations?

Of course it is. I was lucky to have several managers that I would call "good", and even a couple of "great" ones, so that before I jumped into the startup world I got to see what a "good" manager does for a project. Those were sometimes Accenture people, sometimes people who worked to the client. The fact that they worked for a consultancy was irrelevant, but the fact that they were managers was obviously relevant.

How could my background not be "interwoven" in the article content and recommendations? Are you suggesting I should make things up instead of basing them on experience?

> Are you suggesting I should make things up instead of basing them on experience?

No. I am saying, now explicitly, that the shortcomings of the article are directly related to 1 & 2 in my original comment.

You never specified what those alleged shortcomings are. Nor have you established a believable link, since, once again, the article is not about management consulting, but about management. I'm not going to continue this game of cat and mouse with comments. If you can't express yourself clearly and concisely, I have better things to do with my time than try to decipher your criticism.

FYI, the recommended books are much cheaper on Amazon.

I think that the risk of poor management is something that will be dealt with at any company where your employees are all young; startups have a younger employee base - and you get a lot of people re-inventing the wheel.

There is a lot to be said for the companies, especially in silicon valley, that are large, established and older - they will have a range of good managers.

If you're only out looking for rock-stars, ninjas or other witty adjectives your employee base maybe younger and lacking experience in some of the more esoteric aspects of running a company.

When I was interviewing at Twitter they mentioned they had ton of internal chaos where a lot of the young employees, having had maybe only one prior company as an experience point only had that company's culture for reference - and this was a problem for them.

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