You're barely managing
barely-managing.bearblog.dev
barely-managing.bearblog.dev
> I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor.
> I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%?
...
> This series will provide my personal guidance on both how to be a manager and how to do the job of managing people.
> You do not need to read this entire thing A-Z like a tome, but instead I encourage you to casually work through the core articles (they will be highlighted) and then jump around to any others that catch your interest.
This is incredibly frustrating. I have read countless peoples' opinions on management, with perspectives ranging from analytical measurement to pop-psy, but none of them has offered me, in the end, more credibility as a manager.
According to the opening statement here, none of that even counts as "study", and the solution it offers is ... reading this blog. Casually.
It's self-selecting for an audience of people who have already read lots of blogs about management, telling them that reading blogs doesn't count, and then offering another blog to read.
What seemed incredibly valuable was that it provides the top level context for how we got here. This article does a good job getting you past first order thinking of how to manage, and makes one consider how & where managers arrived; it's the Chesterton's Fence of management. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
I personally only started to take more seriously the writing of people who a) have been managing for a long while successfully, and b) regularly sync up with other managers so that their pieces aren't a sample size of 1.
a) has credentials to back up his opinions
b) often he triangulates with other people to give more weight to his arguments. For example for Staff Engineer he did interviews with many Staff+ ICs
c) is very humble and open about what he doesn't know or what is "the best of my knowledge"
Overall I give him more credit than any internet rando.
"but none of them has offered me, in the end, more credibility as a manager."
Spoken like a true manager. Is credibility/credentializing the point? I mean, it's certainly used everywhere like requirements of having an MBA (which often include leadership/management classes). But I don't know if any training really makes someone a good people leader who didn't already have some natural talent at it.
I think that inherent talent (by which I mean "a deep and genuine interest") is important in any field of expertise, including management. But I also agree with Adam Savage's opinion on this: you can achieve 80% mastery of anything through practice. Getting that last 20% requires talent.
My favorite manager of all time just left me alone and believed everything I told him when communicating back to the business. It was never clear to me if that was on purpose (he trusted me) or if he was just a lazy ass.
And I don't care, I loved working for that man. But if you were to ask him to lay out what makes him such a great manager he'd never be able to do it.
These types of bloggers are exactly the people you don't want to be taking management advice from, they have an ulterior motive other than being great managers. They want to *sound* like great managers, not actually be great managers.
Sometimes you have to take non synchronous goals and mash them through a form to press out a result. The middle manager is there drive results, end of story. Friends along the way, is meh. Just look how finance people manage each other.
Where in the post you’re replying to did you get enough information to make this assumption?
As a manager, it’s not my job to prescribe one universal management style for every employee. If I trust someone, they ask for autonomy, are proactive when they need help, and can execute, then a very solid baseline is to let ‘em cook.
Isn't finance in general a dystopian hellscape?
Do not make this a person question about you, it is a generic question about everyone your manager is in charge of. The managers job isn't just to hire good people and stay out of the way.
They lack the acting ability to pass off something they read as their genuine response, so it feels artificial and further divides us. It's like being charismatic. Some people have it naturally, others can develop it over time with real experience, but it isn't something you can pick up in a course.
> 2. Bad managers are the cause of a lot of workplace failure, i.e., late projects, subpar products, and unmet goals.
> 3. Managers are one of the most under-supported cohorts of employees on the planet.
Agree on the first two, but for #3: managers are perhaps the most OVER-supported cohorts of employees on the planet. Much of the time, simply by being a manager, you're qualified to be a manager somewhere else. The single most important aspect of hiring a manager is ensuring that they're not an asshole and that they've demonstrated an ability to deliver.
In terms of actually delivering after being hired, depending on level, a manager gets a ton of slack in terms of demonstrating their skills compared to an IC. I've seen devs fired on their start date for not being able to hire, but bad managers can weasel their way around for more than a year before they're shown the door. It gets even worse at the director, VP, SVP level, and they're usually never outright fired — it's usually framed as they "decided to prioritize time with their family" or similar.
Like any set of skills — if you want to develop management skills, the onus is on you to make sure it happens. Most of the time, nobody is going to hold your hand into becoming a staff+ engineer, and the same goes for management.
What are some red flags to look for in a manager that would indicate to the IC they have one before it’s too late?
It actually much closer to the opposite of what the author seems to mean, which is help improving.
I see what you’re saying and deeply feel where you’re coming from, but I think you’re identifying a different malignancy.
The level of support the company affords managers and up is measurably more than the support they give an IC.
It’s a tough game.
I mostly agree with what you're saying but I don't think it contradicts the original article.
1. Leadership is a taught skill. Most people DO NOT realize this. People aren't natural born leaders. You learn by learning the principles of leadership, and practicing them day in and day out. Alas, not everyone leads the same way. We all have our own tricks and style.
2. Communications Skills: This is also a taught skill. Yes, we all have our own style, but knowing how to communicate within your style is critical.
3. Negotiations: Any time 2 people have to discuss getting anything done. It is a negotiation. Alas, most people don't understand basic negotiation theory. Never mind the advanced stuff. I'm not talking used car salesman shit. That doesn't get you anywhere long term. But how to get to real win-win situations, or at least the least lose-lose you can manage.
4. Expectations: A manager has to learn to work with what they have. Not what they wish they have. Or 5 mini-me's. Learning to have your own expectations right, when to push, and when to let go is a critical part.. you only get so many "shits to give". So if you give a shit... make sure it is about the right topic. How many times have you seen a CEO give a shit about something they just shouldn't care about? ... Learn the lesson now.
Leadership is a different skill from programming. Very different.
And I've only seen 1 non-technical leader in my career who was any good. That said... I've seen plenty of bad technical leaders who knew everything. :)
This thread is mostly just like these management books - collections of anecdotes disguised as a training manual. Which is incredibly frustrating since most of them can be applied in that particular situation with those particular people. Are there really no principles that can raise your effectiveness in any situation?
Some time ago there was an army manual shared on HN, which taught leadership from first principles. Pure gold, I thought, and read on, until page 4 where the anecdotes of how some captain or other led his men to battle and captured the hill started...
It's widely praised and cited on HN when comments such as yours (rightfully) come up.
I learned my basics of leadership in Alpha Phi Omega - National Service Fraternity (also met my wife who is also a brother.)
Communication, Alpha Phi Omega, and also a course from Harvard's Negotiation Team, focused on "Difficult Conversations"
Negotiations, a course from Harvard's Negotiation Team, focused on "Getting to Yes".
I typed out a huge answer to your question, but I realized it'd be better as a discussion. If you want to discuss leadership, I'd be glad to, we'll figure out a way even as anon internet strangers ;).
As we say: Incest is best, put your brother to the test.
It makes sense that brothers would date. We share a love of community service, many common values, and experiences. Think about how much that simplifies the whole dating thing.
I agreed, not realizing how much of a shift it was. It's an entirely different profession, and it's made me wonder how realistic the notion of an Engineering Manager is. It's sort of like the "full stack" engineer - yes you may have baseline competency across disciplines, but you're not going to excel at all of them.
Sometimes I wonder if engineering teams would best be served by someone who actually went to business school for management. Likely there would be tension as this person is very unlikely to have anything beyond conversational technical knowledge, but I'm not sure what we're doing right now is any better.
Are these actually good? Sometimes I feel like education has such a large disconnect from reality. Especially true in corporate fields. There is also the meme of MBAs showing up and ruining everything. I also went to business school for undergrad, idk if any of it is useful. though it was a while ago now
The wrong model is being applied to software. Managers are redundant.
> But attorneys usually don't work in large teams.
You are both onto something. Tech managers have to manage/support entire teams - like sports teams. Any single individual is not as relevant as the systems governing their work together. Often those are technical systems, and often those are day-to-day systems.
But most managers treat management like they need to manage individual people. They over-index on people behaviors and outcomes instead of the team together. This shows up in performance reviews, stack ranking, a culture of nitpicking and fear instead of blameless growth.
Ultimately even the business just wants good outcomes and it is in the best interest of companies that managers help their team produce outcomes instead of managers spending time managing each individual.
Perhaps the title of managers should be changed to executive assistants. They should be removed from front-line engineering and should only do the mundane work. And they should not be responsible for performance reviews or stack ranking.
For me it was a nice contrast to the "industrial age corporation" and "widget factory" models that are in common use.
Note that I don't think MBA really gives someone the right background to be a good people manager.
I think the material itself is useful, and that the MBAs who show up and ruin everything would be even more likely to ruin everything if you put them in the same positions without the knowledge from their MBAs. But the barrier to entry for even elite MBA programs frankly isn't that high, so if you treat an elite MBA as a sufficient condition for a leadership hire, you're gonna have a bad time.
The only way that your manager could be classed as a success is if you and the others who left were not necessary to the business. As mercenary as that sounds, we are talking pure business outcomes here.
I agree with everything in that article.
At the same time, I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc.
I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have two orthogonal skillsets I need. Which one is core, which one is trainable?
In other words, do I hire person with A and train them on B? Or do I train a person with B and train them on A?
(As somebody who was a techie and is now in a management role, I'll lead through the entire series and see what help I can gain from that. But note there exist MANY useful, structured and helpful resources for those who want to improve their people managing/supporting skills. The key part though is acknowledging you want/need to improve those skills - for many of us, learning SQL or C++ or JavaScript is perceived as a "hard skill", useful and pragmatic; whereas "people managing", "coaching", "negotiation" etc are seen as "soft skills" and not worth. If this article helps some people convert their thinking and acknowledge we need to work just as hard on people skills as on tech skills, awesome:)
They just want to know:
- Can you code according to the requirements of the business?
Sometimes soft skills are needed for that, but not nearly to the level that I trained them at. So, the skills languish. I might get picked up to become a manager at some point and they might be relevant again, I'll retrain them. For now though, I've noticed my soft skills aren't that relevant. My ability to code and push features out as fast as possible (with good code quality) is.
I don't know about your school, but at my undergrad they didn't teach soft skills for a psychology degree.
Managers, like programmers or any other professional, start out as novices and get better through experience. Applying book-knowledge to real life and seeing what works and what does not is actually a solid way to learn. It's basically what we do when we learn coding, with the difference that feedback circles are much shorter in coding. Maybe you could help managers learn faster by giving them feedback?
1. It takes a lot of learning
2. It takes a lot of practice
3. It's a complex landscape of skills (coaching well-performing employees, coaching under-performing employees, planning & managing a project & timelines, obtaining & managing a budget, managing client expectations, reporting at executive level, supporting technical design, etc etc are all wildly different skills and not every manager will have all of them at same level, just like not all techies will be expert in database and front end and back end and data analytics and enterprise architecture and infrastructure and networking etc:)
I agree. But in my experience the one quality that makes a good and bad manager is simply considering the humanity of your employees when making decisions.
> Applying book-knowledge to real life and seeing what works and what does not is actually a solid way to learn.
I also agree, but I think you're assuming these managers did this and they did not. If the team was failing it was because the team wasn't following the teachings closely enough and had to be re-educated.
> Maybe you could help managers learn faster by giving them feedback?
These managers are not interested in feedback or learning. Why would they? They already read all the books.
The real question is where are these places that are supposedly training people? The companies I've seen don't do any real training and expect people to just be proficient at everything.
1. Formal training classes, internal or external - many large companies do offer them
2. "Self-serve" internal training - videos and documents etc; again, many large companies do offer them
3. Informal coaching and mentoring - e.g. my boss is constantly providing feedback and mentoring, sometimes in tiny bitesize chunks you can easily miss and not categorize as training, sometimes in larger nuggets of wisdom. In turn, I do dedicates sessions when a person joins my team on what project is about overall, what their role and place is, what are the challenges and expectations; and then provide feedback and mentoring on continuous basis
4. Self-learning. As individuals we too have responsibility / ownership to train. Just like in my techie days, I'd devour e.g. Oracle DBA or AWS books for fun & profit, in principle, as a manager now, I should similarly read books on coaching and management (I must admit I find them less exciting; but other people feel differently:)
Number 2 is basically worthless if they don't give you time to do that training and provides you with an actual mentor to discuss things.
Number 3 is interesting. Oftentimes the feedback of managers is tainted by politics or anterior motives. Informal mentors can be found, but it seems very rare to me. In many cases in my past, it seems two mentors will offer you two conflicting pieces of advice.
Number 4 seems to be the main method of learning companies are moving to. It does suck though because usually they treat personal project experience or school experience and no experience at all. Even if you can self train in 9 different listed tech in the job ad, there seems to always be a 10th that you don't know but they require.
Like a surprising number of things, mentorship and advice should be actively sought if you want to benefit from them. It's one of a number of things I thought was automatic/granted early in my career :-/
> They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.
> You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
> -- Steve Jobs
YMMV, but best managers I worked under were extremely competent programmers and had an eye for the big-picture stuff. They knew when to intervene and when to leave engineers to their own devices. It's when managers start to think their job is to create specs, run & enforce sprint boards, and create processes upon processes, that working under becomes a torture. So, yes, I would say 'barely managing' is a feature, not a bug.
- Negotiation
- Communication skills (verbal, written, and listening). I've found only a few managers to be good at this. If things are happening without your knowledge, or if your employees don't talk much to you during 1:1s, then there is a trust gap (warranted or not), and you need the skills to break down that barrier.
- Influence
- Social dynamics (yes, I know this is overly broad). So much of the behavior at big companies falls into this category. An example is understanding empire builders, and how they almost always are poor managers. Understanding that having 15 direct reports probably means you're not managing them, and why despite this (I dare say) common knowledge, it is still quite common. Understanding why poor behavior amongst both staff and employees is tolerated, with almost absolute impunity.
- Some amount of psychology. Psychology of motivation, etc. Obviously, a lot of the research on this topic is flawed, but some of it is quite "obvious" at the work place.
- Cognitive biases in evaluating others (still very common to reward the firefighter handsomely, sadly). (As an aside, understanding why almost all companies have little interest in evaluating their employees, but they all act as if they do).
1. Be willing to be wrong a lot and admit it
2. Show vulnerablility
3. Deal with constant setbacks and disappoinment
Most people get the reigns and are suprised to find out its actually a thing nobody wants. Like being a social worker.
We are in for a rude awakening to find the opposite :). There was a brilliant hardward business review article on what managers learn in their first year - if you read it and acknowledge some of those challenges / aspects on day 1, it'll put you far ahead of your fellow first-time managers:
https://hbr.org/2007/01/becoming-the-boss
(sadly, I read that article in my year two of techie-who-became-a-manager :)
The most succinct managerial advice I have heard comes down to (a) the CEO has a strategic plan for the org for which your team has a role (b) in this role what is your team supposed to accomplish and within what constraints (c) if your team can’t do it figure out what needs to change so you can (d) if your team is making progress, learn what are the drivers and blockers so you talk intelligently if there is a change in timing or scope (e) talk with your peers and ask how are their teams doing?
2. Show vulnerablility
3. Deal with constant setbacks and disappoinment
This. It takes balls to take the hit for the team and to admit when something goes wrong. Often that means nuking your own promotion or looking worse to your own boss.
Most first level managers are just not ready to stop playing that promotion game themselves. And in their quest for their own promotion, they impose too much burden on the team.
The literal filter for hiring a manager should be "You might not get any promotion for 10 years. Are you still interested in this job?"
And now that I manage a small team, the overwhelming majority of my management skills come from "what did I like and dislike from the past decade of managers? What worked or didn't work?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
It is my favorite book when it comes to practical advice on managing software development teams.
Fun fact about lawyers - in many places there's still the ability to enter the profession through the concept of "Reading law" which is exactly what it sounds like - reading through court cases and doing work under the tutelage or apprenticeship of an existing lawyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law
The move to law education being the overwhelming majority way to enter the profession is only an advent of the beginning of the 20th century, and it caught on because the American Bar Association lobbied states to only allow people who went to law school and passed the bar exam to practice law.
To quote Pratchett directly:
"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
:)
* Directing / organizing / etc. the activities of groups, efforts, etc. towards specific (typically 'orderly') goals
** And "fifth Beatle" of the apocalypse ... (also, "deus ex machina" of the story, IIRC, though funny and insightful even from that perspective - as usual w/ Pratchett)
Then there's always the sort of henchman / understudy, here, in the world of "milkmen" ... https://www.redmeat.com/max-cannon/nourishing-nectar-nubbins... ... "I hate you Milkman Dan".
Isn't this one of the aims of officer training in the armed forces?
They also have a couple other benefits:
1) The clear command structure, obviously—however, I think the “they gotta follow your orders” aspect gets overstated in importance, and is actually a minor part of it.
2) There’s minimal experimentation and bike shedding. Low and mid level managers have little room to fuck around with whatever new method from the idiotic airport book they read last week. Here’s how we do it: now, go do that. This is how you manage, and how you run things, if you don’t know what to do, here’s the document you read, and here’s who you talk to.
3) Crucially, 2 is supported by having a well-defined way things run. Most corporations are an absolute mess of tribal knowledge and fucked-up procedures that nobody with perspective realizes are fucked up, by comparison. Officers and high-level NCOs move around every couple years, and everything’s got to be ready to keep running even if the #1, #2, and #3 guys in, say, a brigade, all get killed at the same time. Your military’s simply fucked if it’s dysfunctional in the same empire-building, managers running around doing their own half-baked thing, onboarding is an afterthought, any new VP can radically shake up the way whole segments of the company run on a whim (and different divisions might run totally differently, probably not for any good reason), way that most corporations are.
4) They actually train leaders. How many companies do that? Of the ones that do, how many take it even 1/10 as seriously? Almost none. Companies act like leaders have to be minted by an MBA (and, let’s face it, being the Right Sort) and like most people aren’t really cut out to be leaders and have to prove they can do it before they get any support or training at all, or like leadership is some secret that only those who’ve figured it out on their own deserve to know (why, imagine if leadership became too common a skill! The horror—for managers’ salaries). The military’s approach is that leadership’s not rocket science, and most folks with half a brain can be taught to achieve some useful level of leadership skill. Will they all be great? Will they all be generals? No, but most folks could be trained to be bottom-of-the-pyramid managers at least without doing too horrible a job of it, on average. And unlike an MBA that’s full of learning about business more broadly with practical leadership training as a kind of side-quest, military leadership training is focused on leadership per se. It’s efficient, and honed to reliably produce fairly OK results, at least.
Yeah to both!
But that being said it's pretty hard to judge what makes a good manager because we already can't agree on what the role of manager is. I think there's a somewhat systemic issue here that people have very conflicting expectations - managees want a) someone that helps them advance in their career, protect them, and create some clarity. Manager's managers want b) someone that get shit delivered, adheres to internal bureaucracy, and if possible creates _some_ retention.
Corporate training will be mostly about a), while being limited because training is expensive. There's also a widely spread culture of self-inflicted expectation that managers should be omnipotent, and therefore shouldn't ask for help if they're doing their job properly. How many times did you have to personally sacrifice because your boss wouldn't dare to ask their boss for a few days delay? And at the same time if that's celebrated as "being tough" or "getting shit done", anf that's the kind of stuff that gets managers promoted. It's a self reinforcing loop. It's corporate natural selection. And that's the stuff that management schools will teach you about, given that it's what makes you successful.
The b) side being more important to managees than company, it's less taught in a corporate setting - and therefore requires self directed training. It requires empathy, and an actual interest in the role itself, not the power it yields. You rarely encounter managers with well developed skills on that side, most just have whatever intuitive skills they acquired by themselves
Like, what does it mean, to execute? To manage? What's the difference between the two things, and why do we have the layer/abstraction?
Its somewhat akin to the differences/identities/similarities of the "Product Manager" versus "Project Manager" conundrum/befuddlement. Does anyone really produce if they can't project? Can you project without actually producing a product? Do you have an issue with the fact that, as a project manager, you must indeed project? Are you aware that the word issue doesn't just mean problem, but is also rather a benign statement of fact, and a verb as well as a noun...
These fuzzy boundaries are ripe for misgivings and, in my humble opinion, an exceptional source of contemporary misanthropy across the classes.
Just getting these differences right, like absolutely tweaked, for your company, can make all the difference in the world. But yet, time and again .. too much be, not enough do ..
I have a masters in IT Management from an ok school but I learned the most about managing personalities from watching Rip Torn's character Artie in The Larry Sanders show. Obviously an exaggerated characterization, but treating developers like talent is effective.
I've found catering to developers has prevented many conflicts I see between managers and their teams and have been asked to take over several other projects when developers become disgruntled.
I don't think there is any organizational downside. If anything, makes you pay closer attention to resources, gets more realistic estimates, and encourages comradery and communication.
One final benefit I noticed is it can make work more entertaining because you feel like you're playing a character at work. The flip side is holding in what you really think can grate on you. I recommend vigorous exercise as an outlet.
I've recommended this to other managers but they think its a horrible idea, but I also only recommend it to bad managers.
Me. Just me. Some folks that I encouraged to do so, not to the same extent though. And I don’t get any respect for it from other managers. If anything it makes it harder to deal with other managers.
I’m always interested in becoming a better manager and was hoping I could pass this on to managers on my team, but it did not at all ring true to my experiences. I see people get promoted up as their competence improved, even at the VP Engineering level. Classic Peter Principle I guess but they haven’t yet hit the incompetence layer.
Just because someone is "qualified" doesn't mean they will be good at it. Some of the best software developers I've known had a physics degree or electrical engineering degree, and some of the worst programmers I've known had PhDs in CS (in fact, a PhD in CS almost guarantees they will write crappy code because it means they've lived in academia their whole careers, insulated from the actual industry).
I mean, this objectively untrue if you consider IT and tech.
The author makes good points, but there's no widely accredited skillset for a 'manager' to have. Is the goal of a manager to guide their employees on their career path or to help the business make money? My personal feeling is the former, but every company I've worked for obviously leans toward the latter.
Nothing provided in this person's internet footprint provides me with answers to those questions.
How many companies have good tops? Few I know of and None I worked for.
the amount of managers who will alienate you within five seconds is high. assertive communication which comes across as pressuring is very common, maybe sign of insecurity i think.
Then, in larger teams, there's some room for HR-like stuff - salary negotiation, personal conflicts, carrier growth opportunities, "how are you feeling" kind of stuff.
The managers should only do the later, but most of the time they completely take over the former, becoming clueless jira ticker shufflers, that multiply like rabbits, because they always think "we need more Managers, because I can't keep up with all the jira shuffling and meetings overheads I created".
Zero. And I'd worry about the judgement and motivations of someone who decides to spend 4 years of their life studying how to manage others, instead of picking up any other skill.