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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

The biggest pain is the people. You'd be surprised how childish grown ups can be. FFS just be adults and get along. 80% of my stress as a manager is basically solving playground squabbles between people old enough and experienced enough to know better.

Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc for above childish reasons.

Turns out that a lot of "professionals" are not professional at all and are actually pretty petty, spiteful, grudge-holding argumentative children who go into a strop (or as the article puts it "go lay on the grass thinking about their project") for a day or 5 if they don't get their way.

The rest of being a manager is a breeze though! 10/10 would buy again etc :)

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> the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc

The worst part about this? It's just in some people's nature to do this. I'm a manager in the public service so it's basically impossible for even the CEO of my organisation to go "oh, that undermining backstabber guy is way better than spangry, let's fire spangry and replace him with undermining backstabber guy". And yet one of my reports constantly does this kind of thing anyway. It's utterly inexplicable.

Well, it's well known that to become a team lead you must eat the previous team lead)

To be fair, some managers over-optimize to protect against people undermining them, not sharing knowledge and responsibility and even actively removing top performers with leadership ambitions

Something I’ve noticed in the company I work for is that team leads which still write code is that they will take for themselves the high visibility projects.

I even think this is sometimes in good faith, as in "this is some serious shot, better handle it myself to avoid failure".

My favorite pattern is what I call "code sheriff" lead, who does all code reviews himself to prevent bad code from reaching trunk. Then proceed to complain how you can't go on a vacation because all processes stop.

Or worse, only do shiny and "fun" things that customers don't care about while ignoring all sorts of practical bugs/issues.

Not necessarily! You can just hang in tight and let someone else eat the team lead. In my experience it is often product people wishing to cosplay as tech lead (and they will promptly proceed trying do the same to you), or a middle manager/CTO (ditto).

> Then of course the other 20% of the stress are your reports actively trying to undermine you, or publicly question your purpose/existence, or cut you out of decision making processes, going behind your back and contradicting previous agreements, trying to short-circuit or subvert agreed processes etc etc for above childish reasons.

Frankly, this makes it look like you are indeed a problem that deserves to be questioned and bypassed whenever possible.

This sort of viewpoint is the perfect example - the short-sighted kneejerk "I know better" response that jumps to conclusions without taking into consideration (...or frankly even being aware of) any context or rationale or background info for why things are the way they are.

People like this cause problems and headaches for everyone as they are loose canons causing havoc, confusion, and wasted effort.

Congrats - you are very likely your manager's biggest annoyance.

If you think something is wrong or inefficient or whatever, talk about it with your manager or skip-level. Don't just take matters into your own hands and subsequently screw things up for loads more people by doing stupid things like entering into/cancelling agreements/commitments with other teams/customers etc because you think your manager is a bozo.

My thought as well. My manager loves it when I cut him out of the decision making process. It means less work for him and the whole point of having senior ICs is to let them take on those responsibilities.

As a team lead and manager, I've had SWE friends mention that management shouldn't even exist. Petty arguments, performance issues, termination, even sexual harassment reporting are things I've had to personally deal with.

Well that shouldn't be an issue in a professional workplace and functioning team, is the rationalization. I couldn't agree more! Yet, there's a huge gap between what should and does happen when a bunch of humans (sadly, mostly men) work together.

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