Steve Jobs adopted no 'bozos' policy – best managers those who never wanted job
aol.com
aol.com
* VP hires a middle manager who's a bad fit, but VP doesn't want to admit it
* A manager is promoted into a higher role primarily as a retention mechanism, rather than because a true business need exists
* A manager is promoted into a higher role in an organization that rewards following processes over getting results
* A middle-management layer used to be necessary, and has grown less necessary, but the org is reluctant to do away with it
* There is a perceived need for the middle manager to prove themselves fast and hard both upward and downward, and there's an inherent conflict in how to do that
None of these necessarily reflect the skills of the middle manager; rather, they represent organizational problems.
The best manager I've ever had engaged me on a technical level and asked for my help outside of my immediate responsibilities just frequently enough, had been through the same shit code I now had to deal with and left me to it, and was forthcoming, transparent, and collaborative during 1:1s.
The worst manager I've ever had tried to repeatedly trick me into admitting fault regarding some inane pet issue they were clearly stewing on, failed to identify any kind of clear success criteria for any given task, and possibly just put me on mute during 1:1s.
Then I went to work on a high performing team in a high performing organisation and discovered that even in that environment there were people promoted to get them away from stuff they were a) terrible at and b) had made a total mess of.
The similarities of a company run by average MBAs and a country run by career politicians is a concept sadly not explored very much, for how topical and catastrophic it is.
Oh they know alright what they are doing. It's just has nothing to do with what they are saying, nor with your or mine best interest in mind.
My bias might be showing, but what is politicking other than being in the same room with "influential" people, exchanging favours and licking boots when necessary? One would agree that a great manager does more than just appeasing their boss and trying to climb the ladder of power.
That’d be akin to saying “what is sales other than sending a bunch of emails, sharing benefits pamphlets, and taking commission cuts when necessary?”
Like being real estate agent are just like car salesmen that happen to sell house instead of car. They show you the product try to use your emotion to manipulate you into buying it and collect a commission :-)
First - who are you selling to? Does your product fit their needs or are you wasting everyone's time? How do you find who to sell to? Is there a feature that keeps getting requested that you can bubble up to the product team?
How do you close a sale, or even know who the decision maker is? Is the price too high or too low? Is there a way to work around financing or timing issues?
There is a lot that goes into sales that bleeds into product, marketing and user experience. Not every sale needs all this attention but a salesman needs some sense of all these things to make those extra sales and not waste extra time/money on dead ends.
Flip side would be saying making websites is just making product designs clickable and tying all expected functionality together. Technically true, but it ignores scaling, user flow, bugs, logging, robustness, optimization, etc.
When something looks simple you may be looking too narrowly at something that connects to lots of other areas.
Yes, this is real issue with job market, that most managers are cautious about somebody, who looking initiative, as they are usually "well-fed and satisfied", and don't like people like Jobs itself, who said "stay hungry".
And yes, in many cases, established business need predictability, not innovations. But this is truth of market, especially marketing, especially good seen in Search Engine Optimization, when you invest into innovations (or in case of marketing into your market, or into your site in case of SEO), if successful, you will once see good grow, then things become into plateau, and then appear unavoidable shrink, and tops need regularly start new circle of grow with new idea (or may be with few good ideas).
And real talent of Jobs, that he without special education, somehow understood this truth.
At some companies, it is almost impossible to even raise concerns about a middle manager's performance. It should be much easier, especially if a group of people would rather work for one of their own than certain "bozos".
Keep in mind, Apple, unlike most companies - has an extremely functional org structure.
So by definition, managers should be experts in their discipline. Aka “no bozos”.
(Unlike most Fortune 500 companies, where you could get away with not being an expert in your department - but just a good people manager)
It's great to have both, however those are rare gems.
A manager that only does management stuff? Well, what do you think they are going to do?
Also, managers that aren't proficient in the field they are managing also doesn’t usually work well and I thought was always disrespectful to the team.
Obviously there are exceptions to the above.
The epitome of the terrible manager is one that panics, runs like a headless chicken or throws their hands in the air when their subordinates are stuck with too short a deadline or a massive hurdle, for example. The great leader is the one that assesses the situation and say "OK, leave it with me, I'll go talk to the boss that this ain't working," raising the morale of the entire team. What's the point of the manager otherwise?
Management and leadership are the one and the same thing, the big problem in many companies is the belief they're not.
A talented engineer can be an amazing leader, even if they have no management responsibilities.
A good manager can form a high functioning team and develop their staff, without setting the vision.
So I disagree they are the same things, even if the combination could be particularly powerful.
>Management is about ensuring people are doing the right things.
This is all completely incoherent to me. What are "the right things"? What is "setting a vision"? It really sounds like you just listened to some motivational speakers. It's just silliness.
Parent is exactly right. You can't do any of these things well and sustainably without doing both, and taking responsibility for both. Trying to do one or the other is just a scam.
Management is a job function. If someone has decided that X needs to happen, then a managers job is to ensure that X happens. They may or may not have influenced whether X is the thing that needs to happen.
Leadership is convincing people to go in a certain direction. It can happen on many different levels, from the overall direction of a company, to choosing certain technologies to use, to adopting some practices, or whatever. It's more of a quality that anyone can have, rather than a job function.
This tracks with my experience: I have worked places where the day-to-day was fine (management) but the year-to-year was not (leadership).
And when overseeing a group of people in static but important cookie cutter functional roles, you can be a great manager of people, without taking them anywhere new.
Those are the extremes, but there are two poles. Even if most influential people in an organization have varying degrees of responsibility and talent for each.
aol.com - wow, it's been many years, the better part of a decade almost, since I've seen that domain or any content on it. Had no idea it was still around.
Yahoo and some other domains that are from that time period still show up in search results, but I don't think I've seen aol.com articles in a long time now.
https://fortune.com/2024/02/24/steve-jobs-management-advice/
The last straw was right before a pre-planned vacation (3 hours before, to be exact), he wanted me to merge our Jr developer's branch into mine. I merged it, and pushed it to the repo (not master or live, but backed it up to our repo server for when I got back).
Another note here is that they refused to use Git. Didn't even know how to pronounce it correctly and stuck to his guns about SVN. We ran into merging issues constantly.
When I was flying home, he sent me this nasty email saying that I'm not a 'senior developer' and that there were bugs in my code, etc, etc. A month prior to this, I was getting praise from the entire team and company bosses about a brand new extension I had written with no issues. He didn't want to hear that all of the bugs were incompatibility issues with the JRs code.
One other issue I ran into frequently was that the original code base (which he wrote), was so buggy, I would need to fix 5-10 bugs before I could even start working on a new feature. It was also filled with LOTS of security vulnerabilities, which were ignored. If I mentioned any of this in a constructive way, he would raise his voice in front of everyone at the meeting.
All was good though. They finally let me go because they 'ran out of money' a few weeks after I came back from vacation. The company folded within 6 months. Since then, I've had the best manager and contract I've ever had in my career and 3X my money over night.
Sometimes you need a shitty manager to appreciate the good ones.
I'm currently seeing this dynamic at my own company with my cofounder. I can manage things, projects and people, make them feel good about working at our firm, but I can't for the life of me inspire people to go above and beyond their job description. Meanwhile, my cofounder could rally the troops to cross the Somme in the midst of machine gunfire if needed.
Reasonable high caliber people don't need to be "managed". You can manage people working in the restaurant, make them a schedule, make sure they show up, etc. In a creative and intellectually challenging industry like SWE, why would you hire most bright people to pay them lots of money and then think they require continuous "managing". They might need someone to report to and escalate when need arises but that should be very lightweight.
Generally managers are used for handling failure of culture and the cause of that failure at the same time. If you are running a shitty shop, full of crappy devs, who you want to pay crappily, then you need a manager for ~ every 8 people, to whip them and make sure they are doing their jobs, and get fired if they don't.