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I’ve had good managers and bad managers.

As an IC, a good manager will shield you from the chaos, infighting, changing priorities and ever shifting timelines. They will ensure that you are aware of what’s going on, and have enough clarity to be able to proceed.

A bad manager will most likely try to help by exposing you to all of the above, and cause you get caught up in all of the confusion that comes with it.

Just one example.

To piggy back on it. A good manager will shield you from other bad managers and outsourcing firms promising the moon.

Quite a sad state of affairs.

I think it’s important to say that they also protect from rogue/drive by superstar IC’s. The ones who will come along and “fix” your problem, leaving a mess that nobody understands behind them that makes them look competent and your team incompetent, when in reality they’ve just half assed the job.

I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.

It really reveals how clueless some managers are when they sing praises of the "rockstar" IC who from day 1 trash talked their coworkers and broke everything they touched before leaving after a few months to do the same somewhere else.

It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.

You can replace managers with ICs, QA, product owners, Executives, anyone really. It’s not a trait inherent to managers.

From my perspective, I've had mostly good managers, in the sense that I've had multiple managers get fired over the years for being more interested in making sure the team had the tools and support that it needed than doing what the org at large wanted that wasn't possible.

To me, the best managers I've had have done a good job balancing what their team was able to do against what the org needed/wanted them to do. Sometimes that was pushing back against the org and doing the hard work of saying things weren't going to happen, and sometimes it was being clear and sympathetic about conveying difficult realities down to the team about what was needed. I've had managers convey things to me that ultimately led to me quitting and finding other work, but I hold them in high esteem because they clearly communicated what needed to be done to meet demands and I decided it wasn't for me and didn't hold it against me.

There are good managers. They're just also good peers who happen to be your manager and fulfill the role of a manager as best they can. Sometimes the system of the company rejects that, but that's also a sign you're maybe working somewhere that wants you to have no peers and no support, and maybe that should prompt some changes for you as an employee.

For years, all my managers were extremely bad to the point where I thought I was the problem. Until I had my first good manager.

My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.

With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save their ass, so I behave accordingly. I essentially manipulate them as much as I can: it's politics.

With a good manager, I share all I can, reach out when I need their help, and have their back when stuff goes south. It's team work.

> My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.

That's a great way to put it. I've had two managers I think of as good and this is definitely something they had in common.

A good manager is simple to see: success is the team's, failure is their fault. If it is not the case, you have a bad manager.

Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people?

Whose fault is the failure then?

Is it possible for the IC to be given insufficient resources by their PM? Such an insufficient pay or insufficient time or or? Whose fault is the failure then? My point is, we all work between lines and try to do our best, whether we are managers or ICs. A good manager will try to do their best just as you do, a bad one will throw all his troubles on your back, or blame you/the organization/moon phases for them.

It's a responsibility of management to ensure that the work is understood and proper resources are negotiated for and allocated to perform it.

When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.

If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.

In a good organization, there will be several layers of people owning failures of different types. The low level manager can claim ownership of failure to sufficiently manage expectations, their manager can claim ownership of failure to prioritize properly, and a yet higher level leader can own failure to provide funding.

What is so amazing about someone who throws themselves under the bus? Shouldn't a manager increase the probability of success?

It's about shielding the team from the consequences of failure. A good manager will say "If my team failed it's because I did not prepare them well enough/lead them well enough/manage expectations well enough". this is what ownership looks like. It is orthogonal to probability of failure.

What is the actual utility of this however? Instead of trying to determine who is to blame, why not try to identify areas of improvement?

Hence why a good manager "throws themselves under the bus" in the event of failure — the manager failed to increase the probability of success.

I like this take a lot. This assumes that authority, competence and responsibility are aligned. However, this is often not the case in "modern" management as authority is spread very thin and responsibility is fluid (highly dependent on outcome).

A good manager provides air stops shit falling down while letting through all the credit

* Understands what every person on their team is doing

* Coordinates actions between team members

* Actively removes things blocking their team

* Navigates the organizational bureaucracy for their team

* Technical enough to pitch in when things are running smoothly

* Personal enough relationship that you can be honest

A disproportionately large group of the good managers I've had were ex-military, and their big traits were clarity about what we were doing and why, and that when the SHTF they would fight alongside the team, not against it. This wasn't exclusive to ex-military types, but if you are so cynical as to believe in no good managers you may want to look for places which employ this style.

I can imagine within gov contracting this same group of people are violently annoying instead, but I have never had the experience of that world.

Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much bigger target for communication. The good ones filter out noise and help you prioritize your work.

The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.

The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.

There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.

I have had a good manager and here are some concrete examples. He thought it was important to deliver what we promised so he would work with us to get good estimates and would then bring those outside our team and argue for a reasonable time/scope. He would deflect stupid requests (add AI to our project that had no reason for it). In my four years working under him he got us two off cycle inflation adjustments by going to HR and telling them to retain good talent in software we need to pay more.

I've had good managers. They always get outplayed and outmaneuvered and ultimately fired and replaced by sociopaths who spend all their time successfully playing politics and never doing anything significant.

Well I've had good managers but you're right in that they were peers more than emperors.

As for something concrete, I can think of managers fighting for my bonus allocations, fighting for comp days after a crunchy deadline, things like that. Estimation was earnest and not pushy. Problems were handled in a solution oriented way, not a blame game. You could argue that's just maintaining combat readiness but I'll take it.

I see here a lot of generalities about good managers helping you prioritize work, shielding you from chaos, bringing organization to the team, etc. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Any reasonably well-organized, good-intentioned, and less selfish person/manager can do that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a good manager.

The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.