People can read their manager's mind (2015)
yosefk.com
yosefk.com
This key assumption behind the whole article is actually a terrible mentality to take for true and self-evident, as the author has -- at least within the scope of one's relationship with a manager.
The people that most of us have been impressed by in our careers, and in our life, are often very hard to characterize this way. They aren't going around fitting themselves to the next nearest supervisor's desires (stated or unstated). Instead, they've generally developed a strong and characteristic signature to the way they approach their work and they've learned how to quickly impress that personal signature onto the people around them so that those people know what to expect. Here and there, that mean leaving some workplace for being a poor fit to its needs and capabilities, but the long term arc is towards settling into some role as a respected expert who advises and informs the management team that leverages them.
If you think everybody ("generally") will just strive do what their immediate boss wants, and so don't challenge yourself to not do that, you just trap yourself into thrashing around and being frustrated by trying to read people's minds, parse direction vs incentives, impress people who can't even pin down what you're about (because you yourself don't know), etc.
It's a dead end. Don't buy into it.
A defense of the initial assumption might be made by tossing the bit about the proximate manager who you're either obeying or anticipating and widening the scope to say that we're all pursuing reward over plain obedience. And that's a good defense, but only because the "reward" is something abstract and personal like fulfillment of our own career/lifestyle trajectory or our own vision of the craft.
When I wrote about "who we're impressed" by, that's a broad category and it should includes most of us -- either now or when we finally get our shit together and stop trying to do short-term people-pleasing and mind-reading. Most of us are neither professional sycophants or professional psychics and the only way to stay sane through a 40 year career as professional engineer or other kind of technical IC is to do the good work that you can do well, make sure people know what that is, and hope that it's lined up with where the industry needs during that time.
Such people are rare. I’m speaking from experience working at multiple startups. It’s even worse at big companies.
Those people impress you because they're rare. But the author still took the time to explicitly talk about almost the same set of people you are, who buck the trend and sometimes manage to make real changes.
Anyway, it becomes clear by the end that he's giving advice to managers, less so to the managed, so it makes little sense to focus on what he might wish individual contributors did. From a management perspective, that's not actionable. You don't make plans based on rare impressive people, you make plans based on the common case. I mean, do you disagree that a manager should plan on their reports acting on their real incentives rather than what the manager says they want?
Hopefully, you see your self -- or your future self -- as a person you would be impressed by. These people are all over the place, looking competent and confident, being appreciated, referred, and brought onto projects. They are legion, and it's not hard to be one.
But thinking in the way reinforced by this article and some of the replies to my comment traps your career and your mental health in a much less comfortable and sustainable place.
We don't always, or even mostly, or often ever, work at an organization that wants to be impressed by their engineers, no matter how much they say they do. The sorts of places that actually do foster that are rare and all but impossible to get hired at. I don't have the luxury of working at somewhere where I'm impressed by my coworkers and look up to them. My career and mental health isn't comfortable or sustainable.
I'd love to fix this, but in the meantime, I often literally don't get to pick my manager and how they interact with me or value my team's work and priorities. I can tell you that the engineers who most impressed me and were appreciated by me were often not by management, and not brought onto projects. It may not be hard to be one, but it's often hard to keep being one.
It's the same for people - most don't want to work harder, and most don't want to work better, and those that do are disruptive to those that don't, and that includes managers. The reward, the real mission, is long term, stable income without risk, not grabbing more of the market by being faster or better.
Competition is the answer, but no one seems to like that.
The ones who specifically aggravate their bosses, the bosses responsible for promotion and project assignments? I'm no longer sure we're talking about the same people.
Anyway, yes, I try to be one of the crazy ones. I just also try not to have any illusions of what the consequences will be.
I think this is such a great watershed for software organizations.
20 years ago I used to work for a bunch of Swedish companies that took this attitude to the extreme. They are now all basically wiped out by US companies. I think the root cause is that those US companies did organize around rare impressive people.
It’s very hard to do anything truly innovative and valuable in software unless you’re willing to let go of the “we are all small cogs in a big machine mentality” and let some people shine. Will the selection of those few people who get a chance to shine be perfectly fair? No. But at the end of the day (or decade) everyone will be better off for it.
Take it from an ex Sony Ericsson contract engineer.
Technically I can imagine a world where every member of a software team sets themselves up as an adviser and productive support for the management team through sheer force of personality and mastery of soft skills. But practically it seems a bit utopian. Firstly, there are cases where the manager is just more canny than the report and a please-the-boss strategy would be best for everyone. Then there are the cases where the manager is low-empathy or not great at taking advice once they've made a mistake which covers 80% of the managers I know (most of whom are nonetheless pretty good and capable managers). Then the cases where the manager is incompetent technically and will fall for persuasive gibberish from someone who spends more time talking than coding.
If management is ideal and the employees inspired then everyone pushing for what they think best is great. But the moment the cracks of reality intrude I'd bet on yosefk's cynicism. It just asks too much of an employee that they have to be technically competent enough to chart their own path, business savvy enough to correctly place themselves for the needs of the organisation and be capable enough at soft skills to sell these truths to people with more power than them. The best of us might. Most are going to do what they get rewarded for instead.
> they've learned how to quickly impress that personal signature onto the people around them so that those people know what to expect.
I think you point still fits in the article's premise: the people that impress you are able to get rewarded for what they do, whether the manager initially intended to do so.
On the other hand, if they constantly don't get rewarded they'll eventually leave for greener pastures, so it stays a crucial part.
an exaggerated example would be a manager saying that they value communication and talking through problems, they can proselytize about the values they think a team should have all day and night. But when everyone under that person sees that person consistently yelling or going off on people when they try to communicate with them about a problem... we are probably just going to shut that person out or hide things from them because its not worth the stress of trying to communicate with that person.
this isn't about people striving to please their boss, its about perverse incentive structures and your superiors words and actions matching.
Assuming "impressiveness" leads to success is the real dead end. I think these people get to be "impressive" because they're actually rich enough to not care what managers want. You said it yourself: "leaving some workplace for being a poor fit to its needs and capabilities". If you can afford to do this, then of course you can be as unique as you want with no consequences. If the managers start raining on your parade, you just quit.
Put another way, regular forms of success in NA business culture, at least from my PoV, comes from "reading the room", and the unspoken implications that your higher ups who actually do have control over your ability to stay employed, are saying even if they're not saying it. If you spend more time on something because you feel it's virtuous or stylistic to do so, but your manager wanted just the most basic bullshit for some presentation, you've failed, and you've wasted time and money, and I think this is more common than not. Nobody ever got fired for picking Bootstrap or w/e the saying is. In rare circumstances you chance your way into doing something so efficiently or well, within budget in a way that specifically fulfills all the wishes of everyone who has tangible control over your income, and also in a way that was worth the time and money, so much so that you get praise and a raise eventually. You can't try and do this all the time thought, you'll burnout or maybe destroy trust or read the room wrong about your requirement. If there's not a very clear path to being well-rewarded, then focus on what you're getting paid for.
The alternative is specialty contracting or running your own business, where you can choose your customers based on the fact that they want your unique expertise, if you're lucky.
If you succeed at either, great, but don't necessarily set that bar for yourself.
When someone is grotesquely underpaid the bar is pretty low. Take median salary for example. In some places merely buying a home and having it appreciate over the course of one singular year is enough to replace an entire median salary (in that same place)
> if you’re lucky
Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less, because everyone feels like whatever they're paying you, regardless of whether they felt like they got a deal or not, is in exchange for the work they expect from you. When I hire a bike mechanic that charges less, I'm happy I'm paying less, but I naively still want my bike to work properly, and if they didn't match my expectation, I'm going to be unhappy with the service. Charging less doesn't necessarily change someone's expectation, but having junior in your title might give you more leeway.
> Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
Being lucky, in the context I used it, meant that you've been able to successfully find a path of gradual and measurable or desirable evident skill advancement, perhaps with a few standout projects that prove you have those skills, and that people willing to pay you as a business operator (independent contractor or w/e, someone who has complete latitude to apply their apparent skills for money) will be compelled by (i.e I want you to make me a website because you seem to know your shit for x reason). Those projects aren't an every day thing, and you should try very hard to identify them and succeed at them, holding yourself to a higher standard than normal for your own sake.
For famous programmers, that was Doom, or hacking the PS2 or Jailbreaking the iPhone, or inventing the Masonry layout, or maybe the Boston Globe website, all things they may or may not have done while being just an employee, but that they can obviously point to and be like "I worked at ___ for 5 years and one of the cool projects was this thing where we figured out how to do responsive images before it was feasible for a major newpaper", but otherwise a ton of smaller projects that nobody's heard of. Hire me for something as a contractor and I'll apply my skills in a way that I think will solve your problem well, not the agency I no longer work for.
> I don't necessarily agree that the bar is lower because you're paid less
And then this
> I naively still want my bike to work properly
It reads like your conclusions are at odds with each other
Anyway I think we can wrap this one up just heading over to levels.fyi and comparing 2021/2022/2023 salaries for positions with 2024 salaries for the same positions.
Either way, I can see how those quotes seem at odds with each other, but the key word in the second is "naively". As in, I'm happy I got a good deal, but how well I expect the job to be done isn't tightly coupled to how much I'm paying for it, not often anyway. I as a software developer of an identical caliber to some other arbitrary person applying for the same job might ask for some amount less, but it doesn't mean I'll be expected to do any less than what they were hiring someone for.
If the person I got a deal on to fix my bike did a sufficiently terrible job, I might expand my budget, or I might attribute it to a careless person. I might expect similar results because I'm not hiring the dealership to do a repair, instead I'm hiring a smaller shop in a cheaper area, but ideally I still get an oil change.
None of this is categorically true of course, but it's just an attempt at articulating that everyone feels like whatever they're paying, it's enough to have the output be. I guess it's important that the work be categorically similar, like I'm not going to pay $40/hr for a junior boot camp dev and hope they'll design a data center for me.
That difference in perspective seems to be at the root of the disagreement, too.
What is that impress people generally, and what is it that impress you specifically? That might be at odd.
Being impressive in itself is nothing desirable, really. Think about all the sociopaths whose names are engraved in history books as they were the greatest butchers of their time.
On my side, I prefer people that are showing ability to give love and care with empathy first, and then see how to make any technical challenge fit in that frame.
Another is that what they want depends on the last person they talked to. That is, what they want changes.
Within that situation of shifting goals, often what they want from their direct reports is validation. “You’re right, this org is broken, let’s fix/purge it together.”
Sometimes there is not much mind to read.
I did (a), next meeting he said I should do (b). I did (b), next meeting he said I should do (a). This went on for a whole year and a half before I finally left.
IMHO, what you have identified above is a dysfunctional work environment.
Any manager whose interaction with those they work with is dictatorial in nature, who assume what they want is not to be questioned nor analyzed, almost certainly speaks in terms of "resources" and not "people."
Consider the hypothetical shop that values fancy math but claims to reward bugs. There might be an official bug hunting program. But the rewards might be low value like pizza or a lame company award while the mathematicians are getting raises and promotions. There are mixed messages and it won't be clear to every what is valued and some people will overhear at the water who just got a raise and put the pieces together and others won't.
It is messy and fuzzy when goals and statements don't align internally, and I suppose talking about it is also often messy.
For example:
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they
expect to be rewarded for.
And:
Finally, don't expect people to enlighten you and tell you
what your blind spots are. Becoming a manager means losing
the privilege of being told what's what.
But managers are not kings. No matter how much they wish it so.
Now this was a telecom MMI product with lots of what we now call CRUD operations, bracketed with range checks. Instead of making a library, this team would copy/paste code and customise each MMI command, and naturally they had copy/pasted defects galore across the system.
I came from a firmware background (16kbytes of 8 bit micro assembly) and this enormous waste of resources was astounding to me. When I called it out in public in the weekly review meeting, well, let’s just say it was not a pleasant experience.
I don't know if this is a recent thing.
> Instead of making a library, this team would copy/paste code and customise each MMI command
If it has been for a while, then a library call is few lines vs copying that meets the arbitrary metric of higher LOC.
At the end of the day, it's down to the incentives
One of our interns was close to the end of his term and this director wanted to hire him. He thought he was amazing based on all the code he wrote. The problem was that this intern was bad, so we had him write unit tests. But he was bad at that too so he had to make a lot of revisions based on feedback. Thankfully we didn't hire him after myself and others explained why the intern had so many commits and LOC.
However, there are some people who can't. I am one of them.
And that is why I am not successful in my career.
Valve is a good example, their long term support of existing features is poor. But their ability to come up with new and interesting features is amazing. Their compensation for new things is much higher than maintaining old things.
Yes, on an individual level people might not always chase the rewards. In fact, it's better not to always do that. In tech, it's way better to learn more to up skill ones self as that'd lead to better earns later. However, on average, what is rewarded will advance further than what is not.
Manager: [Situation] is happening. What is your plan for dealing with it?
Me: I'm thinking I should do A, B, and C, for reasons X and Y.
Manager: No, that's not right. I think you should do D.
Me: OK, I will do D.
Annoyed looking Manager: Don't do D just because I told you to. I want you to understand why you should do D so next time this happens, you can reason yourself into D without me suggesting it.
Me: <shrugging> OK, help me to understand why we're doing D.
Manager: No, that's not what I want. I need you to get to the reason by yourself!
Me: OK, I don't know what you want me to do at this point. Should I leave this 1:1 and do D or not?
I wish I could read [Manager's] mind. We could just never get past this merry-go-round, and I eventually just left the job. I think this was [Manager's] attempt at career development for me but we just couldn't see eye to eye on any decision I made.
Honestly, this just sounds like a manager who isn't very good at their job. A good manager doesn't just blindly send you off to learn skills they think are necessary; they either teach you themselves (if they have the necessary expertise and spare time) or help you find resources where you can learn what you need (mentorship, suggested reading, etc.). If you describe to someone where where they need to end up without giving directions, it shouldn't be surprising if they get lost!
Just from what you've told, it doesn't sound like it was.
Sadly, some people just have to prove that they're smarter. Whatever you suggest, they will insist that the correct answer is something else. They won't give you a reason for that supposed correct answer because there isn't one. It's an ego thing.
"I need you to get to the reason by yourself!" is not something any competent manager is going to say. That's not how learning works.
I'm glad you were able to leave. That sounds horrible.
Manager or not, coming up with a solution without explaining why the other solutions don't cut it, and why it better solves the problem is plain toxic.
Asking questions that show why the other solutions don’t work - carving out the problem space until all that’s left is the solution D.
The alternative is to describe all the motivations for D. Which it’s clear your manager wasn’t capable of doing.
I do sympathize though, it’s not exactly easy to measure this… but it’s also not impossible?
The best solution I have found for the problem of rewarding prevention, is having leaders repeatedly tell their people that prevention is important. And when performance review season comes around, folks that do preventative work can ask for quotes from people more senior that were close to the work to speak to its impact.
YMMV, and this may not work in every org. It did work reasonably well in a number of technical orgs I was in.
Once you phrase it that way, I start to think it might be literally impossible. How did Aslan put it? "We're never told what would have happened." It's basically the same problem as predicting the future, just starting from a time in the past, with even less grounding in reality. Impossible, right?
Measurement is important, but it isn't everything. If it's your only hammer, you're going to have... exactly the bad time our society is currently having, I guess.
If we didn't have any intuition at all about potential risks, how could we be taking actions that we think reduce risk in the first place? We (hopefully!) don't try to numerically quantify how productive an engineer in raw numbers like "number of lines of code modified" or "number of commits merged", but that doesn't mean we treat it as impossible for experienced engineers to be able to judge the performance of their subordinates. I honestly don't see this as that much harder to measure than the type of engineering work that does already get rewarded; the reason it doesn't get measured as much is because it isn't valued as much, not the reverse.
It’s important to supplement metrics with estimates, stories about the real world impact of the work, quotes from others close to the work. The less measurable, the more you need to lean on those other tools. Assuming 75% of reactive work can be measured and 10% of preventative work can with any degree of certainty, you’ll reach for those other tools more often for the latter.
And yes, those people are still out there. Some of them have learned their lesson about LoC in particular, but they haven't lost their craving for simple (often simplistic) metrics.
The difference with "regular" engineering is that working features are in fact quite tangible, even if their exact costs aren't. You put a ticket on the board for a button, or a bridge, and eventually you can push the button or drive on the bridge. Not so for prevented disasters. By the time a disaster becomes tangible, it's usually too late.
As for the people who want to find a metric as simple as lines of code, I can't imagine we ever find something that will satisfy them, so I'm not particularly dissuaded by the idea of people looking for that not being happy with the measures that I think would be effective. To me, this is a classic case of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I think that it would be unfortunate for us as an industry if we only considered ways of measuring risk prevention that are 100% quantitative.
The problem with these people is that they're "satisfied" with the illusion of certainty, until things blow up. We agree on the fundamentals re measurement, but you have to watch out for that effect. Every metric is a chance for someone to implicitly decide that it's the ultimate truth of reality.
Going on vacation, a manager once sent me a long message detailing all the priorities (sic), in order, that I should focus on (sic). Not 2 weeks later, the same person proceeded to escalate things, borderline shouting at me, when something that wasn't even in the original list "wasn't receiving the proper attention". I should have known, somehow.
I generally take people at their word, even management, and when I spot the difference between words and choices I find things more difficult than they need to be.
If they're deceiving themselves, that's more interesting than my old model, and suggests possibilities I need to think about.
People can read their manager's mind (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34786436 - Feb 2023 (68 comments)
People can read their manager's mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10820158 - Dec 2015 (60 comments)
Communicating: still important, and doesn't automatically happen.
The more interesting part to me is realizing that people care so much about what their manager values. I've always had the mindset of focusing on what the team/product/org needed the most.
People respond to incentives.
If I ask for a task, and the output is not the one expected: I ask for the motivation that lead to the bad decisions. Then, ChatGPT proceeds to retry the task "incorporating" my feedback, not answering my question!!