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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

What alternative do you see? At the end of the day it is philosophically impossible to manage situations that cannot be detected. It is like the OODA loop to catch a ghost; the ghost can't be observed because it doesn't exist and the ODA part becomes a questionable exercise.

Managers who react to known signals in predictable ways are strategically better than managers who just make stuff up on the day in unpredictable ways.

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To use a famous, well-known example relevant to the HN user base: Software productivity can't be measured with any simple metrics - essentially every attempt at coming up with software output metrics can be trivially gamed, yet that hasn't stopped people from trying mightily (I'm probably showing my age in recalling how much effort was put into "function points" from a couple decades ago).

At the same time, nearly all of us can identify developers who are highly, highly productive, and others who are not. We may not have great metrics for software productivity, but I can guarantee that Fabrice Bellard is about 100 times more productive than I am.

Metrics are inherently an oversimplification in attempt to get complex phenomena down to a strictly ordered value, but the real world doesn't work like that. I think your mistake is thinking that just because things can't be reduced so a small set of numbers would also mean they can't be observed, and that isn't true.

You also have a problem that a team can benefit from people who are less productive as coders, but more productive at paperwork, organizing, mentoring, meetings, etc.

I’ve seen several teams fire less productive coders and then the team fell apart into individually good coders.

That teams require a blend of capabilities and personalities is anathema to the “everyone a widget” mentality of most corporations — but remains persistently true.

As a manager, there is diminishing returns to measurements. At a certain point, you have to trust the team to do the right thing without having full documentation, specification, and provable outcomes.

Many of the most important decisions do not have quantifiable outcomes. How many incidents did this architecture or refactor prevent? What cultural effect would that person we didn’t hire have had over the next year?

At least in early stage or growing startups, I think if every one of your actions is measurable and fully specced, you’re in trouble.

> At a certain point, you have to trust the team to do the right thing...

Yeah, but that is explicitly not managing them. That is the standard "I can't measure this situation, therefore I will not attempt to manage it" response of a good manager.

You are not perfect though. There will always be factors overlooked and simply acknowledging that before it becomes a problem is something most management has failed to grasp which is what motivates this sentiment. I can bet now often than not on this thread alone now people have felt the negative effects of every action being quantified for the sake of 'profitability' by someone who lacks a firm grasp on the field being measured, which leads to high performing employees being let go.

I don’t really know what that means. Management is not about control, it’s about outcomes.

I am responsible for the outcomes of my teams, full stop. I am responsible for the growth and development of the engineers who report to me.

If that means sometimes standing back and letting the cook, then that’s the right thing to do. I’m not here to involve myself because otherwise people will ask “well what are you doing??”

(The answer to that is that the more independent teams can run at a high velocity of quality output, the fewer managers your company needs. That is good!)

> Management is not about control, it’s about outcomes.

Management is about controlling the outcomes. Nobody could claim to be managing a situation well if they are responsible but exercising literally no influence over the process. If the manager could be replaced with a garden gnome and it doesn't change the outcome then the situation is effectively unmanaged.

We seem to be in furious agreement so I don't know why my perspective is eluding you. You're looking at a situation that might have an outcome that is unacceptable. You've identified that there is no measurable way to assess progress or quality. You've concluded that there is nothing you can say, do or observe that will help. The situation is then left unmanaged because there is nothing to measure and you're waiting for something you can measure before you act. This is the basics of management, what you can measure you can manage what you can't you can't.

It just happens that in the small software is unmanageable, as quickly becomes clear if you have management experience of a non-software process and compare it to managing a software team.

You're claiming that it's "philosophically impossible" (whatever that's supposed to mean) to do X, as if philosophy is some immutable and fully-understood constant like a gravitational constant. This is what reading too many management books and theories does to people - management theory isn't some sort of physical constant which is unquestionable or even testable

Detected != measured. A good manager has no problem to evaluate and manage situations even if they can't put numbers on what is happening.

Detected = measured. They are equivalent actions. You can even trivially metricise such a situation - plot it on a graph, x axis time & y axis a plot of "did we detect it?".

The stupid graph will only say "goodness" with arbitrary values.

Are the companies you most admire run that way? Is that how the technologies that you love were invented? Is that how the individual technologists you look up to operated? Is that how the most impactful, world-altering inventions were created?

For me, the answer is no. Perhaps for you the answer is yes.

You are not thinking at all carefully about what it is to measure something and how much meaning you get from that. Metrics need to convey a lot of useful meaning, and measure something that is worth measuring, otherwise they are worse than useless. I’ve seen otherwise-intelligent people led totally astray because of this totally blinkered fetishisation of metrics over everything else. You cannot meaningfully reduce even a small complex system to a handful of graphs. There is a place for metrics, but responsible use demands humility, not supremacy.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Paperback...

The alternative is to do the thing that doesn't scale, because all the purported ways of scaling are worse than that.

Our ancestors made do for thousands of years, hell they coordinated the logistics of wars with far greater complexity than even the largest of companies.

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