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Comment by ryoshu | Hacker News Reader

Delegation -> This is 1000% the hardest thing to do. You need to let go and trust your people.

Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.

Quality over quantity -> Yes.

The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.

Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.

Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for.

You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,

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>The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.

The best managers I've ever had saw it as their job to remove barriers and bullshit from my day. It's what I try to do as a leader as well. It serves the purpose of making their jobs easier, and also takes up your time which creates less opportunity for you to micromanage and forces you to delegate.

>Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.

This is SO important, and where I struggle the most. Your team won't appreciate it, but when they have the time, support, and resources they need, they'll notice.

Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.

It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?

Agreed. "Where's my dopamine" is the right way to describe it. As an IC I could find a bug, craft a test that reproduces it, write a fix, see the test go green, see the PR get approved and land... I'd get a little dopamine ping at each step. As a manager I'd have days where I had constructive 1:1s in the morning and maybe made a decision on some strategic or resourcing problem in an afternoon meeting. Of course I recognised that the work was not only valuable, but higher impact than just fixing a bug. But the direct hit in the pleasure receptors just wasn't there. I'd finish a day a like that and instead of feeling happy with my work, I'd just feel exhausted and not looking forward to the next day.

After a few years as a manager I switched back to the IC track. I sometimes wonder if my experience means I'm just hard-wired to be an IC, or if with more time and practice you can train yourself to get the dopamine feedback from management activities.

I'm still getting dopamine off getting a team member promoted, two years later. Every success they make reminds me that I helped them build that confidence and those skills. Manager-side successes might not be obvious and daily, but they have staying power like you wouldn't believe.

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