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Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

I think you also need to account for the amount of bad.

Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.

But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.

Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to:

30 or 40 careers damaged, internal stalinist purges. Months wasted on drama. 21 million yearly recurring in wasted IT expense. Probably close on 500 million in non recurring waste over 4 years. 4 million yearly recurring in executive waste. Significant brand damage, significant resume damage for people who worked through it. Actual end user harm.

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> Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed. But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.

Ironically every place I've worked, a lot of these bad programmers got placed into the management pipeline, because they had not the skills to hack it as an IC, so it was a worst case scenario of "fake it till you make it".

You could be the most incompetent programmer in the world, but a suave bullshitter is a shoe-in for management, where they now get to tell the competent programmers how to do their jobs.

In all fairness, a bad programmer can do a lot of damage. They can create attack vectors, destroy data and cause production outages. None of that is good. There are things in place to prevent that, but if those also fail, it'll be a busy week. Ask Crowdstrike.

https://ezo.io/blog/crowdstrike-outage-and-the-blue-screen-o...

Bad managers can also lead to a lot of bad programmers because all the good ones left. I reckon a bad manager is a multiplier of bad programmers. Bad is just bad no matter what level you are in.

I think the main difference is that programmers have (or should have) more transparent processes that they go through (code reviews, design doc reviews / signoffs, CI/CD to catch mistakes) compared to managers. Granted, I'm an IC so I know more about those - maybe managerial roles have similar ways to ensure you catch the "bad" early enough.

I think its genuinely harder to measure the squishy productivity / collaboration / delivery output stuff that managers are supposed to own, but also .. managers aren't as incentivized to create processes to measure managers ..

Fair, however if a bad programmer isnt subject to code review, thats sort of a management issue.

Yes managerial blast radius is an order of magnitude larger, and ability to measure performance lower / more lagged.

There's a reason why the saying goes "people don't quit companies, they quit bosses".

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