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Comment by franktankbank | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Tim was the manager. What exactly was the paid for manager doing?

There are different types of managers. I'd use the term technical lead for tim. Someone needs to maneage product delivery. Someone needs to manage the backlog. Someone needs to manage the training of everyone. Someone needs to ensure people are getting setup for their next job. Someone needs to ensure everyone is paid right. Someone needs to handle it when two people don't get along. The above is a small subset of the full list - I don't know everything on the full list.

Not to be a total fucking asshole... but:

> Someone needs to manage product delivery:

You mean the 2-week delivery cycle into an automated CI/CD? Good lord I hope they don't have a useless scrum master too.

> Someone needs to manage the backlog:

I'm curious what input the manager has into this besides reading through a list of engineer curated items.

> Someone needs to manage the training of everyone:

Tim seems to be handling that.

> Someone needs to ensure people are getting setup for their next job:

Tim seems to be handling that.

> Someone needs to ensure everyone is paid right:

HR has but one fuckin job as far as I can tell.

> Someone needs to handle it when two people don't get along:

Hey Tim can you id the asshole? How comfortable are you hiring/firing?

Obviously IME non-technical management has done nothing but played politics and prevented firing of shitheads who were wrongly hired.

Do you have experience being a tech lead and/or a manager? Tech leads and people managers are two explicitly different roles in many organizations, for good reasons, including, but not limited to them being both full time jobs. It certainly depends on the company and the size of the team and other things, but many many tech leads are not at all comfortable hiring & firing, nor with interviewing and prioritizing work and product managing and meeting with management and approving time off requests and dealing with complaints and deciding raises and promotions and dealing with equipment and managing budgets… the degree to which you’re downplaying these roles is what leads me to have to assume you might not know what’s really involved.

Man that is a whole lot of fluff to differentiate between being able to hire and fire. I wonder what Tim would do.

So your mind is made up that someone fictional who is not described in a blog post does not contribute to an org you know nothing about? Is your point that all management is useless? Or something else? And why are you certain, what is your experience running a team or a company? Maybe the sarcasm isn’t communicating your point effectively?

> You mean the 2-week delivery cycle into an automated CI/CD? Good lord I hope they don't have a useless scrum master too.

If you can automation that job good for you. However some people work in a regulated industry where not getting FDA/FAA and their equivalent for every other country in the world before shipping software means someone will go to prison.

> I'm curious what input the manager has into this besides reading through a list of engineer curated items.

They better have a lot. You might call it product owner (in scrumm), or some other title. Every project I've never worked on has more great ideas than they can invest in today and so you need to figure out what the priority is. It better not be only engineering that has input to this - marketing (a very different skill from engineering) needs to have input, as does finance...

> Tim seems to be handling that. [training]

It is normal to handle more than one management task. I doubt Tim is handling harassment training. This is the main job of HR (not making sure people are paid as you seem to think)

> Hey Tim can you id the asshole? How comfortable are you hiring/firing?

probably not. As one manager of mine told me, he always knew long before the team if someone would work out. The team is close, knows that person is nice (most people are nice), and seems to be smart. If you are the first to notice someone isn't getting up to speed quick enough you are the "asshole" that needs to be removed from the team, an outside manager will be much quicker because they are removed from personal contact with the person in question.

> HR has but one fuckin job as far as I can tell.

Yes. Protecting the company. As long as anyone's paycheck doesn't have a slur actually written on it, that's roughly where HR's interest ends in the matter.

Don't feel too called out. If I thought you were wrong on anything else here, I would say so.

HR generally gets a secondary job of checking with other companies are paying someone for similar work. The primary job is protecting the company as you noted. (though paying someone a competitive wage protects the company from people leaving for too little, or the from paying more than they must)

Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. With less experienced developers he would patiently let them drive whilst nudging them towards a solution.

That's not a management activity - that's the kind of coaching you would expect from a senior IC ("Individual Contributor" - I still hate that term.)

Generally I would expect a "manager" to have authority over other people in the company: run performance reviews, handle promotions and hiring and firing.

I think it's important for companies to provide a career structure that allows for influence, decision making and leadership roles that don't also require taking on those management tasks. Management tasks are extremely time consuming and require a substantially different set of skills from being a great team coach or force multiplier like Tim in the story.

I can't quite tell what the manager in this story should have been doing though. Where is their value add? If its just MBA fluff playing psycho games with metrics then I'd argue they can get fucked.

It could be a big company. There might be some layers of C-levels, the a layer of managers to listen to them and turn their commands into concrete things, and then a couple crumple-zone layers of management to make sure that the concrete bricks from the top don’t damage actual productivity when they hit.

I would agree, but the manager probably should be in touch enough that they could see the teaming behaviour themselves.

They did… that’s the whole premise of the article

A lot of people seem to have zeroed in on "the manager's decision" and completely missed that it referred to the department manager, not the team manager, and the story is told from the perspective of the team manager.

Not sure the story is even real but apparently that was going on long enough without his manager knowledge that the manager was dead set on making tims exit preparations

Clearly performing another under appreciated task: to act as a buffer for Tim, allowing the team to flourish even when they don’t adhere to company policy. And all other managerial stuff apart from coaching.

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