So you're a manager now
scottkosman.com
scottkosman.com
Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics.
If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people that the manager just needs to serve.
I’m in a semi-private peer group for managers and the number one most common struggle for new managers is their first encounter with employees who aren’t working unless a manager is standing over their shoulder, or who are causing problems within the team. Books like “The Managers Path” can help, but in my experience the best help is to find a more experienced manager you can talk to for advice. A lot of the difficult realities of managing people are messy or even painful and are often intentionally avoided in feel-good internet advice.
1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what the hr training tells you about it not being personal etc)
2. This is a big one. Performance has a huge under rated aspect that is environmental and circumstantial. I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket.
Management is really a mixed bag. I loved the coaching, direction setting, strategy, etc but always having to sell opaque higher up decisions as your own and being an inverted $hit umbrella for leadership can be draining. I guess the solution is to just join executive leadership ha.
I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Yet much less is written about the difficult employees who aren’t responsive to management coaching. Most of what is written is about the stories where good managers turned difficult employees around or bad managers failed to help employees, leaving an impression that the manager is solely responsible for the outcome.
In the peer group I mentioned above a common story is for someone to arrive after trying to coach a problem employee for years without progress. When you’ve been led to believe that a failing employee is really a failure of management it’s hard to let go of them, because letting go is admitting failure. It takes a reality check from someone more experienced to realize that not every employee has good intentions. These situations aren’t written about as much because they’re uncomfortable and many don’t like reading about it.
Maybe off-topic: I think a lot of writing comes from a place of control. The writers want to feel like they're in control and the readers want to feel they're in control too. The internet functions as people's outlet and fantasy environ, so scary writing naturally gets filtered out, i.e. post something uncomfortable and people must retaliate to preserve their comfort, their sense of control.
There are legal, ethical and emotional risks attached to writing about failed relationships with difficult colleagues. These stories are meant to be shared over a hot (or strong) drink.
Hiding the anonymous negative stories doesn’t help anyone.
Now coachability could mean different things - Are they absolutely unreceptive to feedback? Were they actually hired in the wrong role? fantastic interviewers but terrible on the job, mislevelled, completely wrong area, passion etc? Record of toxicity?
Arent these (except may be the mislevelled bit) grounds for a PIP to begin with. Ive felt these situations were easier to manage in FAANG?MAANGO etc precisely due to the highly process driven cultures. Also i think the "emotion" of it goes away because hiring is extremely generalized and pipelined (best case you see a candidate's interview feedback if you are the HM and usually you only do that if you are happy with the "numeric rating"). Generalized hiring has its own problems but that's another story. Again this may be different at various companies so just trying to job my memory.
Btw I loved this:
> I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Often managers are demonized without recognizing that managers themselves are part of the machine that is the company and the culture (and I feel this actually has become so by design).
It's really... not? I guess, it probably depends on the person too. But at some level, you have both a lot of power to influence things accidentally in a bad way if you're not careful, and at the same time absolutely minimal power to actually get stuff done (you always need to rely on others for the "doing" part, oftentimes several levels deep/ with a lot of potential for miscommunication).
Those opaque decisions? You _have to_ take decisions, because not taking decisions is very often worse than taking a bad decision. And you don't have the information, you can't have the information, you need to work at a high level of abstraction because it's impossible to know all the details. Unless the relevant details are being communicated to you just in time (spoiler: they won't be), you won't know them. If you actually care about how well you do your job and what is your impact on others, it's not a walk in the park, at all.
Is that really part of management etiquette? In my experience nothing ruins my trust in my manager more than when they pretend that they love every decision from the higher ups. My favorite managers have always taken a “well this is dumb but we have to do it because the CEO said so” approach. It creates comraderie and lets me know they are a real person.
My least favorite manager of all time laid off a valued member of the team for financial reasons (sad but understandable). Within 24h he had started to rationalize and defend that our team was actually /better/ now. I assume he was trying to convince himself as much as the rest of us.
Managers are weird because they are implicitly asked to take on elements of the organization into their personality. It’s unavoidable to an extent. But some fully become Sartre’s Waiter. I always wondered if this type of manager went home and was totally cool and normal with their family or if they brought The Board home with them too.
2. I don't believe those are the types that OP was talking about. There are people that will just never work out to begin with, and there are people who have bad days/weeks. The latter are already trusted and deemed worthy, so it's not the same class of problem.
And remember, being a director is just being an inverted $shit umbrella for veeps, so the grass isn't always greener!
Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle.
Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet.. when you HAVE to fire someone, you want the low performer around to hit your metrics..
So a lot of shops carry around a lot of dead weight for different reasons, as long as the person is not a net negative contributor.
Aside from that, yeah, how to deal with poor performers is as much an art as a science. I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
While this works in the short/naive scenario, I feel like in most cases these low performers prefer the "gravy" work if you will. The type of work that almost everyone prefers and is good at. So you risk setting a bad precedent for perverse incentives by rewarding poor performance with easier work.
In a sufficient sized team you may have boring/rote tasks that your high performers hate & neglect, but sometimes a comparatively lower performer will take on.
In many cases it's the (sometimes perceived but not in practice) higher performers that want the harder exciting high profile tasks, but maybe don't want to do the less fun parts of those tasks. Basic data munging, documentation, testing, monitoring, configuration management, etc... no fun!
A lot of perceived high performing devs I've worked with want to be like surgeons who walk into the OR, put their hands into the gloves, pick up the tools prepared for them on a tray, do the surgery, and leave.
Some parts of the job just suck and there's no easy out. I just tell myself this is why they're paying me.
https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-...
This podcast has made me a 10x better manager.
Good starters:
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity...
- https://www.manager-tools.com/2018/06/manager-tools-onboardi...
I sampled some newer episodes in the past few years and was not impressed. One episode was just the host and guest ranting about how remote work isn’t real work and how everyone needs to get back to the office, which was wholly unhelpful for me as a remote manager.
Edit: I also linked the wrong feedback episode. The correct one was from 2008...
People who don't contribute or cause problems need to be sequestered as much as possible. Don't let them bring down the rest of the team. I think "managed out" is the term that's being used now. That is a skill that a manager of any level can use to keep their team performing even when they don't have the authority to remove someone, or the process to remove someone is many months long.
I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.)
It's why I like working with smaller companies, usually not established enough to just make middle management eat shit and ignore customers.
Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored).
Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. I remember suggesting that it would be nice if we could have an additional server for a system we were building and got told "yeah good idea, go ask <PM> if it's in the budget". It was, and we got it. I was in heaven.
I've been at a few small-scaling-to-big firms going through tremendous growing pains. Most of the time it was that they had the insight to hire team leads & ICs with experience from bigger competitors but not any higher up the food chain.
That is - higher extremely experienced, talented people, and have them report to the some guy that was hired 20 years ago because he went to school with the founder, or his buddies kid, or some dude who never worked elsewhere in the industry. So ultimately the deciders and decisions didn't change and it was all window dressing.
Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing?
Often the answer is no.
That's the main challenge I have coaching management folks - now you have the option of doing work, and often you'll be tempted to take the path of least resistance, but that'll usually lead you astray.
Edited to add - sorry I missed your net negative comment - to touch on that, as it's another thing I see often.. Giving up on the org's ability to satisfy your needs is another toxic pattern for management - it is a lose/lose essentially. Management is often in a position of needing to push for the things it needs and advocate for the people relying on them.
In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure.
It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time.
2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time
3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks
4) Finally the person is let go
OTOH, why shouldn't your team be able to say you're a bad manager and just get you fired? There is rarely a simple process to do that.
They're the productive ones so this seems a little backwards.
At any rate I definitely don't see why a managers job should be made easier to avoid the realistic implications of firing someone. If they can't cope with the clearly defined rules then maybe they're just not a competent manager.
IMO the problem from a management perspective isn't really the bad performer staying too long.
Also, dealing with HR as a manager is mostly fine. They actually respect you.
And just having someone that sucks on your team for one extra year is not really much of a burden. Sure you have to do extra paperwork, adjust morale, but that's just the job.
The problem IME is when this is used against you. When timelines are tight and the C-Level complain that "you already have N reports", but you can't fire or transfer the person who's disruptive, doesn't delivery or is clearly doing a second job instead, and the C-Level is too lazy to check what's going on.
This is a deliberate tactic. Don't accept their framing. You are following the correct procedure and...
This is the tough bit, you need to call out whoever is trying to keep you down.
That's why it's so hard.
Even then who knows. I once had to deal with an employee who filed a claim without a leg to stand on. The powers that be had already decided from the get-go I was at fault, even though they clearly didn't even bother to look at what I submitted. When questioned about it they couldn't even speak to it! They initially sided with the worker, but after weeks of phone calls that basically amounted to "read what I gave you already", eventually they relented with "Oh yeah, you are right. I have revised my decision." If it had been a slightly more biased/lazy person instead...
Lawsuits like this are more common than I expected before I got a peek behind the curtain, but in my experience companies aren’t rolling over for $200K settlements frequently.
The last time I was at a level in a billion dollar company to have some visibility into this, the company had a small team of corporate counsel who were pros at handling these cases. They would get a lot of suits from people hoping to get a quick payday and then spend a minimal amount of time actually engaging them. This either made them go away when the other side realized it wasn’t an easy win, or made them change their tune and ask for a very small settlement (four or five figures, not six).
And I’ve never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments. That’s weird.
Nevertheless, even paying $200K to separate from a toxic employee would be a long term win relative to paying $200-300K (fully loaded cost with benefits) for multiple years while also risking them making your good team members leave and damaging your product.
You're right that zero or four or five figures is the more common outcome -- usually because most people aren't quite so passionate to really lean into this type of thing.
On "never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments" -- actually, that is the best practice. For the department the toxic employee was hired into to be 'accountable' for the fact that they hired such a person and did not exit them with adequate documentation to easily defeat a lawsuit.
This is the difficult conversation template I put together and use:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHyfR0XAc5ehRoqRImV1yAFh...
It certainly reflects the process I've gone during some difficult conversations, at least when I did them well. And I've certainly done the other approach where I just dug my trench and they dug theirs; oh lord, is it a terrible approach!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6ALA?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_a_con...
I think even a bad difficult conversation is better than no difficult conversation so just giving the managers I work with some tool to compel action is valuable.
Indeed! I suppose I misunderstood my manager's direction to onboard the new guy.
What I find fascinating about this is how predictable people become once you know the different personalities and their nuances. It helps tremendously to also be interested in getting to know people. And yes, you will encounter people that are disruptive. Usually, and I can only speak for my environment, the team itself is quite good at handling that. I just need to give them room and provide a setting where they can talk about the issues at hand on a constructive base.
That's why I love my job, and it may sound weird - but I'm the guy who can ask all the obvious questions that come to mind and others don't dare to ask. I love that I can build myself a toolbox to use in different (and difficult) situations. And I love to see my team succeed on the one hand, and learn from failure on the other.
curious - is there a way to learn this other than from experience?
I will never cease to be amazed at managers who don't do this. I've seen enough managers who pick fights with the wrong subordinates then have to scramble to replace key staff when they leave.
> You’re not the player, you’re the coach. Sometimes that means strategy and big-picture thinking. Sometimes it means shielding your team from dumb shit. Sometimes it means buying someone coffee and saying, “You’re not crazy. This is hard.”
Guess what good agile coaches or scrum masters are expected to do :-)
Agile coaches are also not able to shield the team from dumb shit. They don’t have the power to make priority calls on what the team is doing.
Also - I "deal" with underperformers because my team needs to deal with them. It all comes back to "what benefits the team".
I see that there are a lot of different varieties of agile coaches out there.
It's interesting how everyone thinks they're "managers" in "agile" teams.
Scrum Masters, Product Owners. I've even had Designers and QAs trying to make decisions on behalf of the team.
In scrum in particular, teams are supposed to be "self-organizing and self-managing". Perhaps that's why :-)
Oof, hits close.
Suggestion from a QA to implement some feature that is hugely difficult to implement? Business agrees so developers now need to make it happen.
The crazy one for me was QA not going through business and just marking new feature ideas as "bugs", and then informing business that "there are still lots of bugs to be fixed".
Cross-functional teams can be very toxic when there is no decision maker, and someone suddenly decides they don't want to really collaborate.
At best they're clerical support and training. In practice they can become officious ticket minders.
Hope you will experience better Agile Coaches through your career.
It doesn’t help that most of the management advice you find on the internet assumes that inside every employee is a happy, productive worker and their manager can unlock it with the right words.
In the real world the range of employee types is very large. Some of them are just toxic and you’re not going to coach it out of them. Knowing when and how to cut your losses is important for preserving the rest of the team.
Too right. Hire slow and fire fast was a saying that I saw recently.
IMHO, besides the messiness, performance management is unspeakable because people generally hate authority. We've all had bad experiences with authority figures. We're also told many fantasies about the morality of groups of people. If the people are blameless, then the the fault lies with the manager who resembles (or opposes) our teacher, our parents, our government. And so forth.
I use to subconsciously think that until I learned, the hard way, it was irresponsible blame-shifting. A recent HN discussion demonstrated some of those dynamics at play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42273798
Situations where that isn’t the case likely drive a high level of burn out and stress.
* You are responsible for sticking to commitments that depend almost completely on other people sticking to theirs.
* You're still on the hook for delivery, so if someone you assigned a subtask can't get that job done, you either have to pass it on to someone else (which often ends up harming the social dynamic of the team) or just do it yourself. Throwing an employee under the bus is not a good look.
* You get to be the "executioner" when a RIF rolls through, even if you get RIFed yourself, and even if you had no input into who is getting RIFed. Those Sunday evening "let's have a chat tomorrow morning" emails, and the following chat, are the most gut-wrenching things I've ever had to do as a manager.
* By the time you become a manager, you're probably one of the most experienced members of the team, so you are still always the "go-to" person when someone needs a gnarly bug fix, or if there's a lore question, or if a sticky situation with a customer comes up. If your reports are too green, it's hard to delegate these things, and this just adds to your own cognitive load.
* You don't have enough clout to make organizational-level changes. So process things that you see that are really inefficient, and you have some ideas how to address them? Now you've got to convince your manager and probably theirs, too, and they usually don't want to rock the boat.
Your best path as a ground-level manager is to not spend too much time here: become a second-tier manager (ie, director) or find a nice landing place as an individual contributor again.
I really feel like the tension between <time to develop a deep understanding of your scope> VS <time before the next re-org (or layoff)> is not in your favor.
Problem is: going to Director level takes several years, at least. And even there, you are basically the CEO of a small start-up, in the sense that you need to constantly fight for "market shares", i.e. scope. Else your org risks getting irrelevant pretty fast, and you are in for a lot of trouble.
The other fun bit about that from the worm's eye view is bottom tier managers who haven't really internalized that their direct reports also are very aware that they're stuck with the "executioner" role and, before/during/shortly after layoffs, frequently reach out with "Got a minute to talk?" with no additional explanation or context, giving their reports a mini panic attack every time.
People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.
In your first two points, I think that after you know your team well enough, you will understand where your engineers' skills lie and learn how to delegate effectively to either the person most capable or the one who will learn the most.
Your last point is true in larger enterprises. However, it's not so bad if you are a manager in smaller companies or startups, when you are 1-3 steps from the CEO, you get a lot of independence.
In the other points, I must admit I never went through an RIF and never had a situation where the "engineers were too green." However, I worked at an enterprise company where there was a 1:1 ratio of interns to employees, so it might be a large enterprise. Generally, there is always at least one senior in the team to deal with firefighting.
As long as you are a go-to person, you have more clout than you realize. Spend your social capital while you have it and make changes. Also, making change requires allies but they don’t necessarily have to be in your direct chain of command. Lastly, to make a change in an org, just change. People will follow. Most people are not leaders, but you are. Act like it and you will see that you command far more respect than you think you do.
So how do you demonstrate caring? For me (YMMV) I prioritize relationships over everything else at the very start; you will be dropping the ball somewhere but can recover from technical gaps, product knowledge, etc. I get in the trenches with the team, not to do their work but to try and make it easier; the important but non-core stuff that nobody wants to tackle. For each direct I continually ask "where is this person heading and how am I help them get there?".
One tactical tip: too many managers - especially new ones - focus on mentorship, and then maybe coaching but neglect sponsoring. This is so important, very passive but probably takes the most energy because you need to keep your receiver power at 11 and then connect the indirect dots. The act of recognizing and connecting an individual with an opportunity is deceptively hard, but the returns for everybody dwarf any advice you can give.
You think you’re being obvious. You’re not. Spell out expectations. Over-communicate. Set goals in plain language."
Lots of managers i had the pleasure of working with, missed this memo entirely...
You might think that saying "I need this done by the end of Friday" will make your IC sad. No, what will make him or her sad is you coming for the deliverable on Friday when they have just started.
Continously demand short deadlines of the team and they will not get frustrated anymore but very much deathly hate management. Rewards will not cut it. Ever. The line has been crossed and there is not much that will repair this.
Sure, the manager may just only get their assignment that things need to be done asap, but it is also their task not to transfer that frustration to the team. You would be amazed how much respect a manager can get if they just tell 'No' or negotiate a differebt deadline and honestly tells the team just that.
They are not bad people, but I do personally feel annoyed by it, and I do feel it drains me of energy and flow. I feel like there are too many 1 hour meetings that shouldn't have been there at all or could have summarized in 5 minutes.
Without context, manager communication is noise. It's a waste of everyone's time and is functionally sabotage because it disempowers people. Worse, the problem can compound itself when a team gets demotivated and the manager tries to solve "lack of ownership" by spending even more time trying to direct behavior.
Good managers give their team appropriate context and tools, and then trust the process. Good organizations train and support managers in doing that.
Lots of people speak instead of write for no reason other than they are bad at typing.
It’s not that annoying or burdensome to be repeated to in text.
Some people don’t read, but those people can be special cased with meetings and talk.
Cool that you want this done today, but "we" are not doing that. Tell the client it's going to take another day instead of planning a scoping meeting and interrupting my dev time
This seems to be fairly common in tech and consulting. How am I supposed to succeed at a manager if I have no fucking clue what my reports are going to be working on?
I feel like this is a failure in either companies not knowing how to setup management for technical roles, or I was given 0 training on this and it resulted in me not knowing what the hell to do all the time with my reports.
The claim in this article is that my job was no longer to do work, but in every role where I reached manager I absolutely was still expected to do my own work. I just also had to vaguely guide some other person and give them reviews and feedback while never having worked with them in my life.
Maybe I was unlucky but these stints at management left a sour taste. I'm not even sure I would call my experience "management" except companies kept naming it that.
For some reason my high performance meant that in addition to my high performance I should manage these other people working on other projects (that are just as in depth as mine) and this can in no way detract from the amount of work I do.
God I want to quit.
What is a manager anyway? I've been in this industry for multiple decades and I honestly still have no clue. They are never willing to assert what they are working on, or what blockers they have, during standups. They aren't striking deals with clients. They aren't building the product. They demonstrate no visible function. What, exactly, are they doing behind the scenes?
That's not to imply they aren't doing anything. I just can't figure out what it is and I'd love to know more. The article says "Learn from them.", but I have never seen anything to learn from. It is all shrouded in mystery.
- Creating tickets. It’s very easy to scoff at this, but it’s much harder than you might expect. Business gives vague or unclear request and you have to translate that into tickets that your team can actually work on. Even when business creates their own tickets, you have to review them fix the mistakes in the assumptions that they’ve made or figure out how we will implement what they’re asking for.
- Answering questions. Either via Slack or by jumping on a video call, this can eat up a huge portion of the day. You have to do a decent amount of handwaving in the descriptions of tickets, which means sometimes you’ve missed something or you just haven’t been clear enough. It can often feel like being more clear in the ticket leads to almost work than just doing the ticket yourself.
- PRs. Reviewing code can be incredibly difficult. Making sure you load up the full problem space in your head and are sure that the code you’re reviewing won’t break something that the developer isn’t aware of. Depending on how good your QA is at the company, this might be all or most of the review code gets before being released. That makes it very stressful. It’s also painful to have to go back and ask a developer to completely rewrite something or change their approach because they’ve misunderstood the ticket. Even more painful when you’re on a deadline. This can lead to either you wanting to just fix the code yourself or merge it as is hoping that you can clean it up later.
- Meetings. “How hard is it to sit in a meeting?”, it’s a valid question. But often you are ask to present updates on the work your team is doing and ask questions completely out of left field about future work, ongoing projects, etc. These fill up your calendar quickly if you’re not careful and leave little time for future planning so you feel like you’re always sliding into homebase on Friday.
- Releases. Of course this depends heavily on what your release cycle looks like. However, the longer your release cycle is the more painful this can be. If you have a good chunk of work sitting waiting to be released it stresses not only the team, but also the manager and makes it difficult to have a feature leapfrog all of that work and get released earlier because a client needs it NOW. This is especially true when you have no direct control over the release process. Being asked multiple times or about multiple things “when will that be done/fixed?” And knowing it’s sitting there just waiting to be released is frustrating.
- Interrupts. It can be very frustrating to have a plan be executing on it and then have business come in and change all the priorities. Maybe it’s just for a day or maybe it’s drop that project completely and go work on something else. This is stressful, especially if part of the project has already been committed and you either need to back it out or find a way to hide that work (from the released product) until you can get back to it.
- Performance review. Even for high performers this takes time but for people who aren’t pulling their weight, this sucks. As a manager, I think it’s common to feel like you failed them in some way, you haven’t been giving enough advice along the way, or nudging them in the right direction but when you finally have time to take a breath and think about their performance, you realize it’s not up to snuff. Having hard conversations earlier helps, but it’s much easier said than done.
- Sprint Planning. On top of all of this, every one to two weeks you need to have enough work ready for the team to work on for the next sprint. This of course gets much more difficult if business isn’t even sure what their priorities are until a day or two before you have to plan.
- Development. It’s not uncommon to have the manager also expected to write code. Finding uninterruptible time blocks can get very difficult. Switching between writing code, PR-ing, it and sometimes acting as QA is rough.
I’ve rambled for long enough, so I’ll stop here. None of this is to say manager’s jobs are harder or anything like that just trying to point out some of the things they work on. Also, everything I wrote above won’t apply to every manager. It’s a massive spectrum.
Last thing I’ll say is that a lot of managers try to be the “pain sponge” for the team. Not all managers do this, but often hiding the frustration or the work they’re doing is done to shield the team from it. Not to mention a manager isn’t always going to advertise some of the things they’re doing “Well Johnny’s PR took forever because he messed up a bunch of stuff”, “I had multiple meetings this week to discuss letting Johnny go”, “I had to hold Johnny’s hand for two hours the other day to help solve a problem”, etc.
As always, YMMV, not all managers are the same, not all managers are asked to do the same things. This is just what I’ve been responsible for.
> Meetings.
This seems to be where all of their time is spent as best as I can tell as an onlooker. But what goes on in those meetings, in your experience? "I worked on meeting with Mary to deal with X so that we could Y. No blockers." doesn't make it to standup, strangely enough. Which is sad as that is the only information I'd want to know about from a standup! I already know about what the developers are doing. Their work is highly visible.
I don't mean to imply that there is no reason for those meetings, or that they are somehow easy, but I'd love to know what it is all about. One part just because I'm plain curious, one part because I wonder what information isn't making it back to me that would improve the ability to do my job, and one part because I want to know if is something I'd want to take more involvement in.
It's all over the map, but here are some examples
- Weekly planning meeting with higher-ups to discuss what their priorities are for the next few weeks
- Weekly Product Status meeting to discuss what the teams accomplished over the last week, any blockers, etc
- Standups, for a while I was running them for (and managing) 3 different teams
- Meetings with design to go over mockups and point out issues before they reach the team ("That's not possible with our current data", "that is an expensive lookup currently", etc). Let them know what is/isn't possible (or rather, isn't possible without a bunch of work, almost everything is "possible" if you have unlimited time)
- (every other week) Process improvement meeting to go over changes we might want to make to the (growing) company, re-evaluate processes we have in place, etc.
- Weekly demo meetings, though developers are in this
- Twice a week architecture meetings, though developers are in this, discuss problems we need to solve and how we want to solve them. Equal parts "present an idea to the team" and "I have a hard problem, help!"
- Monthly check-ins with my direct reports
- Weekly Planning meetings with the team, though developers are in this
- One-off meetings with individuals or small groups to discuss a plan for a feature/bug/etc (so with some developers but not all)
- PR meetings, some PRs benefit from being on a video call with the developer so they can explain their reasoning/code/etc. Sometimes it's due to the size/complexity of the PR, sometimes it's due to the person who wrote the code (who might need more guidance than others, I don't advertise this)
- Solo PR "meetings", if I don't block the time out, my schedule will fill up
- One-off meetings with business about urgent issue or new ideas they've had
- Interviews, this is temporary but currently every free minute of my day is scheduled to talk with potential new employees
- One-off meetings to help a developer with something they don't understand or need help solving. This is rarely visible to the rest of the team as I don't advertise "Johnny needed my help yesterday"
- Production issues. I'm not sure how common this is or if your manager does this but I get tapped for the vast majority of production issues due to my familiarity with the code (and having written parts or at least worked with most of it).
- HR-type meetings, to discuss an employee. These are, thankfully, rare but when it does happen there are normally multiple over a week or two
- PIP-type meetings, another things I, obviously, don't advertise. When I need to meet regularly to talk with an employee about their performance
Not listed here is the "prep time" for these meetings. Some require little/no prep but others I'm expected to present info in and so I need to collect/organize it so I'm ready to go. Things like "ticket/backlog refinement" fall into this category as well. Sure I just have a 1hr planning meeting per team but sometimes it takes me that long or longer to go through things business wants worked on, fleshing them out, asking them questions to clarify, etc.
None of this is to say "Your manager's meetings are all legit", I have no way of knowing that. Just like I have no way of knowing how my experience lines up with other people in, ostensibly, the same role. "Manager" can mean a bunch of different things.
One small thing I'll tack on, sometimes I don't share the subject/contents of meetings because I know it will be depressing/distracting/unhelpful. I don't share every whim of the business side of the company or every bug mentioned because it's not what we are currently working on and it will be a distraction. Also, sometimes I have multiple meetings in which I'm pushing back/"fighting against" a proposed path forward. There is no reason to let the rest of the team know about that since it will only anger or distract them.
Your new job is to make other people successful, which sometimes means slowing down, asking questions instead of giving answers, and being okay with solutions that aren't exactly what you would have built.
One question I have though is what are you supposed to do if as a new manager you aren't allowed to... well, do your job? I haven't been able to find a lot of resources on what to do in such a situation.
I'm a new engineering manager (~8 months in) and my boss isn't letting me hire full-time devs to replace consultants whenever they leave or their contracts are up and I am not allowed to replace any developers who leave either due to a company-wide hiring freeze. I have lost 4 of my most senior engineers in the last 6 months since I can't replace the consultants or hire anyone new. I'm down to 2 senior devs on my team when we used to have 6, with the same amount of work. They have also implemented mandatory return to office clearly frustrating my team. In addition, I am not allowed to promote any of my team members to try and encourage them to stay.
The heck am I even supposed to do? What is the point of being an EM if you quite literally are not allowed to do your job? I can't hire, I can't promote people, and I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team. My boss just tells me to try my best to encourage the team through this tough time.
I haven't found any resources on how to handle this kind of situation as a new EM. If I knew this is what was in store for me I would have never taken the job.
Without any other detail, from my experience (10 years doing Eng Manager/Senior Eng Manager roles) I'd advise you to start interviewing. Not necessarily because you're in jeopardy, you'd know that better than me anyway. But think of what you want out of your job: One thing should be professional growth -- going from a new EM to a great EM and being set up for future promotions. You won't get that here without a major mindshift from your boss (and probably up the reporting chain from them too).
Interview and when asked why you're leaving when you just became an EM, say "I love my new role and the team, but XYZ Co seems to be deprioritizing or phasing out the ABC team and I find myself without the resources we need to be successful."
The good news is you have management experience now so you may be able to land another Manager level at a company that is not in a downward cycle.
In all seriousness, the trick is not to burn yourself trying to change things you have no control over. Maybe that's means letting the company burn.
I'd start by thinking through how much of that "need" is real.
What is driving the things your team "needs" to accomplish? What hard external constraints are you operating under? What are the interaction points between your work and the rest of the organization? How much flexibility do you have? And, holistically, how much flexibility should you have?
After that, it's a matter of negotiation. Given some understanding of the real constraints as well as the personal/political factors driving your manager, how can you come up with a better approach for your team and your work? I personally found the book Splitting the Difference really useful for approaching these sorts of conversations, but I'm also not especially good at that sort of thing naturally!
Unless you have an absolutely awful relationship with your manager, a starting point would be asking these questions to them. The trick is to pose these as legitimately open-ended questions. I learned the value of this first-hand: if I'm trying to convince somebody about something, asking an open-ended question will either get them to rethink their beliefs or they will come back with an answer I didn't think of, and either way I got something valuable out of it.
At the end of the day, you need to find some way to have slack in your work, or the team will fall apart. Slack can come from changing what you're doing and how you're fitting into the broader organization, or it can come from factors the organization does not "see". That latter is where the real risk lies: that's the dynamic that results in unreasonable corner-cutting and then burns people out.
I should add that I have not been in this situation as a manager, but I have been in that situation as a lead with no formal, positional power. That seems similar enough to be a good staring point, but I'm sure it's different enough that you should take everything I say with a grain of salt!
One thing I've realized is that we talk about "plans" and "budgets" and "roadmaps" as something constant and immutable, but they're not. They're just decisions that the organization made. We can make different decisions! But that in particular might be a view that's more useful as a lead than as a formal manager, because it very much goes against the way most organizations are run. This realization changed my perspective on what's going on, but I suspect it would be impolitic to emphasize it when negotiating up the chain.
- write up my thoughts and feelings—sometimes notes to myself, sometimes as docs I can share with others
- talk to somebody—I got a lot out of having mentors to talk to in and outside my job; occasionally they gave me non-obvious advice I found useful, but mostly just talking through something really helped
- do just *one* concrete thing about whatever is worrying me
In your case, the answer could well just be leaving like others are suggesting. But, even if it is, trying to do something about it at your current place might still be worth the effort in the short term. Even if things don't work out and you leave, it can make you feel better in the short term, and it's a great chance to learn how to handle this kind of situation by actually trying something. (And, in hindsight, that whole paragraph is advice I needed to give to myself just now more than advice for you or anyone else :P)
One of them explained “In management, they nip at you from the top, and they nip at you from the bottom”. Meaning that you had many more people with demands. A programmer usually has only one, maybe a few.
Later, I learned that many managers are paid less than senior programmers.
I turned down every request to begin managing, and I finished my career happy.
Not in Europe.
It fails to take into account that as a manager you may very will end up with employees that are toxic, disrespectful, cheating, lazy, incompetent, intolerant, unmanageable...
And contrary to popular belief, that it is not always the managers fault.
I had a close relative become a manager, tried their utmost for a year but gave up. It was not worth the sleepless nights, stress, therapy and sitting in the parking lot crying their eyes out after work.
Anyone else see the exact opposite, that out of N people that _could_ become managers, it’s the worst individual contributors that do? Mostly because they want it most. People who love being individual contributors are going to become good at it, and they’ll resist management tasks.
I think this is great and very natural. But there’s a kind of zombie myth that engineering managers are the best former engineers that refuses to die. It’s decent engineers with some aptitude and/or desire to manage.
Anecdotally, the two worst managers I've had were developers, but I've had three really good managers that were formally developers. Then the best manager I've had used to be a business analyst.
Managers are judged by outcomes, not by contribution. Good leaders know how to shield their team from the chaos above while shielding the managers above from the challenges of managing many different personalities. They are a conduit for collaboration and inspiration.
Bad leaders are chaos agents and are the main drivers of attrition and should be rooted out quickly. They are a poison pill.
Unless you work somewhere under-staffed with an org chart that's mostly an aspiration.
Also keep in mind that as a manager, you are a custodian of culture. What you do and don't do will shape your team's culture which will (in part) shape the whole company's culture. So think about how you can develop positive culture (and also, ask!).
Budget. Getting some for your team or at least for your priorities. Protecting what you get. Capex vs Opex.
Upward management. Translating messages upwards. Interpreting C suite decrees. Pacing and leading. Inducting new leadership before they fuck things up.
Retention. Keeping the people you need on your team. Cutting the people you don't. Compensation and promotions.
All of which is to say, Politics. How to not come out a loser at the game of thrones next time there is a merger, reorg, budget season, or just end of quarter.
Always spend your budget, ideally about 5-10% over (find out what others do)
If you don't, next year you get less. You can't save 20k this year and spend it next year. You can't even save 20k and get rewarded for being cost efficient as you'll be punished with a lower budget next year.
Yes it's stupid.
I view this as you won't see a good manager's fingerprints on the thing that receives the recognition, but you will find them all over the people who are being recognized. It's harder to get a dopamine hit from this but like protein over sugar, it lasts longer & helps build you as a manager.
But if you fired all the managers then... What? Wouldn't everything just continue as before? Grug brain has never understood management.
(Tone indicator: Not a value judgment. I'm not saying that all managers are particularly good at this, same as how observing that "builders build things" does not mean that the builders are necessarily good at building.)
I don't sort of "hate managers" or anything. Just curious about why businesses always seem to think they have to have them.
(Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.)
One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?"
On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that?
And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.)
So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way?
You probably can't. I certainly can't.
There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else.
And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else.
So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.
My original post is about the intuition behind how to approach questions like that. Whenever anyone says "Why don't they just do $OBVIOUS_THING?" the answer is "because nobody is doing it."
Now, with respect to that particular feature, I can provide some personal experience to explain /why/ [almost] nobody has that feature. As a disclaimer, I don't know HEB's website. They were just someone we dealt with, and I don't live in their service area, so it's interesting that they have the feature.
What I can tell you from experience is that it would not be a significant driver of revenue, certainly not enough to be a majorly supported feature by a major company that has other value props out there. By far the biggest revenue driver for a grocery company are the staples that people buy every single week: the same milk, the same bread, the same cereal, the same ground beef, the same mac 'n cheese.
People, as a general population, are not adventurous at home When you want something new and interesting, you go out to a restaurant. When you want something familiar and comfortable and, most importantly, easy, you make it at home. I would hazard that the number of times that the average American family of four would cook a brand new recipe they've never had before is probably less than a dozen times /per year/.
So if you're a company that gets >90% of its revenue from weekly recurring users and staples, and <1% of its revenue from recipe-driven results, and you have limited resources, which of those do you think you should focus on? Obviously, you focus on the former. A 10% increase in staples sales is worth millions and millions of dollars, whereas a 10% increase in recipe sales is worth, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not nothing, but it's not really worth it from an ROI perspective. Maybe if it's a set-it-and-forget-it kind of feature, it might work?
But over the long run you'll have to come back and upgrade dependencies and migrate to the newest framework du jour, and blah blah blah, and the next thing you know you have a team of four full-time engineers working on a feature that brings in half their salary.
HEB doing it is, well, it's interesting. I am supremely confident it is not a significant revenue driver. It might be something that increases NPS scores or something to that effect, but it's not going to move the needle on revenue very much. So it's interesting that they have the feature.
So if you take all of that into account -- you'll just have to trust me that I know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry about that -- then you can see that someone saying "What if we just got senior people in a room to see what they think?" is a question that doesn't deserve much attention. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because it's actually an interesting idea that has no merits when you dig down and look at it.
If it worked, as the intuition goes, the industry at-large would be doing it. And the evidence bears that out.
But if I said "I don't understand the point of brakes. Why do all cars get made with brakes?", then as well as making your point ("look, do you really think you know better than Stellantis!?") there's also a straightforward answer which is "cars need brakes so they can stop instead of killing people."
What's the "straightforward answer" case for the existence of managers? Your answer just suggests that such an answer does exist, without revealing what it is.
I don't have "the answer" (I have _an_ answer, see below), and I also don't need to know "the answer" in order to understand that the managerial class doesn't exist for shits and giggles. There's value there.
If Bezos thought getting rid of managers at Amazon would make him another half a billion dollars, you bet your ass he'd do it.
My answer? It's exactly what that group of seniorish people would do: make decisions. But the seniorish people can't make decisions all day and ALSO do the things they're senior at. You may not like that answer -- and you don't have to! -- but "making decisions" is something that needs to get done at scale without sacrificing the actual productive work that ICs do.
But again, I think you're asking a great question, and I think there's room to say "Is the current paradigm the best paradigm?" and explore other alternatives.
But the very clear answer from all research in addition to basic intuition is "As far as we know, yes."
Why? Doesn't really matter. We just know that if we didn't have managers, the world as we know it wouldn't exist. (For better or for worse!)
I feel like a discussion of management without those components is missing something critical. Maintaining high performing teams requires that you get really good at this. This article makes it seem like the job is really just talking to people and making sure they're motivated, but in my experience that's the easiest part of the job.
Let's not get dragged down by this stories how pathetic the reality of leadership roles has to be, this all depends on the leadership structure and culture.
Is it? Being on the other side I've left jobs because of manager over-communication.
If you don't have the right communication skills, let someone else do the job. There are plenty of people out there who are very capable of effectively communicating without over-communicating. Just as you wouldn't want a developer who writes excess code to make up for their lack of being able to write good code, same goes for a manager trying to communicate. Going over the top to make up for your shortcomings is never a recipe for success.
Emotionally supportive advice like this is probably part of an important foundation. But I've been on the receiving end of management that's trying to figure out how to do their job through osmosis too many times. I move to avoid it, but I just don't have it in me to put my personal drive into work anymore when the generally-accepted way of training a new manager is letting them whoopsiedaisy torpedo a multiyear project or two along the way.
> But if you show up with humility, curiosity, and a genuine desire to make work suck less for the people around you? That’s real leadership.
No. No it's fucking not. That's necessary but not sufficient.
I think this is a generally good advice, but can also be misused.
I liked my previous manager, he had a principle for that part. Shielding the team from those crap, especially paperwork stuff. The trouble was that I could see how it was grinding him down, and I knew I could help him with it (because this was Japan, he didn't speak Japanese, I do and language barrier create inefficiencies) but he refused. My manager before him (this time the opposite: Japanese but couldn't articulate himself on English so I took care of all the English team communication) did and it worked smoothly.
If you're a small team (in a startup) doubly so, since grasping the full context of your team & outside is not as big of a task.
Best is to at least be open if your team members are open to helping you with the trickling down bullshit.
The bottom quintile never get anything done and hopefully you have fired them or convinced them to stop being bottom-tier. For the rest, to accomplish good work they need (A) to give a shit, which often is directly under your influence: how much they think their boss appreciates and cares about them is important. (B) to know what their strengths and weaknesses are so that they can improve, and (C) to be allowed to focus on the important things and not be pulled in 100 directions, which a good manager constantly keeps aware of and constantly tries to tune. A bad manager fails to do A, B, and C, and as such their teams are less likely to accomplish things.
I have one criticism: no auto-play GIFs, please. They're so distracting. They could be better as short, pausable videos.