A career mistake that capable people make | Hacker News Reader

A career mistake that capable people make

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20 pointsanthonyb5 comments

The article stresses some good points, most of them showing up in HBR every now and then. However, the environment (esp. of a "freshly" promoted manager) can also be at fault of the underutilization and overwork.

I found One Minute Manager to be a good book on the topic, illustrating the problem very well : http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Minute-Manager-Ken-Blanchard/dp/....

Coworkers and subordinates quickly spot other employees that are the "go to" people. What you need to be able to do, is to say "NO, do it yourself" in all but the most important cases. Give directions not solutions, delegate.

I am more and more convinced that a model similar to Github is the correct one for (software) companies at least - undirected development.

I don't mean chaos, but I do mean employees simply doing what they view as the next most important thing. As a manager and a developer I know that managers often focus on their priority list at the expense of sensible decisions by those closer to the metal

The managerial decisions should be code quality (reviews) - and here need to be violently strict for great ideas badly implemented - and general vision

Can it work - it's easier if we see work less as a centralised dictatorship and more as a distributed collaboration.

The company I currently work for using KanBan, and while we have a general sense of direction in that we have a list of things that need to get done before a release we don't really have much of a list of things that have to be done in a certain order (other than normal dependencies). This allows us developers to look at the KanBan board, pick the next task and start working on it.

If for example right now I am not too interested in solving a scalability issue because it was only seen this one time and we can throw CPU power at it for now, I can move on to working on the logging/metrics stuff that interests me instead which will help us get a better insight into the system as a whole, and maybe that scalability issue will be solved differently because of more information.

Yes, we have a set direction (government contractors generally do), but I have a lot of leeway in that I can choose what I want to work on.

The same can be said for every other team in the company. It has allowed us to work together very well and yet at the same time makes it possible for all of us to work on things we thoroughly enjoy, AND time to switch off from one part of the project to another and solve another problem. Keep things mixed up and interesting.

But do you pick the job or can you say "there is no logging story - we mus do one therefore I am working on it"

I can, and my team can come to me and ask me for stuff like that, but it depends on what kind of time mode we are in.

If we have a deliverable due and it is coming down the wire, wants get thrown out for needs. So I guess my work is a little bit of column A (set by manager) and a little bit of column B (free choice).

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