Becoming A Boss | Hacker News Reader

Becoming A Boss

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135 pointsdavidedicillo18 comments

Things to be prepared for/random advice for when you become a boss:

- People will treat you differently because you’re their boss.

- Yes, you can still be friends with people who work for you. But the work relationship will always have to be taken into account.

- You will have to delegate things that you would prefer to do yourself. It sucks, but you have to do it.

- You will have to delegate things that no one wants to do. It sucks, but you have to do it.

- You will have to put a dollar value on the efforts of other people. Some people will get more, and others will get less. Sorry!

- You will be tempted to tell them about things that you hope will happen (e.g. “I think we’re going to be able to get you a nice raise this year”) Don’t do it. Either it won’t come through and they’ll be disappointed, or it will come through and they will have gotten their hopes up for even more.

- You will be tempted to “give the squeaky wheel the grease”. Keep in mind that everyone wants things, but not everyone will speak up.

- If someone just isn’t working out, you have to let them go. Remember that you’re not doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for everyone else on the team. They deserve a great team that works well together.

- People who work for you want to check in on you to see how they’re doing. Some will say it, some won’t. They need to get feedback from you either way.

- The second person who works for you is going to have different needs from the first person who works for you.

- People who work for you need to know that you have their back. Sometimes this means fighting for proposals that you know will fail.

- The happiness and career success of another human being are now your personal responsibility. You probably have more power than you immediately realize. Don't try to pretend it's not there. Use it responsibly, for the benefit of both the company and the individual.

Just my experience, YMMV, etc, etc. Yes, there are probably some rare people who don't need management . . . but true cases of that are probably extremely rare. This is based on experience managing a small team in a large company. I'm sure being "the boss" rather than just "a boss" is probably even more extreme.

This is really valuable, thanks for taking the time to write it. As the sort of person who has a tendency to get caught up in small, nascent businesses (startups, I suppose ;) I've recently spent a lot of time either working for my friends or having my friends work for me. Knowing the difference is more important than I used to realise (especially as small, nascent "projects" become actual businesses) and managing the relationship (either as boss or underling, yet friend in each case) has its own learning curve.

You will be tempted to tell them about things that you hope will happen (e.g. “I think we’re going to be able to get you a nice raise this year”) Don’t do it. Either it won’t come through and they’ll be disappointed, or it will come through and they will have gotten their hopes up for even more.

I read a good book once by a defector from the Soviet military, explaining the lessons he'd learned as an officer on the other side of the iron curtain (this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Soviet_Army).

In it he described one thing he'd learned about how to lead people:

Always try to remember the golden rule of controlling others -- NEVER PROMISE ANYONE ANYTHING! If you are able to do something for another person -- do it, without having made any promises.

From this first rule there follows a second -- NEVER THREATEN ANYONE!

You can punish someone and, if you consider it necessary, you should do so. But promises and threats simply weaken your authority as a commander.

(The full text of that chapter from the book is here: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/08.html)

This is true in civilian life, too. Promises and threats are just wind that people blow when they can't do what they really want to do. Leaders with real power don't threaten to fire someone; they just fire them. They don't promise to give raises; they just give them.

People understand this, and if you lean on promises and threats, it makes them subconsciously evaluate you as weak, ineffectual. Someone who it's not really necessary to listen to.

I have been wondering about option 1 (creator-type founder hires manager/CEO for managerial tasks, keeps focusing on creating) for quite some time.

Google is a great example where Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviewed Eric Schmidt and hired him as their CEO. Worked great for 10 years, and their relationship seems to keep working today.

Are there more examples (also unsuccessful ones)? I'm actually not aware of any. It seems much more common that one of the co-founders becomes a full-time manager (or that they are kicked out of their own company).

First example that comes to mind (although not a tech company) is TechCrunch with Arrington running the editorial side and hiring a CEO. That seemed to work well for a while.

> stare at the elephant in the room, name it, and deal with it. The maker/manager conflict

This is actually a component of the primary tool for mild-to-moderate depression, cognitive-behavorial therapy. The patient has too many problems in working memory* and the first step is the shunt some to another logic processor, Broca's area. So the therapist asks the patient to name their problems. Write them down, and then start chipping away at them.

A common method of addressing the problems is to name the worst case and the best case, the consequences, the odds of those each happening, and then what actions can be taken to move the odds in the desired direction.

* See the analytical rumination hypothesis, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.ht...

I don't see there being an essential conflict. When people say managerial work they often mean a blend of the following (in this oft discussed startup CEO sitch): • helping employees focus on high value tasks that perhaps have some personal growth value for the doer • business development • some element of divining an effective path into the future for the product or service (a roadmap if you will). • some element of business development and or retention. • more things.

If you care deeply about creating an work place that can hire and retain people you'll be excited to work with, and sustainable continue to hire great people, good making CONTAINS good managing. You're just building by really trying to understand how incentives and human psychology interact.

This is in my admittedly cynical view a false dichotomy posed generally by investors seeking to justify pushing out founders in favor of their handpicked person. I see this more from old school VCs than from the newer breed. Keep in mind the most successful tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Facebook) had founders who stayed in control all the way through. A fact that is recognized by Andreesen Horowitz for example.

The truth is that management is like any other skill - it's learnable and teachable. Founders who do that and can see through the old school VC shibboleths stay in control of their destiny.

i think that is exactly what i wrote.

"I have come to believe that most people can be talented at managing people if they want to be."

you can hate on me and hate on VCs all you want. that's fine. but please don't misrepresent what i wrote

"And one of the big challenges is that the 'managerial position' (as Lena calls it) is often in conflict with the talent for making things that got your there in the first place."

No truer words have ever been spoken, especially in tech. The skills that make you a good developer or designer are usually exactly the ones that make management a terrible path. Some traits, like empathy for users/customers, lend to success in both areas, but I'm hard pressed to find another.

This is the reason I resigned from a mgmt position. I was delegating all the interesting work (learning experiences). The team was too big for me to be hands on. If you can keep the team small you can still be the "manager/boss/lead". Hiring the right people can make it feel less bossy. I would do it again with a smaller group.

Is manager/maker really the only way to scale things? Instead of the maker founder becoming a manager, how about the maker founder getting "assistants". For the management parts, it could be similar to a traditional secretarial role, and for the making part, it would be along the lines of master and apprentice.

Apart from these, there are certainly other ways to organize, if efficiency is not the key thing. If the bottleneck is "try out lots of cool things, and see which one sticks", such as a research department, then it could be organized more like a cooperative with individual makers. There would probably need to be some selection of things to include in a next release if it is a manufactured product, but on the web, that might not even be necessary. Sure, integration would be a mess, but in some cases, that is not so important.

I gave a talk on this very topic a few months ago. Here are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/priestc/the-kanye-quotient

Basically, some people have a knack for managing, others have a knack for creating. Put a creator in a management position, and they will suck. Put a manager in a creator position, and they will suck. The trick is to put the right people in the right roles, and to make sure you're hiring both types of people. Managers prefer hiring other manager-type people, and creators prefer hiring other creator-type people. Often you have companies that are either heavy manager based (where nothing gets done), or are highly creator based (where the office environment is miserable due to conflicts and ego). Both companies are bound to fail.

One of the most difficult things (for me) has been finding the appropriate balance (which changes depending on the context) between doing things myself, and delegating them to others.

Still struggling with this.. I wish there was a howto somewhere..

i was hoping to see in the article more about how to find this balance, sadly i was let down.

Combine cost benefit analysis, risk analysis, and comparative advantage concepts.

What is the cost to you doing it? What is the cost of you delegating? What are the risks? What is the opportunity cost? (The opportunity cost is not your sleep, or your time away from your business. The opportunity cost is you having to delegate something else. The business will expand to the time you let it, anyway.)

As a boss, your goal is to become a multiplier. What can the team get done with your guidance as opposed to what it could get done alone, with you as a line worker?

But when all else fails, err on the side of delegation, because your first instinct will be to do it yourself. :)

IMHO, maker/manager boundary is quickly disappearing. In the past, makers built systems from predictable but brittle parts, while managers used less predictable but more adaptable humans. Now most engineers have to deal with distributed and adaptive systems while managers have to use and understand a lot of technical systems, so both makers and managers are exposed to very similar challenges.

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