This misses the single biggest mistake every new manager makes: avoiding hard conversations with your reports. If you start managing folks you were recently in the trenches with this can be VERY hard. These are your comrades after all! You want them to like you. It’s all very natural. Sadly it is the single biggest cause for dissatisfaction I’ve seen on a given team. Being unwilling to give honest, direct feedback results in underperforming teams and unhappy reports. It’s counterintuitive but very important to get right as a manager. The big “AHA!!” moment for me was when I realized you need to speak to behaviors and outcomes not character. So instead of “you’re sloppy” you say something like “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”. Involving them in the solution and explaining why it matters. It makes all the difference and folks ironically respect and like you more for it.
> “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”
This is just about the laziest and least trustworthy language possible to use. Your reports aren't going to know what they don't know and are just going to become paranoid and work slower. The code quality will likely not improve from a conversation prompted this way. This is also a continuous process, not a magic high stakes meeting. If you're in charge you should see patterns in the code reviews and know what their knowledge gaps are causing these issues. They're looking to you for help if you're the one bringing this up in the first place.
If that's too time consuming or over your head you should not be a manager. Leverage your own knowledge and use mentorship to avoid conflicts with your reports and the improved productivity will please the people above you as well. You aren't giving anyone what they need by merely communicating requirements. Your job is to fulfill those requirements with the team you have.
> I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks
I would tend to even leave out the first part of that phrase. Focus on the actual objective measure: the rollbacks. They happened, and the goal is to figure out how to not have them happen in the future.
I got the impression that when he says "couple of years" he's talking about the low-end of the word couple. The other thing in the article that jumps out is the conclusion where he says that a team that is shipping and happy is enough to be crushing it.
That isn't really enough in my experience. There are 3 questions - is the team happy? Are they shipping? Is what they are shipping valuable? - and I've seen a lot of new managers are so overwhelmed that they forget about number 3 and a fair chunk of people end up unemployed because sooner or later the bean counters figure out that the team isn't actually productive.
This article, overall, doesn't identify achieving excellent outcomes as something he got wrong at first. I suspect either he is a natural manager or it is a mistake that is still being made. Probably the latter based on the other mistakes identified. The journey I've seen usually goes from lost -> controlling external perceptions of success -> oh I need to actually succeed and it isn't what I thought.
> I've noticed quality issues in your code recently...
Why is it always the report who is the source of the problem and not the manager?
How about "I've created a toxic work environment and put my reports under a lot of stress. And I have not given them any opportunities to grow and learn new skills. I am planning to do better..." Words that will never come from the mouth of a manager.
Have a hard conversation with yourself first before blaming the reports.
I have found that company culture has the biggest impact on junior managers. It sets the expectation for them the most because they don’t have any actual ability yet.
Overly empathetic companies end up with terrible junior managers because they can’t have any real direct conversations. Tough and demanding companies I have seen fair much better because no one can hide from tough conversations for too long.
100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.
"I have noticed you ate brutalizing your subordinates and that has increased quality and output but I know it is not sustainable and the team is going to crash" any ideas how to communicate it are welcome
I agree with the sentiment and importance of addressing these things, or dealing with conflicts in-general, but I disagree with the tone somewhat and disagree with the notion that you're not in the trenches with them, but it depends on what trenches means to whoever it's relevant to. I feel like many new managers know they'll need to deal with this, but never developed their abilities prior to being a manager, and don't realize that just because the conversation happens, doesn't mean it produces valuable outcomes, breeds respect, or means anyone will like the way you approached it, or even that you were as vulnerable or honest as you thought you were.
Every manager I've had that used your example quote—almost verbatim—went on to be incredibly passive-aggressive, because they're trying too hard not to actually create conflict, they want to be liked more than they care about the result, they don't have that much innate confidence, or like the author of the article suggested, they want to see the results they would have produced when they were an IC, and haven't yet learned how to guide autonomy and relinquish a certain amount of control. These are perhaps the traits that led them to keeping their IC job all those years.
These people would turn 1-on-1s into 45 mins of beating around the bush, trying to get me to reveal myself as having insufficiently met the unspoken criteria they've been having internal anxiety attacks about, and maybe in the last few minutes when there's no room left for pushback they'd conjure the answer they wanted to hear and set that as the benchmark.
This failure on their part predictibly bled into other interactions and created toxicity and resentment, they couldn't yield control, and they couldn't have a real discussion that involved more than themselves manifesting as their overbearing mother waiting for their kid to implicate themselves for some petty wrongdoing. They couldn't clearly communicate priorities, or timelines, or requirements, and were starting in their new job with a skill issue of their own. They hadn't adapted to the role or developed a good personality for it, and apparently lacked an ability to reflect on their behavior or communication style.
I don't mean to extrapolate too far from this or in-turn attack you in any way, it's just a small quote, but in the past it's been telling.
"Can we talk about code quality issues" doesn't just avoid a character trait, which I agree should should never be the target, it leans into vague, soft, meek, intentionally indirect language that just creates undue anxiety and establishes an ambiguous context for whatever the problem might be, and was a dishonest pretext for for downstream attribution of fault, since they couldn't accept the possibility that the problem might be upstream (which it wasn't always, but if it had been, they weren't going to address it then). In these situations, sometimes I was struggling with purely my own productivity, having a bad couple weeks, but otherwise it was some other issue they weren't willing or able to genuinely help me with.
Do your best to be humble, learn to delegate and try to trust people, avoid thinking about character traits but don't avoid direct (and clear) language, and accept that your perception might be inaccurate. Get as far away as necessary from the dreaded "just checking in" or "is there anything we can do to improve (your problem)" as possible. What if their code is suffering because of noise in the office or someone's depressed because they're having relationship issues? What if it's because you keep coming over to their desk unannounced and asking diverting their attention?
If you can do that, you're on a good track.
Edit: it's worth noting that the underlying assumption in all of my comment is that people and their reasons and issues are often different, and likewise how they respond to this language may be different, and as such many might actually love the quoted phrases because they aren't imposing, and a good manager will do their best to communicate with people in a way that accepts that a variety of ways to address conflict is the right move, and sometimes less imposing language is viable.
Most of these are pretty accurate, but there's good news: giving a sh!t about your people will likely get you 80% of the way to being a good manager. If you genuinely care about them, their work and progression you're already aligned with the key aspects. You can learn & figure out the rest. It might be hard and very unpleasant at times, and stressful, but building the teams that build software is the most rewarding accomplishment of my life.
I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.
One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.
I joined a new team as a manager and after 3 years was kindly asked to step down and become an IC. While there are many external factors to blame, I decided to do an honest postmortem with myself so I thought about these things a lot.
As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough.
You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you.
You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep.
Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.
I've entered 2 new orgs as an engineering manager, after getting some experience organically. You need to prioritize between lots of things, including technical / people. Usually people is the right choice I've concluded, but the first time my teams were using all new tech for me and I really struggled after over focusing on relationships. The second time I still focused more on people but new the tech better, and forced myself to find time to go through more typical developer onboarding. It was way more successful.
Some of the things you mention sound right for a team lead (i.e. single team) but not really for an EM where you might have 2+ teams. You need to be able to solve the problems the leaving teammates create for you, but stepping into the role is probably the last thing you should do. Don't get me wrong, you need to live the life to build credibility and empathy, but doing the job yourself is usually a substandard, unsustainable solution.
> You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction.
They call this "managing up" or something like that.
> if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
I'm an IC on a team full of seniors with strong domain knowledge that recently hired in an EM from the outside. In short, it was pretty bumpy and despite the guy being an ex engineer, his constant questions about how the system works were a huge drag. Maybe to him he was digging deep but to me it felt like my (and my teammates') work was blocked by his inability to grasp simple concepts. Like the time spent explaining could've been spent just fixing the bug.
So I guess with the digging deep thing, be careful to not take up too much of people's time!
Having full knowledge of the work is not the same thing as full knowledge of the system. Being able to step in to do the work of one of your people is one possible way to provide a safety net for the bus factor, yes. But not the only way, and I'd argue it is not the best way.
This is your team - you are managing them, not the other way around, so if they have expectations of you that are incorrect, then fix those expectations. If you are not technical, tell them so. Communicate your needs and expectations, and then let them do the work. If there is a bus factor that is too high of a risk for a sustainable team, cross-train the team to remove the bus factor. Have a sense of the priority of all the work so that if someone quits, you can re-arrange the schedule, not be forced to jump in and put out a fire.
At the same time, be building up your people so that they can jump in and replace you. After all, if you cannot be replaced, you cannot be promoted either. Don't pigeon-hole yourself into a front-line manager role unless you truly love it. Grow your team, but grow yourself at the same time.
> if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
I don't think that's the main goal for a manager (even technical). I'd say generally, the manager should understand why the team is building something, and the engineers should know how. The why includes who is going to use what was built, when do they need it, what trade-offs can be made, etc.
IMO, if I have to choose between managers that are technical “enough” and glorified babysitters, I go for the latter. Little knowledge is dangerous and causes more pain than help. At least glorified babysitters know that they don’t know enough and leave all the important tech decisions to the devs; that’s relieving.
That’s the team leads job. The manager’s job is to manage the people. You are a babysitter or more akin to a teacher that has to stay out of the way of the kids doing things well and prevent the bad kids from ruining the class for everyone.
Not at all. I mean for a small team where you are or expected to perform as TLM yes. But generally speaking no.
I can't read the article to tell if this is just an observation from you, or if you are responding to the article, because my DNS just broke for whatever reason.
> Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
That is not the manager's job. The real question here is, do you know the bus factor of your team and do you know what particular skills are most critical to replace?
The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way.
Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work.
Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.
They are taking so many more factors into account that you don't see. It's like a junior engineer saying, why not just bang out the code? You're missing all the long term impact.
I hate the term IC. Its often used in a semi-derogatory context.
Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager.
Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
> The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way.
The difference is in how your performance is judged. ICs are judged by their individual contributions, hence the name. Managers are judged by the performance of their team/department/organization/company. It's not enough to say, as a manager, "I personally ran the sprint meetings and did 1:1s and performance reviews so therefore I'm doing a good job."
The individual work managers do is much harder to tangibly measure. Things like establishing a culture, balancing your roadmap between one-off customer requests and internal production vision (and hacking in some AI crap to make your CEO happy), hiring the right people. Just doing the table stakes individual work of managing your direct reports' vacation time, promotions, and running team meetings is really only good enough for beginner, first-level line managers at bigger companies, where they just need people to execute established processes.
> Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t.
ehhhhh. Management is a lot more reactive, that's true, but saying it requires less brainpower isn't true. As a manager you're constantly context switching. You don't just care about the codebase and solving one specific problem, you also care about sales and marketing, your customer support team, the budget for next year. You're getting slack messages from executives who need an update right now on your project, at the same time as an engineer needing to talk because their partner just filed for divorce and they need mental health days (and you need to support them while also figuring out how to rebalance their workload). It's a very different way of working that uses very different parts of your brain. But it's not just sitting in the executive bathroom and delegating work while you smoke a cigar.
Delegation -> This is 1000% the hardest thing to do. You need to let go and trust your people.
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
Quality over quantity -> Yes.
The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for.
You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,
>The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
The best managers I've ever had saw it as their job to remove barriers and bullshit from my day. It's what I try to do as a leader as well. It serves the purpose of making their jobs easier, and also takes up your time which creates less opportunity for you to micromanage and forces you to delegate.
>Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
This is SO important, and where I struggle the most. Your team won't appreciate it, but when they have the time, support, and resources they need, they'll notice.
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
Delegation was one I struggled with a lot in the early days. Even as the CEO, I was reluctant to give up my customer service responsibilities of manning the inboxes. Eventually, I understand that even if someone handled it only 80-90% as well, that would be much better for the company than having me do it.
Delegation is so hard, i struggle constantly and I'm technically a "Sr. Manager". When the project is up against deadline pressure, it's so tempting to do something yourself that only takes you a day vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. Inevitably you become the bottleneck when a wave of escalations or other management tasks come down the pipe but there's a pile of actual work you decided to take on yourself half done too.
I’ve got a good hack for the dopamine: PowerPoint and excel. Go to town on making kick ass presentations and reports. “Ship” those to the org during meetings and all hands. It’s not the same as code for customers, but it helps. Also, if you have time, code non critical things that will never be a dependency for anything else.
Agreed, my go to when feeling like I haven't produced real work in awhile is to document processes, especially if there is something I've noticed has been done poorly or been asked about a couple times recently.
I build internal tools, do BS support requests and push little initiatives that align with my core values. Like get a dozen people in-person for a technical watch party - cheap, easy, super rewarding.
It is cynical, but quality over quantity is bad advice if you want to grow your career as a manager. It's a real failure mode. Not being aggressive about growing your headcount will hold you back. Pretty much all managers are evaluated on amount of headcount when it comes to promotions, especially if you're not tied to P&L.
> For over a decade, my dopamine (from work) came from a very predictable place: shipping new things. As a manager, those direct rewards will simply disappear, leaving you feeling unfulfilled for weeks (months in my case).
Your job as a manager is still to ship things -- only now it's to ship more than you ever could alone. You get the privilege and responsibility to steward the skills of two or more engineers and shape the entire part of a business. The dopamine is harder won and often more rewarding. Management is difficult and exhausting but it's anything but unfulfilling. Let's not start new managers off telling them what they can't do but what they can do.
Ironically, as a manager of software engineers you should still be very engaged with the team's code. How else will you understand your capacity and understand what gaps you need to fill? Run the test suite, review designs, read PRs, ask questions, give praise for attention to detail. You will keep the bar high on the team and advocate for their work more effectively within the organization.
I'm not in management, but couldn't OP become a working manager? Might depend on the size of their team and demands of the new role, but I've worked with managers who wear their IC hat on occasion and thought it was a positive value-add for the group as a whole.
For small teams (like, 5 people max) that may make sense. It really depends on the organization. With some orgs, you're going to meetings all day and there's no time to focus.
This is generally a bad idea. I never know when I'm going to get pulled into something that will take my attention away from the task. The only times I really do that anymore is if the task is not time critical or if it is something that I know I could be picked up by others in any state without any issue.
For team leads, yes - to some degree. It is really hard to get the balance right, and even harder to step out of one of those worlds as your responsibilities grow.
> As an individual contributor (IC), your work spoke for itself; people could easily see it. Plain and simple. As a manager, it’s less black and white, and surprisingly, for many new managers, part of your job now involves managing how others see you.
This doesn't only apply to managers. Even as an individual software engineer, the more you move up (if moving up is something that matters to you), the more you have to play politics.
Your work can't possibly "speak for itself", since the people it's speaking to (the managers with power over your career) don't speak code.
"Is my team shipping? Are they happy?" is a simple yet powerful metric for success. If more managers internalized this, I suspect we’d see healthier teams and better products.
As a (former) manager of a department in a design school, I defined three managerial imperatives:
1. Get rid of old, dead wood. Given that our program is scaffolded, with each course building upon the preceding, A single low performing lecturer can bring down the quality of an entire program. Don’t trust student feedback when identifying such people. They favour nice lecturers over effective ones. Getting rid of low performing team members in a university can be a low process. It can sometimes be quicker to find programs they would be happier/more productive in, and engineer a transfer.
2. Hire effective new blood. Well duh, I hear you say. Finding good new hires can be a difficult task. For those who I really wanted to hire, I did my research on who they were and what they might want, and tried to show them that I was willing to build a nest for them.
3. Have a vision of what the department should be. This vision requires constant maintenance and should always consider input from the team.
#2 is considered taboo, but IMO if a team is full of people who are checked out, it may be time to make huge changes.
People become jaded and start to tell you all the ways we can't do something, or it will take too long. They often don't realize what tools are at their disposal to help make change easier, and instead insist there is only one good path to a solution...
Fresh talent really helps get people excited again, after the initial shock of layoffs. Not to mention new talent always comes in excited for an opportunity.
On "Where’s my dopamine?", while I'm not a manager but just a tech lead, so still working as an IC for most of the time, I do get satisfaction from eliminating repetitive work for people in my team and optimizing process.
It's great to be able to tell your teammates that the meeting is canceled because you just sent an email explaining that you prepared everything for next sprint and here's a 5 lines summary.
I’ve been an IC, a manager, a CEO and now even an IC again. This advice is all really sound and easily digestible. Many thanks to the author for sharing it.
What are you supposed to do when your manager has terrible and/or selective memory? My last manager would assign me work and then promptly forget half the time what he assigned me. It was bizarre. Sometimes it worked in my favour because I would do something he assigned me - then show him - and then he would sing praises for my "self initiative" and creativity. Like dude, you told me to do this. Of course this sort of amnesia will eventually come back to bite you when you are yelled at because "why are you working on Y?? you should be working on Z!!". Dude you told me to work on "Y" two days ago.
I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again.
Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare.
Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards
to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability.
OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!
About the poor memory stuff, just get it in writing. “In writing“ could mean in an email, or a chat, or more likely in an issue tracker that has an audit log. When there’s a discrepancy, just link to where it was written down.
The worst is having a manager who thinks he's great, but is actually disloyal and shit. Not sure how best to deal with that situation other than to ignore and eventually move on... If they'd be willing to admit their failing and improve, that would be awesome. Asking for a friend.
New era manager mistake. Ask ChatGPT about time estimates and pretend you know that because you are an expert, then use that to micromanage people. Mistake is a nice word. I consider that to be pure evil
I worked at a company that emulated Valve’s hyper-flat structure on their engineering team, with 1 manager having 50 direct reports. That’s as close to a management-less structure as I can think of, since your manager can’t attend meetings or do 1:1s anymore.
It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy.
Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day.
About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else.
People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping.
1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer.
The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.)
Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.
I find it hard to take anything seriously where "imposter syndrom" is mentioned. That said, I think having full time managers at all is a mistake. This was discussed in detail in this podcast: https://37signals.com/podcast/everybody-works/
Everyone is different, yes, but people are >99% similar. We all go through the same developmental stages, perhaps at different times, and we exhibit millions of the same psychological biases.
Everyone wants to be the benevolent manager, especially if there is enough money for everyone, and especially in these times where collaboration and positive management are touted. But you have to keep a carrot and a leash on the employees.
My first employees got a 33% raise the first year things were good. Long story short: None of them are here anymore and we’re still scrambling to recover from the mess they’ve created by being lazy.
Now people struggle to get a few percent salary increase. It eats me to my core, but I want them to get my product out.
I have to admit I initially hired a few Papered Posers, and it was a mistake to pay them 2.4x higher than market rate to ensure the project would reach conclusion on schedule.
The lessons we learned:
1. "Manage or be managed...": your first lesson is people will try to manipulate those in positions of authority regardless of competency. i.e. the idea of "goodwill" being the true core product can escape the irrationally ambitious/sycophantic.
2. No amount of money can make someone care about company projects. The worker may be interested in the project, or is simply there for the wrong reasons. Remember you want to keep employees content, but a "kingdom of kings" is unsustainable.
3. People can postpone something until tomorrow indefinitely. Thus, pay very close attention to projected deliverable times.
4. Fire someone for being unproductive according to a defined workmanship-standard as soon as possible. It will notify the rest of staff you are not there to play games, and stupid behavior will have consequences. Mostly effective with Jr staff using ChatGPT to try and BS the world like any other con.
5. Delegation? Just initially run trial contracts with potential staff first for each project deliverable. Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime, or a second chance to be unaccountable for their behavior.
6. Entrenched incompetence: organizations have their own emergent structure, and it will usually drift back to the same dysfunctional patterns/designs.
7. Redacted
8. try to leave things slightly better than when you arrived.
9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle".
localghost3000|1 year ago
sublinear|1 year ago
This is just about the laziest and least trustworthy language possible to use. Your reports aren't going to know what they don't know and are just going to become paranoid and work slower. The code quality will likely not improve from a conversation prompted this way. This is also a continuous process, not a magic high stakes meeting. If you're in charge you should see patterns in the code reviews and know what their knowledge gaps are causing these issues. They're looking to you for help if you're the one bringing this up in the first place.
If that's too time consuming or over your head you should not be a manager. Leverage your own knowledge and use mentorship to avoid conflicts with your reports and the improved productivity will please the people above you as well. You aren't giving anyone what they need by merely communicating requirements. Your job is to fulfill those requirements with the team you have.
pdonis|1 year ago
I would tend to even leave out the first part of that phrase. Focus on the actual objective measure: the rollbacks. They happened, and the goal is to figure out how to not have them happen in the future.
roenxi|1 year ago
That isn't really enough in my experience. There are 3 questions - is the team happy? Are they shipping? Is what they are shipping valuable? - and I've seen a lot of new managers are so overwhelmed that they forget about number 3 and a fair chunk of people end up unemployed because sooner or later the bean counters figure out that the team isn't actually productive.
This article, overall, doesn't identify achieving excellent outcomes as something he got wrong at first. I suspect either he is a natural manager or it is a mistake that is still being made. Probably the latter based on the other mistakes identified. The journey I've seen usually goes from lost -> controlling external perceptions of success -> oh I need to actually succeed and it isn't what I thought.
beryilma|1 year ago
Why is it always the report who is the source of the problem and not the manager?
How about "I've created a toxic work environment and put my reports under a lot of stress. And I have not given them any opportunities to grow and learn new skills. I am planning to do better..." Words that will never come from the mouth of a manager.
Have a hard conversation with yourself first before blaming the reports.
crowcroft|1 year ago
Overly empathetic companies end up with terrible junior managers because they can’t have any real direct conversations. Tough and demanding companies I have seen fair much better because no one can hide from tough conversations for too long.
steerpike|1 year ago
antman|1 year ago
interludead|1 year ago
bobsomers|1 year ago
brailsafe|1 year ago
Every manager I've had that used your example quote—almost verbatim—went on to be incredibly passive-aggressive, because they're trying too hard not to actually create conflict, they want to be liked more than they care about the result, they don't have that much innate confidence, or like the author of the article suggested, they want to see the results they would have produced when they were an IC, and haven't yet learned how to guide autonomy and relinquish a certain amount of control. These are perhaps the traits that led them to keeping their IC job all those years.
These people would turn 1-on-1s into 45 mins of beating around the bush, trying to get me to reveal myself as having insufficiently met the unspoken criteria they've been having internal anxiety attacks about, and maybe in the last few minutes when there's no room left for pushback they'd conjure the answer they wanted to hear and set that as the benchmark.
This failure on their part predictibly bled into other interactions and created toxicity and resentment, they couldn't yield control, and they couldn't have a real discussion that involved more than themselves manifesting as their overbearing mother waiting for their kid to implicate themselves for some petty wrongdoing. They couldn't clearly communicate priorities, or timelines, or requirements, and were starting in their new job with a skill issue of their own. They hadn't adapted to the role or developed a good personality for it, and apparently lacked an ability to reflect on their behavior or communication style.
I don't mean to extrapolate too far from this or in-turn attack you in any way, it's just a small quote, but in the past it's been telling.
"Can we talk about code quality issues" doesn't just avoid a character trait, which I agree should should never be the target, it leans into vague, soft, meek, intentionally indirect language that just creates undue anxiety and establishes an ambiguous context for whatever the problem might be, and was a dishonest pretext for for downstream attribution of fault, since they couldn't accept the possibility that the problem might be upstream (which it wasn't always, but if it had been, they weren't going to address it then). In these situations, sometimes I was struggling with purely my own productivity, having a bad couple weeks, but otherwise it was some other issue they weren't willing or able to genuinely help me with.
Do your best to be humble, learn to delegate and try to trust people, avoid thinking about character traits but don't avoid direct (and clear) language, and accept that your perception might be inaccurate. Get as far away as necessary from the dreaded "just checking in" or "is there anything we can do to improve (your problem)" as possible. What if their code is suffering because of noise in the office or someone's depressed because they're having relationship issues? What if it's because you keep coming over to their desk unannounced and asking diverting their attention?
If you can do that, you're on a good track.
Edit: it's worth noting that the underlying assumption in all of my comment is that people and their reasons and issues are often different, and likewise how they respond to this language may be different, and as such many might actually love the quoted phrases because they aren't imposing, and a good manager will do their best to communicate with people in a way that accepts that a variety of ways to address conflict is the right move, and sometimes less imposing language is viable.
hackable_sand|1 year ago
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.
alsetmusic|1 year ago
One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.
brap|1 year ago
As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough.
You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you.
You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep.
Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
Some of the things you mention sound right for a team lead (i.e. single team) but not really for an EM where you might have 2+ teams. You need to be able to solve the problems the leaving teammates create for you, but stepping into the role is probably the last thing you should do. Don't get me wrong, you need to live the life to build credibility and empathy, but doing the job yourself is usually a substandard, unsustainable solution.
thanksgiving|1 year ago
I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction.
They call this "managing up" or something like that.
exitb|1 year ago
I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
resonious|1 year ago
So I guess with the digging deep thing, be careful to not take up too much of people's time!
codingdave|1 year ago
This is your team - you are managing them, not the other way around, so if they have expectations of you that are incorrect, then fix those expectations. If you are not technical, tell them so. Communicate your needs and expectations, and then let them do the work. If there is a bus factor that is too high of a risk for a sustainable team, cross-train the team to remove the bus factor. Have a sense of the priority of all the work so that if someone quits, you can re-arrange the schedule, not be forced to jump in and put out a fire.
At the same time, be building up your people so that they can jump in and replace you. After all, if you cannot be replaced, you cannot be promoted either. Don't pigeon-hole yourself into a front-line manager role unless you truly love it. Grow your team, but grow yourself at the same time.
alain94040|1 year ago
I don't think that's the main goal for a manager (even technical). I'd say generally, the manager should understand why the team is building something, and the engineers should know how. The why includes who is going to use what was built, when do they need it, what trade-offs can be made, etc.
dakiol|1 year ago
dyauspitr|1 year ago
jiveturkey|1 year ago
I can't read the article to tell if this is just an observation from you, or if you are responding to the article, because my DNS just broke for whatever reason.
> Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
That is not the manager's job. The real question here is, do you know the bus factor of your team and do you know what particular skills are most critical to replace?
ChiMan|1 year ago
Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work.
Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.
darkerside|1 year ago
YZF|1 year ago
Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager.
Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
mjr00|1 year ago
The difference is in how your performance is judged. ICs are judged by their individual contributions, hence the name. Managers are judged by the performance of their team/department/organization/company. It's not enough to say, as a manager, "I personally ran the sprint meetings and did 1:1s and performance reviews so therefore I'm doing a good job."
The individual work managers do is much harder to tangibly measure. Things like establishing a culture, balancing your roadmap between one-off customer requests and internal production vision (and hacking in some AI crap to make your CEO happy), hiring the right people. Just doing the table stakes individual work of managing your direct reports' vacation time, promotions, and running team meetings is really only good enough for beginner, first-level line managers at bigger companies, where they just need people to execute established processes.
> Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t.
ehhhhh. Management is a lot more reactive, that's true, but saying it requires less brainpower isn't true. As a manager you're constantly context switching. You don't just care about the codebase and solving one specific problem, you also care about sales and marketing, your customer support team, the budget for next year. You're getting slack messages from executives who need an update right now on your project, at the same time as an engineer needing to talk because their partner just filed for divorce and they need mental health days (and you need to support them while also figuring out how to rebalance their workload). It's a very different way of working that uses very different parts of your brain. But it's not just sitting in the executive bathroom and delegating work while you smoke a cigar.
interludead|1 year ago
ryoshu|1 year ago
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
Quality over quantity -> Yes.
The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for.
You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,
Loughla|1 year ago
The best managers I've ever had saw it as their job to remove barriers and bullshit from my day. It's what I try to do as a leader as well. It serves the purpose of making their jobs easier, and also takes up your time which creates less opportunity for you to micromanage and forces you to delegate.
>Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
This is SO important, and where I struggle the most. Your team won't appreciate it, but when they have the time, support, and resources they need, they'll notice.
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
TripleChecker|1 year ago
chasd00|1 year ago
binarymax|1 year ago
starky|1 year ago
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
mindvirus|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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drewr|1 year ago
Your job as a manager is still to ship things -- only now it's to ship more than you ever could alone. You get the privilege and responsibility to steward the skills of two or more engineers and shape the entire part of a business. The dopamine is harder won and often more rewarding. Management is difficult and exhausting but it's anything but unfulfilling. Let's not start new managers off telling them what they can't do but what they can do.
Ironically, as a manager of software engineers you should still be very engaged with the team's code. How else will you understand your capacity and understand what gaps you need to fill? Run the test suite, review designs, read PRs, ask questions, give praise for attention to detail. You will keep the bar high on the team and advocate for their work more effectively within the organization.
otteromkram|1 year ago
I'm not in management, but couldn't OP become a working manager? Might depend on the size of their team and demands of the new role, but I've worked with managers who wear their IC hat on occasion and thought it was a positive value-add for the group as a whole.
98codes|1 year ago
icedchai|1 year ago
starky|1 year ago
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
wavemode|1 year ago
This doesn't only apply to managers. Even as an individual software engineer, the more you move up (if moving up is something that matters to you), the more you have to play politics.
Your work can't possibly "speak for itself", since the people it's speaking to (the managers with power over your career) don't speak code.
interludead|1 year ago
Daub|1 year ago
1. Get rid of old, dead wood. Given that our program is scaffolded, with each course building upon the preceding, A single low performing lecturer can bring down the quality of an entire program. Don’t trust student feedback when identifying such people. They favour nice lecturers over effective ones. Getting rid of low performing team members in a university can be a low process. It can sometimes be quicker to find programs they would be happier/more productive in, and engineer a transfer.
2. Hire effective new blood. Well duh, I hear you say. Finding good new hires can be a difficult task. For those who I really wanted to hire, I did my research on who they were and what they might want, and tried to show them that I was willing to build a nest for them.
3. Have a vision of what the department should be. This vision requires constant maintenance and should always consider input from the team.
bearjaws|1 year ago
People become jaded and start to tell you all the ways we can't do something, or it will take too long. They often don't realize what tools are at their disposal to help make change easier, and instead insist there is only one good path to a solution...
Fresh talent really helps get people excited again, after the initial shock of layoffs. Not to mention new talent always comes in excited for an opportunity.
iLoveOncall|1 year ago
It's great to be able to tell your teammates that the meeting is canceled because you just sent an email explaining that you prepared everything for next sprint and here's a 5 lines summary.
urbandw311er|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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blindriver|1 year ago
smokel|1 year ago
mikhmha|1 year ago
I never understood whose blame the poor memory falls on? In my opinion it was on him to stay organized - something he never made an effort to do. Others would say it was on me to communicate to him what he told me. I don't get paid enough to be his executive assistant. And I don't see the point in communicating better if he would just forget again.
Other times his memory was bizzare. Like he would remember some off comment I'd made to him in a 1-on-1 and then use it as a way to butter me up or appeal to me. I once mentioned to him I follow news in the "programming space" (aka reading this website). And he seemed to remember this whenever he needed to appeal to me to look into some new platform feature clients were requesting. "You read a lot about this stuff right??? Take a look into PDF generation using this library. You read a lot about this stuff right??" I think he thought he was juicing up my ego with this. So bizzare.
Of course its the same manager who did the fundamental sin of complaining downwards to me, and about my peers whenever one of them messed up. Dude you're the CTO. If you can't maintain face then I will lose all confidence in your ability.
OK I'm going to stop venting about my last boss now. Sorry!
epalm|1 year ago
toolslive|1 year ago
purpleidea|1 year ago
hnlurker22|1 year ago
the_clarence|1 year ago
jimberlage|1 year ago
It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy.
Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day.
About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else.
People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping.
1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer.
The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.)
Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.
Gunseng|1 year ago
Chengdavid|1 year ago
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throwaway984393|1 year ago
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nineteen999|1 year ago
Ferret7446|1 year ago
anotheracc88|1 year ago
It would be like golf swing or skiing mistakes. Every instructor knows em.
eastbound|1 year ago
Everyone wants to be the benevolent manager, especially if there is enough money for everyone, and especially in these times where collaboration and positive management are touted. But you have to keep a carrot and a leash on the employees.
My first employees got a 33% raise the first year things were good. Long story short: None of them are here anymore and we’re still scrambling to recover from the mess they’ve created by being lazy.
Now people struggle to get a few percent salary increase. It eats me to my core, but I want them to get my product out.
Joel_Mckay|1 year ago
The lessons we learned:
1. "Manage or be managed...": your first lesson is people will try to manipulate those in positions of authority regardless of competency. i.e. the idea of "goodwill" being the true core product can escape the irrationally ambitious/sycophantic.
2. No amount of money can make someone care about company projects. The worker may be interested in the project, or is simply there for the wrong reasons. Remember you want to keep employees content, but a "kingdom of kings" is unsustainable.
3. People can postpone something until tomorrow indefinitely. Thus, pay very close attention to projected deliverable times.
4. Fire someone for being unproductive according to a defined workmanship-standard as soon as possible. It will notify the rest of staff you are not there to play games, and stupid behavior will have consequences. Mostly effective with Jr staff using ChatGPT to try and BS the world like any other con.
5. Delegation? Just initially run trial contracts with potential staff first for each project deliverable. Failure to deliver on time means they don't get another dime, or a second chance to be unaccountable for their behavior.
6. Entrenched incompetence: organizations have their own emergent structure, and it will usually drift back to the same dysfunctional patterns/designs.
7. Redacted
8. try to leave things slightly better than when you arrived.
9. Managers usually can never be a normal employee again. People subconsciously fear they cannot control authority, and will prefer to hire someone easier to "handle".
Best regards, =3
chasd00|1 year ago
Bjartr|1 year ago