[HN Gopher] Employees are happier when led by people with deep e...
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Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise (2016)
Author : mgh2
Score : 536 points
Date : 2021-03-26 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hbr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hbr.org)
| vdddv wrote:
| very little information given on who is behind that site. One
| name, linking to one twitter account with very little on it
| nobleach wrote:
| My direct boss, yes, absolutely he could do everything I do and
| perhaps even do it better. His mind is brilliant for being able
| to see the big picture and know the potential pitfalls. When I
| spitball ideas at how to solve a problem, he seems 5 steps ahead.
| With that said, he plays a different role. He is more like the
| arbiter between business and engineering. And I like him having
| that role.
|
| With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have coding
| prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their areas. I love
| knowing that our CEO is one heck of an inspiring guy but I don't
| want him meddling in engineering. I'm sure he's smart enough that
| he could figure it out, but that would be a waste of his talent.
| Right now, his brilliance is evident in the people he's put into
| leadership. They're all experts of their domain. This frees him
| up to do more CEO things (like get our next round of funding)
| caturopath wrote:
| > With that said, I actually DO NOT want my C-suite to have
| coding prowess. I prefer them to be gifted in their
| areas...This frees him up to do more CEO things (like get our
| next round of funding)
|
| I think you're missing one thing here that makes it a little
| more analogous to your boss: not only should the CEO and your
| boss be good at their own jobs (e.g. securing funding), they
| should be good at their reports' jobs as well (just like yours
| is). Expertise that is 3+ layers down the org chart is
| completely irrelevant, of course, as you point out.
|
| There are executive situations where there's a lot of
| specialized knowledge one level below where this doesn't quite
| work, but that should garner lots of extra attention.
| realityking wrote:
| My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able
| to go "one step down" and still do a competent but necessarily
| great job at any role that reports directly to them.
|
| The CEO certainly shouldn't be expected to have the skills of
| every expert across the entire organization. But if they were
| to be the executive in charge of
| Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they'd ideally do a
| passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top
| (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP
| level down it works out quite often.
| whydoineedone wrote:
| I certainly feel this way. There are too many MBA-types who
| aren't really competent at the low-level technical work they
| manage and don't really even have an understanding of it. It's
| hard for me not to be resentful about it. I know that's my own
| ego talking but it's the truth. I changed my career trajectory to
| avoid folks like that
| toolslive wrote:
| combine this with Putt's law, and you understand hell.
| "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who
| understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they
| do not understand."
|
| Putt's Corollary: "Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a
| competence inversion." with incompetence being "flushed out of
| the lower levels" of a technocratic hierarchy, ensuring that
| technically competent people remain directly in charge of the
| actual technology while those without technical competence move
| into management.
|
| have fun ;)
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Lol. DUH
| dalu wrote:
| Captain Obvious sends his regards
| benja123 wrote:
| From my experience you don't need a manager to necessarily be an
| expert in their field, but it certainly does help.
|
| When a manager lacks the expertise then what it comes down to is
| how much a manager is, 1. Willing to work hard to gain the
| necessary knowledge to be effective in their job, 2. Listen to
| their subordinates on matters they are less knowledgeable about
| and displaying a deep interest in truly understanding it.
|
| What I have noticed is that if a non expert manager is not
| willing to do these two things what usually happens is they
| become yes men/women for upper management. They will agree to
| commitments that the team can't necessarily meet (or in some
| cases will require them to work overtime), other times they will
| make the team cut corners or do things that are going to create a
| lot of problems down the road. When it comes to cleaning up the
| mess that was created, they have already moved onto to their next
| role leaving the clean up to their old reports and the next
| manager.
|
| A manager that is an expert in the field they work in can do just
| as much damage as a non expert manager when they micro manager
| everything leaving little opportunities for growth.
| [deleted]
| korginator wrote:
| Clickbaity and utterly misleading title. I expected very
| different content, but I agree with the gist of the article, in
| that the boss must be highly competent at *his* job, know what
| he's talking about and stay grounded in reality.
| florigator123 wrote:
| Isn't this obvious? Just think about the converse: "employees are
| less happy when led by people who don't know anything about the
| matter at hand." Doesn't strike me as very insightful.
| Hotple wrote:
| Emotional labor can be really taxing, and I think it's sometimes
| underrepresented as a stressor in people's lives.
| helge9210 wrote:
| "If Your Boss Could Do Your Job"
|
| Anecdote: in one of the law firms whole departments were sent to
| LWOP due COVID-19 and department heads had to do all the work
| themselves. They found out that they are perfectly capable of
| singlehandedly doing the job of the whole department.
|
| My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| My boss can code better than I do, but he doesn't have the
| time, he's got CTO stuff to do instead. So I code and he CTOs,
| and everything tuns out well.
| dzolob wrote:
| That is, if your boss wants to not get his/her job done.
| matthewmcg wrote:
| It's hard to see this happening with the rate structures that
| most firms use. Clients don't want to pay partner level rates
| for junior associate work.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cameronbrown wrote:
| Then that boss is failing to scale his/her team properly. It's
| not really a point of pride if one person can singlehandedly
| replace all their reports, imo.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
|
| If your boss can do your work, has the time to do your work (eg
| there isn't enough work), the work doesn't need to be done in
| parallel, and can do similar quality work, and is willing to do
| that work, you're not needed.
|
| That's the takeaway, without oversimplification, which makes
| sense.
| markild wrote:
| Agreed. If not, you could just as well have said "If a
| colleague can do your job, you're not needed."
|
| It's actually an interesting point that. Oversimplified a
| bit, I feel there are two different ways that people measure
| their worth in the workplace. There is "no one else can do
| what I do" and then there's "I make sure that everything I do
| can be done by someone else".
|
| Personally I much prefer the latter.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > If a colleague can do your job, you're not needed.
|
| I can program in ASM, since I did it in college. That's a
| different assertion from "if a colleague can do your job,
| you're not needed". ASM programmers are still needed. Also,
| there's the whole "making a baby in 1 month with 9 wombs
| doesn't work".
| viklove wrote:
| Seems like those department heads are bad at scaling up their
| department's services to adequately utilize the resources at
| their disposal. They're probably arrogant pricks who make
| everything flow through them anyway, meaning they're the
| bottleneck that caused the slowdown in the first place.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > My take: if your boss can do your job, you're not needed.
|
| If he has time to do your job. My boss can code, and very well.
| But he doesn't have time to do so.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise _who
| share their knowledge and help others grow_.
|
| It's missing key words
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Employees are happier when led by people with deep expertise_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218 - Jan 2017 (238
| comments)
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I don't mind if my boss can't do my job. I mind if my boss can't
| do my job AND tells me how I should do it.
|
| The major difference there is one is support and tracking, the
| other is just incompetent in all areas if management.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| What if.. your boss doesn't know how to do _your_ job, BUT he
| knows the requirements around it?
|
| E.g. I am an amateur coder. Anyone who has typed 3 pages of
| code without looking up on a book or a website, is x100 better
| than me. If someone decides to make me the leader of coders, I
| won't tell them "I command you to use this syntax over that
| paremeter (?)" (coz I'm like Jon Snow.. I know nothing), but I
| WILL tell them to a) take daily backups/use version control, b)
| write comments on your code, c) do daily huddles, d) sit in
| pairs and review each other's code, e) some bright
| ideas/suggestions that THEY will make, f) I will bust my ...
| and try to study as many books/blogs/resources to learn the
| area (and managing coders better), g) I will talk to as many
| coders (young and old) as I can to understand them and their
| needs better.
|
| Does that make me a good coder? Hell no! I didn't mention "read
| Java" in any of my aformentioned example. Will this make me a
| good manager? Well I have managed OTHER teams in & around IT..
| why not coders? They are people too!
| jtdev wrote:
| How do you "know the requirements around it" if you can't
| code?
|
| Imagine managing a team of diamond cutters and not being able
| to cut diamonds yourself... you would only recognize poorly
| cut diamonds after they had been cut and you would have no
| idea of how to help your team improve with specific
| recommendations and guidance.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I don't know - in my experience as a programmer, when I work
| for somebody that's never worked as a programmer, they tend to
| estimate based on how long they wish something would take
| (which is usually an hour, two max). Ex-programmers turned
| managers who still code from time to time are far more
| realistic about how long something might take to complete.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| And about how much small differences in assumptions and what
| was written in the ticket can impact development times.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| My experience with the
|
| > Ex-programmers turned managers who still code from time to
| time are far more realistic about how long something might
| take to complete.
|
| Is that they had huge egos and thought they could do
| everything in much less time than I could, or would just "put
| in the time to make sure it was done when it had to be"
|
| So nah, I prefer not having ex programmers as my manager.
| loopz wrote:
| What's the contrary point?
|
| Employees most happy being led by clueless, ignorant, inactive
| managers who throw them under the bus?
| oytis wrote:
| From my personal experience, when people wish their manager was
| more technically capable, it indicates some management failure.
|
| I am currently managed by a person who although has a technical
| background but for a long time is only doing management, so
| definitely can't do my job. And it is totally fine, because he's
| not making any technical decisions, these are made by technically
| excellent people.
|
| Examples of management failures that I have seen on the other
| hand involve product managers and/or people with sales attitude
| playing product designers or solution engineer's roles. That
| doesn't end well and creates a lot of conflict between the
| management and the technical people.
| notahacker wrote:
| Since two of the measures of boss competence are entirely
| employee-rated the causality is likely to run both ways. i.e.
| regardless of their _actual_ technical skill in your field and
| management abilities _as assessed by others_ you are less likely
| to appraise your boss as competent at their own job and capable
| of doing your job if you 're unhappy about the work they have
| asked you to do.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| True. Non technical managers can get in the sea. They're
| protecting their asses 99 percent of the time. Those who can, do.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Wow news just in, employees are happy with competent managers.
|
| What. A. Surprise.
| jordache wrote:
| I think this sentiment only applies to line level tech managers,
| where it's likely conceivable for that manager to be close to the
| work done by subordinates.
|
| If you got higher in the org, the focus of managers become more
| strategic and process oriented, with stronger alignment with the
| business side of things.
| [deleted]
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Personally, I would never work for a manager that had no skills
| other than "management" skills. I've been in a few organizations
| where every manager is hired from the outside and installed and
| they have no expertise in the area or the product itself. I've
| quit those companies quickly.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Having had some absolutely horrible managers in tech the worst
| usually are the ones with lower technical expertise. The reason
| being is mainly related to understanding scope of work and the
| complexities of said projects.
|
| That being said I also have had other really bad managers who
| were star IC's that were promoted to mgmt as they really had no
| where else to go in their career. These managers usually are
| clueless on dealing with people and other teams.
| caturopath wrote:
| Given the right support, I've seen lower-knowledge managers
| really do well. I think a lot of the worse situations I've seen
| were when someone didn't realize their technical judgement was
| inapplicable or rusty, and that they needed to defer to their
| experts.
|
| This is tricky, of course -- for low-level managers with
| typical engineer IC reports especially, it's super common for
| them not to have a single report whose judgement they can
| trust.
| airhead969 wrote:
| I think we should deconflict managers from leaders. Managers are
| people who facilitate employees' productivity and HR matters,
| whereas leaders trail-blaze priorities, philosophy, and mentor
| towards the actual work. The issue is trying to make a senior
| leader into both a leader and a manager, when these are very
| different skillsets and both take a great deal of time. IMO, it's
| better to do like Google by having managers that aren't
| micromanaging tasks but are there to provide assistance.
|
| tl;dr: Let the leaders lead and the managers manage. It's nice
| when one person can do both well, but that's an unreasonable
| expectation for the amount of work involved.
| datavirtue wrote:
| At GE the aviation engineers were the only ones that really
| seemed happy. They were all working under grey beard engineers
| who were by far the least pretentious managers. Everyone else was
| under someone from the encient GE Taylorist philosophy of "a good
| manager can run anything." Very painful uphill battle on anything
| because you literally had to translate everything into a message
| that informed them of how it was going to make them look good and
| advance their career. They simply don't understand or care about
| the work/product/customer. You could literally build amazing shit
| with a lot of support from colleagues etc and it didn't interest
| them because they had no foundation to recognize the potential.
| If you did manage to have one or two of your managers (I had
| five-ish) that did see the impact potential the rest of the
| hierarchy or "matrix" would smother it. Not to mention the
| clueless (horizontal) scrum masters.
| hinkley wrote:
| Like the Senate, you often need someone who can break ties. A
| team with an even number of technical people can get deadlocked
| on a decision. If the boss can't or won't step in, it can make
| for a miserable experience.
| jrockway wrote:
| If I've learned anything from watching the Senate, it's that
| 51/49 doesn't drive forward progress. Those 49 will do
| everything in their power to undermine the 51.
|
| If you find your team deadlocked on decisions and you think the
| way forward is to find a tie-breaking vote, I have bad news for
| you.
| hinkley wrote:
| Work is not a democracy but some difficult decisions have to
| be. I think a lot of the time the arrow points the other way.
| A boss who can't or won't make decisions when pushed to do so
| also creates an environment where deciding is difficult.
|
| Often all it takes is a qualitative comment that one could
| mistake for leadership, and the guy who won't be accountable
| for any decisions is not leading anybody.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah. Making a decision is the first step, but the life of
| the decision after it's made is vitally important. You can
| look at Congress getting stuff passed with split votes, but
| you can also see the other side digging in to undermine the
| decision. The Affordable Care Act is an example; it passed,
| it was implemented, but the Republicans are in court every
| month with a new challenge.
|
| I think you want to aim for consensus building that doesn't
| have half of the stakeholders spending 100% of their time
| to get your decision reversed, basically. Maybe it's
| impossible to build a consensus, and you have to act.
| That's the value in the tie-breaking vote, and that's what
| Congress does. But we shouldn't try to model getting things
| done at work as an epic battle between Blue and Red. That
| level of polarization is toxic. Maybe Congress can't fix
| that problem, because they represent 328,000,000 people,
| but we can aim for something better in a smaller group.
| dandanua wrote:
| On the other hand, if your boss thinks he can do your job (and do
| it even better than you), while in fact he can't - you will get
| the worst nightmare.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Another nightmare is needing your boss' help & not getting it
| because your boss simply chooses not to help. Early in my dev
| career I ended up w/ an smart, unhelpful manager. They were the
| only person in the company w/ Scala experience, and I needed to
| touch a Scala service as a fairly green developer. I asked my
| boss for help, and was denied. I later found out that my boss
| had recommended against hiring me during my interview, and I
| was still placed on their team. I did not like that job & quit
| after a few months.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I'll take it up a notch: all of the above + doesn't lift a
| finger and finds faults at everything you do. Add a bit of
| colonial superiority complex and its recipe for a job from
| hell.
| Sileni wrote:
| And focuses most of their time and energy into brown nosing.
| Zero respect in either direction and an adversarial
| relationship by design any time you need resources from the
| company/higher-ups. /shudder
| Frost1x wrote:
| Is worst nightmare the new normal? Various levels of management
| often handwave away a task because they understand its function
| at a high level. True quality management requires a deeper
| understanding of what it is you're managing.
|
| I understand the function of creating, launching, and orbiting
| a satellite geosynchronously to do GPS so it's easy, right?
| Yea, not so much.
|
| I'm a firm believer that you need to understand everything _at
| least_ one layer deeper than high level functional descriptions
| so you can start to reason about the difficulty or amount of
| skill needed to accomplish something. You understand the real
| problems (even if only at the surface) and know where
| opportunity lies. With a pure functional perspective many
| current managers have, you simply can 't reasonably manage and
| plan and are instead a glorified resource scheduler with whims.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| The more junior you are, the more likely it is that not only can
| your boss do your job, they can do it better than you can. The
| more senior you become, the less likely that is to be the case.
|
| How many CEOs could do all of the CFO, COO, CTO, and General
| Counsel's jobs? Zero.
|
| How many programming team leads can do the junior programmer's
| job? Basically/hopefully all of them.
| FpUser wrote:
| I could imagine CEOs being capable of performing COO and CTO
| function. It will of course screw up main responsibilities so
| it is better not to mix.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's likely that they can do any one of them well (whichever
| function they came from), but not all of them. They can
| probably do a passable job at some other one, which means
| that for at least half of those executives, they have a boss
| who can't do their job.
| mcguire wrote:
| How many programming team managers can do the programmer's job?
|
| In my experience, often, not many. And it is usually a recipe
| for disaster.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| This is not at all my experience (except CFO which has
| responsibilities not only on paper but in real life, where
| blame can't be transferred) but I'm willing to chalk it up to
| culture differences.
|
| Basically the more you see yourself as a "manager that
| facilitate work" the easier it is to go higher and the less
| expertise you need (social expertise exempted). Need something
| done? Hire someone to do it!
|
| Is there a specialist under you that isn't replaceable? Better
| keep him in his position!
|
| I really wish we had what you seem to have though.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good
| boss may need some rethinking. It's not uncommon to hear
| people assert that it's a bad idea to promote an engineer to
| lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A
| good manager doesn't need technical expertise, this argument
| goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma,
| organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those
| qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that
| the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also
| matters enormously. ... Using these three measures of
| supervisor competence, we found that employees are far
| happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in
| the core activity of the business._ "
| sokoloff wrote:
| I would think the General Counsel has the hardest of those
| abilities to "I'll just have a go at it."
| airstrike wrote:
| I think it's probably hard to rank them but being CFO also
| requires specific hard skills that you can't improvise on
|
| A good COO will also have specific experience and therefore
| hard skills and easily outclass a general manager that's
| just winging it... but some operations are simpler than
| others, so the requirements associated with any of these
| C-level roles (including CFO and GC) are really on a
| spectrum
| skohan wrote:
| I think the point is not "your boss should be able to do your
| job better than you can", but "in a pinch, your boss would be
| able to step in and fill your role if needed".
|
| Even in the case you gave, a good CEO might be able to do that.
| When you are at the C level, whatever the role is, you're
| probably going to mostly have to be good at stakeholder
| management, strategic thinking, listening to your peers and the
| people working under you and taking good decisions based on the
| inputs available. A good CEO should be able to step in and
| apply those skills outside of their domain of expertise, even
| if they are not going to be the best CFO/CTO in the world.
| mcguire wrote:
| Technically, it means "your boss should be able to make
| decisions based on an informed understanding of what the work
| entails." Without that, management decisions are going to be
| based on who plays golf with whom, or most shiny consultant
| or marketer who crosses the threshold.
|
| I've spent some time employed by organizations whose
| decisions are disconnected from day-to-day reality; train
| wrecks are fun to watch, but they get less fun when it's your
| job to ride the train into the brick wall.
| notacoward wrote:
| The more senior you become, the more you should focus on being
| one of the leaders yourself instead of staying in individual-
| contributor mode. If that means you outstrip your own boss's
| expertise it might mean less personal satisfaction for you
| (been there done that) but can still improve satisfaction for
| the team as a whole.
| speby wrote:
| This ... it is a total fantasy to think that the leader(s) of a
| company are somehow aware of all of the work that is entailed
| by every job in the company. For really small companies, or
| junior employees with a line manager, that may be true.
|
| But as you said, the more senior you become, things completely
| change. There isn't a CEO in the world that could do all of the
| jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales,
| tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations, legal).
| It's impossible.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The comment said that _your boss_ can likely do your job, not
| that _everyone more senior than you_ can.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _There isn 't a CEO in the world that could do all of the
| jobs they hire other executives to do (finance, sales,
| tax/accounting, HR, marketing, technology, operations,
| legal). It's impossible._
|
| Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands of
| small business owners every month.
| speby wrote:
| For sure, for very small companies or small/junior teams
| who have a line manager.
|
| This also doesn't quite acknowledge that even if you _can_
| do all of those functions [in a small business or one-
| person company] it does not mean you 're actually good at
| those jobs.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's hard to manage if you don't have a clue about what
| you're managing. Every estimate looks equally realistic
| to you. You can't tell lies from the truth. Your own
| sense of other's performance is limited to easily faked
| "symptoms" of working hard, like spending a lot of time,
| or talking in meetings. You don't have to be good at the
| jobs beneath you to manage them, you just need a clue.
| speby wrote:
| Definitely agree there.
| ska wrote:
| > Impossible, yet accomplished by thousands and thousands
| of small business owners every month.
|
| It's an appealing thought, but really they are doing a
| different job. Vast majority of those thousands of small
| business owners couldn't effectively step into one of those
| roles at even a mid-sized corp, let alone all of them.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 2-person startups often have someone called a CTO.
|
| Similarly, a small business owner might call themself a
| CEO.
|
| Neither is wrong per-se, but when we're talking about CEOs
| who have hired a team of executives to run their company,
| it's most reasonable to assume that GP was not talking
| about such a small business.
| cwkoss wrote:
| In Japanese, 'Jyozu', the word for "good at doing ___", is the
| same as the word for "likes to do ___". I think the idea that
| these two distinct English concepts are in fact the same is very
| interesting.
|
| Perhaps a significant effect is that people with deep expertise
| tend to be much more passionate about their job, because without
| passion they could not have developed deep expertise.
| zora_goron wrote:
| I wonder if part of this includes a possible correlation between
| deep expertise and enthusiasm/passion for the subject matter,
| which is passed on throughout the team.
| staunch wrote:
| Steve Jobs was probably the best team builder in tech (and maybe
| business) history with Apple v1, NeXT, and then Apple v2 and he
| learned this lesson well.
|
| _" We went through that stage at Apple where we thought, 'Oh,
| we're going to be a big company, let's go out and hire
| professional management.' We went out and hired a bunch of
| professional management; it didn't work at all. Most of them were
| Bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to DO
| anything.
|
| If you are a great person, why do you want to work for somebody
| you cannot learn anything from? And you know what's interesting -
| you know what the best managers are? They are the great
| individual contributors who never ever wanted to be a manager,
| but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is able
| to do as good job as them."_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q
| kmonsen wrote:
| I do think you can get the worst managers that way as well, and
| jobs at some points was one of the worst. You do need empathy
| and ways of handling underperformers that is not screaming at
| them hoping things will get better.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think the conclusions miss the mark slightly and focus on a
| symptom of good bosses: they care about tasks from a state of
| understanding what is required to do them well, they have empathy
| for the challenges, and respect for the talent in completing
| them. Obviously the easiest way to get to this perspective is to
| experience it first-hand, hence the correlation between those who
| could do the job and being good managers of the job, but I don't
| see this as a requirement, just a common path.
|
| I also don't see this a refutation that we shouldn't hire good
| engineers into management, rather we shouldn't do this blindly
| and as the single criteria. My best managers were all top
| quartile engineers but probably not top 5-10%, because they also
| cared about the non-technical requirements that a good manager
| needs to cover, and this inevitable consumes focus, effort and
| time that your best engineers don't want to allocate.
|
| I'm a relatively new engineering manager (~3 years) and wrote
| about the traits of a good development manager from my
| perspective here:
|
| https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20200204-four_qualit...
| skohan wrote:
| > probably not top 5-10%, because they also cared about the
| non-technical requirements that a good manager needs to cover
|
| It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are not
| generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements, and
| I don't know that this assertion is justified.
|
| From my perspective, as a relatively new technical manager who
| also spent years as an engineer working with technical
| managers, it's not only about empathy but also about having a
| thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate intuition
| around the subject matter. When I was working as an engineer,
| what I often found frustrating about working with non-technical
| managers is that they often work on the wrong set of
| parameters. Discussions often revolve around details which are
| not really important to the success of the project, or are
| relevant to the work, and often the team is led down a more
| difficult path than is necessary because requirements are set
| in the wrong terms.
|
| I think it's possible to compensate to some degree with empathy
| and people skills, but it's hard to compete with having the
| experience and speaking the language.
| watwut wrote:
| I agree, knowledge matters. It is pipe dream to think that
| empathy and people skills are enough for manager (or anyone)
| to compensate for lack of knowledge. Lack of technical
| knowledge does not imply neither peoples skills nor empathy.
| Technical knowledge does not imply lack of either
|
| Moreover, I found that non-technical managers had often
| trouble in empathy and people skills departments. I think
| that a lot of issues stemmed from non-technical manager
| having basically inferiority complex, confusing disagreement
| with disrespect, being unable to distinguish between mistake
| and lie. Moreover, not understanding culture technical people
| tend to create or even not being aware that there is such a
| thing as difference of culture.
|
| The cultural difference is a big thing - non-technical
| management in my experience value completely different
| things, ends up insulting engineers or otherwise creates
| difficult situations. All of that then implies that I as a
| programmer suddenly have to deal with interpersonal issues
| that manager created or is unable to deal with.
|
| The thing is, the choice is not between non-technical person
| with people skills and technical without. The choice is
| between person with technical knowledge and one without,
| where the one without them has also disadvantages in peoples
| skills.
| cwyers wrote:
| Even if two traits are positively correlated, they can end up
| looking negatively correlated when you are selecting on those
| traits:
|
| https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1373266475230789633
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > having a thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate
| intuition around the subject matter.
|
| > they often work on the wrong set of parameters. Discussions
| often revolve around details which are not really important
| to the success of the project,
|
| There's a fairly large gap between those two positions.
| Personally, I'm a fan of a manager that knows enough to
| discuss the topic with me, but they don't need to know enough
| to analyze the problem itself. I want to be able to explain
| to my manager what the problem is, what the various solutions
| are, and which one I think is best and why. If they can
| understand all that, that's enough for me.
| 0xEFF wrote:
| I agree with this up to a point. It's been valuable to me
| as an IC, and I feel it's a value I provide when the
| problem is so hard there isn't a clear solution.
|
| It's nice to be able to say, "what do you think I should
| do?" as an IC, and nice to be able to analyze the problem
| if necessary as a manager.
|
| On the other hand if nobody knows what to do with a hard
| problem, everyone gets stressed out about it.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > On the other hand if nobody knows what to do with a
| hard problem, everyone gets stressed out about it.
|
| Those are the problems that it's the developer's job to
| figure out, in my opinion. If the manager can figure out
| the problem and solution but the developer cannot, then
| the dynamic is backwards (or the manager is actually a
| dev/tech lead, not a project/product manager). Or it's a
| totally different team structure than I'm used to.
| skohan wrote:
| The reason I think it's good to have a product/project
| manager who _can_ get down to this level if needed is
| that it increases the scope of possible solutions. With a
| strict division between tech and product, typically the
| solution space is bounded by the product requirements.
| But if you have a product manager who is able to operate
| on the level of implementation details, you can adapt the
| requirements in ways which are better on both a user side
| and implementation side.
|
| It shouldn't be the _norm_ that a manager is operating on
| the level of implementation details, but it is good if
| they can understand them, because maybe they have more
| levers than the development team has access to in terms
| of unblocking a tricky issue.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > because maybe they have more levers than the
| development team has access to in terms of unblocking a
| tricky issue.
|
| I think I understand the disconnect here. From my point
| of view it's the manager's job to figure out what problem
| the client is trying to solve. It's the developer's job
| to figure out what the possible solutions are, and
| recommend what they think is the best one. As a
| developer, I expect to be in the meetings with the
| clients long before the solutions are chosen.
| briankelly wrote:
| > It sounds like you're saying that top-tier engineers are
| not generally qualified in terms of non-technical
| requirements, and I don't know that this assertion is
| justified.
|
| I see this sentiment or implication that technical skills and
| people skills are somehow mutually exclusive often, even on
| here which is crazy. I think this stems from some broader
| trope that people are "balanced" like RPG characters or
| something, e.g. nerd vs. jock or artist vs. scientist,
| salesman vs. accountant, etc. The reality is that people who
| achieve in one area are more likely to achieve in others. If
| someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they can
| probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if they
| wanted.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _If someone figured out how to be a good engineer, they
| can probably figure out how to be a good manager, too, if
| they wanted._
|
| The "if they wanted" part is key. It's hard to become
| extremely good at something unless you really enjoy doing
| it. I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers
| would rather be doing engineering than anything else. If
| you make them a manager, they're going to enjoy that less
| and not be as good at it -- but a lot of people get
| pressured into becoming managers nonetheless.
| skohan wrote:
| The cool part about being a technical manager is that you
| can expand the scale of what you are capable of. So for
| instance if you ever had an idea like "if only I had
| infinite time and infinite energy I would do X", you can
| build a team which has the tools to provide that.
|
| If your goal is to have an impact, you have to be lucky
| to do this as an engineer. There has to be a structure
| around you which converts your work into value. As a
| manager it's much more reliable that you can be the
| person to create that structure.
| thesimon wrote:
| > I'd imagine that most people who are top engineers
| would rather be doing engineering than anything else.
|
| Really? I love software development, but I don't think
| just churning out random CRUD software based on some
| specs is very interesting. A lot nicer to solve problems
| of your customers, see how the product makes them happier
| and think about ways to improve their user experience.
|
| Somehow I assumed that's how others felt as well.
| jonas21 wrote:
| If the top engineers at your company are churning out
| random CRUD software from specs, you may want to
| reconsider where you're working.
|
| Good engineering _is_ about understanding the problems of
| your customers, designing software that solves these
| problems, and improving their user experience.
| seppin wrote:
| > > The reality is that people who achieve in one area are
| more likely to achieve in others.
|
| This mentality is why we asked Elon Musk what he thought
| about COVID, and paid attention to what he said like it
| meant something.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960
|
| The Halo Effect is particularly bad in SV.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| While aptitude correlates with aptitude, at a given level
| of accomplishment they may be anti-correlated due to
| Berkson's paradox[1].
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| They might. But it could easily take a few years, during
| which time they'll very likely be a mediocre to poor
| manager.
|
| Expecting someone with five years of engineering experience
| to become an effective manager overnight - often with no
| training or mentorship at all - makes as much sense as
| expecting an intern to operate at the same level as a
| senior on Day 1.
|
| Even really smart people with multiple talents need more of
| a warm up than that. And most people are neither that smart
| nor that talented.
| skohan wrote:
| But that's true of non-technical people too right? So the
| question is if you as an organization are considering
| investing a year or two to develop a manager, why not
| start with a subject matter expert?
| [deleted]
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hopefully it is never an overnight switch and the
| engineer's career goals are respected. Any non-shite
| company is going to have engineers taking on leadership
| responsibilities at various levels they are comfortable
| with before turning them full loose.
|
| In some companies, like Gore Industries, and other
| employee owned entities the engineers and operations
| people organically select their own supervisors by
| consensus and set pay democratically. I have been in
| environments that did that without explicit structure
| even, and it was very productive. Unsurprisingly,none of
| those were publicly traded.
| samvher wrote:
| That sounds fantastic, I wished it was easy to find
| places like that.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Pure luck.
| s17n wrote:
| > The reality is that people who achieve in one area are
| more likely to achieve in others.
|
| Aptitude is in general going to be either uncorrelated or
| positively correlated across different areas, but time
| invested is going to be negatively correlated. Hence the
| stereotype of nerds with poor social skills: building
| social skills takes time and effort, and time and effort
| spent on building those skills is time and effort not spent
| on, eg, improving your programming ability.
|
| Of course, people who have off the charts aptitude will be
| in the top percentiles across the board. But you're not
| going to find too many organizations staffed entirely by
| those people.
| skohan wrote:
| The savant/nerd engineer with poor social skills is a
| troupe which does exist, but so is the manager who washed
| out of the developer track because they couldn't keep up
| on the technical side, and they're not a better manager
| than they were a developer but those failures are harder
| to quantify.
| ska wrote:
| > But you're not going to find too many organizations
| staffed entirely by those people.
|
| The number you are looking for here is zero, at least for
| organizations of any size. With a bunch of luck and money
| you can put a small team together like this; otherwise
| they are just too scarce.
| briankelly wrote:
| Yes, you make some good points here but I would argue
| that in most organizations that skills that make for
| effective engineering are aligned well with those
| required for managing. At a certain point, reinvesting
| into programming ability sees diminishing returns and ROI
| on e.g. mentorship, task planning and delegation out-
| paces improvement in technical skills dramatically. Of
| course, this is not universal and there are specialties,
| domains, and organizations that require technical
| competency and competitiveness above all else, but I
| don't think that's the general case for most engineers.
| skohan wrote:
| It's fun to be a "star player" developer, but in terms of
| maximizing your own individual potential, you're always
| going to be able to produce more value by leading people
| than by your own output alone.
|
| There are some technical mountains to climb which require
| superlative engineering talent, but in terms of impact
| it's hard to compete with a leader who is able to
| coalesce a team or organization effectively towards a
| single goal.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > At a certain point, reinvesting into programming
| ability sees diminishing returns and ROI on e.g.
| mentorship, task planning and delegation out-paces
| improvement in technical skills dramatically.
|
| True, but this may not be seen as relevant to the
| individual if they enjoy engineering more than those
| other things.
| random314 wrote:
| Very often when folks describe the ideal manager, they are
| describing themselves.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| My first reaction was to disagree, but then I tried to
| remember the embodiment of 'not-ideal' manager and, in my
| mind at least, they are basically everything I am not, or
| at least not want to be.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Yes, and that's why worker self-management is the proposal
| one sees from any form of politics that doesn't care for
| managers -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-
| management
|
| To be honest, I would love to work for a place that
| implements self management even half hartedly. My
| understanding is that Valve is like that. Valve may not
| make things on the schedule that people want them to - but
| no one can deny that their quality is supreme.
| skohan wrote:
| My perception is that valve has suffered some negative
| experiences due to bad actors interacting with its
| radically libertarian labour practices. I don't have
| insider knowledge, so I could be wrong, but this is the
| sense I have gotten reading articles over the years about
| how the IP for VR was handled for instance
| lbotos wrote:
| A quote I stole from some conference talk that i think of
| all the time as a manager: "You become the manager you wish
| you had, you need to become the manager your reports wish
| you had."
| Retric wrote:
| That's an interesting idea.
|
| Arguably my best manager had a graphic design and UI
| background. Where they excelled was having worked directly
| with software developers and non technical people for a
| decade they could understand the relevant tradeoffs without
| getting into the weeds.
|
| However, former software developers where generally much
| better the deeper and more relevant their technical
| background. Seemingly because they understand what to
| prioritize, but perhaps it's was simply easier to
| communicate with them.
| varjag wrote:
| Essentially a manifestation of bikeshedding. Yep, very
| common.
| skohan wrote:
| Yes and it can go especially poorly when you have a
| "problem oriented" person on the team:
|
| 1. Manager proposes low quality requirements
|
| 2. Problem oriented team member points out a flaw in the
| requirements which is orthogonal to the actual goal of the
| feature/team/organization
|
| 3. Endless discussion around this one detail
|
| 4a. Manager changes the requirements just to end the
| debate, in a way which sacrifices the core goal and weakens
| the product/team/organization when there is a simpler
| solution available to reach the core goal
|
| OR
|
| 4b. Manager accepts an extremely complicated solution which
| maintains the specific requirement which was not required
| to reach the core goal in the first place, thereby risking
| the timeline
| datavirtue wrote:
| Sounds like the text book description of how to start
| wrecking a software project.
| tomlagier wrote:
| Oof. The number of 4b's I've had to deal with in my
| career...
|
| What are some techniques to use when you see this
| happening? I frequently try to get stakeholders to
| simplify and really identify the core problem / proposed
| solution, but I run into a lot of "all or nothing" or
| "design for every possible use case" folks in startups.
| skohan wrote:
| A couple approaches I have seen which can be effective
| are:
|
| - Call attention to the timeline and frame things in
| terms of specific tradeoffs: "Yes we can do A, but that
| means we won't have the time/resources to do B"
|
| - Propose an incremental approach. I.e. "There are some
| technical challenges with achieving A+B+C, so what if we
| start with A, and then asses the best way to reach B and
| C."
|
| With the incremental approach, I think this can help
| avoid the stakeholder feeling like they lost something,
| and 9 times out of 10 once you give them A they will find
| out that's all they needed in the first place, and they
| don't end up asking about B+C again.
| slt2021 wrote:
| little bit of caution on "Yes we can do A, but that means
| we won't have the time/resources to do B" - this, along
| with Agile method of squeezing work every two weeks will
| lead to simply mediocre quality hacked together
| deliverables and accumulation of technical debt.
|
| Sometimes you need to spend time upfront and do it
| properly from the beginning, otehrwise the software
| quickly can become unmaintainable
| bumby wrote:
| > _it 's not only about empathy but also about having a
| thorough understanding of, or at least an accurate intuition
| around the subject matter._
|
| I read the OP with a very different takeaway than what you
| may have inferred. I did not get the impression they were
| saying empathy and technical skills are mutually exclusive.
| By saying their best managers were in the top quartile, they
| are implying they were technically competent but not
| necessarily _the most competent in a single domain_.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I agree, when I was working with small companies this kind of
| thinking was all too common: Can we make a Twitter clone in a
| week? "Yes it's just a backend and a frontend." Vs "with
| support for 187 million active users? Which level of
| accessibility? Will we have a cloud provider? Media upload
| support? Redundancy? What kind of login functionality? Do we
| have support if they loose their email account? Why are you
| looking at me like that? You know what: no we can't do it. No
| I don't care that your grandson thought anyone can do it".
| Guest42 wrote:
| And the common question..."How quickly can you do it if I
| add 10 people....ok 11, but no more, because we have to be
| mindful of cost"
| zabzonk wrote:
| > Can we make a Twitter clone in a week?
|
| Why would you want to make one at all?
| danielscrubs wrote:
| You can replace it with an in-house customer chat, if you
| feel the example is contrived.
|
| But my point is, everything looks easy if you look at it
| shallowly, managers without professional programming
| experience will look at the problem from that angle.
|
| The best will be able to help, the worst will have this
| shallow look and expect the moon by morning.
| chasd00 wrote:
| heh in the consulting world it's pretty common to be in a
| situation of "i signed a contract to deliver a twitter
| clone in a week, here's the kickoff date. get started."
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Can we make a Twitter clone in a week?
|
| Yes.
|
| The v1 isn't the hard part of building a competitor to
| Twitter. The hard part is scaling the user base, getting
| funding to keep the site running and being able to grow it.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| V1 is a hard part, what you are talking about is the
| insanely hard part. ;)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I meant, cloning all of Twitter today is useless because
| you won't ever need the infrastructure to handle 100M+
| users.
|
| But a basic microblogging platform? It's not impossible
| to do in a week.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I believe you can do it in whatever time you want. You
| are the one setting the definition of done after all, not
| the manager.
| ghaff wrote:
| >top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of
| non-technical requirements
|
| It's just that _both_ sets of somewhat orthogonal skills are
| less likely to reside in one person.
|
| An analogy from baseball is why are pitchers generally lousy
| hitters (even pre-DH)? Did they get less practice? Probably.
| But it's also the case that (again even pre-DH) any ability
| to do more than lay down a bunt was absolutely a nice little
| bonus but their job 1 and 2 and 3 is pitching the ball.
|
| On the other hand, even the best fielding shortstop in the
| league still needs to have a half-way decent batting average,
| even if they can get away with a lower one than other
| positions.
| pydry wrote:
| I see it mostly as a refutation of the idea that MBA style
| management-as-a generic-function works - nothing more.
| madhadron wrote:
| I have come to the conclusion that management is not a
| profession. Engineering, law, medicine, teaching are
| professions, that is, occupations that require considerable
| training or study. Manager is a role in a team that requires
| you not to be deficient in social and organizational skills.
|
| In settings where the people being managed are professionals,
| I have come to think that there should be a vote of no
| confidence option where a majority vote of the team can
| immediately remove the manager.
| chasd00 wrote:
| it's the opposite really, a good manager is rare because
| being a good manager is very very hard and takes an
| enormous amount of both study and experience. Being a good
| manager is like being a therapist for a dozen people with
| deadlines on mental health. The soft skills required cannot
| be acquired from reading the documentation.
| loopz wrote:
| When the work is managed well there's never need for
| escalations, defusing, death marches and therapy.
| skohan wrote:
| But I think the parent comment's point is that this can
| be a very challenging job. A good manager's task is to
| absorb the chaos of the outside world, and give the team
| a calm, structured workflow. It's easy to see where a
| manager is failing, but if they're doing their job right
| their work is invisible.
| loopz wrote:
| What is creating the chaos outside the "developer
| bubble"? Is progress well managed, or not.
|
| So we reward visible work. The higher flames in Ops the
| better, to not be invisible.
|
| This is why manager must have domain knowledge.
| tigerlily wrote:
| > there should be a vote of no confidence option where a
| majority vote of the team can immediately remove the
| manager.
|
| Like in a band. Best projects I've worked on have been like
| bands. Each engineer skillfully playing their instrument,
| while the manager secures the gigs, promotes the band,
| listening and acting on feedback from the members.
| skohan wrote:
| My metaphor for my current team is a basketball team.
| Each player knows their role, how to pass the ball to the
| right person at the right time, and the team collectively
| adapts to challenges in real time. The manager's role is
| to look at the big picture, get the team the resources
| they need to succeed, and make strategic decisions to
| allow the team to succeed.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I like what you wrote because it makes me feel better about my
| own short comings.
|
| But is it actually true?
| random314 wrote:
| Very often when folks describe the ideal manager, they are
| describing themselves.
| cjfd wrote:
| Is somebody with empathy somebody with empathy or a pushover?
| The problem is the existence of architecture astronauts. How is
| a manager without technical skill going to distinguish between
| an engineer pointing out a real problem that needs some work
| versus the utterings of the architecture astronaut who is going
| to create an overly complex architecture just because he can
| get away with it?
| LegitGandalf wrote:
| Not only that, but if tech matters to the company, and it
| increasingly does these days, the broader organization really
| needs to have some technical savvy in order to avoid a bunch of
| anti-patterns that are running wild in non-tech savvy
| organizations:
|
| * Setting bad expectations with stakeholders and customers
|
| * Taking on bad opportunities, committing the organization to
| unnecessary technical debt for no monetary gain
|
| * Fracturing teams across competing opportunities
|
| * Top down decrees issued from abstraction that causes
| organizational thrashing
|
| * Decisions made in abstraction with no understanding of the
| stubborn technical constraints that block fruition
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Part of the problem is that a manager brought in without any
| relevant experience will often see their job as an exercise in
| making numbers bigger- they will attempt to cut costs and
| increase revenue in the short term without understanding which
| costs are really important or what the revenue is based on. This
| leads to brief increases in profit margins followed by customers
| fleeing to the competition, which the manager responds to with
| another round of cost cutting.
|
| Even worse, the lack of deep understanding means that the manager
| cannot distinguish good ideas from bad ones, and often cannot
| distinguish talent from bluster, leading to poor hiring decisions
| and directionless leadership.
|
| Everyone knows that putting a untrained business major in charge
| of a squadron of soldiers would end badly. He might be able skate
| by until they got into combat, maybe, but after that they
| wouldn't listen to him for long. But for some reason we think
| that putting an mba in charge of an engineering team is a good
| idea.
| codegeek wrote:
| The boss "should" be able to do most of your job BUT they Should
| not need/want to. Good bosses understand the word "delegation"
| and that is what it takes to build a real team and company. I am
| a boss and I can do most of my team's work (whether efficient or
| not) but I don't want to because I have higher priority things to
| do to get the most out of my time. For example, I can code but I
| don't (well mostly). I have a team of developers. I focus more on
| customers (existing and prospective). But then again, I have
| customer support folks who help with daily requests so that I am
| not answering every support question myself. Can I ? You bet.
| Would I ? Not if I want to scale my company further. If shit hits
| the fan, sure I will talk to a customer but I trust my team to
| take care of them before it gets to me.
| p-sharma wrote:
| > For example, I can code
|
| Not saying that this is true in your case but I have seen this
| too often that managers think they can code just because they
| did it 10 years ago. It's surprisingly hard to write good code
| when you are not in practice.
| postalrat wrote:
| Is your work really higher priority or is it just your job?
| poxwole wrote:
| Duh!
| j_walter wrote:
| This is no surprise really. Any major company promotes managers
| from within unless they have a lot of industry experience. A bank
| manager would have a hard time being a manager at any FANNG
| company (on the engineering side at least) no matter how good
| they are with people...you have to have at least some in depth
| understanding of what the company and department does.
|
| The best engineers don't usually make the best managers either
| because they have a hard time giving up control. Good managers
| let their staff do their jobs and give them the tools needed to
| excel (including mentoring and coaching).
| yeswecatan wrote:
| I was actually looking forward to giving up some control as I
| became a manager. Unfortunately, we haven't hired anybody to
| fill the day to day void I left so I'm still doing my old job +
| now managing a small team.
| skohan wrote:
| You might have to be comfortable letting the void exist, and
| let your managers deal with the resulting failure. If you
| continue doing two jobs without escalating the issue, your
| employer is getting a great deal and has no incentive to
| correct the situation.
| vsgzusnex wrote:
| Then maybe your job right now should be hiring?
| yeswecatan wrote:
| It should be. Our recruiters haven't found any good for
| months.
| aszen wrote:
| what are u looking for exactly, a good place to attract
| talented developers is to post jobs on some slack
| workspaces, many programming languages/frameworks have
| dedicated slack work spaces where enthusiast developers
| like to hang out. i find that people in smaller
| communities have richer technical skills and often are
| easier to work with
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Get a linkedin login and start looking. Seems like
| recruiting either are focused on other teams, or don't
| have enough context. Both of those can be helped by you
| doing some lead generation.
| jonplackett wrote:
| 'Employees happier working for people with little expertise' is a
| ridiculous statement so I'm not sure how this could come as any
| news to anyone.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Of course people are happier when they're lead by AN ACTUAL
| LEADER rather than by some a-hole who just "manages tasks" PM-BOK
| style!
|
| I swear, some of the articles in HBR should just be sub-titled:
|
| "STUFF YOUR MAMMA TAUGHT YOU BUT YOU FORGOT WHILE GETTING YOUR
| MBA"
| sitkack wrote:
| The M in MBA stands for Monkey or Money, or both.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I was personally taught by the store manager of a supermarket how
| to sweep the floor and of course that built respect for him and
| the organization. (e.g. he knew how to do every little task like
| sweep the floor, cut meat in the deli, bake bread, etc.)
|
| The (now retied) director of the art museum at Cornell could be
| seen out in his suit passing out pamphlets for an exhibition
| together with students promoting clubs and concerts.
|
| Go to the exhibition and he'll personally give a talk about the
| art that will help you appreciate anything from a suit of Samurai
| armor to Mark Lombardi's conspiracy diagrams. It's nice to see
| the top guy, who performs like a top guy, doing the simple work.
| Wistar wrote:
| One day a few years ago as I was walking into the Kirkland, WA
| Costco, I noticed a familiar-looking older guy pushing a line
| of shopping carts in from the parking lot. It was James
| Sinegal, then CEO of Costco.
| afarrell wrote:
| There is a dichotomy here. If an individual contributor is
| unclear whom they report to or what the product strategy is,
| then seeing the CTO contribute to numpy is not comforting.
|
| As you say:
|
| > It's nice to see the top guy, who performs like a top guy,
| doing the simple work.
| alchemism wrote:
| A 'good' sea captain will also exhibit this trait and step in
| to perform tasks of necessity.
|
| Since safety at sea comes in large part from 'simple work'
| being done rigorously, it is heartening to see the top man
| wiping down a slick deck to prevent the chance of accidents.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Don't forget the pirates/privateers of the caribbean. Captain
| was elected and removed at will by the crew. They freed
| slaves and distributed "wages" according to the level of
| contribution. The crews were diverse as hell. And they
| established a republic in Nassau...hundreds of years before
| the United States was formed. Of course, the companies (ships
| crew) robbed people and could be murderous at times, but the
| same could be said of "legitimate" less egalitarian companies
| of the time.
| sitkack wrote:
| Totally an aside, but I saw
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi 's work (Vatican
| Bank Scandal) at the Portrait Gallery in DC, and it is
| absolutely fascinating.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| When I was in my teens, I got my first "real" job. It was
| working at a service station.
|
| The station was a part of a chain of dozens. The owner was a
| well-known local multimillionaire. For whatever reason, he
| happened to be at my station on my first day at work.
|
| He and I spent over an hour pumping gas, checking oil, doing an
| oil change, patching tires, and so forth.
|
| I learned a lot more than simply how to work at a service
| station that day. I continued working at that station for over
| a year. Never saw the guy again. As I recall, when I started he
| had stores over half-a-dozen states.
| musingsole wrote:
| I love this story and the owner is exemplifying the moral
| behavior I'd want to if I were in that place... However,
|
| > Never saw the guy again.
|
| It doesn't scale. If you have the knack to build a company
| like that, eventually you won't be able to touch the front
| lines of what your company is doing. Hopefully, having that
| type of leadership at the top creates emulation all the way
| down, but still, it rings of "die a hero or live long enough
| to become the villain"
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| Joel Spolsky on his sergeant major, 3 paragraphs. One of those
| anecdotes that will stick with you forever.
|
| https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadershi...
|
| (Not the original source, but the most readable I found.)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I couldnt agree more. A previous boss held a company wide meeting
| and everyone laid out their yearly goals. When he got to his it
| was something like establish channel partnerships. Very wishy
| washy and difficult to measure. I knew almost at that moment that
| I wasnt going to be at the company at the end of that year. He
| had decided his job was now to manage rather than do the job the
| rest of us were doing.
|
| At a certain point that may be effective but we were not at that
| point.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's fairly obvious but surprising coming from HBR.
|
| If you're in a leadership position, you generally get there by
| being a subject matter expert, a professional manager (ie money
| person) or an attorney.
|
| Being able to walk a mile in someone's shoes means a lot.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Plenty of previous discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13481218
| mgh2 wrote:
| It is interesting to see new perspectives though, I am glad HN
| allows this after some time. Time changes everything.
| w0mbat wrote:
| I think there is actually a U-shaped curve here.
|
| Working for an expert engineer is fun because their expectations
| are in line with reality, and they don't compel you to solve
| problems in stupid ways or in the wrong order, because they know
| how things should work. In any case they understand when to help
| and when to delegate to you.
|
| Working for a bad engineer is the worst. They criticize smart or
| elegant solutions because they differ from the stupid way they
| would have done it. They try to dictate how everything is done
| because they think they know how, when all they really know is
| how to fuck things up.
|
| Working for a smart person from a completely different discipline
| is fun. Say if you are programming CGI special effects for a
| movie director. They have respect for your different expertise
| and defer to you when needed. They find joy in your work because
| to them it's a kind of magic. They don't tell you to solve
| problems in stupid ways or the wrong order because it's not their
| area. It's fun that they request impossible tasks sometimes,
| because working out how to get close to the impossible dream they
| are imagining is how you get to do your best most innovative
| work.
|
| Working for a inexperienced person from a different field is also
| fun. Although they don't know much, they know that, and won't
| dictate how your job should be done. They will still have
| appreciation of your expertise. They probably have unrealistic
| ideas about how long things take, and what is possible, but as
| long as they are willing to be guided, the project can still turn
| out OK. Their lack of knowledge of what's possible or how things
| normally work often leads them to come up with crazy new ideas,
| and working out how to make those real is my favorite thing.
| ozzy6009 wrote:
| Xenophon (c. 430 - 354 BC):
|
| 1. "Leaders must always set the highest standard. In a summer
| campaign, leaders must always endure their share of the sun and
| the heat and, in winter, the cold and the frost. In all labors,
| leaders must prove tireless if they want to enjoy the trust of
| their followers."
|
| 2. "There is small risk a general will be regarded with contempt
| by those he leads, if, whatever he may have to preach, he shows
| himself best able to perform."
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