[HN Gopher] It's easier to manage four people than one
___________________________________________________________________
It's easier to manage four people than one
Author : staccatomeasure
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-08-18 10:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (staysaasy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (staysaasy.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If your whole job is to manage one person, your real job title is
| probably 'personal assistant'. Of course, this inverts the power
| structure in hierarchical organizations, and it probably points
| to some kind of problematic internal organizational issue with
| the outfit.
| einpoklum wrote:
| A post which assumes that organizations must be run
| hierarchically. Why does a team of 2 people need to have one
| command the other?
| dymk wrote:
| I can take care of ten houseplants easily. I immediately
| overwater and kill a lone houseplant.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Get an easier houseplant to take care of.
|
| I have a peace lily and despite my best efforts to kill it
| through neglect, it is still here almost 4 years later, kicking
| and thriving.
|
| It survived being not watered for over a month, overwatered,
| cut in half [1] and being left outside in near-freezing
| temperatures accidentally for a week or so.
|
| 1. Cutting it half is actually the preferred propagation
| method, so it wasn't an intentional way to harm the plant.
| dymk wrote:
| The point is not that houseplants are hard to take care of.
| It's that neglecting them a little bit out of neccessity is
| actually good for them.
| antisthenes wrote:
| That sounds like a manager problem and not the houseplant
| problem.
| dymk wrote:
| Yes.
| wszfahwbwbaha wrote:
| You should say your point instead of tiptoeing around it
| dymk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's a very noisy tiptoe to mirror the headline of the OP
| almost exactly.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| if they can easily care for 10, why would you assume they
| need easier plants?
|
| their point was they love them to death. in my house, i
| prefer to keep fish because they do well with lots of
| attention. i don't keep the plants because i would over-water
| (over-love) and then kill them :( this is all half-joke,
| half-serious.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| >Note: mangers should be very invested in their report's success.
|
| I have never had this experience in my entire professional
| career.
|
| How does one arrive at such a privileged and pampered existence?
| Like... they treat you with dignity and respect? What sort of war
| crimes do I need to commit to get this kind of job?
| johnfn wrote:
| I mean... managers _want_ their ICs to do well and get
| promoted. It makes them look good, because they 're growing
| their own team. Most healthier organizations work this way?
| siva7 wrote:
| I've managed a team with only 2 reports. Wouldn't recommend it
| unless you're the founder/owner. In my experience the minimum
| size for managing a team should be 3 direct reports and not more
| than 9.
| nfhshy68 wrote:
| Been on a team of 10. Trainwreck.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| When you have a team that size you're looking for a couple of
| senior developers to act as mentors for the others. Often
| with the right people these relationships naturally develop
| but sometimes not.
| greedo wrote:
| Ha. I'm on a team of 23. And our manager expects us to all
| have roughly identical skills so we're interchangeable.
| Retirement can't come soon enough.
| dangus wrote:
| This should also mention as a generality that managers should get
| training and support from the organization.
|
| This, in my experience, almost never happens. Companies just
| assume you know how to be a good manager. They shouldn't make
| that assumption even for experienced hires, especially if they're
| looking to establish a specific culture.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Usually managers get trained in the bureaucratic processes of
| management but yes, there is usually no training in how to
| actually manage and often no mentoring either.
| thenoblesquid wrote:
| Even if they don't assume the manager is a good one, I think
| it's common to have cultures where first time managers are
| expected to just figure it out for themselves, because their
| manager had to do the same thing.
| kriro wrote:
| I think the key question here is...why manage one person. A one
| to one ratio of managers to "workers" seems completely rediculous
| to me. If you insist on one to one then assign a mentor, not a
| manager, at least if it's a technical domain and there's an
| option to assign someone that is not a pure manager.
|
| If you're ever assigned to manage a single person, it's better to
| go big picture and wonder if this is a reasonable way to run a
| company (imo). If a single person is working on a project that
| requires oversight that person should be senior enough to "manage
| themselves". If they are too junior, the team should be bigger
| (because it's important enough to require oversight). If it's
| oversight due to legal issues that's fine but then the management
| can be hands of and should basically spot check that everything
| is following said legal requirements.
|
| At least that's my humble opinion. I treat one on one manager to
| technical role relations as an organizational smell.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Small companies often have situations where a clearly distinct
| function/department goes from one person to two; where someone
| who wasn't really an individual contributor but running a
| separate thing alone now is managing a 'team of two' including
| themselves.
| twunde wrote:
| So this is primarily a problem with small companies, although
| you'll sometimes see it on teams when several people leave
| around the same time. The typical example is a non-VC backed
| small business, where a senior individual is hiring a junior
| person because that's all there's budget for at the moment.
|
| But yes, its absolutely an anti-pattern, because as you've
| pointed out junior hires do need more oversight and help. I've
| rarely seen the situation work out.
| toast0 wrote:
| I was a manager of one, and it's not even about junior or
| senior. My first report left (not because of me!), and my new
| report was much more senior, but I had a lot more managerial
| work to do because they didn't have the company knowledge and
| contacts to self-manage.
|
| Thankfully, I was relieved of managerial duties shortly there
| after. I had only agreed to manage in the first place because
| we were a team of 12 with one manager, and that was too many
| reports, so half the team got to manage the other half, and my
| initial report was self-sufficient (well, we kind of all were),
| add some new hires and report moves and manager:report numbers
| got better.
| Cd00d wrote:
| I was once put in the position of co-managing a single report.
| Two managers, one of them a first time manager, and a senior
| report - it was one of the hardest management experiences I've
| had. I was far easier to manage two parallel teams of 5 than to
| manage half of one person.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As somebody soon to be leading a small team, these were wonderful
| points beyond just the single report pitfall
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| However... as someone who is managing one person on a domain
| that I am not an expert in... It would be nice to have
| workarounds and not just point out "lol no, don't do this!".
|
| Sometimes you don't have a choice.
| Timpy wrote:
| I was once the sole report of a "senior developer", and the
| article nails every pain point that caused me to leave. His code
| had tons and tons of serious problems. The database was a mess;
| he insisted on storing multiple data points in a single column,
| querying the entire table, then regexing out the information he
| wanted in php foreach loops. This was because the database was so
| bad you couldn't join more than two tables without crashing it.
| He vetoed everything I tried to do to improve the codebase,
| really normal best practices. I read books and books and tried
| coming to him with sources on why we ought to normalize our data,
| or use prepared statements instead of the unreliable homemade
| sanitizer function he brewed up. He had been insisting for years
| that long load times were unavoidable. I was so frustrated with
| the situation that I didn't bother to help him save face when I
| fixed everything with a couple of indexes.
|
| I spoke my grievances to the owner who listened with open ears,
| but he told me directly that it was hard for him to know what to
| do because it was outside his field of specialty and the senior
| dev had more experience and a long tenure at the company. I
| appreciated his honesty, and started job hunting immediately. I
| only worked under that senior dev for 7 months.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _he insisted on storing multiple data points in a single
| column, querying the entire table, then regexing out the
| information he wanted in php foreach loops._
|
| This is not a senior developer, this is a [bad] intern who has
| two months of experience 60 times. Although now I see you have
| senior dev in quotes and maybe that's why!
| dvtrn wrote:
| _he told me directly that it was hard for him to know what to
| do because it was outside his field of specialty and the senior
| dev had more experience and a long tenure at the company._
|
| This is what lead me to leave what was otherwise one of the
| most fulfilling jobs I'd ever had working as an engineer for a
| B Corp that provided tech consulting exclusively to non-profits
| humanitarian organizations.
|
| Loved the mission, appreciated the leadership team, but
| absolutely loathed the this one developer on my team. So did
| the rest of the team.
|
| Guy went through a divorce and became the worst kind of person
| imaginable. The engineering director suddenly retired due to a
| life-threatening medical condition, and this fella made it his
| mission to usurp as much power as he could. Pretty soon people
| started leaving the company because of the guy, leaving me and
| the other juniors as the only people behind.
|
| Guess who was made the new engineering director. His code was
| fine and performant but he was an absolutely miserable, awful,
| truly rage-filled person but those open ears when anyone tried
| reporting up just happened to be attached to the same body that
| would shrug and point to his seniority and tenure as a means to
| not do anything about it.
|
| He's still there. I can see his picture on the company about
| page to this day. Everyone else is smiling jovially and he's
| literally, actually, I'm not kidding you scowling at the
| camera.
|
| And I'm still remiss because aside from that and that alone, I
| really enjoyed what I was doing there.
| feoren wrote:
| I cannot imagine what causes company leadership to see a
| whole team fall apart in short order, with _everyone_ saying
| it 's the fault of this one person, and the leadership
| shrugging and going "no way to know!". It's the absolute
| height of lazy, awful leadership.
| snapetom wrote:
| I was a very junior dev when I worked for a huge health
| insurance company, I was placed under a senior dev to learn JSP
| and Java Servlets using an internal app. I quickly ran through
| a book on JSP to prepare for the project.
|
| When I get there, the guy had already written one page of the
| app, and he did it by doing System.out.println in the servlet
| for ALL THE HTML. In other words, he didn't use JSP templates
| at all.
|
| System.out.println("<html>"); System.out.println("<head>");
| System.out.println("<title>This janky ass code</title>");
|
| I looked at that abomination and said, "This isn't JSP at
| all...." He rambled on about sometimes in a project, we just
| need to get things done with the tools we knew, etc. etc.
|
| I went to our boss and told him I wasn't learning JSP, which
| was the mandate of the company back then. He just kind of
| smirked and said, "Yeah, that sounds like Ken. He knows
| programming, though, blah blah blah."
|
| 2nd worse boss I ever had, the dev was a lunatic, and that
| company was a joke.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Are you serious? You're not exaggerating?
| snapetom wrote:
| As a heart attack.
|
| Guy was a trip. So many stories about that guy, many of
| them very disturbing. Even worst was the manager that let
| him get away with that shit. These were the days when
| technical managers weren't a thing. He had an accounting
| degree and he managed engineers. I, a junior dev, spent
| about 40% of my time explaining basic things to the guy.
|
| Joke of a company.
| agumonkey wrote:
| were they large ? I'm curious about the amount of money
| wasted through them :)
| mateo411 wrote:
| Somebody should tell this dev about StringBuilder. Think of
| the productivity and servlet performance improvement!
| justforaskin wrote:
| A friend of mine lost his mind on a JSP that was doing too
| much. In protest he printed it out to paper multiple cubicles
| with the content.
| cpursley wrote:
| Yikes. Sounds like you at least leaned a whole lot!
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| If you manage one person you get all the overhead of managing
| people but only the productivity of one person. Same for
| offshoring. My company has people in India so we often get one or
| two persons added to the team. This produces enormous overhead
| due difficulty of communication over a 12h time difference but we
| still get omit the work of two people. It would be way more
| efficient to have ten people there so the overhead is worth it.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >This produces enormous overhead due difficulty of
| communication over a 12h time difference
|
| I refuse to do it again / anymore.
|
| I've been asking for contractor's actual working hours before
| assuming a 9-5 time schedule in their timezone, then looking at
| actual working hours of overlap. But no matter what, I
| absolutely require 3-4 hours of overlap a day. I'm DONE with
| the one round-trip communication per day routine.
| pojzon wrote:
| Im currently in such situation.
|
| Our team in central EU and second team in US. 8h difference.
| We learn about everything last and have nothing to say. One
| sync on manager level per day. Cant get anything done well.
|
| Already filled papers to quit.
| needs wrote:
| On the other hand in my current company we have people from
| all over the world: US, EU, Africa, Asia and Australia.
|
| Everything is asynchronous, flat hierarchy, only seniors
| hired as freelancers though, so quite autonomous people.
| Two dev syncs per week, fine if you skip one for whatever
| reason. One single manager for 10 people. It works quite
| well.
|
| For me this is remote working done mostly well.
| etempleton wrote:
| Managing one person becomes hard because neither manager nor
| subordinate have a comparison point. Particularly because in
| these scenarios the subordinate is new to the working world and
| the manager is new to managing. They are both the best and worst
| employee/ mangager either have ever had and they have no context
| to know which is true.
|
| The truth becomes more clear in later in both individuals
| professional journey. I can look back early in my career and
| realize I had a terrible 1:1 manager, but thought it was me. I
| can also look back on a time I managed an employee 1:1 and
| recognize where I could have been better.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I don't get all the negative comments about 2 person teams. It
| happens in small companies and startups. You bring a domain
| expert and you also hire a junior or less senior person. And
| sometimes you don't even need to hire more, the team can be super
| productive or the projects are as many as required for a team of
| 2.
|
| Personal anecdote: I have done it twice as a manager and had
| great experience and collaboration both of the times (at least
| this is my take in both of them). The key is to not see yourself
| as a manager but more like a mentor and equal contributor to the
| projects. It also requires great communication skills and
| openness, as well as taking as many opportunities for new
| projects and cross team collaborations as possible, in order to
| not alienate the team as well as make the direct report feel that
| he can grow with you. Of course it happened that no bad
| experiences or bad hires happened in both my cases, but tbh i
| suspect the consequences would be small as small team usually
| means small projects. I have seen worse cases from bad hires, or
| bad collaborators in larger teams and way larger projects, which
| can also deteriorate the morale in more people and teams.
| roflyear wrote:
| Yes. I am actually a proponent of the sith kind of management
| style. You work with your boss. You work with your report. He
| works with his report.
|
| I own a 4 person company. That is how we work. My clients talk
| to me (and sometimes my report -we don't isolate) I talk to my
| report about internal stuff and he decides if his report should
| be involved. Highly productive.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Additional idea: there is a different relationship between worker
| and manager, and between (manager) and (manager of managers). If
| upper level manager has a worker as a report, I doubt he will be
| able to handle this in the same fashion as mid level manager.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| What does "managing" mean ?
|
| I am not trying to be argumentative. But there are a lot of
| arguments in this thread basically going straight past each other
|
| My two cents are
|
| - user proxy (product manager)
|
| - standards enforcer (linter)
|
| - resource gatherer (arguing for resources from other managers)
|
| - political actor / representative
|
| - mentor / coach
|
| Now, most of not all of these are _also_ things everyone says one
| should do for one 's own career.
|
| I am just wondering, what do most managers bring to the table
| other than neat hierarchy drawings? Is it basically a nice coach
| like role?
|
| How much power should a coach have?
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| My manager has ~14 reports. We're all on different projects every
| quarter and my manager knows nearly nothing about any individual
| project.
|
| I see arguments for essentially the same problems from the
| article:
|
| - Managers aren't reliant on the feedback or success of
| individual reports. >80% of people will always give positive
| feedback. - Managers don't give feedback or help resolve
| problems. It's effort on their part with no upside. - We're all
| still isolated because there is no consistent team. - No one has
| context. Managers can't understand 10+ projects.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech. We have
| the same structure. But we don't have that problem. It's up to
| us to be able to describe a project, create documentation and
| artifacts, seek customer feedback, etc and prepare a "promo
| document". I approach each 1 on 1 like a miniature interview
| where I describe my projects in STAR format.
|
| I solve problems by working with my project managers. But
| mostly, I can deal with the customer myself when it comes to
| tactical issues.
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| There is a sweet spot of amount of reports, where a manager is
| able to handle the projects and the performance of the
| individuals -- once you hit the 8 people mark, you should be
| looking in to splitting the team up - the manager could
| delegate and mentor a jr manager to take on a part of the team,
| etc. But 14 is too much.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Co-author of OP here, cool to see this post come up again.
|
| An even more challenging situation that I've seen since is the
| 1-1-1 management system (manager manages 1 person, who in turn
| manages another). When that arises, you really need to fix it as
| soon as possible, either by rearranging, or hiring people to
| spread the number of reports.
| cardanome wrote:
| I am currently the last leaf of an 1-1-1-1 management system,
| it is absolutely insane.
|
| I just don't get the why. I guess it is some career driven
| insanity, everyone wants to be a manager.
| mateo411 wrote:
| Try to have a good attitude about it. You are the base case
| in an inductive proof!
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Yeah that's brutal. The legendary Human Centipede Org Chart.
| Good luck..
| justinlloyd wrote:
| A couple of jobs back I was in a 2-1-19 with me in the
| middle, where in a very short timeframe it became a 5-1-1,
| with still me in the middle. It was Hell on Earth and I
| couldn't bail out fast enough.
|
| Short story: RTO in pandemic due to executive fiat, team
| revolts, HR fires everyone, I quit two weeks later.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| And this pattern gets compounded across organizations. CEO has
| many reports, those reports have 1-2, who all have 1 report
| down a chain.
|
| Nothing gets done, everyone gets blamed.
| rdtwo wrote:
| That's the worst you get to give status updates to 3-layers
| of manager stating from the most senior to most junior.
| endlessvoid94 wrote:
| Just wanted to say that the stay saasy blog is terrific. It
| makes me really wonder who you folks are. 90% of organizations
| just suck at everything you write about, so you must have some
| great experience.
|
| Anyway, thanks for all the great content.
| asplake wrote:
| On that recommendation, subscribed!
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I know this might sound crazy but we're actually ex-Theranos.
| The miniseries was all lies.
|
| (thankfully joking)
|
| Thanks for reading! We've definitely made our share of
| mistakes too, but Stay SaaSy has been a helpful way to
| organize the thousands of tips that we've learned across many
| stages of growth. Really glad that you've found it helpful!
| roflyear wrote:
| I disagree. I think the 1-1-1-1 can work very well.
| eweise wrote:
| I was given a single report once. Then a couple months later I
| was told to fire him. Apparently that's the reason I was given
| the report. Mgmt sucks.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed with article; the 4th point around context is almost
| universally true - to put it another way, you cannot make a bell
| curve with a single data point. It becomes difficult to
| accurately evaluate how well a single person is doing. Yes, there
| are some absolutes, but underneath most seeming absolutes ("this
| is how long it should take to accomplish activity X", "this is
| the minimum acceptable quality for product Y"), lies experience
| and statistics. ~four people is a good starting size as you can
| more accurately plot how well people are doing, _and_ how well
| you are doing as a manager.
| victor9000 wrote:
| This is why I'm reluctant to consider Founding Engineer roles.
| It doesn't matter how well you do, how much benefit you bring
| to the team, or how much value you create for the company. Most
| founders are first-time managers and will have absolutely no
| context for how to measure your productivity.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the 4th point around context is almost universally true - to
| put it another way, you cannot make a bell curve with a single
| data point. It becomes difficult to accurately evaluate how
| well a single person is doing.
|
| I've always been confused about the terrible reputation of
| "stack ranking" for roughly this reason. What other kind of
| ranking is there?
|
| You can rate people according to metrics that have been
| established for the task they're doing, but the nature of
| software is that when a task has been done once it doesn't need
| to be done again.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think we are in agreement, but if we try to play devil's
| advocate to ourselves :)
|
| There are tasks you can conceivably determine some
| thresholds:
|
| You pick up 10 bushels of apples a day, you "meet
| expectations". You pick up 15, you "Exceed expectations". You
| pick up 5, you "need to improve".
|
| But again, I will make an argument that these are curved as
| well, it's just that curving was done previously and on large
| data sets.
|
| You can establish seemingly absolute criteria in software -
| from seemingly hard numbers (line of code, programs deployed,
| tickets closed, IRs in prod after deployment, etc) to softer
| numbers (are your comments good, is your code maintainable,
| etc). But again... how do you come up with these numbers?
| Either you make them up, in which case they'll have to be
| adjusted based on reality of your actual developers, or
| they're based on previous experience, in which case it's the
| reality and curve of previous developers.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > You pick up 10 bushels of apples a day, you "meet
| expectations". You pick up 15, you "Exceed expectations".
| You pick up 5, you "need to improve".
|
| > But again, I will make an argument that these are curved
| as well, it's just that curving was done previously and on
| large data sets.
|
| Yes, that's what I was saying. But that doesn't work in
| software because the job cannot be standardized (or rather,
| to the extent that the job _can_ be standardized, it can
| also be immediately automated and therefore ceases
| requiring any employees).
| greedo wrote:
| Stack ranking sucks because it's extremely difficult to
| evaluate performance in IT other than broad company wide
| goals. Determining which developer had the greatest impact is
| a fools game. Determining which sysadmin was responsible for
| five 9s of uptime, on and on. Too many people are good at
| gaming any metrics you set up.
|
| So what happens is the manager throws up his hands and
| evaluates you based on intangibles; how nice you are to him.
| How many people complain/praise you. How much friction people
| assign to working with you. All vague and all completely
| orthogonal to your true performance and value to an
| organization.
|
| As contributors figure this out (usually around year 5 or
| earlier unless they're socially clueless), they learn how to
| game this as well. "Managing up." Promoting themselves
| whenever possible, deflecting blame, avoiding risky projects
| that could tarnish a reputation, and for those with a
| Machiavellian mindset, sabotage coworkers.
|
| And while some managers might be able to detect this
| behavior, most in my experience don't. Most enjoy the
| flattery, and since they're usually not technical, or not
| versed in current technology, defer to whomever sounds the
| most authoritative.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| > has been done once it doesn't need to be done again.
|
| _incoherent angry mumbling_
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Why wouldn't you simply have the singleton report roll-up to the
| next level? Something has to be incredibly wrong with the
| organization for this kind of stuff to happen, surely?
| s1k3 wrote:
| Can happen in flux. But also the higher up may not have the
| expertise to manage the person from a day to day. It probably
| matters more for mid level employees where there is still hand
| holding but also some depth of expertise.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| The most common situation is that you have a new manager who's
| building their team. This is easily fixed (keep hiring).
|
| Next most common situation is that someone wants to be a
| manager, and the company wants to support that purely for
| career or employee happiness reasons. This is where you're more
| likely to end up in an awkward situation.
| antipaul wrote:
| Does it make sense to ever have less than 3 reports?
| siva7 wrote:
| If one goes on vacation or leaves the company, your team falls
| easily apart. That's why a team of less than 3 reports +
| manager is an anti-pattern.
| fatjokes wrote:
| Is it really not uncommon for a manager (even a new one) to
| manage a singleton? That has always felt like an antipattern to
| me. On my team I would not mint a new manager unless they had at
| least 2-3 reports.
| dogleash wrote:
| It's not uncommon, weird, or counterproductive when there is a
| team of two and one is the other's direct report. The problems
| arise when the manager treats the situation with more hierarchy
| than the situation warrants.
|
| Think about it like if a small company's accounting department
| grows to need two people. One position being above the other in
| the org chart is fine, but don't expect much stratification in
| the roles. They're basically splitting the work but one person
| is also representing/responsible for the department to the rest
| of the company.
|
| Accounting is an easy example, because it's pretty clearly an
| isolated discipline. It's also possible that there is
| specialization that needs a 1-over-1 managerial relationship
| elsewhere in org chart. But it runs more risk of being a
| ladder-climber taking their first step and cocking it up by
| acting like there is a non-trivial amount of stratification
| between them and their report.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Overlooked: managing 4 people confers more authority and
| subordinates are more likely to be cooperative.
| riversflow wrote:
| Bingo. Not trying to bring gender into this, but I've
| specifically seen father-son teams work really well on many
| occasions.
| eric4smith wrote:
| One reason is that it's a part time job to manage one and a full
| time job to manage 4.
|
| Generally people put a part time job on the back burner and focus
| on the main full time job.
|
| Just speaking from experience.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's true. That's why is m against people with a 30%
| allocation on my team. Projekt Managers think you can just
| split a person's work into parts but when somebody is allocated
| at 30% tk you, you actually get way less performance.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What about 50/50 in non overlapping skills/experience, eg:
| windows sysadmin and mobile app dev ?
| ilc wrote:
| 50/50 is a lie.
|
| For the person working it, both sides often expect priority
| or "more" than 50%.
|
| When someone wants to 50/50 me, I tell them, 51/49 is fine.
| But there must be a clear priority when there's a conflict.
|
| Strangely, when I do this, the urge to 50/50 me usually
| goes away. I have nothing against working 2-4 projects. But
| there must be clear priorities, or I must be able to set
| them.
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| My math is usually that splitting somebody into
| percentage allocations reduces their total productivity.
| So 50% + 50% results in 50% total productivity.
| 30+30+30=30.
|
| The only time this can work if the person knows their
| work really well and can do it in their sleep. Otherwise
| the context switches are way too much for most people.
| idiocrat wrote:
| There could be a point of an economy of scale, which is not
| explicitly mentioned in the article.
|
| While I can "come by" managing just one person (cutting the
| managerial corners), for 4 persons I need to organize myself
| more efficient.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > Generally people put a part time job on the back burner and
| focus on the main full time job.
|
| And if "people" was only the manager in question that would be
| somewhat okay, but usually it's the reporting chain above of
| that person that thinks the same too.
|
| I made the mistake of accepting to manage an intern (not
| mentor, manage) once, and I was expected to do 100% of my
| normal job on top of managing him. It takes an unbelievable
| amount of time.
| FrankWilhoit wrote:
| The ease or otherwise of management depends entirely upon the
| local notion of what "management" is. This varies widely, but
| usually consists largely of somebody's hobbyhorses, unrelated to
| pragmatic considerations.
| liberalism wrote:
| There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not
| bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not
| protect...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-19 23:01 UTC)