[HN Gopher] Steve Jobs adopted no 'bozos' policy - best managers...
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Steve Jobs adopted no 'bozos' policy - best managers those who
never wanted job
Author : pg_1234
Score : 12 points
Date : 2024-02-25 21:48 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aol.com)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Steve Jobs was right. There are a lot of bozos in middle
| management and it seems that the Dilbert and Peter principle
| applies, but somehow in the sense that people are promoted to
| cause the most damage possible.
|
| At some companies, it is almost impossible to even raise concerns
| about a middle manager's performance. It should be much easier,
| especially if a group of people would rather work for one of
| their own than certain "bozos".
| johnny99k wrote:
| Well, my worst manager was a developer that got forced into it.
| He was passive aggressive, petty, and If I didn't initiate
| meetings with him, we would have no meetings with me at all (but
| sit there angry in silence about something I never asked about).
| I tried so hard to dance around his issues. He never stopped
| working or took vacations. If I took one (unpaid, I was a
| contractor), I would get passive aggressive comments for a week
| in our daily standups from him.
|
| The last straw was right before a pre-planned vacation (3 hours
| before, to be exact), he wanted me to merge our Jr developer's
| branch into mine. I merged it, and pushed it to the repo (not
| master or live, but backed it up to our repo server for when I
| got back).
|
| Another note here is that they refused to use Git. Didn't even
| know how to pronounce it correctly and stuck to his guns about
| SVN. We ran into merging issues constantly.
|
| When I was flying home, he sent me this nasty email saying that
| I'm not a 'senior developer' and that there were bugs in my code,
| etc, etc. A month prior to this, I was getting praise from the
| entire team and company bosses about a brand new extension I had
| written with no issues. He didn't want to hear that all of the
| bugs were incompatibility issues with the JRs code.
|
| One other issue I ran into frequently was that the original code
| base (which he wrote), was so buggy, I would need to fix 5-10
| bugs before I could even start working on a new feature. It was
| also filled with LOTS of security vulnerabilities, which were
| ignored. If I mentioned any of this in a constructive way, he
| would raise his voice in front of everyone at the meeting.
|
| All was good though. They finally let me go because they 'ran out
| of money' a few weeks after I came back from vacation. The
| company folded within 6 months. Since then, I've had the best
| manager and contract I've ever had in my career and 3X my money
| over night.
|
| Sometimes you need a shitty manager to appreciate the good ones.
| wavemode wrote:
| To be fair, though, this manager you're describing sounds like
| they were a very poor IC to start with. Whereas Jobs's claim is
| that exceptional IC's make for good managers.
| samspenc wrote:
| Not going to comment on the topic itself but ...
|
| aol.com - wow, it's been many years, the better part of a decade
| almost, since I've seen that domain or any content on it. Had no
| idea it was still around.
|
| Yahoo and some other domains that are from that time period still
| show up in search results, but I don't think I've seen aol.com
| articles in a long time now.
| mattl wrote:
| it's a republished article from fortune.com
|
| https://fortune.com/2024/02/24/steve-jobs-management-advice/
| jawns wrote:
| The places where I've seen the worst middle managers are:
|
| * VP hires a middle manager who's a bad fit, but VP doesn't want
| to admit it
|
| * A manager is promoted into a higher role primarily as a
| retention mechanism, rather than because a true business need
| exists
|
| * A manager is promoted into a higher role in an organization
| that rewards following processes over getting results
|
| * A middle-management layer used to be necessary, and has grown
| less necessary, but the org is reluctant to do away with it
|
| * There is a perceived need for the middle manager to prove
| themselves fast and hard both upward and downward, and there's an
| inherent conflict in how to do that
|
| None of these necessarily reflect the skills of the middle
| manager; rather, they represent organizational problems.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| A "working manager" usually has a higher chance of being a better
| manager. They are usually busy enough with their own work and
| they don't have enough time for the management stuff.
|
| A manager that only does management stuff? Well, what do you
| think they are going to do?
|
| Also, managers that aren't proficient in the field they are
| managing also doesn't usually work well and I thought was always
| disrespectful to the team.
|
| Obviously there are exceptions to the above.
| sph wrote:
| That's the same with politicians, isn't it? The best people to
| run a country are those that know what they are doing, but
| usually tend to have a serious paying job, while in practice most
| people in places of power are career politicians - inept and
| removed from the real world.
|
| The similarities of a company run by average MBAs and a country
| run by career politicians is a concept sadly not explored very
| much, for how topical and catastrophic it is.
| danjl wrote:
| The only management technique that works is not to have any. Keep
| companies small, below 50 people, and you don't need anyone with
| the title "manager". Instead of taking your best individual
| contributors and making them managers, as Jobs suggests, keep
| them as the leads. The problem is big companies, not how to
| manage people.
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