In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try.
In a large company, management is essential to the adversarial system. Workers can and should take advantage of the company's inability to tell who is contributing. Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output.
The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things.
Promotions, raises, growth, performance reviews etc. is all a psyop to get you to stay for longer and do more work. It's about what you can negotiate, what that promotion would signal to your peers, how much of a flight risk you are. It's never to incentivize good choices concerning how to hone your craft, get rich, or do work you consider meaningful.
Have you ever had a good manager?
Assuming equally competent people, feedback from a senior peer is likely to not be as good as someone who's full-time job is to be a people manager. Good managers are very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of people in the team. Senior peers do not have to be aware of this and as a result, don't tend to be able to articulate these kind of things. They may be able to give good task-specific feedback, but holistic and personal feedback is difficult.
The median senior is just as poor at giving feedback as the median manager, and management in large companies isn't inherently adversarial. It's very environment dependent.
Yes, I have had managers that I consider to be good. But my definition of good is closer to "the person responsible for hiring and firing me, but otherwise leaves me alone" than the definition provided in the OP.
I have had managers who match the definition of good provided. It's clear these guys had read too many books and listened to too much Tony Robins. Being a dummy for their management-fu is draining, and every interaction gives NPC vibes.
The former got literally 10x more out of me than the later.
There is this bad meme going around that because managers are often technically incompetent, they must make up for it in some other way. There's no law of nature that says that must be the case. You can be lacking in many skills, and slip through the hiring process and into a manager role.
> The median senior is just as poor at giving feedback as the median manager
I didn't say feedback, I said advice. The advice I'm looking for might be how to understand a technology or technique, or how to negotiate a raise. Why would I seek either from someone technically incompetent who has to negotiate against me?
> There is this bad meme going around that because managers are often technically incompetent, they must make up for it in some other way. There's no law of nature that says that must be the case. You can be lacking in many skills, and slip through the hiring process and into a manager role.
I'm not sure why you are so focused on people who are clearly terrible. If they're technically incompetent, managerially incompetent and "slipping through" the hiring process they are obviously not good.
My managers have all been technically competent and brought enormous amounts of value to their teams. Providing structure, facilitating the creation of team processes and rituals, correctly dosing chaos and scope for each team member, shielding the team's focus, etc. They also all encouraged me to look around for other jobs and see what I am worth.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/you-havent-seen-greatness/
Being able to engage in personal feedback that cultivates fruitful relationships with their reports that make them happier and more productive is a nice-to-have. But ultimately a manager's responsibility is to the business, not their reports -- and sometimes what they need to do is implement whatever measures of process, control, or guidance the business demands and just cull the ones who don't get on board.
+1
> Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output.
I had friends whose company went from "high-performing small" to "large", and the way they described the transition was "we thought adding management was going to be like adding an internal skeleton, a structure that'd help get all the functional parts of the company pulling in the same direction. Instead it turned out to be like an exoskeleton, a carapace that served mostly to constrain and put hard limits on the functional parts of the company."
Obviously any organisation, at some point during growth (at least under the traditional VC model), has to convert from "high-performing small" to "large". My view of the goal of founders and early employees is to (a) spot when this transition occurs, and (b) have arranged to already be liquid. When the settlers outnumber the pioneers and the range is fenced in, it's time to ride off into the sunset.
On the other hand, I've been at small 20 to 30 person companies with several layers of management. Infact, at one, there were actually more "managers" than individual contributors. It's a big WTF.
A good manager supports your development, keeps an eye on the big picture (which is quite hard if you're working on the smallest unit of the company, e.g. code), and would also send you home if you work too much. Because time != productivity in general.
A promotion means flight risk? What?
Just a thought: If everyone else sucks, it can be time to look inward.
Contrary to your insinuation, everyone does not suck. I've been fortunate enough to work with talented engineers, sales people, VPs, CTOs, CEOs, and founders. I have never come across a talented person who was brought on as a manager. And not one of these talented individuals needed to be managed.
but aren't these also managers?
> Maybe yours included Not really, no. I'm a startup CTO and co-founder and don't consider myself a traditional manager. And, of course, my livelihood isn't endangered by a stranger on the internet ;)
It's not that I disagree, you know. It's the black-and-white smell the comment had. And at least for me it's not much about managing someone, but enabling someone. People are no machines. And most people aren't very good with the long term view in my experience. Be it less interest in what happens in the long run or just an attitude, that's what I noticed.
"Managing up" is a useful concept for how to interact with your managers. Post from a few years back that has useful sources: Design Patterns for managing up [0]. Hand in hand goes this Australian Gov't work book for Assertiveness:
> Assertiveness means expressing your point of view in a way that is clear and direct, while still respecting others.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939
1: https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-You...
I would not say I am trying to "manage up", but I am definitely trying to be a lot more active in my growth process. In the past I kept waiting for things to happen, and thought my manager would have all the answers. Now, I want to be an active part of that conversation and find the right path.
You will actually be helping them if you can package up "asks" in a way so that all they have to do is hit reply on an email, type "approved" and hit send. There's often an asymmetry between the value you get vs. the cost to your manager which you can exploit. For example, where I work they provide financial support for certain forms of further study (e.g. master's degree) in certain domains. If one of my direct reports sent me an email explaining they want to study X and the policy covers them studying X, here are the details etc. etc. I will say "approved" pretty much every time. The money doesn't come out of my budget anyway, so it's free additional remuneration frommy perspective. Heck, even when it is my budget I often don't care because it's not personally coming out of my own pocket, and we lose that money anyway once the next financial year ticks over, so better to spend it while we can. But if they just sit there quietly hoping that I'll one day come to them with an offer for them to do further studies in X, they're going to be waiting forever. I want to give my team members stuff but I've got 50 billion other things to content with so I don't have the time to plan their career for them. The worst are the people who think I'm their mother and they come to me with "I want this thing, now you go figure out how to do it for me." The thing is, I'm lazy: I like to do easy things, and I don't like to do hard things. And that request sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Easier to just say no.
So remember: (1) If you don't ask you don't get, (2) It's almost never my money anyway, and (3) If you make it easy for me to say "yes", I almost certainly will.
Any conversations about things going well, feedback, etc should always be framed as "am I getting closer to Senior?".
You really need to understand what the delta between where you currently are and where you are aiming for looks like, and make everything about closing that gap.
Many people do not even pass step 1, which is defining the delta with your manager. This can actually be fairly difficult, because it requires your manager to both understand your current level and have a strong understanding of what Senior looks like so they can explain the areas where you are lacking.
Once you have a delta you need to figure out what success looks like. If I'm currently bad at X, what does being good at X look like? Ideally you should be able to demonstrate and discuss progress between every 1:1. If you can't, your feedback loops are probably too short and it will take you a long time to improve.
I think SMART goals largely don't fit with skill growth, because operating at the next level is about learning new behaviours. They tend to be highly contextual, not specific. They do not tend to be measurable. They do not tend to be things that you can set timelines for, like "I will operate like X in 1mo". It's a holistic change in the way you function. Level matrices are extremely poor representations of the behaviours for each level. They tend to describe the outcomes of the behaviours, rather than the behaviours themselves.
Also, the reason this takes time is exactly because it's about learning new behaviours not following a checklist of things that Seniors do. You need time to make them habitual and build the intuition associated with them.
The other method is to quit, if you are actually better than your level but your company fails to acknowledge it for whatever reason.
I think when managers are made to outline a concrete path to the next level, a gradual level inflation may occur at the company. This is because a manager is never going to say “I don’t know” when you ask them this, even if they don’t know, and then they are forced to advocate for you to promo after you satisfy whatever they told you.
If they don’t advocate for you at that point, they end up looking like a terrible manager to you and anyone else you tell your true story to (including their own manager).
If the level inflation is not identified and accounted for, this can lead to a company collapsing via inept leadership from bad internal promotions.
Good managers understand what the shape of each level looks like, and companies that care calibrate levelling across orgs. Your manager advocating for a report who does not meet the bar doesn't work because it requires approval from more than just your manager.
In saying that, I think there is always going to be some title inflation and some level of playing the system. But I have found that people at higher levels do tend to be more competent and embody more behaviours associated with that level, though levels can get fuzzy above senior.
[0] https://commoncog.com/seeing-expertise-milestone-worth-aimin...
If there is peer input into the grading system, the ape brain social hierarchy judgements are being leaked into the leveling system (in a good way). If someone feels bad about the reviewee being at the new hierarchy spot they aren’t going to support the promo, regardless of what the candidate did. Of course the candidate doing things influences the ape brain judgement so it’s not as if these things are completely disconnected, it’s just not how it looks on the surface.
Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform really well and it won't get you anything. and sometimes you can perform mediocre and still get lots of promotions and bonuses.
and why do you really want to get a promotion? if you just want more money, the most effective way to achieve that is to look for another job. doing that, you'll get far larger raises far more quickly.
If you're ever down with not getting a promotion, just know that there are ways to think about it that might be constructive.
First time sharing anything I have written.
Lately I have been wondering about how to be managed properly. I feel like I have not gotten what I wanted out of my career.
This is my attempt at learning more about the subject, and sharing with people that are going through a similar struggle.
Hope that it is useful. :)
A manger inherently isn't your friend nor on your side, a mentor is.
It's straight up in the name: the goal of a manager is to remove your individuality from the perspective of the person above the manager. The manager is essentially an abstraction layer if you're looking at it from a software development perspective, so the caller doesn't need to worry about the implementation details.
Your manager can also be your mentor, but the manager can't mentor everyone they're managing. That's just impossible from a time perspective
Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful.
My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to learn what books and other resources they used to teach themselves management, then study what those books portray as the ideal employee. Your job is now to play the role of that ideal employee and set the stage for the manager to feel like the ideal manager. It takes a bit of restraint and the performance can feel fake at times, but as long as you play the role they want to see and you make it easy for them to play the role they think they should play, you're going to do well in their eyes.
At minimum, I suggest every employee read a couple books like the Manager's Path book linked in the article so it's easier to identify when weak managers are trying to implement things they read from a book. It's like a cheat code to navigating managers who outsource their thinking to books and try to reduce every situation to something they read or heard a podcast about.
In my last case, my manager read a book about all about how managers shouldn't solve problems for their employees, they should only give coaching for employees to solve their own problems. He went full cargo cult on that advice and literally stopped helping us get things done within the company. His only response to any issues we raised would be a long string of leading questions and coaching, but he refused to actually do anything. I fought this for a long time until he mentioned the name of the book, I read it, and I realized that I had to start making him think that he was coaching me to a solution whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job. It took some mental gymnastics, but after I unlocked his secret I became good at navigating around him to get things done.
This is exactly what a large number of managers (and corporate ladders) miss.
Managers (and layers above them) are given organizational authority - not merely to coach people, rate people, calibrate people - but to use the authority to solve problems of organizational type in their domain
As an example, if a project is running behind schedule:
- A poor manager tries to hide the real status and tries to PIP and manage reports on that project out.
- Whereas, a good manager tries to bring people together and understand how the team can handle this together, sometimes with borrowed staffing, sometimes with cut scope, sometimes with negotiation of timelines, sometimes with abandoning the project altogether.
An employee saying I'm not following what you want me to do. Sure sometimes an individual is just dumb as rocks, but when I hear anything along those lines my working assumption is that I as manager fundamentally fucked up. Things should fail at execution stage, not at me giving instructions stage.
...employees that just nod and walk away confused on the other hand...that's my textbook definition of failing to "Learning to be managed" because it fundamentally robs me as manager of the opportunity to fix an imminent trainwreck.
