The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").
The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical arguments, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."
If you're coming from a technical role, understand that your new job is not to be an engineer. If you're lucky and are good enough at your new job that you have some spare cycles, you might get to guide some architectural discussions
It can be rewarding to help guide a team towards something you could never accomplish alone, but you must resist the temptation to step and do "do things".
Disclaimer -- I moved up to a director-level position and realized within a year that to be good at it I would probably not be able to continue expanding my technical skills, at least not on company time. I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports. The minutia of actual line management wasn't bad as long as there was a good team, but I definitely underestimated the people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics that goes along with being a good manager.
Well, that sounds pretty slick. How's it working out? As someone who was just approached by management about a director position, and this being somewhat familiar ground, I'm concerned about the lack of expansion and technical progression as well. Haven't really seen many "no direct reports" situations in my neck of the woods, unfortunately... but it seems like that could be something to aspire for.
This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.
I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.
There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.
I don't know how to contact you, so if you ping me at [0] or [1] I can send you a link to my resume. Thanks!
edit: I'm a big dum-dum – it was quite easy to find your Fb profile, I sent you my resume there (check 'Other' messages). :)
0: https://plus.google.com/+AndreiSimionescu
1: my username at gmail
One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.
"Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be
prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
time they perform that action, and expect it to be
performed in that way until otherwise instructed."
Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.
PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D
I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.
After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.
Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.
Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.
It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.
One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.
It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.
I know turnover in engineering is usually high (if people are moving around every 18 months to 2 years)... but 600%?
Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.
Really this translated into me taking a long time to understand what the priorities of the business were vs the development priorities. Definitely let's of stuff I would consider typical first time manager mistakes.
Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.
The grandparent poster slots neatly into the model as a loser selected by a psycho to be promoted to clueless just long enough to absorb the blame for something. After the misdirection, the clueless is discarded, along with any losers that may have attached too strongly. The situation was designed to terminate in failure, as a reset button, so that the psycho in charge could turn a few clicks on his career ratchet.
Your title doesn't impact your role on the team. You can easily make a big impact as a leader, without the people management aspect.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and better for morale to hire a couple of temps to do the data entry?
It is clear from what you have said that your people were overworked, deadlines were not reasonable and there were not enough proper employees. Yet management persisted with their existing paradigm and you got to be the one that bore the bad news to everyone so they all resented you.
The best you can do in that situation is exit. Which it sounds like you and others figured out.
Sleep well knowing you cared about the people and the results, it was upper managment that did not. They cared only about the money.
As a side note, I hear this excuse a lot, about how money will be lost if we don't do this bad thing or that. Money is brief, setting up the proper business practices is long term. Sure, there are temporary situations that require extra effort... but they are obvious and temporary.
At the end of the day, the dev team pulled through and got product out the door, warts and all. This then enabled sales and other teams to get more clients on board and paying, which actually saved the company.
put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.
Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.
Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.
I learned from a superb mentor Laurie Litwack who was a great program manager at microsoft that you should learn about each of your reports "heart, tree, star".
heart: what do you love? tree: what / where do you want to grow? star: how do you feel rewarded?
especially in an environment where you can juggle awards, this can be really helpful, if someone values a bonus and someone else values titles & public recognition, you can balance them out and make everyone happy. and hit a budget. ideally...
I'm still stuck at 'training'.
"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.
The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.
The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.
Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.
The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.
If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.
I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:
"What is good general management advice?"
But the question that was asked is:
"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"
A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,
"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."
For example,
"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."
[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]
Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?
I think that making available a number of paths for growth is certainly a good thing. I expect there are size limits on such a structure - either for the company as a whole or the extent of the company that gets to experience that track.
This is something I'm very curious about - small companies which have managed to keep their employs happy, well-paid and continuously growing (as individuals).
>'Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?'
I doubt there's ever truly a single source for manager failure, but if I had to bet on the most significant variables in failing in a typical situation I'd say:
* Promotion Beyond Competence:
Happens for all sorts of reasons - nepotism, stereotyping, political maneuvering (puppet appointments), adherence to tradition and many more.
However it happens, the person is not properly equipped for the role, in the worst case it's to such a degree that they don't recognize how far they fall short.
* Lack of Ambition / Urgency:
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, don't fix it. There's too much risk. No reason to rock the boat and jeopardize a steady, comfortable paycheck.
* Unmanageable People:
I expect lots of people have never worked for a good manager of any measure. That bad experience makes them utterly certain that anyone who isn't 'in the trenches' 100% of the time useless - a drain on their productivity.
So, once the good one comes along - the one who will make him/herself an impenetrable human bullshit shield for 98.6% of every day in exchange for a 5 minute status report - they refuse to offer up that barest minimum.
A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.
Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.
I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.
Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.
Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.
And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.
Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.
As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.
Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.
Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.
Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.
If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.
I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.
Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.
The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.
edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.
That was us. Maybe we should make the software do it?
In other news is anyone else still put off by the site even when it isn't all blurred? Its kinda weird I still get a gut rench feeling looking at their logo. They got a ways to go I guess.
More seriously, thanks, sometimes they are useful and the share hack will come in handy.
Delegation: (usually the first failure I see) http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html
And the rest: http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html
Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.
Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.
So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.
At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.
@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?
It is also not enough to just talk about the day-to-day. The 1:1 is not a smaller standup meeting. Just because there is "nothing on your plate" does not mean you skip the 1:1.
I generally prepare by reviewing notes from previous meetings and any goals that we have set together. Also bring a number of questions about company direction, transparency, colleagues, etc. Over the course of many 1:1s I can build a pretty comprehensive understanding of what makes this person tick and how they feel about their work and colleagues.
What I've found is that its a good indicator of when I need to launch a new job search.
Under good management, I usually don't feel the need to share a list like this. If I do, then I can usually have a 5 minute chat with the manager to get things worked out. If that doesn't work, a longer discussion can be in order.
Under bad management, I usually feel like any attempt at change is more likely to hurt me than help me. I once took the risk of sharing the netflix culture slide deck [0] (a quick and insightful must read) with a manager. His response was that, if I was attracted to that sort of culture, then maybe I should get a job at netflix. Fail. You can probably guess at the number of management discussions we had after that.
A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.
I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.
Cheers!
From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:
Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.
Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.
Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.
I'm facing this argument right now, and it's unclear to me on what my manager's opinion on this is. I'd rather not trade quality. While I agree with the quoted answer, I can't think of a good argument to back it up, and the answer doesn't provide one. Can someone give something more concrete here, especially something more concrete than, "well, a weak hire will cost you more in training / patience / bringing them up to speed / constant mentoring"? (or is that really the argument?)
There's a lot to write here.. but above seem important to me dealing with problematic manager.
This attitude could potentially backfire. It can lead to a closed-loop that eventually results in dishonesty to meet unattainable numbers. Better to plan growth empirically and adjusting for things like regression to the mean at the team and company level.
It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes.
When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your team. They are worth it.
Lately I have felt the desire within me to lead, or to create employment for others as I see so many of my peers selling themselves short, slaving away for terrible managers who have no idea what managing is.
I'm grateful to see you and others in this thread who approach management with a 'what can I do for these people' attitude. Do you have any advice for a young guy like me who one day wants to be one of the 'good managers' or hire people under me but has zero management experience so far?
I'm thinking it might be good for me to run workshops or hackathon projects or short-term commitments to limit my faults so if I make a mistake it's over soon and I can reflect on it and do better next time. Do you think a lot of short-term projects would be like management training speed-dating, or is there a better way to work on these skills?
Then, listen to people, understand where they are at, offer something which means that they develop personally. Make sure everyone is really clear on what you are trying to achieve and then give them the rains to lead and achieve that together. My product development teams have a very strong idea of where we are going with the products and they do 95% of their work without any input from me.
Again, listen to people. Attend meetings, not to control things but essentially keep your ear on the ground for issues or friction then resolve it quickly with the person in focus. Also I attend meetings to inform people on what is going on in the rest of the organisation.
We run a very open organisation, so we discuss budgets and how we approach things very openly. Open discussions about how we are expanding are important. One effect of this is that we have very little in the form of politics in the organisation.
A lot of this can sound like clichés, and it is, if you don't do it well and with people in your focus. The organisation we run is there to support a great group of people doing great things. Not the other way around.
You have to hire good people that you can trust to do the job, up front. Then you have to trust them to do the job. It's as simple as that.
Not delegating.
Not working through others.
Not managing a group's resources.
Promoting one's self while failing to support one's boss.
Appropriating others' work as one's own.
Not growing relationships with other groups in a non-protective, non-clique, non-silo'd way.
Following, rather than questioning, organisational policies (i.e. not managing upwards).