undefined | Better HN

0 pointsopportune3y ago0 comments

There are a lot of other factors at play:

A lot of less experienced employees don’t understand what managers do. There is also a certain personality I’d call “the geeky engineer” who thinks the same way.

Some things that are actually signs of an effective manager are hated by employees. Some individual employees for example need micromanagement or frequent manager involvement to make sure they don’t go off track, get stuck without telling anybody, or blow a time budget on something unimportant (eg a task is scoped at 2 weeks and they spend the entire first week playing with something speculative that may help).

A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage. And I don’t mean that the EM needs to be Staff-level necessarily.

Even a good manager is incentivized to do things that are globally suboptimal (empire building, overextending) for career growth. This is also true of ICs though.

Personally, I think the biggest problem is the EM hiring bar though. Where I work has high standards and is very selective when recruiting ICs, but it seems like all that goes out the window for external EMs. I do think EMs deserve high pay and to be incentivized to do good work, but that requires a hiring process that better distinguishes between good and bad EMs.

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

chw9e3y ago· 3 in thread

If your employee is blowing their time budget they are most likely either:

a) a bad employee who you should not try to micro manage to make effective but should just replace with a better employee

b) unaware of the context around the task and does not have aligned motivations with others to get this done quickly

If b - then a good manager should do a better job of figuring out how to develop the intrinsic motivation of the employee and find ways to align the incentives and motivations of management and employees better.

Trying to micro-manage to avoid employees doing things you don't want is putting a band-aid on the problem. In fact it's even worse because you're creating a bad work environment that will attract more sub-par employees who accept micro-management and will scare away the high-performing employees you so desperately desire. Eventually you have a bunch of micro-managing managers who themselves are being micro-managed and your company bloats to several multiples in size of what is actually required and efficiency is spiraling out of control.

opportuneOP3y ago

There is not necessarily a dichotomy between good and bad employees, and I’m certainly not saying every engineer should be micromanaged, but IME certain engineers require it to be able to perform well.

I think it should be applied on a case by case basis when necessary, and I’ve seen effective managers do this in the past. Anyway, the type of employee who requires this treatment often is precisely the one that least enjoys it, which is my original point.

phkahler3y ago

How about C - someone who sees a lot more at hand than a specific problem being worked and goes on tangents fixing issues management isn't aware of or doesn't understand. It's career limiting to operate this way, but is long-term better for the company.

esafak3y ago

These people deserve a better company, and should seek one. Or start their own.

kitsunesoba3y ago

> A lot of managers are both highly paid and truly bad. I think a lot of businesses don’t do as good of a job vetting EM hires as they do SWEs the EM will manage.

From my vantage point as an engineer it also seems like what qualifies as "good management" is hard to pin down because not only is it difficult to quantify in the first place, but it also varies between teams and organizations… a management style that worked in one team and company might fly like a rock elsewhere. If that's true, it'd make vetting managers challenging even if the business in question is trying to vet them as well as they do engineers.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse