Hacker News Reader

Comment by quake | Hacker News Reader

I started a job at a new company about 6 months ago after a stressful 20 months at my first real engineering job. I didn't know that I had one of these 'bad managers' until I had a good one. The difference between a manager that knows what they want, and know the product/environment over a manager that simply knows what they want in very broad strokes is staggering.

View on HN

All the good managers I've had share some characteristics: they don't micro manage, they tell you exactly what they want, they don't try and be your best friend and clearly establish themselves as a boss so you can honestly deal with each other, they are proactive so aren't waiting around for us to tell them we may be late, they can see for themselves delivery will be late well in advance, and they take responsibility for failure instead of trying to sell out everybody underneath them. It's always refreshing to deal with an honest manager that recognizes they hold the power. The wannabe best friend managers weasel around and are manipulative, a cancer in your team.

As an engineer, all the good managers I've had have had their hands in the tech in the present or the past. Really confuses me why companies hire externally for managers working directly with engineering. Knowing the tech makes a huge difference in managing expectations.

Because Engineering and Management are a completely different skill set, so most Engineers do not make good Managers.

It is true that engineering and management are a different skill set. However, why is it that we simply throw people into being managers, while we realize that even after 4 years of training and engineer is still highly inexperienced.

Management is a skill, and it can be taught. Why does nobody do so?

In a lot of places you do. One starts as a team lead, (which is kind of a journeyman manager where you can defer to the real manager) then might move to managing a subteam of 1-3 people, and then on to a full team.

But being an engineer (or at least a recent one) is a key part of engineering management. My favorite article about that:

https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...

The trouble is that managers with non technical background do not make good managers either. It is not like they would have some awesome impressive track record.

Most engineers don't make good managers until they get some good mentoring or training. They're not unmixable skills and it's not impossible for an engineer to become a good manager with time and dedication to that craft.

I completely agree most engineers suck at it though but I think that's because most companies promote engineers into management for lack of a better career path.

I'm not sure that's specific to engineering; I think most people in general might not make good managers

Then again, this can really make your manager suck too. If they have the “I’m a developer!” attitude but haven’t actually done any programming for a decade, they’ll waste a ton of your time with their outdated ideas rather than just being your manager.

Some examples?

Agree on all these points except I’d elaborate. I’ve seen managers go from good to bad by not realizing a key difference between management of junior and senior engineers. For junior teams you want a manager who tells you what they want, clearly, as you said. However with senior engineers the manager needs to ask their reports what to do. Key difference! You tell junior people what to do but you _ask_ experienced people what to do. That’s the only way to benefit from their experience.

It's also a good idea to pick the brains of your junior and mid-level people, you never know when they have some information that might change your plans. If they spend all day working on a single component and you spend all day in meetings, they are virtually guaranteed to know a lot you don't - the only remaining question is whether or not something they know impacts your plans, and the only way to know is to be proactive.

It's easy to get into an uncomfortable situation where a superior gives an order and it falls on a junior to slam the entire team's brakes because something they know was overlooked.

they tell you exactly what they want

Let me turn this around. I've run R&D at my startup for six years now. The #1 thing that sets apart a star engineer from an average one is the ability to work successfully during situations of incomplete information.

In other words, the star engineer already knows what to do, without me having to provide all the detail.

The subpar engineer is paralyzed by ambiguity; the excellent one thrives in it (provided the problem or objective is well defined).

If you're an R&D manager, you likely have much more latitude to rely on subordinates and not know what you want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com