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Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

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I developed and managed a team of professional services consultants and I have the opposite view. Teammates who needed me to explicitly tell them what to do are ok if they’re interested in growing beyond that but not otherwise. Ideal team members would see problems coming down the track, identify a solution, implement it, and brief me before I heard about it from someone else. If I thought their solution was not workable, I have a window to redirect them. If not, they solved a problem and I make a note so I can help them get promoted later.

Granted my PS practice ain’t no Google, but subordinates who require direct instruction for any longer than it takes to get comfortable are for the birds.

I'm currently in a similar situation by the sound of it.

There's an ebb and flow of inbound projects, and one of the engineers has taken advantage of his down time by building out infrastructure and reusable platforms. He pauses that and resumes paid work for clients as they come. I love it - he gets a lot of satisfaction out of building what he thinks we'll need without explicit deadlines, and consults me and his direct manager as necessary. His work is inspiring the more junior engineer on the team to learn and work more creatively and productively. That frees me up to establish better relationships with our Sales and Success teams to bring us new and better clients, which in turn increases their close rates. With the right people and environment, you can create a positive feedback loop that is fairly self-sustaining.

I believe it’s a two way street.

Employee can’t be a mushroom in the corner waiting to be told what to do.

Also, Manager can’t be incompetent and _only_ rely on employees to figure out what to do.

Both need to be proactive - employee in being interested in growing and manager in providing direction and interested in employed growth.

I'm not sure I agree. If I'm paying you nearly half a million a year as a US FAANGish senior engineer, I'm not going to have much patience for the excuse that "my manager didn't find enough high-value work for me to do". Compensation like that, to me, implies a higher degree of ownership and responsibility.

If you're a junior engineer, or sitting somewhere on the left-hand peak of the bimodal software engineer compensation curve [0], then sure, I'd expect your manager/PM/TL to slice up some reasonably high-impact work for you to take care of. Otherwise, bug PMs for ideas. Learn the basic shape of the organization you work in. Draft some one-page proposals and pitch them.

Don't expect to get paid like a heart surgeon just for crushing well-scoped React feature requests.

[0] https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

Yeah. I've never had that sort of comp but for long stretches of my career I've largely charted my own path. While my first manager in my current job and I always got along very well, he traveled a lot, I traveled a lot, and I never expected much in the way of specific direction. If I had a question I asked him.But we largely did our own things under a general umbrella. Probably atypical but I was hired pretty atypically as well. (Basically a position was created for me.)

> Expecting ICs to "find something and kill it" signals desperation

Ugh. Way to misrepresent GP. Table stakes for strong engineers is to be able to proactively find and solve problems in products (among other things.) Of course, they'll need the support of the larger organization, managers, PMs, etc., but they're are not just a bunch of drones that take orders.

If you want management to tell you explicitly what to do, expect management to be paid MUCH more than you. And if it's explicitly not your job, hopefully you never question or disagree? (And yet... if your management is expected to make all the calls themselves, in practice, that's gonna risk getting it wrong more frequently - there's only so much time in the day to be fully up to speed on all the decisions and branch points in plans.)

Complexity is fractal, you can often find important solutions to important problems as an individual without needing to be "crowdsourcing the direction of the company."

Good individuals who can let their managers focus on organizational things and solve technical things are valuable. Otherwise, if you just execute a list of tasks, you're pretty interchangeable.

No decent manager on the planet thinks that they know everything that needs to be done.

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