Ask HN: What are you missing from your management team and nearest leader? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you missing from your management team and nearest leader?

I am trying as a first shot here to gather information from you about what is missing from your management and leadership team. And what you as a software engineer would teach them if you had the chance. What would you change ? Why would you change it ?

I am doing so because I am in progress of validating an idea which should result in a course which is to educate engineering managers and leaders towards what I have come to terms with is a a field-experience based approach (fred brooks comes to mind) and what I call common knowledge for what my own expectations are from engineering managers.

What would you teach your manager about managing software developers and teams ?

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Here's the problems I face with my tech lead:

Lack of vision and lack of decisiveness. A "we'll cross that bridge when we get there" attitude for everything. No clue about the tech stack and no direction causes the programmers to, for lack of a better word, start working randomly, and it's no surprise the code will look like an ant colony. Bad design decisions go undetected, and when someone does bring them up, management has no clue what to do about it. In fact it is really too late by then.

There's a guy who is on the spectrum. Terrible communicator. But understands pretty much everything about our code.

There's a guy who doesn't understand shit, doesn't know software engineering terms, and feels the need to redo everything his way (so that he understands. He admitted so when I called him out).

There's a guy who gets shit done, but there's always a couple of issues with it that reveal themselves later that have to be iterated on, back and forth.

There's me, I need some central directives and direction. Right now the rewrite-guy is always breathing down my neck and second guessing the way I have my microservice set up, despite not understanding the external API problems I have to design around.

Would love a manager/tech lead that could actually just do something useful with this situation rather than faff about. The tech lead is present for all of this, and sees all of it happen, but never really interjects or involves himself. There's never resolution, unless you really push him for it.

You may want to read a book akin to “extreme ownership” (though I would recommend exactly that one) and help your tech lead solve these problems. If you want to stick to this job. You don’t have to have the title to work the solutions.

The freedom to fail.

When I compare software corporate leadership versus military leadership this is the thing that sticks out the most. In corporate software (at least in web dev) everyone is treated like a small child who needs their hands held and must be protected from themselves by a parent who pretends to care about their output. That is stupid.

Look, the only purpose of software is automation. If you want to impose a bunch of safety and sanity checks stop the bike shedding insanity and instead automate the shit out of it. As someone who has written a test automation application for the browser it isn’t hard, and yet it’s treated as a separate speciality.

When people are allowed to fail they are empowered to succeed.

I've had the opportunity to work under various managers, each with their own distinct qualities. While some have been commendable, others have fallen short. In the tech industry, a significant portion of individuals lack a genuine passion for technology; instead, they opt for this field due to monetary incentives. Many swiftly pivot towards managerial roles, often at the expense of their technical expertise, resulting in superficial knowledge.

This transition frequently leads to unrealistic demands regarding project timelines and deliveries. There's a prevalent lack of faith in engineers among these managers, primarily because they struggle to grasp the intricacies of the work engineers do.

Politics will kill any team so keep in mind that one bad apple is enough to divide the rest. Sometimes it's better to decline a management position when you sense that the team is highly dysfunctional and you're brought in to fix things.

Can you elaborate on "one bad apple" ? Is it a team member ?

What is your own take on why the team is highly dysfunctional ? Anything goes!

Grateful for feedback.

The bad apple can be anything in hierarchy, from your manager to his and down to your team member but oftentimes a combination. In a team it can come down to hurt ego. So if you're now the guy brought in to fix the team, you can expect this to be your sole job but not what you actually expected from the interview and job description. Also be very cautious if you're not meeting the WHOLE team for some time during the interview phase. In my books this tactic is used by executives to hide (read: lie) the dysfunctionality of the organisation to a prospective talented manager who would otherwise decline.

My team can’t decide on a direction we’re too busy respecting everyone’s feeling and opinions. As such instead of one source of documentation we have 3-5 and none of them are good. We can’t enforce quality standards because we can’t decide what that means. We suffer from lack of decision making ability

Don’t call yourself “leadership” or a “leader”. This isn’t feudal Europe. You are a manager. If you call yourself a leader I won’t trust you.

Competency, IQ, and morality. FAANG tends to hire people lacking these into management.

come and see me, dont hide behind jira...all that wasted time meeting with the upper-ups is time you are missing whats going on with the project...so many resources are spent on reporting and the only indicator you take notice is the completion date

Do I understand this correctly by saying that time spent from the leadership are spent nursing higher ups and not what the team finds important ?

Has the team addressed this and if so is there any valued measurements towards improvements ?

For the reporting part, are you part of a team that works by some kind of process ? Which ? What are the reporting about ?

Are you a spy or something?

Bagels.

I really would appreciate a nice bagel with smoked salmon and hot honey.

Then a nice craft Cola.

not everything is a tech problem. sometimes it is sales and marketing and just downright ignorance and chuck-it-to-tech on part of the operations team.

Skill, drive, and compassion, to start with the basics.

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