In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion. They treat their reports like serfs who are obliged to burnish their image.
The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.
I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.
> trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion
There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.
One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.
And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.
The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.
I've been meaning to write a blog post about the "level of purpose" in a job:
At level 3, the best level: The company is curing children's cancer or something else that you are personally motivated to do and satisfied by. The work is something you would do without pay (though you might not have as much time to do it if you weren't paid). Your highest purpose is to cure children's cancer.
At level 2: The company is doing work you are not personally interested in, but you work with good people doing good work. The company and people support each other and build a profitable product. Your highest purpose is to make the company profitable.
At level 1: The company starts doing stupid shit and acting in self-destructive ways. The company is run by managers who care more about growing their own headcounts than the overall profitability of the company. Your highest purpose is to make your manager happy.
At level 0: Your manager is also doing bad things. At this level the only purpose the job fulfills is giving you money, and there's no reason to not go full psychopath and do whatever it takes to maximize the amount of money you get. Your highest purpose is to make money without doing anything too illegal and avoid trouble.
What level is your job at?
Level 3 is rare and always will be, that's okay.
Level 2 is good, and I sometimes hear people on HN offering level 2 as the correct attitude to have towards work. But we need to recognize that workers are often asked to do stupid or semi-dishonest things that are not profitable for the company.
Level 1 and 0 are stages of hell, and it's sad how common they are.
I think there are actually two separate axes here, one for the meaningfulness of the job, and one for the behavior of management. There are lots of companies where the work is personally fulfilling (level 3) but the bosses are in it for themselves (level 1 or 0). From what I've heard, SpaceX would fall in this category for me, as would many non-profits.
That's an interesting model, but I see it different: one axis is a prerequisite for the other axis--they aren't separate.
The company as a whole might serve a noble purpose, but your purpose as an employee will have no connection to that if you're just redesigning the coversheet for TPS reports.
> In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion.
Heh, I'm a worse manager. I keep trying to impress the people I manage. Working on the mama bear part though.
That's frustrating that you've only had one manager whose calendar was viewable by their team. That's the norm all up the chain of the current place I work. I think it was like that previously too.
I like that your manager had _you_ make the meetings for them after sending all the materials to prep for it. I get the feeling that several times that resulted in solving the problems asynchronously instead of actually having the meeting.
It is technically systemically called an unstable equilibrium. Admitting even one person in a company that places carreer above all else, forces either a full austing by the rest of the company, incurring a coordination cost, or at an individual level facing untennable competition as you operate at a severe disadvantage in self promotion.
This is why, besides maybe a small time window at some startups, management will always on average consist of ruthless looking after number one personality types.
While in a small business their goals migght still by nescessity align with those if the actual company, in a more corporate setting the relation between actual company performance and personal activity is so detached that even those taking into account alignment to a certain degree are handicapped relative to those going 100% self promotion.
The systemic stable equilibrium is therefor a shark tank of rutheless egoists trying to exploit anything and everyone they can to climb over each other and pull each other down.
Anecdotal, but every Engineering Manager I've had for the past 10 years has had a calendar I could see. One EM had anonymous event names on their calendar, but I think it might have been the default setting in AD.
That’s pretty standard in Europe too. It makes sense - what if the meetingd are about downsizing or outsourcing the team? The company and worker’s interested are often not alligned, so a layer of secrecy is warranted.
I must be an extreme outlier. In 20 years of career in half a dozen companies I have always had good managers. Decent persons (I called a few of them friends), good managers, and all extremely technically talented. Almost always even the skip level managers were also very technically competent.
Definitely lucky relative to my experience then. My current manager is very strong, but prior to him that manager I don't think any programming experience/background at all (he was laid off within about a year of me joining, but it felt like I was taking crazy pills watching him in meetings having no idea what anyone was saying).
I also think some of the most variable managers you get are at the smallest companies. Like one company had a CTO who was 25 with no prior professional experience that I know of other than co-founding this company. He wasn't bad, bad but certainly not doing half of what he could at that level.
However I've also had experiences where the manager changed 2/3 times in 2-years at a larger company, which IMO is a bad experience.
Same. I had one bad manager and it was at a small startup run by non-technical people but doing something technical. Most corporate managers I've had have been decent.
I think nobody should have managers, but your examples were so confidently wrong that it's hard to agree with your whole statement. I am on the opinion that any work, no matter whether "high-skilled" or not, doesn't need managers, unless that's just an euphemism for more senior employees that also do the work.
with enough people, and a sufficiently high view, all problems are about human-management. This is the case for any subject.
Management is not a product of university MBA programs and power-hungry corporate animals seeking to impose their will on others; it is an inevitably of group labour.
The dean of their department, and other administrative staff who don't have any clue what they do. Trust me that the clueless sociopathic administrative layer can absolutely interfere with professors' lives. Tenure can protect them somewhat, though.
> Architects don't have managers.
Yes they do. I don't know why you think this.
> Lawyers don't have managers.
They do unless they're partner, which is probably a small percentage of lawyers. A lot of lawyers are in the legal department of a larger company, with managers.
> Doctors don't have managers.
I know less about this but I'll bet there are plenty of hospital administrative staff above them who are sociopaths and get in their way.
> Software development is the only high-skilled work where people have managers.
All forms of engineers have managers: aerospace, civil, environmental, mechanical, etc. Only if they're running their own consultancy do they not, but you could say the same thing about plumbers and electricians. I'd actually wager a higher percentage of architects and engineers have managers than do tradespeople. Whether you have a manager has less to do with your profession, and more to do with whether you run your own business or not. Some professions run their own businesses more often than others, but I don't think engineers and architects are at the top.
This focuses on what managers should do differently, but not what engineers could do differently to make the relationship better. Improve their communication skills, document and evangelize their work, etc.
When I have a poor manager who doesn’t improve quickly, what I do differently is get a different job. I understand that’s a privileged position to be in, and also that one needs to have a fair bit of experience to identify whether the manager really is the issue. Nevertheless, trying to fix a relationship one-sidedly when someone holds authority over you is not a worthwhile cause.
This does depend on what the engineers are being employed to do..
Are they there to be communication and documentation experts, or are they there to turn requirements into something that works?
I agree that there is benefits in having engineers who can engage with their managers, advocate for required changes and influence the management to act in a more beneficial way, but at some point the person doing this stops being an engineer and starts being a manager themself.
Managers are there to manage, that is organise, coordinate and ensure that their staff are completing tasks in the most efficient way possible. That will at time require them to communicate with both their superiors and their engineer staff. That requires them to be the the communication and documentation expert, not the engineer.
> Improve their communication skills, document and evangelize their work, etc.
Whether engineers do or don't do documentation and how much of it is decided by management.
Second, unless you are specific, I will assume the "improve their communication skills" is purely stereotype based. They are engineers, therefore they do not have communication skills. And we are going to pretend so even though they just communicated what they need very very clearly and politely.
It's very rare for me to not find a way to work well with most managers I've had. What I find the larger problem is what's lost in communication/translation going up and down the org chart. This isn't usually a problem for small or shallow orgs, or in rare cases larger orgs that have strong technical leadership. What does happen is that there's layer(s) of middle-management that's typically where technical details are lost. The best way to combat this is to have flatter structures, or isolate divisions/units. Microservices is one way of solving this communication/autonomy human problem, by forcing system interfaces to sweat the communication details.
IME I blame Telephone(aka Chinese whispers) being the default communication between ICs and skip level manager. A skip level should address a team in writing instead of the manager vaguely mentioning things. Communications among a team should happen in a public channel instead of DMs.
This is super underdone these days. Management likes to talk about the importance of communication till the cows come home but somehow that's mostly upward directed, rarely downward.
Been reading a lot about this hate from the other side perspective's - I've burned out in my first experience as tech manager. There are good materials on Will Larson's blog (and books) and substacks like this: https://gleicon.substack.com/p/the-burden-of-tech-managers. It was all on me for over extending on control and not using my previous experience as leverage to have the team on my side...
> Your manager, who you’ve barely seen all year except in meetings, suddenly has opinions about your “growth areas.” They cite that one PR that took too long (ignoring the context) or mention you need to “be more visible” (while giving you no time to do anything visible).
It’s taken me a long time to come around to recognizing this as the common thread in all the ‘bad bosses’ I’ve had over the years - each has felt pressure from above, but been unable to level with me about the position they’re in, and unable to sit down with me as an ally to allay upper management’s concerns. Instead, they’ve essentially sat on the issue, until they can’t anymore and find reason to let me go - and there’s always a reason if you care to look, no one is a perfect employee.
My exit interview ends up being the relief to the pressure they’ve been feeling, and then, in turn, I can imo assume they resume incubating, until they’re ready to hatch the next scapegoat.
Having one’s professional fate so haphazardly tied to an untrustworthy comrade is really only made tenable by the compensation this industry tends to offer - and between the layoffs and hiring freezes plaguing the SWE field lately, it’s definitely becoming less of a comfort. I hope I can get away with retiring before I run seriously afoul of the situation.
Engineers should be talking with customers at least some of the time, so that part is covered.
There is the strategy side of things which you won't get from talking to customers, but I've seen many cases where senior management make absolutely terrible (and obviously terrible, not only with hindsight) strategic messes, so I'm not totally convinced that senior management are necessary for this part either. Senior management do usually have a better overall picture - eg. that some product is losing money and some other product is growing rapidly - but that's usually because detailed revenue numbers are hidden from everyone below the C-suite.
The fact that management issues are so persistently reported and so widespread in tech, should be a strong signal that management practices in tech have failed - measured by the number of non-faang companies that lost their trajectory by copying corrosive FAANG practices.
In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion. They treat their reports like serfs who are obliged to burnish their image.
The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.
I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.
> trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion
There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.
One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.
And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.
The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.
I've been meaning to write a blog post about the "level of purpose" in a job:
At level 3, the best level: The company is curing children's cancer or something else that you are personally motivated to do and satisfied by. The work is something you would do without pay (though you might not have as much time to do it if you weren't paid). Your highest purpose is to cure children's cancer.
At level 2: The company is doing work you are not personally interested in, but you work with good people doing good work. The company and people support each other and build a profitable product. Your highest purpose is to make the company profitable.
At level 1: The company starts doing stupid shit and acting in self-destructive ways. The company is run by managers who care more about growing their own headcounts than the overall profitability of the company. Your highest purpose is to make your manager happy.
At level 0: Your manager is also doing bad things. At this level the only purpose the job fulfills is giving you money, and there's no reason to not go full psychopath and do whatever it takes to maximize the amount of money you get. Your highest purpose is to make money without doing anything too illegal and avoid trouble.
What level is your job at?
Level 3 is rare and always will be, that's okay.
Level 2 is good, and I sometimes hear people on HN offering level 2 as the correct attitude to have towards work. But we need to recognize that workers are often asked to do stupid or semi-dishonest things that are not profitable for the company.
Level 1 and 0 are stages of hell, and it's sad how common they are.
I think there are actually two separate axes here, one for the meaningfulness of the job, and one for the behavior of management. There are lots of companies where the work is personally fulfilling (level 3) but the bosses are in it for themselves (level 1 or 0). From what I've heard, SpaceX would fall in this category for me, as would many non-profits.
That's an interesting model, but I see it different: one axis is a prerequisite for the other axis--they aren't separate.
The company as a whole might serve a noble purpose, but your purpose as an employee will have no connection to that if you're just redesigning the coversheet for TPS reports.
> In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion.
Heh, I'm a worse manager. I keep trying to impress the people I manage. Working on the mama bear part though.
That's frustrating that you've only had one manager whose calendar was viewable by their team. That's the norm all up the chain of the current place I work. I think it was like that previously too.
I like that your manager had _you_ make the meetings for them after sending all the materials to prep for it. I get the feeling that several times that resulted in solving the problems asynchronously instead of actually having the meeting.
It is technically systemically called an unstable equilibrium. Admitting even one person in a company that places carreer above all else, forces either a full austing by the rest of the company, incurring a coordination cost, or at an individual level facing untennable competition as you operate at a severe disadvantage in self promotion.
This is why, besides maybe a small time window at some startups, management will always on average consist of ruthless looking after number one personality types.
While in a small business their goals migght still by nescessity align with those if the actual company, in a more corporate setting the relation between actual company performance and personal activity is so detached that even those taking into account alignment to a certain degree are handicapped relative to those going 100% self promotion.
The systemic stable equilibrium is therefor a shark tank of rutheless egoists trying to exploit anything and everyone they can to climb over each other and pull each other down.
yup exactly ! the 'geravis principle' comes to mind, cogently described here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Anecdotal, but every Engineering Manager I've had for the past 10 years has had a calendar I could see. One EM had anonymous event names on their calendar, but I think it might have been the default setting in AD.
> I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team.
Is this an American thing? Here in Europe, it seems common. How else can you schedule meetings if you can't see when everybody's free?
You can see availability but not the content of the existing meetings.
That’s pretty standard in Europe too. It makes sense - what if the meetingd are about downsizing or outsourcing the team? The company and worker’s interested are often not alligned, so a layer of secrecy is warranted.
> Breaking the cycle
> The best engineering managers I’ve known — the ones engineers actually like — have figured out a few things:
> 1. They protect focus time like it’s sacred. […]
> 2. They stay technical enough to make informed decisions. […]
> 3. They give credit lavishly and take blame personally. […]
> 4. They make feedback actually meaningful. […]
I must be an extreme outlier. In 20 years of career in half a dozen companies I have always had good managers. Decent persons (I called a few of them friends), good managers, and all extremely technically talented. Almost always even the skip level managers were also very technically competent.
Definitely lucky relative to my experience then. My current manager is very strong, but prior to him that manager I don't think any programming experience/background at all (he was laid off within about a year of me joining, but it felt like I was taking crazy pills watching him in meetings having no idea what anyone was saying).
I also think some of the most variable managers you get are at the smallest companies. Like one company had a CTO who was 25 with no prior professional experience that I know of other than co-founding this company. He wasn't bad, bad but certainly not doing half of what he could at that level.
However I've also had experiences where the manager changed 2/3 times in 2-years at a larger company, which IMO is a bad experience.
Same. I had one bad manager and it was at a small startup run by non-technical people but doing something technical. Most corporate managers I've had have been decent.
Software development is the only high-skilled work where people have managers.
Doctors don't have managers. Lawyers don't have managers. Professors don't have managers. Architects don't have managers. Bankers don't have managers.
Engineers should not have managers.
There should just be different levels of engineers.
> Doctors don't have managers
Is that so? Here is an open position: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/management/ro...
> Lawyers don't have managers.
Hmm, we seem to have very different information: https://timeanalyticssoftware.com/what-is-a-law-firm-managin...
> Professors don't have managers
I wonder what do the Dean and Chair at my university do then.
> Architects don't have managers
They do. See https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/architectural-and-enginee...
> Bankers don't have managers
They do. See this open position: https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/bank-man...
> Engineers should not have managers.
I think nobody should have managers, but your examples were so confidently wrong that it's hard to agree with your whole statement. I am on the opinion that any work, no matter whether "high-skilled" or not, doesn't need managers, unless that's just an euphemism for more senior employees that also do the work.
I looked at your first two links and it's not really clear whether those roles would be line-managing doctors or lawyers.
with enough people, and a sufficiently high view, all problems are about human-management. This is the case for any subject.
Management is not a product of university MBA programs and power-hungry corporate animals seeking to impose their will on others; it is an inevitably of group labour.
> Professors don't have managers.
The dean of their department, and other administrative staff who don't have any clue what they do. Trust me that the clueless sociopathic administrative layer can absolutely interfere with professors' lives. Tenure can protect them somewhat, though.
> Architects don't have managers.
Yes they do. I don't know why you think this.
> Lawyers don't have managers.
They do unless they're partner, which is probably a small percentage of lawyers. A lot of lawyers are in the legal department of a larger company, with managers.
> Doctors don't have managers.
I know less about this but I'll bet there are plenty of hospital administrative staff above them who are sociopaths and get in their way.
> Software development is the only high-skilled work where people have managers.
All forms of engineers have managers: aerospace, civil, environmental, mechanical, etc. Only if they're running their own consultancy do they not, but you could say the same thing about plumbers and electricians. I'd actually wager a higher percentage of architects and engineers have managers than do tradespeople. Whether you have a manager has less to do with your profession, and more to do with whether you run your own business or not. Some professions run their own businesses more often than others, but I don't think engineers and architects are at the top.
This focuses on what managers should do differently, but not what engineers could do differently to make the relationship better. Improve their communication skills, document and evangelize their work, etc.
When I have a poor manager who doesn’t improve quickly, what I do differently is get a different job. I understand that’s a privileged position to be in, and also that one needs to have a fair bit of experience to identify whether the manager really is the issue. Nevertheless, trying to fix a relationship one-sidedly when someone holds authority over you is not a worthwhile cause.
This does depend on what the engineers are being employed to do..
Are they there to be communication and documentation experts, or are they there to turn requirements into something that works?
I agree that there is benefits in having engineers who can engage with their managers, advocate for required changes and influence the management to act in a more beneficial way, but at some point the person doing this stops being an engineer and starts being a manager themself.
Managers are there to manage, that is organise, coordinate and ensure that their staff are completing tasks in the most efficient way possible. That will at time require them to communicate with both their superiors and their engineer staff. That requires them to be the the communication and documentation expert, not the engineer.
I love how many times I've heard "communication skills" wheeled out as an excuse for management's lack of deep focus on their team's work.
If you put 50% effort on marketing yourself and 50% on engineering, the company will quickly be put out of business.
Worse, those that are good at talking are going to waste everyone else’s time.
I said half because that seems to align with the marketing budget vs engineering budget, so it might be the best spot for companies as a whole.
> Improve their communication skills, document and evangelize their work, etc.
Whether engineers do or don't do documentation and how much of it is decided by management.
Second, unless you are specific, I will assume the "improve their communication skills" is purely stereotype based. They are engineers, therefore they do not have communication skills. And we are going to pretend so even though they just communicated what they need very very clearly and politely.
It's very rare for me to not find a way to work well with most managers I've had. What I find the larger problem is what's lost in communication/translation going up and down the org chart. This isn't usually a problem for small or shallow orgs, or in rare cases larger orgs that have strong technical leadership. What does happen is that there's layer(s) of middle-management that's typically where technical details are lost. The best way to combat this is to have flatter structures, or isolate divisions/units. Microservices is one way of solving this communication/autonomy human problem, by forcing system interfaces to sweat the communication details.
IME I blame Telephone(aka Chinese whispers) being the default communication between ICs and skip level manager. A skip level should address a team in writing instead of the manager vaguely mentioning things. Communications among a team should happen in a public channel instead of DMs.
This is super underdone these days. Management likes to talk about the importance of communication till the cows come home but somehow that's mostly upward directed, rarely downward.
It is insane how little is written down, and written down well, in my limited experience in Enterprise, never mind thoroughgoing written communication
Been reading a lot about this hate from the other side perspective's - I've burned out in my first experience as tech manager. There are good materials on Will Larson's blog (and books) and substacks like this: https://gleicon.substack.com/p/the-burden-of-tech-managers. It was all on me for over extending on control and not using my previous experience as leverage to have the team on my side...
> Your manager, who you’ve barely seen all year except in meetings, suddenly has opinions about your “growth areas.” They cite that one PR that took too long (ignoring the context) or mention you need to “be more visible” (while giving you no time to do anything visible).
It’s taken me a long time to come around to recognizing this as the common thread in all the ‘bad bosses’ I’ve had over the years - each has felt pressure from above, but been unable to level with me about the position they’re in, and unable to sit down with me as an ally to allay upper management’s concerns. Instead, they’ve essentially sat on the issue, until they can’t anymore and find reason to let me go - and there’s always a reason if you care to look, no one is a perfect employee.
My exit interview ends up being the relief to the pressure they’ve been feeling, and then, in turn, I can imo assume they resume incubating, until they’re ready to hatch the next scapegoat.
Having one’s professional fate so haphazardly tied to an untrustworthy comrade is really only made tenable by the compensation this industry tends to offer - and between the layoffs and hiring freezes plaguing the SWE field lately, it’s definitely becoming less of a comfort. I hope I can get away with retiring before I run seriously afoul of the situation.
Missing from the article is they are not immune to the Peter Principal. Good managers do not stick around very long.
i feel strongly that most managers are redundant
you could have an empty chair and things would still get done
in general there are too many useless or noise making people in companies i worked in
when they go on holiday the work continues in peace
Things might get done, but would they be the things that the company's upper management and investors want done?
Engineers should be talking with customers at least some of the time, so that part is covered.
There is the strategy side of things which you won't get from talking to customers, but I've seen many cases where senior management make absolutely terrible (and obviously terrible, not only with hindsight) strategic messes, so I'm not totally convinced that senior management are necessary for this part either. Senior management do usually have a better overall picture - eg. that some product is losing money and some other product is growing rapidly - but that's usually because detailed revenue numbers are hidden from everyone below the C-suite.
yes, why not.
remove upper management too. problem solved.
The fact that management issues are so persistently reported and so widespread in tech, should be a strong signal that management practices in tech have failed - measured by the number of non-faang companies that lost their trajectory by copying corrosive FAANG practices.
Were management practices in non-tech fields any better though?
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