This misses the single biggest mistake every new manager makes: avoiding hard conversations with your reports. If you start managing folks you were recently in the trenches with this can be VERY hard. These are your comrades after all! You want them to like you. It’s all very natural. Sadly it is the single biggest cause for dissatisfaction I’ve seen on a given team. Being unwilling to give honest, direct feedback results in underperforming teams and unhappy reports. It’s counterintuitive but very important to get right as a manager. The big “AHA!!” moment for me was when I realized you need to speak to behaviors and outcomes not character. So instead of “you’re sloppy” you say something like “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”. Involving them in the solution and explaining why it matters. It makes all the difference and folks ironically respect and like you more for it.
> “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”
This is just about the laziest and least trustworthy language possible to use. Your reports aren't going to know what they don't know and are just going to become paranoid and work slower. The code quality will likely not improve from a conversation prompted this way. This is also a continuous process, not a magic high stakes meeting. If you're in charge you should see patterns in the code reviews and know what their knowledge gaps are causing these issues. They're looking to you for help if you're the one bringing this up in the first place.
If that's too time consuming or over your head you should not be a manager. Leverage your own knowledge and use mentorship to avoid conflicts with your reports and the improved productivity will please the people above you as well. You aren't giving anyone what they need by merely communicating requirements. Your job is to fulfill those requirements with the team you have.
I’m sure you mean well but reading GP’s post I’m convinced that the laziest and least trustworthy language to use is actually, “you’re sloppy.”
Good idea to think in systems and figure out how to lift the quality of the team but it’s okay to give direct feedback. Especially if the feedback is like GP’s in that it kicks off a constructive conversation, which iiuc is exactly what your final sentence there is waxing on about…
Edit; to be clear I’m suggesting to not aim to avoid conflict. Certainly don’t stoke it for no reason but there is a healthy kind of conflict and how it is engaged with, which builds trust, deepens human relationships, and leads to growth for everyone involved. Psychological safety etc
Fully agree, quality is teams's effort and having a blameless culture where the team pushes for higher quality bar is essential. Chasing a single individual only makes sense when they have a track record of repeating the same thing multiple times - means they are not learning from their past mistakes.
> “I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks. Can we talk about how we can address that?”
That’s the first step in fixing the quality issues, not an end state. Reports don’t know what they don’t know, so step 1 is to get their ideas on how to fix quality issues.
This sounds so stupid. I'm sorry but feedback is already given in PRs. This kind of feedback is just a bad idea IMO. Focus on growth and areas of improvements. Your reports often already know what they should focus on, and they are on their own journey of time management. The only lever you have as a manager is to add or remove pressure. The only help you can give is through mentoring or therapy/coaching.
It really depends on how you communicate with your team and the level of physiological safety you have.
I work on a team where this would be a "matter of fact" means of having this conversation. Nobody on the team would bat an eye at someone else telling them this or their manager telling them this. We all know we're extremely good at our jobs and we all know that even the best of us have issues from time to times. Every, single, one of us would prefer to have this conversation upfront, before it becomes a spiraling issue that results in termination.
That being said, I've also worked on teams where I'd be sending my resume out the moment I've heard those words.
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, there's a tendency to write like that when you certainly wouldn't say it like that. It doesn't help that it's an example.
In a real meeting, it might be more like "the email bug last week was a big problem. I'm not trying to blame you, but it can't happen again, so what happened?"
But I'm also inclined to agree with you. If your strategy to maintain quality hinges on people not messing up, you'll have a bad time.
I mean look, it was an arbitrary example I gave and not a very good one apparently. The bulk of these comments are all focusing myopically on that which is a bummer as it distracts from the point I’m trying to make. Managers need to be willing to have hard conversations and most new ones don’t.
I believe strongly in a blameless culture when it comes to bugs and such. The example I gave doesn’t really honor that. I can’t edit it unfortunately. I do stand my my larger point however.
> I’ve noticed quality issues in your code recently that’s resulted in some rollbacks
I would tend to even leave out the first part of that phrase. Focus on the actual objective measure: the rollbacks. They happened, and the goal is to figure out how to not have them happen in the future.
I disagree, at least in this case. In the comment you're replying to, the new manager is technical and familiar with the codebase, and can assess that the reason for the rollbacks is a genuine quality issue. This is useful information, and if you leave it out then you leave your report partially in the dark, wondering if the rollbacks are happening for some other reason (I can think of plenty).
I'm not saying it needs to literally be in the first sentence or phrased exactly like that, but I don't think that's what they meant anyway. Rather, you do need to be upfront about it instead of alluding to the problem without giving away what you actually think.
I got the impression that when he says "couple of years" he's talking about the low-end of the word couple. The other thing in the article that jumps out is the conclusion where he says that a team that is shipping and happy is enough to be crushing it.
That isn't really enough in my experience. There are 3 questions - is the team happy? Are they shipping? Is what they are shipping valuable? - and I've seen a lot of new managers are so overwhelmed that they forget about number 3 and a fair chunk of people end up unemployed because sooner or later the bean counters figure out that the team isn't actually productive.
This article, overall, doesn't identify achieving excellent outcomes as something he got wrong at first. I suspect either he is a natural manager or it is a mistake that is still being made. Probably the latter based on the other mistakes identified. The journey I've seen usually goes from lost -> controlling external perceptions of success -> oh I need to actually succeed and it isn't what I thought.
That’s indeed critical, but most Director-level managers and below have very little control of how well the business model serves the OKRs. Yes the OKRs need to be achieved and help make the business work, but e.g. if the business model’s margins are just too tepid or if the VC’s expected revenue growth (exponential?) will never actually realize, then there is really zero material value to the shipped product. Hence the focus on a happy team that’s shipping, because at least that provides some technological value. And build a network you can bring to your next gig—- because that’s what gets you the next job.
There are rare cases where a team might discover a new business model or impress a whale customer, and then the business model fundamentally changes.
Yes there is risk the “bean counters” or CFO / COO office will want to cut the cord (especially now tech hiring is in a recession). But tech moves fast; those bean counters will likely end up owning shares of a zombie in the next 5-7 years. And their game is to cash out, not build a future.
And if the business model actually works, then keep at those OKRs and everybody should win. Good business models are where stupid can succeed; the team has the right levers.
> I've noticed quality issues in your code recently...
Why is it always the report who is the source of the problem and not the manager?
How about "I've created a toxic work environment and put my reports under a lot of stress. And I have not given them any opportunities to grow and learn new skills. I am planning to do better..." Words that will never come from the mouth of a manager.
Have a hard conversation with yourself first before blaming the reports.
I have found that company culture has the biggest impact on junior managers. It sets the expectation for them the most because they don’t have any actual ability yet.
Overly empathetic companies end up with terrible junior managers because they can’t have any real direct conversations. Tough and demanding companies I have seen fair much better because no one can hide from tough conversations for too long.
100% agree with this. I would say that the other highly likely mistake new managers make is trying to code their way out of problems. It makes sense, right? Previously when you're an IC and a project ran into issues you could just "code harder" and get through it, but that's rarely the right solution when you're a manager and will likely exacerbate the problem itself if you disappear into the trenches trying to code your way through a critical path. Your role is no longer primarily solving coding problems it's solving people problems.
"I have noticed you ate brutalizing your subordinates and that has increased quality and output but I know it is not sustainable and the team is going to crash" any ideas how to communicate it are welcome
What's wrong with saying what you typed above verbatim? It is a fairy standard scenario and your wordings probably have been said in one-on-one millions of times.
You need to follow up the sentence with "what's next", since the scenario does not have a simple solution (the manager can tone down the demand, but then output and quality goes back to where is was and we have to deal with that). But now that is more about the work itself rather than communication
I agree with the sentiment and importance of addressing these things, or dealing with conflicts in-general, but I disagree with the tone somewhat and disagree with the notion that you're not in the trenches with them, but it depends on what trenches means to whoever it's relevant to. I feel like many new managers know they'll need to deal with this, but never developed their abilities prior to being a manager, and don't realize that just because the conversation happens, doesn't mean it produces valuable outcomes, breeds respect, or means anyone will like the way you approached it, or even that you were as vulnerable or honest as you thought you were.
Every manager I've had that used your example quote—almost verbatim—went on to be incredibly passive-aggressive, because they're trying too hard not to actually create conflict, they want to be liked more than they care about the result, they don't have that much innate confidence, or like the author of the article suggested, they want to see the results they would have produced when they were an IC, and haven't yet learned how to guide autonomy and relinquish a certain amount of control. These are perhaps the traits that led them to keeping their IC job all those years.
These people would turn 1-on-1s into 45 mins of beating around the bush, trying to get me to reveal myself as having insufficiently met the unspoken criteria they've been having internal anxiety attacks about, and maybe in the last few minutes when there's no room left for pushback they'd conjure the answer they wanted to hear and set that as the benchmark.
This failure on their part predictibly bled into other interactions and created toxicity and resentment, they couldn't yield control, and they couldn't have a real discussion that involved more than themselves manifesting as their overbearing mother waiting for their kid to implicate themselves for some petty wrongdoing. They couldn't clearly communicate priorities, or timelines, or requirements, and were starting in their new job with a skill issue of their own. They hadn't adapted to the role or developed a good personality for it, and apparently lacked an ability to reflect on their behavior or communication style.
I don't mean to extrapolate too far from this or in-turn attack you in any way, it's just a small quote, but in the past it's been telling.
"Can we talk about code quality issues" doesn't just avoid a character trait, which I agree should should never be the target, it leans into vague, soft, meek, intentionally indirect language that just creates undue anxiety and establishes an ambiguous context for whatever the problem might be, and was a dishonest pretext for for downstream attribution of fault, since they couldn't accept the possibility that the problem might be upstream (which it wasn't always, but if it had been, they weren't going to address it then). In these situations, sometimes I was struggling with purely my own productivity, having a bad couple weeks, but otherwise it was some other issue they weren't willing or able to genuinely help me with.
Do your best to be humble, learn to delegate and try to trust people, avoid thinking about character traits but don't avoid direct (and clear) language, and accept that your perception might be inaccurate. Get as far away as necessary from the dreaded "just checking in" or "is there anything we can do to improve (your problem)" as possible. What if their code is suffering because of noise in the office or someone's depressed because they're having relationship issues? What if it's because you keep coming over to their desk unannounced and asking diverting their attention?
If you can do that, you're on a good track.
Edit: it's worth noting that the underlying assumption in all of my comment is that people and their reasons and issues are often different, and likewise how they respond to this language may be different, and as such many might actually love the quoted phrases because they aren't imposing, and a good manager will do their best to communicate with people in a way that accepts that a variety of ways to address conflict is the right move, and sometimes less imposing language is viable.
You’re basically validating my original point if I am reading your comment correctly. You absolutely cannot avoid conflict but there is a right and a wrong way to go about it. Simple, direct feedback that speaks to behaviors not character is very important.
To your point about being in the trenches I think maybe you’re extrapolating too much from that. Any manager who is any good is of course right there alongside their team in said trenches.
This is literally the opposite of passive aggressive. That’s my entire point!! You have to be direct with people so the know where they stand. That applies to what they’re doing well on also.
As for the “sell out” statement… I have no idea how you got that out of what I said. Sounds like maybe you had some bad managers?
Most of these are pretty accurate, but there's good news: giving a sh!t about your people will likely get you 80% of the way to being a good manager. If you genuinely care about them, their work and progression you're already aligned with the key aspects. You can learn & figure out the rest. It might be hard and very unpleasant at times, and stressful, but building the teams that build software is the most rewarding accomplishment of my life.
I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.
One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.
I joined a new team as a manager and after 3 years was kindly asked to step down and become an IC. While there are many external factors to blame, I decided to do an honest postmortem with myself so I thought about these things a lot.
As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough.
You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you.
You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep.
Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.
I've entered 2 new orgs as an engineering manager, after getting some experience organically. You need to prioritize between lots of things, including technical / people. Usually people is the right choice I've concluded, but the first time my teams were using all new tech for me and I really struggled after over focusing on relationships. The second time I still focused more on people but new the tech better, and forced myself to find time to go through more typical developer onboarding. It was way more successful.
Some of the things you mention sound right for a team lead (i.e. single team) but not really for an EM where you might have 2+ teams. You need to be able to solve the problems the leaving teammates create for you, but stepping into the role is probably the last thing you should do. Don't get me wrong, you need to live the life to build credibility and empathy, but doing the job yourself is usually a substandard, unsustainable solution.
> You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction.
They call this "managing up" or something like that.
You don't have to be in the weeds enough to implement it yourself but you need to guard against both:
- people working on things that aren't priorities because they only want to work on their own pet projects, by not being technical enough to tell when they're BSing about the technical justification for certain things
- people doing things in inefficient or not-aligned-with-future-needs ways because they are more junior and don't know some technical things, or because you haven't shared enough roadmap context
It's related to "managing up" in that it's good to be proactive about sharing some of that info upward as-relevant with your boss so that they don't have to go out of their way to know what's going on with you (or else you run the risk of them having a wrong assumption when they're making decisions that impact you and your reports).
I’m pretty sure “managing up” refers to the extra work the IC needs to do so that their non-technical manager doesn’t look incompetent to their own manager.
> if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
I'm an IC on a team full of seniors with strong domain knowledge that recently hired in an EM from the outside. In short, it was pretty bumpy and despite the guy being an ex engineer, his constant questions about how the system works were a huge drag. Maybe to him he was digging deep but to me it felt like my (and my teammates') work was blocked by his inability to grasp simple concepts. Like the time spent explaining could've been spent just fixing the bug.
So I guess with the digging deep thing, be careful to not take up too much of people's time!
How long are these Q&A sessions, would you say the work of ICs getting blocked isn’t worth having the manager be able to eg: advocate for that work upwards?
What’s wrong with taking “too much” peoples time? I mean, it’s a colleague, asking questions… it’s not that you are going to work more because you’re allocating time to help others.
Having full knowledge of the work is not the same thing as full knowledge of the system. Being able to step in to do the work of one of your people is one possible way to provide a safety net for the bus factor, yes. But not the only way, and I'd argue it is not the best way.
This is your team - you are managing them, not the other way around, so if they have expectations of you that are incorrect, then fix those expectations. If you are not technical, tell them so. Communicate your needs and expectations, and then let them do the work. If there is a bus factor that is too high of a risk for a sustainable team, cross-train the team to remove the bus factor. Have a sense of the priority of all the work so that if someone quits, you can re-arrange the schedule, not be forced to jump in and put out a fire.
At the same time, be building up your people so that they can jump in and replace you. After all, if you cannot be replaced, you cannot be promoted either. Don't pigeon-hole yourself into a front-line manager role unless you truly love it. Grow your team, but grow yourself at the same time.
> if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
I don't think that's the main goal for a manager (even technical). I'd say generally, the manager should understand why the team is building something, and the engineers should know how. The why includes who is going to use what was built, when do they need it, what trade-offs can be made, etc.
IMO, if I have to choose between managers that are technical “enough” and glorified babysitters, I go for the latter. Little knowledge is dangerous and causes more pain than help. At least glorified babysitters know that they don’t know enough and leave all the important tech decisions to the devs; that’s relieving.
That’s the team leads job. The manager’s job is to manage the people. You are a babysitter or more akin to a teacher that has to stay out of the way of the kids doing things well and prevent the bad kids from ruining the class for everyone.
Not at all. I mean for a small team where you are or expected to perform as TLM yes. But generally speaking no.
I can't read the article to tell if this is just an observation from you, or if you are responding to the article, because my DNS just broke for whatever reason.
> Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
That is not the manager's job. The real question here is, do you know the bus factor of your team and do you know what particular skills are most critical to replace?
The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way.
Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work.
Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.
They are taking so many more factors into account that you don't see. It's like a junior engineer saying, why not just bang out the code? You're missing all the long term impact.
I hate the term IC. Its often used in a semi-derogatory context.
Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager.
Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
> The way to see this is that we’re all individual contributors, from the janitor to the CEO. Because if you’re not an individual, then what are you? And if you’re not contributing, then what are you doing there? When you manage a project or team, you’re just individually contributing in a different (though usually overlapping) way.
The difference is in how your performance is judged. ICs are judged by their individual contributions, hence the name. Managers are judged by the performance of their team/department/organization/company. It's not enough to say, as a manager, "I personally ran the sprint meetings and did 1:1s and performance reviews so therefore I'm doing a good job."
The individual work managers do is much harder to tangibly measure. Things like establishing a culture, balancing your roadmap between one-off customer requests and internal production vision (and hacking in some AI crap to make your CEO happy), hiring the right people. Just doing the table stakes individual work of managing your direct reports' vacation time, promotions, and running team meetings is really only good enough for beginner, first-level line managers at bigger companies, where they just need people to execute established processes.
> Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t.
ehhhhh. Management is a lot more reactive, that's true, but saying it requires less brainpower isn't true. As a manager you're constantly context switching. You don't just care about the codebase and solving one specific problem, you also care about sales and marketing, your customer support team, the budget for next year. You're getting slack messages from executives who need an update right now on your project, at the same time as an engineer needing to talk because their partner just filed for divorce and they need mental health days (and you need to support them while also figuring out how to rebalance their workload). It's a very different way of working that uses very different parts of your brain. But it's not just sitting in the executive bathroom and delegating work while you smoke a cigar.
Delegation -> This is 1000% the hardest thing to do. You need to let go and trust your people.
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
Quality over quantity -> Yes.
The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for.
You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,
>The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
The best managers I've ever had saw it as their job to remove barriers and bullshit from my day. It's what I try to do as a leader as well. It serves the purpose of making their jobs easier, and also takes up your time which creates less opportunity for you to micromanage and forces you to delegate.
>Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
This is SO important, and where I struggle the most. Your team won't appreciate it, but when they have the time, support, and resources they need, they'll notice.
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
Agreed. "Where's my dopamine" is the right way to describe it. As an IC I could find a bug, craft a test that reproduces it, write a fix, see the test go green, see the PR get approved and land... I'd get a little dopamine ping at each step. As a manager I'd have days where I had constructive 1:1s in the morning and maybe made a decision on some strategic or resourcing problem in an afternoon meeting. Of course I recognised that the work was not only valuable, but higher impact than just fixing a bug. But the direct hit in the pleasure receptors just wasn't there. I'd finish a day a like that and instead of feeling happy with my work, I'd just feel exhausted and not looking forward to the next day.
After a few years as a manager I switched back to the IC track. I sometimes wonder if my experience means I'm just hard-wired to be an IC, or if with more time and practice you can train yourself to get the dopamine feedback from management activities.
I'm still getting dopamine off getting a team member promoted, two years later. Every success they make reminds me that I helped them build that confidence and those skills. Manager-side successes might not be obvious and daily, but they have staying power like you wouldn't believe.
Delegation was one I struggled with a lot in the early days. Even as the CEO, I was reluctant to give up my customer service responsibilities of manning the inboxes. Eventually, I understand that even if someone handled it only 80-90% as well, that would be much better for the company than having me do it.
Delegation is so hard, i struggle constantly and I'm technically a "Sr. Manager". When the project is up against deadline pressure, it's so tempting to do something yourself that only takes you a day vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. Inevitably you become the bottleneck when a wave of escalations or other management tasks come down the pipe but there's a pile of actual work you decided to take on yourself half done too.
> vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway.
If that is happening more than twice in a 6 month period you need to do a post-mortem on your management style, something is wrong. Spinning on a task is already a bad sign pointing at a problem that can be solved at the management level.
I moved up to Director this year, and explicitly called out that if I needed to give up any more direct interaction with ICs and "contact time" with the real builders I had probably topped out. I've mitigated this a lot with an awesome team of leads and managers, and a (hopefully good kind of) lazy, non-prescriptive management style.
Sounds like there are some fundamental process/team issues going on. If a team cannot be trusted to deliver, superman always coming in to save the day shouldn't be the solution.
I’ve got a good hack for the dopamine: PowerPoint and excel. Go to town on making kick ass presentations and reports. “Ship” those to the org during meetings and all hands. It’s not the same as code for customers, but it helps. Also, if you have time, code non critical things that will never be a dependency for anything else.
Agreed, my go to when feeling like I haven't produced real work in awhile is to document processes, especially if there is something I've noticed has been done poorly or been asked about a couple times recently.
I build internal tools, do BS support requests and push little initiatives that align with my core values. Like get a dozen people in-person for a technical watch party - cheap, easy, super rewarding.
It is cynical, but quality over quantity is bad advice if you want to grow your career as a manager. It's a real failure mode. Not being aggressive about growing your headcount will hold you back. Pretty much all managers are evaluated on amount of headcount when it comes to promotions, especially if you're not tied to P&L.
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This is just about the laziest and least trustworthy language possible to use. Your reports aren't going to know what they don't know and are just going to become paranoid and work slower. The code quality will likely not improve from a conversation prompted this way. This is also a continuous process, not a magic high stakes meeting. If you're in charge you should see patterns in the code reviews and know what their knowledge gaps are causing these issues. They're looking to you for help if you're the one bringing this up in the first place.
If that's too time consuming or over your head you should not be a manager. Leverage your own knowledge and use mentorship to avoid conflicts with your reports and the improved productivity will please the people above you as well. You aren't giving anyone what they need by merely communicating requirements. Your job is to fulfill those requirements with the team you have.
Good idea to think in systems and figure out how to lift the quality of the team but it’s okay to give direct feedback. Especially if the feedback is like GP’s in that it kicks off a constructive conversation, which iiuc is exactly what your final sentence there is waxing on about…
Edit; to be clear I’m suggesting to not aim to avoid conflict. Certainly don’t stoke it for no reason but there is a healthy kind of conflict and how it is engaged with, which builds trust, deepens human relationships, and leads to growth for everyone involved. Psychological safety etc
That’s the first step in fixing the quality issues, not an end state. Reports don’t know what they don’t know, so step 1 is to get their ideas on how to fix quality issues.
I work on a team where this would be a "matter of fact" means of having this conversation. Nobody on the team would bat an eye at someone else telling them this or their manager telling them this. We all know we're extremely good at our jobs and we all know that even the best of us have issues from time to times. Every, single, one of us would prefer to have this conversation upfront, before it becomes a spiraling issue that results in termination.
That being said, I've also worked on teams where I'd be sending my resume out the moment I've heard those words.
In a real meeting, it might be more like "the email bug last week was a big problem. I'm not trying to blame you, but it can't happen again, so what happened?"
But I'm also inclined to agree with you. If your strategy to maintain quality hinges on people not messing up, you'll have a bad time.
I believe strongly in a blameless culture when it comes to bugs and such. The example I gave doesn’t really honor that. I can’t edit it unfortunately. I do stand my my larger point however.
This is precisely the way to have that conversation.
I would tend to even leave out the first part of that phrase. Focus on the actual objective measure: the rollbacks. They happened, and the goal is to figure out how to not have them happen in the future.
I'm not saying it needs to literally be in the first sentence or phrased exactly like that, but I don't think that's what they meant anyway. Rather, you do need to be upfront about it instead of alluding to the problem without giving away what you actually think.
If "bad code" can make it to production it's usually the fault of the system as a whole, not the author.
That isn't really enough in my experience. There are 3 questions - is the team happy? Are they shipping? Is what they are shipping valuable? - and I've seen a lot of new managers are so overwhelmed that they forget about number 3 and a fair chunk of people end up unemployed because sooner or later the bean counters figure out that the team isn't actually productive.
This article, overall, doesn't identify achieving excellent outcomes as something he got wrong at first. I suspect either he is a natural manager or it is a mistake that is still being made. Probably the latter based on the other mistakes identified. The journey I've seen usually goes from lost -> controlling external perceptions of success -> oh I need to actually succeed and it isn't what I thought.
That’s indeed critical, but most Director-level managers and below have very little control of how well the business model serves the OKRs. Yes the OKRs need to be achieved and help make the business work, but e.g. if the business model’s margins are just too tepid or if the VC’s expected revenue growth (exponential?) will never actually realize, then there is really zero material value to the shipped product. Hence the focus on a happy team that’s shipping, because at least that provides some technological value. And build a network you can bring to your next gig—- because that’s what gets you the next job.
There are rare cases where a team might discover a new business model or impress a whale customer, and then the business model fundamentally changes.
Yes there is risk the “bean counters” or CFO / COO office will want to cut the cord (especially now tech hiring is in a recession). But tech moves fast; those bean counters will likely end up owning shares of a zombie in the next 5-7 years. And their game is to cash out, not build a future.
And if the business model actually works, then keep at those OKRs and everybody should win. Good business models are where stupid can succeed; the team has the right levers.
Why is it always the report who is the source of the problem and not the manager?
How about "I've created a toxic work environment and put my reports under a lot of stress. And I have not given them any opportunities to grow and learn new skills. I am planning to do better..." Words that will never come from the mouth of a manager.
Have a hard conversation with yourself first before blaming the reports.
Overly empathetic companies end up with terrible junior managers because they can’t have any real direct conversations. Tough and demanding companies I have seen fair much better because no one can hide from tough conversations for too long.
Every manager I've had that used your example quote—almost verbatim—went on to be incredibly passive-aggressive, because they're trying too hard not to actually create conflict, they want to be liked more than they care about the result, they don't have that much innate confidence, or like the author of the article suggested, they want to see the results they would have produced when they were an IC, and haven't yet learned how to guide autonomy and relinquish a certain amount of control. These are perhaps the traits that led them to keeping their IC job all those years.
These people would turn 1-on-1s into 45 mins of beating around the bush, trying to get me to reveal myself as having insufficiently met the unspoken criteria they've been having internal anxiety attacks about, and maybe in the last few minutes when there's no room left for pushback they'd conjure the answer they wanted to hear and set that as the benchmark.
This failure on their part predictibly bled into other interactions and created toxicity and resentment, they couldn't yield control, and they couldn't have a real discussion that involved more than themselves manifesting as their overbearing mother waiting for their kid to implicate themselves for some petty wrongdoing. They couldn't clearly communicate priorities, or timelines, or requirements, and were starting in their new job with a skill issue of their own. They hadn't adapted to the role or developed a good personality for it, and apparently lacked an ability to reflect on their behavior or communication style.
I don't mean to extrapolate too far from this or in-turn attack you in any way, it's just a small quote, but in the past it's been telling.
"Can we talk about code quality issues" doesn't just avoid a character trait, which I agree should should never be the target, it leans into vague, soft, meek, intentionally indirect language that just creates undue anxiety and establishes an ambiguous context for whatever the problem might be, and was a dishonest pretext for for downstream attribution of fault, since they couldn't accept the possibility that the problem might be upstream (which it wasn't always, but if it had been, they weren't going to address it then). In these situations, sometimes I was struggling with purely my own productivity, having a bad couple weeks, but otherwise it was some other issue they weren't willing or able to genuinely help me with.
Do your best to be humble, learn to delegate and try to trust people, avoid thinking about character traits but don't avoid direct (and clear) language, and accept that your perception might be inaccurate. Get as far away as necessary from the dreaded "just checking in" or "is there anything we can do to improve (your problem)" as possible. What if their code is suffering because of noise in the office or someone's depressed because they're having relationship issues? What if it's because you keep coming over to their desk unannounced and asking diverting their attention?
If you can do that, you're on a good track.
Edit: it's worth noting that the underlying assumption in all of my comment is that people and their reasons and issues are often different, and likewise how they respond to this language may be different, and as such many might actually love the quoted phrases because they aren't imposing, and a good manager will do their best to communicate with people in a way that accepts that a variety of ways to address conflict is the right move, and sometimes less imposing language is viable.
To your point about being in the trenches I think maybe you’re extrapolating too much from that. Any manager who is any good is of course right there alongside their team in said trenches.
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As for the “sell out” statement… I have no idea how you got that out of what I said. Sounds like maybe you had some bad managers?
I will add one too: sometimes you only find out you don't want to be a manager after trying it. Building a lead mentorship program where both management and the individual can live a realistic experience of being a people leader is invaluable. I've implemented this program twice now and it has been great for building leadership capacity with people who are excited to take this path.
One of the most stand-out moments of leadership I've ever witnessed was my boss protecting me and a colleague from another manager on a different team. He put his foot down and drew a line about what was to be expected of us (among our other competing responsibilities). Fight for me and I'll fight for you.
As a line manager a huge mistake you could make (especially if you’re joining a new team) is not being technical enough.
You may not write code anymore, but you are expected to know the system very thoroughly, otherwise you’ll be perceived as a glorified babysitter.
As a new manager it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not doing any technical work because you’re a big boy now playing in the big boy league, but this will 100% hurt you.
You need to stay on top of everything your reports are doing. Give them their space but always ask hard questions and dig deep.
Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project? I’m not saying it’s something a manager is supposed to do, but that ultimately YOU are directly responsible for your reports’ work so you should be extremely familiar with it.
Some of the things you mention sound right for a team lead (i.e. single team) but not really for an EM where you might have 2+ teams. You need to be able to solve the problems the leaving teammates create for you, but stepping into the role is probably the last thing you should do. Don't get me wrong, you need to live the life to build credibility and empathy, but doing the job yourself is usually a substandard, unsustainable solution.
I think the way "experienced" managers do this is to not actually understand the technical work 100% but rather make your manager think you understand it 100%. Even as an individual contributor, I fail to fully understand all the changes my team is making. I can't imagine being 100% fully up to date with all the changes at are in flight, have landed, etc. and why. The best you can do is some kind of abstraction.
They call this "managing up" or something like that.
- the reason it's happening
- the cost (time / people)
- what else you are deciding not to do instead
You don't have to be in the weeds enough to implement it yourself but you need to guard against both:
- people working on things that aren't priorities because they only want to work on their own pet projects, by not being technical enough to tell when they're BSing about the technical justification for certain things
- people doing things in inefficient or not-aligned-with-future-needs ways because they are more junior and don't know some technical things, or because you haven't shared enough roadmap context
It's related to "managing up" in that it's good to be proactive about sharing some of that info upward as-relevant with your boss so that they don't have to go out of their way to know what's going on with you (or else you run the risk of them having a wrong assumption when they're making decisions that impact you and your reports).
I’ve had many managers over the years, more and less successful, and this was possible just for one of them. And only because they were promoted to the position from a developer level on that team. They hated being a manager though and left the company promptly.
So I guess with the digging deep thing, be careful to not take up too much of people's time!
This is your team - you are managing them, not the other way around, so if they have expectations of you that are incorrect, then fix those expectations. If you are not technical, tell them so. Communicate your needs and expectations, and then let them do the work. If there is a bus factor that is too high of a risk for a sustainable team, cross-train the team to remove the bus factor. Have a sense of the priority of all the work so that if someone quits, you can re-arrange the schedule, not be forced to jump in and put out a fire.
At the same time, be building up your people so that they can jump in and replace you. After all, if you cannot be replaced, you cannot be promoted either. Don't pigeon-hole yourself into a front-line manager role unless you truly love it. Grow your team, but grow yourself at the same time.
I don't think that's the main goal for a manager (even technical). I'd say generally, the manager should understand why the team is building something, and the engineers should know how. The why includes who is going to use what was built, when do they need it, what trade-offs can be made, etc.
I can't read the article to tell if this is just an observation from you, or if you are responding to the article, because my DNS just broke for whatever reason.
> Frame it like this: if this report were to quit today, are you able to step in and complete their project?
That is not the manager's job. The real question here is, do you know the bus factor of your team and do you know what particular skills are most critical to replace?
Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t. So the way you contribute is, in general, by applying the hard-won lessons gleaned from your time on the brain-speed freeway while letting others, whose brains naturally run faster, either because of youth or disposition, do the fast-brain work.
Personally, I don’t generally enjoy managing in part because brain speed, which I value, seems to slow further because of the nature of manager or executive work. When I’ve gotten a taste of management and spent time on calls with other managers and executives, I was shocked to discover how slowly (and often haphazardly) they thought through problems that were quite understandable in an instant or two spent alone. They were all very smart people, and yet the managing—or, more likely, the group settings of meetings and calls—seemed to trap their mind, eventually habitually, in a socially constructed box from which they couldn’t escape.
Ah, I was wondering what was going on with my brain since I became a manager.
Seriously though, I've known some people who are managers and extremely fast/strong thinkers. Yes, the nature of the job requires more of the big picture and less of the details.
The difference is in how your performance is judged. ICs are judged by their individual contributions, hence the name. Managers are judged by the performance of their team/department/organization/company. It's not enough to say, as a manager, "I personally ran the sprint meetings and did 1:1s and performance reviews so therefore I'm doing a good job."
The individual work managers do is much harder to tangibly measure. Things like establishing a culture, balancing your roadmap between one-off customer requests and internal production vision (and hacking in some AI crap to make your CEO happy), hiring the right people. Just doing the table stakes individual work of managing your direct reports' vacation time, promotions, and running team meetings is really only good enough for beginner, first-level line managers at bigger companies, where they just need people to execute established processes.
> Also, it’s helpful to remember, when delegating, that one reason you’re probably managing is that you either have tired of running your brain in fifth gear or, at your age, can’t.
ehhhhh. Management is a lot more reactive, that's true, but saying it requires less brainpower isn't true. As a manager you're constantly context switching. You don't just care about the codebase and solving one specific problem, you also care about sales and marketing, your customer support team, the budget for next year. You're getting slack messages from executives who need an update right now on your project, at the same time as an engineer needing to talk because their partner just filed for divorce and they need mental health days (and you need to support them while also figuring out how to rebalance their workload). It's a very different way of working that uses very different parts of your brain. But it's not just sitting in the executive bathroom and delegating work while you smoke a cigar.
Where’s my dopamine? -> Your success is the teams' success. When they are doing well, you are doing well.
Quality over quantity -> Yes.
The level of engagement -> Your job is to support the team - blockers are your problem, not their problem. Fight to remove blockers. That's your job.
Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
Redefining success -> That's up to you and your manager. If you're a new manager, you need to manage across and up. That's a set of skills that we don't train people for.
You're coming from an IC position and you know how to do the work. Managing people is a different job,
The best managers I've ever had saw it as their job to remove barriers and bullshit from my day. It's what I try to do as a leader as well. It serves the purpose of making their jobs easier, and also takes up your time which creates less opportunity for you to micromanage and forces you to delegate.
>Managing perception -> Which leads into, your role, well done, is invisible. Protect them from the bullshit politics that any org has and let them do what they do well.
This is SO important, and where I struggle the most. Your team won't appreciate it, but when they have the time, support, and resources they need, they'll notice.
It's hard to get a dopamine hit of a second-order signal though. When you're a developer there's a strong linkage between the work you complete and results. If you write code for a new feature, you get to see it take shape on your screen. When your team reaches a milestone, you see where you contributed and can often quantify your contributions.What happens after you move into management? Your day-to-day is no longer filled with relatively concrete tasks and goals. Your role is not to do the work yourself but guide and support a team doing the actual execution. How do you measure that?
After a few years as a manager I switched back to the IC track. I sometimes wonder if my experience means I'm just hard-wired to be an IC, or if with more time and practice you can train yourself to get the dopamine feedback from management activities.
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If that is happening more than twice in a 6 month period you need to do a post-mortem on your management style, something is wrong. Spinning on a task is already a bad sign pointing at a problem that can be solved at the management level.
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