Management.
Wednesday 26th of January 2022
Management.
Social Media Says
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What You Really Think
Been there, I worked for a mid size government contractor. He was red faced mad about 75% of the time. He fired himself for two weeks, the smoothest two weeks in that shop, and shit got done!
This exact thing happened with a client I worked with for over two years. In software. Had my team and another team running the show and building their brand new sites. Cranking out work in months that took their team years. Cutting edge of all new tech. Then they decided to hire a VP of Dev from the outside instead of promote. We all have basically left in 3-4 months while they have gotten nothing done. All because of that dumb son of a bitch.
Another example of hr bureaucracy ruining everything for the sake of trying to justify their existence. You cannot convince me that the world wouldnt be a better place if people stopped pretending HR is a real profession and something that is required.
If only there was some democratic way of peers designating leaders so that the majority of workers like who they work under...
Yeah i feel like tge actual workers would make much better decisions around production than an employer ever could.
Guaranteed that moron was a crony. They didn't just hire outside. They went looking for someone in the local chapter of the good ol' boys club.
**Hopefully** that person took that experience and proof of profit to the next job, got paid what they should be.
My boss left and I took over and feel this way too much heres hoping end of the year reviews go well for me.
Yup, thats going on with my job. Our manager quit back in April and they didnt get a candidate until November. They couldnt officially promote her but had her start her duties and she was officially hired on the 8th, and the 18th is her last day. They expected her to be in meetings most of the time, micro/macromange our group and another while occasionally being pulled for other projects. Luckily our team is pretty self sufficient but even with double the pay I wouldnt step in.
This this this. This is horrible advice. Two of our smartest guys were promoted to manager when the time came, and their days became 95% meetings and they both quit after 6 months. If they are self sufficient, make sure that there is a people person manager to isolate them from managerial bullshit, and let them do that they are good at in peace.
I did this for Starbucks. Ran the store because our manager was fired, new manager was an idiot, then she got fired. I was the one who transitioned the new new manager (who was awesome) into the role. He approached me a while later asking if I would like to transfer stores to get into an ASM role, which is like guaranteed SM after training, I said yes, then the new DM decided he didnt want to hire from within anymore. I was devastated.
Yeah a lot of people don't want that title. I have a friend who was forced to take a manager position in name only with promises that his boss would do the manager duties because they had to have another manager and no one wanted it.
Today I had a meeting to discuss what day our recurring meeting should fall on going forward. It ended up being a spirited discussion.
This happened on a team I manage. The direct manager left. The team pretty much ran itself. I did keep 1-1s with everyone but day to day operations were largely left to the team and specifically I asked the senior member of the team to take that work on. When all was said and done, I hired a new manager to focus on team development and promoted the senior person to the next step that did not involve management because I knew they didn't want that. It is important to know the people on your teams and what they want from their job.
Yep, and effectively co-ordinating a reliable team is a lot different from having to fire someone, or having to organise someone to do a shit job you know they'll hate, or deal with someone leaving and being told you can't hire a replacement, or enforce whatever nonsense company policy... Being a team leader or middle manager can be absolutely crap. The idea that you must be "promoted" into management to make more money is such rubbish. You need effective people at every level of the organisation. Making everyone go for management jobs they might hate just because they need the money is a sure way to make your teams ineffective and your managers bad.
You don't have to be in non-essential meetings. Just don't go. They may be upset you didn't show but you were busy. The next meeting show up right at the start and say " hey does anyone need to talk to me about anything? no? ok I'll see you guys later." That's how you avoid this shit.
Well that's why you ask. Some people don't want to or aren't suited to move into a manager role.
I'm currently in meetings for probably 75% of my day. It's weird. I feel like I'm getting nothing accomplished, but I'm apparently doing well at it. And I'm not sure how to feel about that. There's a part of me that likes that I really don't have to do much other than be in a video meeting or on a group call and ask a question now and then or say something about what a team is doing. I literally lay in bed at times during some of the meetings that are not on video and it's nice to relax like that. I honestly feel like I shouldn't be paid for half of what I do, so there's a part of me that isn't complaining at all. Then there's another side of me that feels like I'm really not doing anything and just bored.
Right this is exactly what I was thinking. On the one hand yes, this team that's running itself for 6 months is competent enough to do without a manager. On the other hand that doesn't mean any one of them wants to BE the manager. And it could also be that for 6 months all the "downward-facing" day-to-day management has been happening, while all the "upward-facing" and strategic management (budget for next year, hire new people, plan projects with other teams) is just not happening. Which could be totally unimportant in some companies, or really important in others.
This is what happened to my sorta boss. He became my boss and sat in meetings 0900-1500 Incase any Vp's had any questions. He asked for a demotion from the manager position. He likes his life a lot more.
*Absolutely.* I could speak on this for about 2 hours. Even as the most accomplished engineer of almost any place I've occupied I am *not* a manager. I *needed* a good manager. That was it. Maybe some people want it, and they should definitely be given a shot. Shit I would have happily answered to some of my Jr's. in a few places. "Yeah. Yeah I think they've got the chops to run a team. Can I get back to my work? I have like three procedures and seven variables in my head right now and you're really dicking me up." But promoting from within as an obligatory? That is an absolute myth. If anything I want fresh eyes in the building to let us know how we're fucking it up. I'll never get myself promoted outside of engineering ever again.
I feel this. I enjoy doing work much more than being a manager. It sucks corporate wise to get huge pay bumps its kind of inevitable though. Cant complain though, first class problems I suppose but still.
How many times have I tried to explain this. This is so true. When you guilt trip a high performer into management, you gain an unhappy manager, and lose your best worker. I think a lot of bad managers come from this path too. Some of the best managers are people not elite at the task they manage, because then they champion their talent, and dont just tell people how to do their job. They enable them.
Imagine if they do this in basketball. Franchise owners telling Michael Jordan that he wouldn't be playing anymore, instead he will be coaching, because Phil Jackson moved to Los Angeles.
It sounds like there should be another position that exists as the "lead hand" like you were previously below where you were promoted to. Like supervisor under manager or something.
You and me both. I held on for two years, but recently quit and took a job as a developer again. I've never been happier.
Absolutely true especially in a lot of tech teams. I think the spirit of the post is just that a lot of management teams dont think to look to their workers who might be interested in growth opportunities, like dont even think to ask, vs shoving in a team lead dotted line to a hard line/full time management role when they dont want it. Ugh work sucks.
Okay so he didnt want the job, Im sure they noticed and knew that. You have to apply or openly express interest in a position to get it. Why would they interview him if he didnt want it?
And honestly, a really good manager doesn't need to control or coerce people into doing their job well. A good manager should help employees to identify what they want to accomplish within their role, provide their employees with support, listen, encourage, communicate, and overall help to build their employees up in order to get the best out of them. Managers serve as an intermediary for communication up and down the chain of command. They relay information from the bottom up, and from the top down. They take conceptual visions and complex messaging and find ways to make that relevant and understandable to the day to day practal jobs of front line employees. A manager is there to take responsibility for the bad, give credit for the good, and ultimately to make sure there is some level of accountability. And a good manager knows that accountability based purely on authority should be a last resort, not the default way to get things done. Unfortunately, there are a lot of not so good managers.
If a company does not have a solid plan to cultivate, skill up, and promote their human resources, then they are vampires. Might there be some logical plan that vampires have for my blood and and bloodless corpse? Yes. Do I want to be part of it? No.
"Just ask" is the best advice I can give to anyone starting a new job. Every raise, promotion, and good thing at my job I can attribute to simply talking about with my boss (and being at least pretty good at what I do). No one is sitting around thinking about giving you a raise, but if you ask for it, they'll think about it a lot more.
This is exactly what I was looking for lol yea its great that people can step up, but you cant get promoted if you dont apply for the job. Your manager once removed likely has no idea what your personal goals are or if youre interested in managing teams.
Mine was handed to me. Although to be fair, while I never asked for it (nor wanted it) I was the only one on the team who was making an effort to communicate what was happening to higher leadership, talking about challenges and issues, articulating the bad stuff that our manager was glossing over. Now I have a dozen people looking up to me every day and manage more responsibility than I ever had in my life. *^quiet ^panicked ^scream* So yes, speak up. Speaking up gets you places, whether or not you have a clear goal in mind.
I help people develop their careers and the first thing I always tell someone new that I'm working with is that you own your career, not anyone else. You're responsible for it. You have to have the skills and relationships matter but ultimately, opportunity is not going to come looking for you, you have to go looking for opportunity.
No offense, bro, but it does not sound like you were applying for a job in corporate leadership. If you became a team lead at Jiffy Lube because you asked for it, well, yes, and I commend you.
This is buried, but I used to work at the same company as this guy and he was chock full of empty fluff like this. I've never known anyone who made so much money but literally had all 500 other employees asking 'wtf do you do here? what value do you bring to the table?'.
As a software developer, I agreed with this until I saw the /s. Sure some technical experience is helpful, but Id rather have someone who knows how to manage than a star developer promoted to management who can no longer do IC work.
Every software engineer I know would unironically support this. Nothing better than a non-technical manager to bear the responsibility of scheduling and talking so that 2 day bug fix turns into a 2 month code excursion without having to explain yourself or anybody knowing different. Whats the hold up, why is it taking 2 months? Uhh, recursive asynchronous cycle detection in Log4j runtime. Server queries and 1-phase locking. Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm in Metapod. Machine learning. Synergy Hmm.
I believe the post is getting at promoting one of the team members to manager rather than hiring from outside the team or company.
A year after making manager, the top item on my to do list was to take my old manager out and buy him lunch and apologize for all the bullshit I caused him. So many things I just wasn't aware of until I sat in those shoes...
Absolutely. Team members aren't rocks, they have brains. In the short term they know what they need to do. They make it work cause, well, it's their job to. That doesn't mean it's healthy or right. Proper leadership is still necessary. If a team member has to pick up the additional duties of team leadership, what's the cost to the team? Individual growth? Make more with what you've got, but recognize what you need.
That happened at our workplace. Our interim Department Chair had been doing the job for about 8 months. Everyone loved her and wanted her to takeover as the official chair. She applied, didn't get the position. Someone else from an unrelated Department got it and they made our interim chair Vice Chair as a consolation prize. Either way, many of our faculty left because they simply were not happy with the choice of the Chair.
This is true. This is the same principle behind why automobiles don't have specific mechanical specs. You put the gas in at one end, and then let the internal combustion organize itself until it takes you where you want to go.
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Mind blowing considering all you'd have to do in that situation is literally nothing and keep collecting a decent paycheck, and they still fuck it up because of ego.
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