Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?
Engineering is a team sport and leadership is a major dynamic necessary for groups to get stuff done together.
What was your biggest leadership challenge of your entire career? How did you overcome it? What happened then?
237 comments
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(a) saw things in terms of them being persecuted, and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally
(b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street, where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy things happen with no malace.
(c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the 'successful' person was only successful because management supported them unfairly in a way my colleague was not supported. My colleague perceived themselves as a secret failure for not doing what the other person was doing. They also thought others telling them they were successful was not genuine.
(d) lacked a kind of self awareness, and tended to take over meetings with their grievances and upsetness. They couldn't see that other team members needed to discuss their own issues, or with the issues they brought up, that other people also had valid emotions and points of view on them they needed to hear and appreciate.
The time we worked on it as a leadership team went beyond having difficult conversations. I've had difficult conversations, where you talk about someone leaving a job, or someone's difficult behavior. You give it in a loving, compassionate way. Some people can get defensive, maybe upset, but will hear the feedback and take some time to digest it. Even when they're upset, they take some part in the responsibility for the feedback they hear.
This person, assumed off the bat, you were going to attack them. They couldn't see the compassion you were trying to bring. They froze up and got defensive. They tended to carry their own narrative of how they were the victim, and didn't take responsibility for their side of whatever they were having a problem with.
I give credit to our leadership team that we kept at it. We didn't accept this person's sometimes abusive behavior. We tried, and frankly, by letting others know it was not OK, and that we kept our focus on it, it helped the rest of the team understand that "yes we get there's a problem here".
We wanted to help the person. We gave them lots of opportunities for improvement and to do the kind of work they said they wanted to do. We gave them coaching and their own time to develop their own interests into new business directions.
After trying and trying, probably helped a bit through some coaching, this person realized the company wasn't a good fit for them, and they left on their own accord. This was a good outcome. Though I wish there was some way to have accelerated it and/or let the person go so they weren't as destructive to the team.
I can understand management being hesitant to fire someone technically competent, but this kind of disfunction can tank the productivity of an entire team of otherwise technically competent people, as OP alluded to at the end of their comment.
Something I realized lately is if you don’t ha e soft skills, it literally makes you worse at coding.
I always knew you needed them to be a good employee, but it wasn’t until I worked with a “senior” without an ounce of social grace that I realized lacking soft skills makes you worse at writing good code.
The “senior” didn’t solve the application’s problems because they didn’t care to ask. They thought they knew everything. They didn’t spread their knowledge onto the rest of the team. Instead, they spent their time working on a half-baked idea no one asked for. They would get stuck on a problem and never ask for help, a junior mistake.
My hot take is you need some minimum of social skills (doesn’t have to be a lot!) to be “technically competent.”
That's why they resented other's success -- they see flaws in others work, and being overly demanding to other people, it seems to them, that those people are not worth of being successful. Also being demanding of themselves makes compliments look not genuine, because they "know" that they are not good enough (in their eyes).
There is also a stress factor, if there were overtimes, or the project is highly demanding (something to do with money, or health, for example), it can be stressful, and multiply that stress by their lack of confidence (because of high demands they put on themselves), and you can get a very stressed out person on the edge of paranoia, therefore some mistakes are found to be acts of war (coz, you know, if you cared about the product at least to some extent, you would have found it, but since you didn't, you either didn't care, so you are the enemy, or you made it because you are the enemy with ulterior motives and it was a diversion, not because you are a human being and make mistakes sometimes).
Also, when they are getting abusive, outline bounds right away! Tell them, that their feedback is more than welcome, but their tone/language does not need to be hurtful, because it actually takes the focus away from the issue they care about, and if they want it addressed, it's their job to keep other's focus on it. BTW, most likely, they have already came up with valid problems, but because of the problematic communication style, they couldn't make other people care about it or even understand it, since no one cared or understood it, or even worse -- said they did, but there were no resolution or even an attempt to resolve, then once again -- "it's all idiots or enemies around with their laziness/stupidity/diversions!". Yes, they got into this vicious circle themselves and don't know about that, but you are in it now, so it's your job to escape it too.
For me, some quality vacation helped, less regular meetings, more written communication unless really necessary (because, it's easier to manage anger over the text, but easier to converse emotion and intent over the call, plus make those calls up to 2-3 persons, since on a meeting of 4 persons, one of them is not paying attention, and we don't want to make our friends think that we brought an idiot or an enemy to the meeting, you know), more casual conversations with teammates, where you don't bring up work at all (drinking beer over Jitsi/Zoom works too!).
Also, I tend to be very accepting on work challenges, so it's not like I would say no to something I don't like, if it needs to be done. I'll do it, even though I probably wont be happy about it, so don't believe that me or such stressed caring person will see your offer to agree or disagree to do something as a genuine offer instead of polite way to demand it to be done.
You may think they would love to do it (even more, they probably brought up existence of the issue to you themselves!), but it's not necessary, that they won't get under even more stress. Instead, try to make lots of small fully defined tasks (don't make them do it, they'll overthink it and there is more stress again, and more problems), put them into backlog, and ask such person to pick which tasks to do themselves. If you see, that they are overthinking/overworking some other tasks instead, make them do those small tasks, at least few a week, small successes help them to overcome stress, see progress, and are unlikely to be scrutinized on code review or QA.
I hope, someone can make TL;DR of this if it makes sense, I'm too tired today. But leaving my long time job soon, where...
Since it looks like you were trying to avoid this, I figured I would let you know so you can excise it if you wish
1. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
Excessive neuroticism (aka emotional instability) can be very hard to deal with, at a personal level and at a professional level. But note that excessive confidence can be just as harmful to an organization as being emotionally unstable, and sometimes just as hard to deal with.
Then, psychological safety in an organization is also important. Honesty and disagreement should be seen as acceptable as long as they happen in a context of respect and in a constructive manner.
You have to ocassionally give developers some time and autonomy to do stuff they consider important. They want to do what they perceive is right, and while not every time you can let them do it, sometimes you have to listen to them, trust them and let them do it. It will not be a waste of time, believe me.
If you don't, you are at risk of them getting burned out. You do not want burned out developers, it's a waste of time for everyone.
Being in the extrema (e.g.: being overconfident all the time, being anxious all the time) is bad.
I am not in the business of fixing gaping personality issues. And any work related coaching was impossible due to his victim mentality and inability to accept feedback.
Some people asked if your engineer was technically gifted. For me the answer is it doesn't matter. The toxic attitude always undermines any technical contributions they makes. Even a talented asshole just ends up taking on more and more critical projects, which widens their sphere of negative influence.
When I started as a lead I devoted a lot of time and energy to someone who was underperforming and difficult to work with (and whose self-perception didn't match reality) when I should have devoted myself more to engineers who were doing well and receptive to feedback.
Maybe other teams are better at dealing with him.
In my country you really can't fire anyone without a major HR process that saps everyone's energy and morale.
In your case it sounds like everyone would have better off if this person had been fired early on in proceedings.
Once I made someone redundant, which can be a back door mechanism for firing in some circumstances. He just wasn't cutting it. I felt ghastly afterwards.
I ran into him months later and he told me he had no hard feelings, and the shock of it had made him reappraise his career path and he had made his way into a job which was much better suited to his skills. He was far happier.
It was very subtle and masterful, you would see people trying to tell him of their problems, and an hour later leave believing they got their way, only to have agreed on the exact opposite, and being happy about it.
I was too young then to fully appreciate and learn from it. It was probably something like what people were saying about Steve Jobs’ “distortion field”.
He would sit and listen quietly, try to figure out what you were passionate about. He would himself get excited about _that_ too, and then slowly move the direction to seeing the world from his point of view.
After a while I got to know the guy pretty well, and I am sure he was not a sociopath and there was no malice in it. He was genuinely interested in people’s opinions and wanted to help them, he just had a grand vision and managed to find purpose for people in it. He was something like the embodiment of what the book “How to win friends and influence people” was about.
What I believe now is that there is a way to talk to almost anyone about their issues and help them overcome them. Every time I have trouble resolving issues like that I would try to go back and think “what would this person do”. Usually helps.
Not only was he dead weight, he destroyed the team's morale and hurt their relationships with other teams. The team looked to me to solve the issue and couldn't understand why he wasn't being fired, and I couldn't tell them "I'm not allowed to fire him".
I spent months working with him on improvement plans, coaching, and mediating with no improvement, and in the end managed to shake him off in a RIF.
I stayed long enough to repair the team's morale and strengthen the hiring process, and then quit as I had completely lost faith in the company.
Also, I'm not sure if you tried this, but I've heard in cases where you can't fire someone, you recommend them for internal transfer and give the other manager good reviews of them. It's a bit scummy but it's the most positive outcome for the team.
I don't want to ignore the question, but it's a sensitive topic and I'm not sure bringing it up would add to the conversation.
> Also, I'm not sure if you tried this, but I've heard in cases where you can't fire someone, you recommend them for internal transfer and give the other manager good reviews of them.
Yes, I actually had a peer recommended this as well. In the end, I decided against it as I felt it was unethical. I didn't want to get rid of a problem by becoming one myself.
You can say there was a medical issue, or a discrimination issue, or nepotism. If you say nothing, people have to assume the worst.
The worst in this case is probably people assuming you didn't try very hard to fire them.
You can selectively “seed” your personal problems with EAP to establish documentation of stuff and use that to make termination difficult or delay. Some people will go so far as to make claims of alcoholism and parlay that. Gumming up the works is effective, as one HR screwup and the employee is good to go. Sometimes you can get promoted for being an asshole.
You can try and create a bubble of goodness in your own team, but you still exist in a sea of shit. Eventually that sea will drown you.
Have to pick your spots.
At some point in my career (I've been doing software for 22+ years professionally) people started taking me really seriously. I could no longer make certain jokes and I had to be careful about my opinions because they were taken (in many cases) as "the right thing to do".
So I got in all sorts of trouble, because I didn't want the leadership at the time. At some point I finally embraced it and actively started figuring out what kind of leader I should be.
After that point, it has gotten a lot easier. I even started enjoying it.
Leaders lead even when they don't intend to. So if you're one (willing or not), you should take the responsibility do your best to make the team thrive.
I think it as: Company > Team > Self in terms of goals, if I cannot accept that, I'll move on to a different gig.
When I just had peers and made a stupid pun, my friends/coworkers would just groan and tell me not to quit my day job. But when people's annual reviews are in your hands, it's a different story. I think it's perfectly fine to open a meeting by lightening the mood with humor, but I feel compelled to generally reign it in.
Keep the 'bad puns' though, that's more of an expression of humility than anything and it gives them an excuse to groan.
Everyone 'hates/resents their manager' just a tiny bit, and a little opportunity to groan but not get too serious about it is a nice valve.
And yes - the greater the power, the greater every little thing gets parsed and possibly taken out of context, I loathe that because it's the thing that stops us from being candid, and why even in the long-form podcast world, people are not truly forthcoming.
This happened to me. It led to some problems though. People from other teams would contact me as the tech lead (was a midlevel dev acting as tech lead) and ask me to do stuff in PRD. I'd like to help, but only official tech leads are granted that access...
Can you expand on this? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What sort of leader did you become? I don't even know what kind of leaders there are.
I care mostly about the personal growth of my team, I firmly believe that if I help them be the best they can be, the world will be a better place (even if it means losing some of them because they realize they want to do something else, the world will still be a better place).
This means sometimes giving advice, sometimes teaching, and sometimes getting out of the way and let them do their thing (even let them fail, and help them learn from the failure).
The scope goes beyond technical advice, I help them frame problems, think about what they want and what they really care about, it's a mixture of counseling and a typical tech lead.
The trick is doing it without making it forced or weird. It took a lot of exploration of my own emotional state, being able to empathize a lot, and allow myself to be vulnerable. This helps building strong, honest connections that I truly think get the best out of people.
I think I'm on the edge of becoming a manager of sorts in the next couple of years. I don't know if I'm ready or even willing but it's the only way to progress in my career.
I'm in similar boat as you, I'd rather be doing the coding. But at the same time I love working with others.
Thank you again
I just never have managed to enjoy leadership in the official sense. Natural leadership, e.g. being looked to for advice, generally followed is one thing. Official leadership, e.g. meetings and planning is for the birds in my book.
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way." - Thomas Paine
Falling into leadership means that people respected you enough to either follow or at least get out of the way.
Edit: my colleagues did not actually get really motivated until we deployed our first client on the new system which did make the whole thing very stressful for me because it was too much of an uphill battle. Once deployed, it was so much more performant and so much more stable that we all saw we would be spending far less time fixing bugs or trying to squeeze out performance: that changed everything.
I made similar suggestions to my boss about a system once. They basically told me it would never happen and to stop thinking about stuff like that so I could focus on the day to day stuff. Well, 2 years later and they outsourced that entire group to a company who will end up rewriting the system...
It was a different time: the product was a combi of perl, php, c++. And then the business world, at least here, went over to java backends.
Now I realize I don't want that job for any amount of money.
This election cycle was tough.
We tried to grow in 2019 with more staff than we'd ever had.
We've always had a leadership problem of trying to transfer skills from the top down to help lift up employees that don't already 'have it' - especially (braggart time) me and my partners skills as I think our uniqueness as a firm is tied to my work in particular (which my parter is very good at picking up) especially tech & a certain unique vertical of advertising.
It's hard to find employees with multi-skillsets and experience to run things themselves using our tools. especially in politics not a lot of people come in from the outside, and there is low tech skill from the inside.
With larger staff we tried to do more training, tried to build stronger team mindset.
That I think that's our biggest weakness and leadership challenge. Still is.
An example from this cycle of it not going well:
A big problem is mistakes. Our work is hard, long hours, stressful clients making last minute decisions.
One staff member in particular made a large amount of mistakes - and big ones. More importantly didn't seem to learn from them. Lost us important clients and reputation.
So come end of cycle we usually have to downsize payroll.
Choosing who is tough. This year had to decide do we prioritize team cohesion and moral at the cost of mistakes (and our reputation is a big potential issue)? Or do we try to go with more skilled employees who are also more likely to leave, especially without the larger team bonding. Or i guess third option do we take a larger risk than usual in having larger cash loss during down period.
We went with higher skill. Well I think it just bit us, losing a key employee to another agency - the same agency the mistake employee landed at. It's not a coincidence. though to be fair in our business we usually lose people after 2/3 years anyways so maybe just stings more than a disaster of decisions.
Hiring is also a leadership challenge for everyone it seems. It's almost random given the few we hire which all look promising which ones end up excelling.
We need to improve learning skills to be more bottom up if we want to grow. But another leadership challenge: I'm also not sure it's our best path forward. we might be more profitable and successful staying smaller and being top heavy.
Either way congrats on starting your own agency! I was an early employee at an agency (not focused on politics but likely similar to yours in other ways) and when I started out there were fewer than 5 employees including two founders. It was very top-led in the beginning, but as we grew to 20 people or so that became unsustainable.
At that point it became about building a system instead of trying to get everyone up to the same skill level. At a basic level we decided that we were really working with clients to set expectations and then meeting (and hopefully sometimes exceeding) those expectations. We too had issues with last minute changes, until we changed our contract and statement of work language to specify the framework for making decisions (usually budget/spend/creative related etc) and how those decisions/changes would be implemented. Same thing with mistakes: part of the expectation from both sides was built in time for QA to catch mistakes before they happened. The more you can set up the framework for success early on in the sales/pitch/onboarding the better. And clients will probably like you more for setting up reasonable guardrails in the beginning.
The framework also allowed for some influence/involvement from the top, which was helpful in filling those inevitable skill gaps. We used some version of the framework until we got to about 45 employees, and then it had to change significantly again to fix some of the bottlenecks that were coming from the top down. It also opened up more time for people at the top to work on business development and sales.
I left out a lot of details but overall it took a “systems thinking” mindset to fix issues once we got to a level where the top-down approach was no longer feasible. The system was set up from top down, but once implemented it could basically run itself with a few tweaks throughout the years. Maybe you can focus on setting up those systems instead of trying to level up every employee to be a mirror of you and your partner.
Hiring/firing when there is a strong system in place also seemed easier: look for people who can grasp/appreciate the system and their place in it, give them agency and opportunity to grow within the system, and evaluate them based on the system and the expectations it sets. We almost never lost talent to other agencies and we rarely had to fire anyone. Maybe we were just lucky, or maybe the system did its job!
My two cents on growth/profitability for an agency: The existence of other agencies, however inferior they may be, means there is a limit to how much of a premium your agency can charge. At some point someone with control over the budget is going to balk at your price and go with the competitor who is also saying they can do everything you can do. Which means at some point you will need to grow your client (and employee) roster or be satisfied with stagnating profits.
YES. That's the exact same struggle we have! making that transition from partner lead, partners doing the work, to having a more distributed 'assembly line' delegation of work to more employees.
that's good advice on client expectations. It's a struggle politics is crazy - very hard to explain just how crazy until you've worked there which is a problem unto itself. democrats really lack technical skill (at the level HN knows) because even most startups don't seem as chaotic and they pay way better. candidates themselves at the Congressional level can be the worst in causing this crazyness.
another good frame that you mentioned is thinking more in an engineering mindset of systems design might help me thank you! micro-services haha.
UGH yes pricing is the worst. That lower margin, higher volume growth is what we're trying, but I'm not sure it might be better to stay small with higher profit margin. We made slightly less profit this cycle despite having over 2x the retainers. I'm money driven so always want more so it's a big decision for us. We're going to try again this cycle - it's not like I'm struggling here, I still am doing well!
Sounds like your experience is similar on pricing. there are so many people who want to do good, come in and start a digital agency and charge no joke $2k or $3k a month for a LOT of work. And candidates and campaigns are super super cheap but in a really dumb way. Especially Democrats. Republicans will pay a flat % of what you raise, in that case the free market really does work - though sometimes too much bad incentive lots of gross (fraudulent) tactics; read the recent Trump/RNC pieces on their fundraising pages.
An example differentiator that is hard to sell or explain is we use an ESP that I don't think any other political shop use because the political features / tooling doesn't exist. I built that on top to make it fit political needs - and some other cool things like real time data for wayyy quicker reporting. I see the value, clients usually don't but most still trust us.
That switch alone usually gives a 4+% open rate bump which usually equals more than the difference in cost.
We tend to fit best & win more work with clients where there is an existing human relationship of good work or from the parent committees where our work and reputation is good, rather than just cold pitching on price to someone we don't know - much harder to win an account cold.
One good sign that we're doing some things right I actually just saw a report comparing digital firms congressional ad revenue and was surprised to see much bigger companies didn't actually have much higher Congressional ad revenue than us. But those big guys have bigger non-profit clients.
So that's a key goal for us to get more advertising. which in itself is hard; TV firms fight to keep their 'primary general consultant' monopoly even if they have no digital experience. It's gross we sometimes have to do commission splits have to give a % to tv firms just to do the digital buying (they don't do anything we do the work.. they say it's because they made the TV spot, but after charging the campaign $40k in production you'd think the campaign owns it...) sucks. but tv guys are the top historically that's who steers the ship right or wrong.
Plus Democrats barely spends on digital. It's ridiculous like PG, Coke whoever gets it and follows eyeballs and $ quickly. Dems are SO far behind d...
I've worked with those "mistake employees" and if they landed somewhere else that's probably the last place I would want to go.
Though to be fair everybody can make mistakes, and you would have to access if it was lack of skill, lack of attention, "impedance mismatch", or maybe it was the general climate that was making this employee less effective.
And I agree the climate or culture of our company is something we're working on and some people just don't work well in that environment. It's like a coin flip though on hires, the ones that you think are awesome sometimes don't do well and sometimes the ones that you think are green end up being amazing!
Plus it's just politics in general. It's really fast paced, high volume, crazy campaigns. the last months are like log higher work/money raised.
Along comes my first day and surprisingly, it’s mostly radio silence. CTO, my boss, doesn’t respond to my emails, doesn’t answer the phone. I call the CEO and he promises to sort it out.
Fast forward a week or two later, something is obviously up. Long story short, the board fires the CTO, making me the most senior engineer in the company. Yikes, but ok. The contract with some of the consultants are up a week or so later, and they choose not to renew. Weird. The only other FT engineer quits. Uh-oh. I’m now the only engineer. I had to learn a new product and code base. The support backlog was long. I was getting called into sales calls.
If I had lived in a tech hub, I would have quit. But I didn’t, I lived in a remote mountain town and finding this remote job took months.
I ended up lasting about 18 months. It was a learning experience, but horrible on my body, relationships, mental health.
It can be that hard to find remote jobs? (I never tried.)
Can I ask how much work experience (eg years) did you have at the time?
I'm glad you could get away from there eventually. (Hmm you found another remote job?)
Best/Worst job ever.
After that everything is a walk in the park.
I will say after working in web development, software engineers are a unique breed and are difficult to integrate into a team. I believe this an issue because of the demand for developers and the amount of knowledge they control.
Luckily, I don't work in the web development world anymore.
I was so stressed I considered suicide despite the damage it would do to my fiancée and family. I didn’t see any way out of the situation and had convinced myself I was going to jail and my career was ruined. There were all sorts of suspicious emails, and truth be told I wasn’t exactly a saint either.
I wound up finding a therapist who specialized in criminals and those going to jail. He listened to my story and gave me very good advice, and said worst case I would go to low-security prison for a few months. He didn’t think (from his professional experience) that I would do any time, and to relax.
We wound up settling with the regulators, I left the company on semi-good terms, and eventually the company got acquired for the biggest exit of my career! And I am very happy I did not kill myself (as are my now-wife and kids).
The silver lining is normal stressful situations don’t rattle me anymore. I have ice in my veins given what I went through. I am now a CTO of a respected company.
lmao. rich people are hilarious. this isn't a "leadership challenge." this is you almost facing the consequences of your actions and then getting out of it and being successful despite the fact that you (by your own admission) were probably guilty. too bad you weren't caught -- then you may have actually learned something.
No, but the consequences of a seemingly sociopath CEO's actions.
Your reply was one of the worst things I've read here on HN the last weeks. Saying such things to someone who was, back at the time, thinking about suicide.
This anonymous poster stayed on topic and told us about a leadership challenges and the personal trials and tribulations of dealing with the challenge. Personally, I'm glad to have read this tidbit and thankful they shared it. They likely can't provide more details for legal reasons and they certainly don't want to bring attention to this part of their career.
So there is a possibility that in a perfect world he could have gone to jail.
It doesn't matter if you think it's true, or if you think the person deserves it, or any of that. It doesn't matter if they're rich.
In the end, you are the asshole. You are the one dunking on someone's toughest moment in life. If you can do it to them, you can do it to anyone.
It's not justified "because they're rich". The same idiotic logic is used by pompous jerks who litter "to give janitors something to do" or who treat waiters like shit "because it's their job". Maybe you're reading that thinking "that would never be me" but, I've got news for you, that IS you. Just a different flavour of it. The person on the other end is human and you treated them like dirt.
You tried to shit on someone who shared their lowest moment in life. Let that sink in, deep.
Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can't do that you shouldn't be working with them. two important notes about that:
1. If you just thought of someone you can't trust instead of thinking about how you can give more trust to people, you just had your ego stand in the way of mutual success. You are a shitty manager, and today is hopefully the first day of you recognizing that and learning to trust.
2. When people don't deliver what you expected, it's because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. What seems obvious to you after 45 minutes in a meeting with three other people already prepared for the topic will most of the time seem obvious to no one else. If it does, I can almost promise, their vision of it is totally different than yours. Learning to work through the defining the problem (that includes asking "does this problem exist?") and then guiding solutions (we have x days, engineering hours, etc available) to ensure they meet the needs of the business. If no one but you delivers things correctly, you're a shitty manager, and today's hopefully the first day of you recognizing you need to learn to communicate and trust.
Not many people are lucky enough to be told so plainly it's their ego, but it's your ego that causes your team to fail. Maybe it's your boss's ego that's causing you to fail... I was told plainly to my face to not let my ego get in the way of the goal... and yeah it punched me in the gut too, so if you're hurting, or in denial know it's okay. We all have to grow, it's worth it.
If you haven't built trust with every person on your team, that doesn't make you a shitty manager. The more people you can work with and trust, the more effective you may be as a manager, but don't let a counterexample serve as proof positive that you suck. Trust is a two way street.
Sometimes people underperform for other reasons that have nothing to do with you. They may have a different perspective, or they may just be having a bad day. Or they may have family or health problems affecting them. Or, they may actually just no longer care or not be good at their job.
For the second -- it is on the manager to know enough about the reasons affecting their report's performance to be able to adapt before the team underperforms. (and it is on the report to surface that information quickly so that the team isn't compromised)
I once worked with a manager who would always ask for details like "oh you have a headache? Do you have a fever?" While I think his intentions were good, and that he just wanted to show concern and even offer support or advice, I always found the questions incredibly invasive and a violation of my privacy.
My team knows that I will always listen if an employee wants to share details of their personal lives (upto anything that crosses the line of appropriatness for work), but I would never pry.
So, in this example, I would never know an employee is struggling with a personal issue, unless they broached the subject with me.
Personally, if I'm sick, the last think I want to do is communicate with my manager - it means you have to be careful, you never know if they're digging, or 'professional but not exactly sincere empathy' etc..
'Adult Professionals' shouldn't need to be coddled. If you're sick you're sick and that's that.
If you have something that's a 'big deal' then you have that in a conversation in which the managers emotional response one would expect is empathy but beyond that it's a matter of 'how to work around it'.
'Trust' is a multifaceted thing, I generally do not trust that people will do their jobs well at the outset, until I've seen evidence of that, but as far as those kinds of workplace issues I definitely 'trust by default'. People get sick and that's that.
And then have a lot of tolerance because we are all a little odd in our own ways and it's just easier not to get caught up in stuff.
If I didn't have such a relation with my manager I'd be looking for a job. If he doesn't look out for me when I'm sick he will probably not look out for me professionally either.
Second point, sure. That's the ideal. But it's not always going to happen, and you need to be able to deal with that situation to be a well rounded manager and leader. IMO.
You can still try to find out what causes their behavior (by showing interests into their perspective) and may be able to help them and therefore the team.
- If they have a different perspective, it should be helpful to listen to their perspective.
- If they have a bad day, it will go away.
- If they have family or health problems, you might not want know the details, but simply knowing that a person is going through a difficult time might give you enough information to know how to improve the situation.
Even if you are not the cause of the situation, you might still be able to improve it as a manager.
A general rule for me is that you should know within the first 2-4 weeks whether you've made a bad hire. This is a bold statement, but my experience is that this time frame will give you enough time to get a gut check (super vague, but there are too many different patterns for me to articulate here). If your gut says no, that will stick with you, and your gut will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy anyways.
This is the quality I learnt to look for in a leader (I am not a leader but worked under few good ones).
I also noticed how good leaders never take things personally. They quickly move on and not hold grudge. I am amazed how good leaders are able to do that and in doing so inspire me to do the same.
He wasn't bad as an engineer, but he had this crazy OCD to a point that even keys in YAML file should be ordered alphabetically.
He had his vision how things should be, and how he would implement them.
First, he was not happy that my solutions were done differently than what he would do.
Then, when I learned about that he wasn't happy and tried to do it the way he wanted by asking him question about it he told me that I required hand holding and as a senior should not need that. Yes I'm senior, but not a mind reader.
I would think that someone who majored in psychology would be better at something like that, but I guess the only thing he learned in psychology class was Socratic method, which he constantly overused when talking to others.
He though he was being clever but only made me think (because I couldn't say it to his face): "just fucking tell me what the fuck you want me to do"
Ugh, I'm so glad I don't have to deal anymore with this BS.
Eh, I am guilty of that (for myself, I don't run around other people's code).
I don't know if it's OCD but I clearly remember the moment I decided to order keys (in yaml, json, etc.): after a debugging session where I lost time because I was scanning whole lists with my eyes, looking for a particular key and thought "it'd be easier if it was ordered according to alphabet and not domains of concern".
Wasn't there a debate/online conversation about `girly code` a decade ago ? About tabs, alignment, etc ? Thank you prettier :).
Sometimes this comes from years of experience (mostly pain ;)). Some leaders, while coming from a good place - I want to help you, and others, avoid pain in the future - communicate it very badly - do it like that... because I say so!
Ordering keys to prevent randomness is very helpful to spot changes when using "git diff", doing code reviews, comparing files side by side.
Often it helped me spotting bugs due to a missing or unwanted element.
I wish code linters had enabled by default with the ability to disable it with some simple syntax.
> No, prettier tries not to change the semantics (specifically, the AST) of the program, and sorting imports/keys could break that guarantee. See here for more details and context, as well as links to similar/duplicate issues: #1684 (comment)
it makes sense not to make it a default.
https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/2460 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/1684#issuecommen...
However, if you get in a situation where people are changing styles back and forth then you need to talk it out. E.g. Alice inserts a blank line, Bob removes the blank line, Alice inserts the blank line again - time to talk about blank lines and code style.
In this case, if Alice sorts the dictionary keys and Bob couldn't care less, it seems both can have what they want by simply letting Alice sort the keys. And if it becomes a common thing instead of a one-off, maybe talk about it.
I don't have good memories from the whole thing.
> And there you have it. I think "girl code" is quite a compliment. Because caring about things like beauty makes us better programmers and engineers. We make better things. Things that aren't just functional, but easy to read, elegantly maintainable, easier--and more joyful--to use, and sometimes flat-out sexy.
A female software engineer who does not strive for beauty in code, is she less feminine? A male software engineer who strives for code beauty more feminine than the female one?
It is a useless argument to get into, when the actual way to describe the type of code would be a choice of "beautiful, sorted, structured, consistent" instead.
Gender, as such, has nothing to do with it.
Even in the conclusion quoted here, the author says "I think it's quite a compliment". As if when you first hear the term "girl code", you're supposed to think "ew", and the author is there to convince you otherwise.
Why not just call it neat or organised instead? Using a gendered term does nothing but appeal to stereotypes and solidify them.
However, if you want a positive, constructive frame the goal is self-documenting code. In that vein, here is a set of ideas I made a major contribution to amongst many other serious-minded software engineers.
http://wiki.c2.com/?SelfDocumentingCode
I feel like this is more common among insecure managers than with secure managers. The insecurity shows up in micromanagement. Micromanagement takes many forms, all the way from verbal status updates to toxic code reviews to lack of coherence in project plans or career plans.
Until this recent manager, I never truly understood what micromanagement and insecure management meant. Maybe I was lucky to have good experienced managers in the past. Insecure micromanagement truly crushes my motivation to work.
Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired.
If you have a competent person who didn't deliver what you expected, then yes, it's probably the fault of the manager's communication. Not so for the lower-end of that competence spectrum.
It might still be the manager's fault for hiring that person in the first place, but that's separate to it being their fault at not communicating properly.
The shitty job here is not firing that type of person quickly enough, and misdirecting the blame towards your communication skills.
EDIT - edited the first sentence for clarity.
While true, a key requirement for even senior developers to function well is good management or a good team lead.
If effective management doesn't exist, the senior engineer should be made manager/team lead since he's doing that work anyway.
On the other hand, if management is micromanaging, then the responsibility of clarification is on the micromanagers.
Management of knowledge workers is a hard job. Most managers are incapable of understanding their reports and understanding their OWN standing among their reports.
Isn't it possible for a dev to fulfill requirements but still deliver a bad result as measured by subjective (but important) things such as code smells, bloat, crappy algorithmic logic, and so on? Or do you think managers need to spec things out in such strenuous detail that surprises (but also, to an extent, autonomy and ad hoc decision making) aren't possible?
There's also the case of R&D roles where it's hard to spec things out exactly in advance, and you're partly relying on the employee's ingenuity.
You either need to accept that someone sees the problem differently than you and accept their solution, or if it is something important to you, you need to get better at explaining your vision.
Anyway, back to your requirements, as you pointed those requirements are subjective. If those are important things you should still outline what's expected. You don't have to do it for every project, and can be when person is being on-boarded.
Requirements covers a VAST range of different garbage that can be provided to someone under the guise of letting them get on with it.
Which is... also the responsibility of the manager. Q.E.D.
I was trying to say that it's not always the responsibility/fault of the manager's communication skills specifically.
In the case of my example above, it was a failure of management to hire a sufficiently competent person, or a failure to fire the person when their lack of competence became apparent. It wasn't (in my example) a failure to communicate requirements properly.
If the employee understand the task given but does not have the skill to carry it out satisfactory, then it may be a question of the competency of the employee.
And who does that person report to? Who made the decision to hire them in the first place?
The problem is, some people have a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset because they've never seen anything different so they think it's impossible. When you say "Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired" it ends up functioning as a red herring to deflect away from poor people leadership. It's a naive excuse made to hide a lack of understanding regarding how something really works.
To figure that out, let's ask this: how do you think the manager hired that "wrong" person in the first place, and how do you think that person ended up in a place to end up failing?
My point is not to be socratically pedantic here, but to point out that communication is /hard/ and often times an inadequate deployment of it is at the root cause of these kinds of failures. What kinds of communications could have gone wrong here?
1) Failure to adequately communicate with higher ups about headcount, business goals and necessity/capability to deploy extra headcount
2) Failure to adequately communicate requirements for the job before hiring
3) Failure to adequately communicate during the interview so as to properly assess candidates
4) Failure to adequately communicate expectations, progress, onboarding and plans after a candidate onboards
Guess what happens if anything about this chain of processes is broken internally? The candidate will fail, and due to circumstances out of their control. And then they will move to a more functional organization, and wonder why they ever wasted their time with this one.
Now, whose responsibility is it to make the right judgment call about that? Whose responsibility is it to have the right internal /communications/ to make sure the decision is well thought out and solid, to make sure it is brought through to fruition successfully? Who reaps the ultimate rewards, and who ultimately shoulders the greatest burden for mis-execution?
Not the IC. It is leadership. This isn't rocket science.
if people generally understand you and one person does not its them. if most people don’t understand you its you.
Is your advice to pretend you trust them? Some kind of "fake it til you make it" approach?
There are people who don't live up to the mark in terms of quality and that's that, and in those scenarios it would have little to do with trust.
I'm a developer at a fairly small company. I never really wanted to be managing people but after some internal drama a bunch of stuff was moved around and I found myself in charge of the team I had been on while we looked for a permanent manager.
One of the devs who now reported to me decided that this was the best time to demand a raise- not just a cost-of-living increase, which are scheduled, but an amount of money that would have made him the highest-paid person on the team by a lot. (He was on the lower end of both seniority and performance.) He was threatening to leave, and after talking to my superiors I basically just said "sorry, you aren't getting that, I don't want you to leave but if you do I will be happy to give you a good reference."
That didn't go over great and he emailed the whole C-suite trashing me and telling them essentially what a mistake it was that I got tapped to lead the team over him. The CEO just forwarded the email to me and said "deal with this." We'd had a pretty good relationship before, (or at least I thought we did) but all attempts to sit down with him and figure out how we could work together ended with him just making it clear that he was not going to play ball.
He stopped showing up to work for awhile and sent his notice not too long after, and eventually we hired a real manager (which was always the plan) and I went back to writing code. Even though I don't know what I could have done differently I still feel bad and think about it a lot.
If anything, you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head. He isn't looking to work with you or the team, he's actively seeking to undermine you; at that point his presence is a negative, not a positive.
Is escalating an issue a fireable offense?
I wonder how it'd been to be a manager, if he couldn't be fired, and he continued contacting the CEO etc saying you (GGP, whirlingdervish the throwaway) weren't any good at your job.
I guess eventually I'd quit (if I was in GGPs position and couldn't do much about it), and he'd become the manager in my place, if the plan hadn't been to hire another one.
I'm in one of these countries. If they have a cause that cannot be legally used to terminate an employee, they just look long and hard for any other misdemeanors and fire them as fast as they gather any plausible "evidence". Creative types can also actively put an employee into a checkmate, i.e. a position where no move or any move is a fireable offense.
In this case it could be as simple as identifying any part of that email as a defamation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860743
I wonder if the lawmakers having made it almost impossible to fire someone, then damages the psychological safety in the company, in that the managers have to start looking for mistakes someone did and using it against him/her. I'd guess this sends bad vibes to the whole team.
Makes me wonder if this holds countries like, was is France?, back, when it comes to startups and innovation, hmm
This wasn't "I have an issue, my manager didn't address it", this was "I have an issue with my manager. He's an idiot. You shouldn't have made him manager. You should have made ME manager", etc.
There is nowhere to go with that. There is no way to fix that. There is no way to ignore that. And the employee is going to be killing team morale more and more the longer they stay at that company.
So your options are to leave the person where they are, killing the team's morale and effectiveness, go to management yourself and ask that the employee be listened to (meaning that now someone as problematic and full of themselves is being put in a management position, which will also lead to the team's productivity dropping to nothing), or you let the person go. Only one of these will leave the team intact.
Also, making this a fireable offense only makes the complainer instead stay quiet, but they will still be “killing team morale”. So is that better?
"Hey, I wanted to raise up my concerns about X. I mentioned it to (manager), but I'm not entirely certain I communicated it effectively. If we don't do Y, Z will happen". Expect upper management to talk to the manager about it, and expect the manager to try and downplay the concern (or if they're treacherous, express outrage that you didn't talk to them about it; have proof of the conversation if that's a concern). If it doesn't lead to change and blows up, it will be noticed.
Better still - if you have anonymous surveys (most companies do), lambast the manager there (politely), and you place the impetus to change things on upper management there (provided a majority on the team agrees).
The reality is that upper management put the manager there -because they trust them-. They barely even know you. That's the reality. You can still talk to them, but you can't come off as though you're trying to undermine your manager. If upper management's response is to tell your manager "deal with it", you clearly came across as trying to undermine your manager; you're a problem. You just made it so it's your job or your manager's, since you just burned that trust, and in a public way that upper management is now aware of. A good manager will fire you because of the effect you're going to have on team morale. A bad manager will fire you because they feel threatened.
This isn't about what is hypothetically better, this is about what the reality is. The reality is that management is all about trust (really, working in groups is all about trust); upper management has to trust middle management, and middle management has to trust the ICs. Your bypassing your manager is going to look like a breach of trust with your manager (i.e., why didn't you talk to them and work it out with them?). Your claims may be right, but being right doesn't equate to being effective, nor does it excuse being stupid in what you do about it. This guy not only doesn't sound in the right, he also was stupid in how he approached it.
As a slight addendum, too - the reality is that managers that are 'stupid' may still be valuable to higher ups. The business is not evaluating managers the same way ICs are. If the manager makes a decision, overruling the ICs, and the ICs raise their concerns about the decision (NOT the manager), carefully, politely, and the decision leads to a bad outcome, upper management will notice. But I've had decent managers who were technically a bit clueless, but who knew to let the ICs make the decisions themselves; the team succeeded. You can have stupid managers who still run effective teams; if they're actually bad managers, upper management will notice. It may or may not be before you've made plans to leave yourself, but the reality is you can't force a manager to be replaced; you can only work to move yourself (to another team, or to another company), or wait for it to be noticeable and be careful to control the narrative.
Sure, that sounds more reasonable. Your initial description could easily be interpreted as “If you go over the head of your immediate manager for any reason whatsoever, you are a liability to the company and deserve to be fired immediately”, which is mostly how I read it. Certainly, an employee must be careful when engaging the company in non-orthodox paths, just as you say, but employers must also be careful in how they communicate the possible options available to an employee; if what employers say comes across like my quote above, an employee can feel trapped and easily become disgruntled in a situation when upper management would actually want to be informed of said situation.
The onus is on upper management to make sure that employees feel safe enough to actually inform upper management of something management would like to be informed about, which includes counteracting middle management, since the incentive of middle management is to try and make sure that employees never ever go over the head of middle managment for any reason at all.
Sounds like you were perhaps arguing against a strawman? I never said don't ever go to upper management, nor that there is never a reason to go to upper management. Just that if someone goes to upper management the way this guy did, the right response is to let them go, that they are a liability to the team, the manager, and the company at that point. Honestly to themselves, too, but that's not on the manager to fix.
If it helps, consider that this person might have tried exactly the same ploy with whoever was in your shoes. I'm sure they had some issues going on in their life, and issues with the existing management that you inherited unknowingly.
Management stress is real. Part of it comes with maintaining confidentiality, whereas a disgruntled employee will rant and get things off their chest.
I won't say it's 100% about the role and not the person, since that's dumb - interpersonal relationships are real and significant. Equally, it's not 100% about the individual. FWIW, and taking your description at face value, I think your response was appropriate and theirs was not.
People are weird - all of us.
We get into our own head-space, and we interpret the world differently than others, sometimes objectivity falls by the wayside.
Sometimes someone is truly working is rear off advancing the mission, but but that nobody really noticed, or if they did, that it didn't matter because 'hard work' isn't necessarily the only management requirement. They get upset because they didn't get the promotion.
Lashing out at 'management' is the easiest, most common thing for any worker to do, often there's a basis for concern, but just as often people don't recognize how inherently chaotic it is the higher one treads.
The moment you're in a leadership position, you will constantly be challenged by at least one 'hard case' of some kind or another.
Once simple rule to help differentiate: if they are making a fuss about the product, or something that will help the company/team, then there's probably good faith there. If the fuss is always about themselves or their career, that's not good.
I had no budget, no control over any of the issues, no authority outside my team, no time... nothing. It was made clear to me that there would be no support in any way. I was young(er) and tried my best but it was a shitshow. I have never felt more exposed and thrown under the bus.
A couple of similar situations were enough to grind down my resolve and I became as disillusioned as everyone else. When the inevitable redundancy was offered I took it and left without hesitation.
Still bemused by how absolutely amateurish and vindictive the situation became.
So I didn't "overcome" it, clearly, but it helped me realise a few things. Firstly, that nobody has any idea what's going on in anyone else's head. God knows what my then-boss thought of me, but it clearly wasn't much, and it clearly didn't match how I thought I was perceived.
Secondly, once things are toxic it's almost impossible to turn things around. A couple of other people at the same place acted very poorly too, around the same time. Looking back, maybe I should have just quit. But it wasn't easy to see the wood for the trees.
Third, stick up for yourself and for others. Don't be an arsehole. Everyone's dealing with their own demons and people in authority should constantly try to remind themselves of this. Support each other and grow together. Fortunately most people aren't arseholes, even if some occasionally act like they are.
I haven't always got those elements right, but at least I'm aware of them.
So I guess what I overcame to a small degree was my own professional shortsightedness! :)
As a new team lead, coming up with a roadmap, and not being able to subdivide a project into independant parts that can be worked on in parallel by different team members.
I was in charge of elevating some code when I first started. I screwed it up and had to spend 6 hours redeploying while the team waited. It did not feel good telling everyone about the situation. It turned out ok in the end.
I was the ASC for a team (actually 6 teams across 2 departments). The application had a serious vulnerability that required multiple people to address. I brought up the issue with my boss - not prioritized. Talked to my department head next. They told me they weren't going to address the issue because they have a backup system. So I added if they ever tested the system or had documentation on how to restore from it - nope. So I did all I could do. All the tech leads were shocked when I talked to them about it. No way was I going to own the security for that POS system, so I posted to a different area of the company.
I worked as a tech lead (unofficially as I'm only a midlevel dev - seeing any issues with this company so far?). Oddly enough, I don't remember any serious issues even though this was the most authority I was given (took really, the others have me their trust/approval/etc to lead them). I had a great team and we were able to overcome a few challenges and provide business value while performing some major technical upgrades.
What is "elevating code"? (I'm trying to work out of autocorrect has screwed up the word "deploying".)
What is an ASC?
ASC is Application Security Champion. Essentially the role requires some internal security training then you are responsible for following the processes to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.
It only afterwards turned out to be a challenge. I didn't have an alternative job offer at the time of quitting, and shortly after my last day at work the pandemic started.
What happened after that? If I can ask
Edit: the company lasted maybe 2 years and barely fed us at all
If you continue to lead, at some point, its going to feel like all the walls are crashing down around you and your team.
Your path forward will most likely not be perfect, but it is a path, and the team will look to you. Be open to ideas and feedback, but I'm talking about when nobody on the team knows what to do because it feels everything has failed.
Pick a direction, start running, and scream "this way!"
It's your job to say "Get to the choppa!" if that is what the situation calls for. Nobody else is going to do it.