Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity.
They did an adequate job on experimental design around randomness within their test population, but they did a completely inadequate job randomly selecting the population pool itself. You really can't extrapolate their findings to the general workforce because of this.
> Participants were recruited from the Essex University Economics Lab sample pool. ... The median participant was a graduate student with two years of work experience.
Hard to see how econ grad students play-acting boss says much about the kinds of long-term relationships / group dynamics that appear in the wild.
How could anything be positively predicted by gender?
More seriously, selection effects should be much stronger than gender, age and ethnicity, and yet there should still be some correlation in one direction or another, wish there were power and confidence values given
There are natural tendencies based on gender. That said, they tend to overlap between the two, but become more extreme at the edges of a given bell curve.
For example, in strength, if you take an equal group of men and women, then half of all men are likely to be stronger than all women and half of all women are likely to be weaker than all men in the group. Meaning half intermingle and overlap.
The same is true for some psychological traits. These aren't absolutes though. I don't think it should generally be a consideration for a given position myself, but there are absolute differences in most cases.
Given there are thousands of papers written on this over the past half century due to the complexity of human behaviour, I'm not sure you'd be able to fit this into one paper. There are too many topics to discuss. Individual side, organizational side, and then it spiders from there. Cognition and psychology, culture, corporate governance, and much more, it's endless.
But to be simplistic, you could just count the co-authors on all those thousands of papers, take the average, and there's your answer. Draw up histograms along various independent variables if you want a bit more nuance.
Hate to be that guy but none of this really matters.
We all know managers get picked by kissing the right ass and siding with the right boss. Which of course makes (most, yes MOST, but not ALL) managers incompetent, or at best barely mediocre by happenstance.
Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization
All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism.
That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of financial instrument aka “investors.”
Then there’s a third group, and this third group is “management.” Management is hired by the investors - not the employees and is generally given more equity in order to convince the manager that they are actually closer to an investor than a worker.
The true job of management is to prevent labor from having more power and more control of the financial vehicle than the investors do - find me a manager that’s empowering their employees in a way that shifts power from investors to employees and I’ll find you a manager with no job.
This is why CEOs carry the weight of all of this bullshit because investors point to them as the scapegoat person for anything that goes bad on the labor side, and employees look to this person for direction and guidance for what to do on behalf of the investors - so they pull the “I’m paid only if the company does well” smuggling in this concept that the company doing well benefits everyone (hint: it doesn’t and if the options are homelessness or death you don’t actually have options)
In cases where “investors” create the org (EIR, VC spinout etc…) they are intentionally creating a demand signal for labor, and a process for which you can grovel to them for them running a max-min algorithm to ensure they don’t pay anything more than they legally have to - going so far as to now make it a religion where it’s unethical to do anything other than this
Alternatively if a group of engineers gets together to create something, the second that they have success on it, the capitalist investors will direct all their existing financial instrument companies to go and try to capture that new market away from the small group - typically via ruthless competition, but sometimes acquisition becomes the mutually minimum cost outcome. This is all with the idea that if you can acquire your way to market dominance in a monopoly type scheme this is the ideal for investors. It is a very predictable line of income and that’s all they care about.
As long as you live inside of this model, there is no possible world where you will ever have a manager who cares about the people underneath them or the customers for more than a very brief period while the rest of the organization figures out that this manager is a threat to the owners.
If you wanna be successful as a “manager” in a capitalist profit driven organization, there is no option other than to align yourself with investors and do everything you can to prevent your employees from becoming more independent (typically by granting unvested “options” that have zero value outside of the organization)
That's a pretty grim outlook, but I honestly can't poke a "hole" in its logic.
Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)
I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.
The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.
Just my anecdotal two cents: what you're saying simply does not match my life experience. The model bit is debatable, but the predicted outcomes are demonstrably false for me and a lot of people I know.
Yes this system produces “wins” and it’s generally at someone’s expense. There are exceptions of course, like everything but this is the general distribution
The whole point though is that if you’re a winner in the game has very little to do with being or having a “good” manager
Know your working style. Identify if there is a direct report with similar style. If no, they are not a good manager for you. If yes, ask them directly if they are a good manager.
What makes you think your interview practice is producing good managers?
You might be looking for them, but my conclusion after reading many "how we hire/interview" posts is most people do something and conclude it works - instead of testing. What if instead you put all the names of potential managers in a hat and drew one - what makes your process better (at least the hat selects for "lucky" people)
If you need months and months to find them, then something is very very broken in your interviews. I see a lot of workers that would be very good managers and they are never given ANY responsibility, ever.
“ The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills.”
That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.
With coding it takes time for teams to sync. Let alone being brought up to speed on an already worked on codebase. Without what basically amounts to as handholding the process becomes more drawn out.
Managers who don't realize you have to basically baby new hires until they are up to speed probably won't be very effective.
That's great, but the video goes on to say that he hired a trained manager (an MBA) with zero experience in manufacturing to manage the Macintosh manufacturing team...
That clip lacks context. Before that clip he was talking about engineers/designers. I think that documentary is just poorly edited, they interspersed Steve's monologue with something that was only loosely related to what he was saying. Manufacturing is labor, it doesn't require much brains. Whoever manages a team like that probably doesn't need to have much experience being on the ground floor.
They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups.
They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.
All these numbers are then correlated with some indicators, eg age, ethnicity, social skill score, and so on.
I guess the big issue here is whether the lab task is representative of a real-world project. The big one for me is that in the real world, you don't often have an objective measure of success, and whatever you do have is not going to be independent of the environment that you're operating in. Sometimes you get to grade your own effort, other times you get graded by some fool who gets it wrong. The team changes over time. Goals change over time.
> They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.
Honestly, this sounds exactly like what a group of graduate students who have never had a real job in the corporate world would come up with as an assessment of management skills.
I feel like you would need 6 months at least to really assess management.
One of my soft skills is people logistics. It's obvious to me when other people don't have it, and some days I wonder why everyone else doesn't see it.
If you treat people like cogs you're always going to be disappointed in their output. For the duration of a study I don't know how you could possibly do otherwise, and get disappointing results. You have to know something about people to figure out how to divide the labor so people are generally near their comfort zone but routinely pushed a little bit out of it for purposes of growth.
I'm not even a manager, just a lead dev, but I am what some people might call an 'informed consumer' of management skills.
i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it.
This is the best advice, and the logical choice if you want to run things in your own way.
One could fight the inertia of a large firm, or simply create an entity that better aligns with your own values and customer needs.
A tax strategy driven small business teaches people how to manage projects, and see the stupid manager/worker BS for what it is... no PMP or Phd required... =3
Essentially, one mitigates the financial risks through tax credits, grants, and labor subsidy programs. i.e. the initial cash burn is money you would have paid in taxes anyway, or simply not purely your own capital.
YMMV depending where you live, and your groups financial situation.
You would be mistaken if you think only "small" firms operate this way... =)
The ex-servicemen I hired used to bug me about taking customer abuse in meetings...
I pointed out we bill by the hour, and if someone wants to sit there irrationally ranting at people to work though their solution... so be it... lol =3
There's a difference between "sucking up" and being polite/courteous and respectful. For me, arrogance has always been a bit of a trigger. I can work with most people, but when someone is both arrogant and less than competent it irks me to no end.
My advice is try to always assume the best possible interpretation of any given person's motives in a workplace. Try to be friendly.
> arrogance has always been a bit of a trigger. I can work with most people, but when someone is both arrogant and less than competent it irks me to no end
I think this is a common trigger for a lot of technically inclined people, myself included.
In those cases I generally try to focus on acceptable outcomes more than "being right". And, importantly, not focussing as much on proving the other guy wrong (which is not quite the same as proving yourself right).
Having a track record of delivery without being seen as the sore thumbs that sticks out goes a long way.
I have zero tolerance for an arrogant manager/Sr. X dressing down a more junior resource willing and eager to learn and get better. I have a reputation for patience, compassion, and a calming effect on clients and team except in this case. I could probably handle it better but one thing about putting someone on a cross for all to see is they're on a cross for all to see.
If your goal is to get into an executive's inner circle, that's a purely political move and will take playing politics... unless you're already a direct report for your current position.
The trap is thinking that management is about "sucking up" or "playing a game." The way I run my team is entirely in line with my personality and values. There's no fakery at all.
In a way, that's the key: you need to be in an environment where you can operate in a way that works for you and delivers value to the organization. I'm very explicit to my higher-ups about what I'm optimizing for, and that if there's a day when my organization no longer values that, I'll step back from this management role.
I would actually encourage you to zoom out 1 or 2 levels, and instead of focusing on the "how to get better at 'sucking up'" problem, I would instead coach you to think about why you chose to apply this specific mental model to your career, and why this form of "black-and-white" thinking might be hurting you even more (as a general theme, where "suck up" is just one specific example).
I am 99.9% certain that, the overall trajectory of your career is not hinging on something as specific as "if only I learned how to 'suck up' then everything would be great". This is actually a form of magical thinking, of making excuses to avoid engaging with the real problems, and instead just lumping everything into a single excuse as to why ____ didn't work out.
The fact that you mention "too much pride, introversion, embarrassment" is also a clue to me that you might be someone with very rigid patterns of thought, and therefore likely to fall victim to black-and-white thinking (that something is all-good or all-bad, that something can ascribed to 1 single root cause to blame, etc.).
Some off-the-cuff ideas/questions, not all of them may be applicable to you, but hopefully it triggers some introspection on your part:
- Do you often think thoughts like, "I know I am right, everyone else is wrong, why can't they just appreciate my genius"?
- Is there anyone that you actually respect in your team/your org? Have you ever tried to ask them, "how did you get to where you are?" Do they mention "sucking up" as a big ingredient?
- When was the last time you asked someone to help you with something? Did you phrase it as a demand or threat? Or did you seek some kind of mutually beneficial win-win outcome?
- When was the last time you admitted to making a mistake?
- When was the last time you let someone else convince you to change your mind about something?
Well, are you an executive, or one step from becoming one? Then it's entirely possible that spending more time socializing recreationally can directly help your career. Golf happens to be a common choice, but maybe your exec team likes rock climbing or playing video games... just depends on the company or the social group.
Also, whether you are an executive or middle-manager or an IC, overall I don't doubt that socializing and networking and investing in good relationships, is helpful to one's career, but to differing degrees (i.e. for execs = a lot, for middle-managers = a medium amount, for line-level tech ICs = a much lesser amount). And building relationships or earning trust by spending time together != "sucking up".
Just the implication that you associate "golf" with "sucking up" apparently, shows that you likely have an inherently antagonistic view of personal relationships. For any given group of people, either they truly like playing golf, or golf just happens to be a convenient activity that allows for lots of downtime, and therefore encourages discussion/communication to happen, either way it's very likely that they are getting together for reasons other than "sucking up".
Why do you assume that what happens on the golf course is inherently or inevitably about "sucking up"? Have you never encountered a group of people, getting together for some event (recreational or otherwise), where they just communicate on equal footing, or debate ideas together, but with no one being fawned over or worshipped?
I presonally think "sucking up" is a better phrase because you "build relationships" with your peers and equals not with someone who can take food away from your family table just because they don't like you. What kind of relationship is that where you are always inferior.
Well, if this is how you think, then I am afraid no useful advice is going to penetrate your preconceived notions of inferiority. It is actually possible, and happens every day at every company, that meaningful relationships exist across managerial lines or levels of seniority; it is simply an existence proof because it exists all around you. But if you are someone who rejects the evidence in front of your eyes, or feels like you are too unique/special that "normal advice" doesn't apply to you somehow, then I am sorry but you are stuck until you address these deep-seated issues about inferiority and viewing everything through a lens of enmity.
FWIW, I actually personally hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time: I distrust capitalism and dislike the distribution of power between the capital-owning class and the working class in society, but I also understand and appreciate and respect the amoral ruthless effectiveness of capitalism. So, I can emphasize to some degree about the moral unfairness of an amoral corporation holding your livelihood over your head, but I can also build real relationships based on human connection, while compartmentalizing the human part away from the structural imbalance of capitalism part.
Look, you asked for advice, I gave some advice and suggested you do some introspection, and just based on the evidence of this comment chain alone, we can see the answers to some of my earlier-suggested questions:
- You aren't willing to accept feedback or alternative challenges to your base worldview. You like to twist conversations so that they happen on your terms only.
- You are unlikely to revisit a previously-held belief, or you rarely change your mind based on new information or new perspectives, or you are unlikely to admit mistakes or acknowledging that the viewpoints of others can also be valid (in fact, specifically you seem unable to comprehend that, admitting that someone else's perspective is valid != admitting yours must be wrong... it's not a zero-sum game, but you seem to think it is).
- When you try to ask for help (again, you were the one who asked for advice in the first place...), some people may try once, but they won't want to continue talking to you, because there is no mutual benefit here. Nobody gets anything positive out of talking to you in this manner, if you bring nothing to the table besides negativity and appeal to surface-level pedantry (e.g. definitions from the dictionary? simple acknowledgement that power structures exist?). If you actually learn how to have constructive conversations, where both parties get something positive out of it (aka make it non-zero-sum), then I promise you, you will find more traction with relationship-building, AND it won't feel like "sucking up". But if you can't learn how to do this, then I fear that people will rightfully avoid talking to you, because they get nothing from it except the misery you inflict on them.
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I'm sure you'll want to get a last-word in, so feel free to do that (and likewise, I will exercise my freedom to not respond and just go about my own life). But if you ever have a change of heart, perhaps when you gain a little more maturity or perspective and you somehow revisit this thread, then you may realize that:
- I already agreed with you that power structures exist esp. under capitalism, that essentially yes, "superior" or "inferior" are necessary-but-not-sufficient factually true labels. Nonetheless, these labels fail to capture the complete spectrum of human relationships, and you offered nothing substantive to refute this point either, so I assume you either don't understand it, or are incapable of acknowledging new information or alternative perspectives.
- I tried to suggest, in various ways with a few leading questions, that you lack humility and an inability to accept feedback. IMHO, this along with your reductive stubbornness about reducing working relationships into simple "boss vs underling" power structures, are the most direct reasons for your professional struggles. In other words, you don't need to learn "how to suck up". You need to reframe your entire approach to human relationships, and recast it in terms other than the one-dimensional interpretation of power structures... We live in a multi-dimensional world, but your "mental model" is too simple, because you reduce everyone to a one-dimensional vector embedding with a single boolean flag: "is_superior (T/F)".
- If you think I am over-focusing on one particular phrase like "sucking up", then you were free to offer alternative angles for discourse, if you wanted to steer the conversation in a more productive direction. But what you ended up doing was basically trying to suck me into the same pit of misery that you inhabit, where superiors are evil and holding your livelihood at threat... maybe that's a fun way to pass the time for you, but frankly there's nothing productive about going down that path, so I won't join you there (and I sincerely hope you find a way to climb out of it yourself).
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As a parting gift, here are some random resources for career growth (I don't know if you are an ...
I suspect that he'll dismiss all this on some irrelevant grounds but this is supremely patient and helpful. You've given him all the feedback and tools to completely change his life if he can lower the shields and soberly introspect.
Very kind. I'm sure it felt thankless but I appreciated witnessing it.
I just want to say that at multiple points in this thread, you could've descended to GP's level, but you didn't. You gave even-keeled advice with fair observations, and remained compassionate throughout. I respect your approach a lot here, and I hope GP maybe learned something. Probably not, but I bet you're a good manager!
I think you should look a bit deeper. Your comment seems to imply if you would just suck it up everything would be perfect but I'm skeptical that it's true
I agree its a necessary but not sufficient condition. I think phrase 'sucking up' seems to have triggered people. I should've said 'building trust and camaraderie' with my superiors, aka being one of the 'bros' in their inner circle .
I don't think i'm triggered, it's more that it seems like a poor framing of what is essentially just the reality of working with humans. I think we have a lot more control over our thoughts and perceptions than we give it credit for. I'm skeptical you'll be successful when you're seeing it this negatively
I see anything that gets me more money as positive. I see 'sucking up' as a positive.
I believe from your response that you perceived 'sucking up' as negative for some reason. Curious about why you instinctively reacted that way. whats wrong with sucking up?
This is a great discussion. Good managers can insulate you from bad companies and bad managers can ruin your experience in a great company. I would go as far as to say the person you work for is more important in some cases than the company you work for.
Here are some thoughts.
Companies aren't always clear on who you would be reporting to during the hiring process. This isn't always intentional, but org structures are sometimes in flux as teams grow.
You should at least ask who you're going to report to or who you could potentially report to and ensure you have a conversation with them.
Also when looking for jobs, instead of searching by company or job openings, look for managers you have gotten along with or would like to work for and literally contact them and tell them you're looking for a new gig and would love to work on their team. Manager's who may not be hiring right now generally are open to the idea of bringing a known quantity onto their team who want to work for them specifically, so if something opens up you jump to the top of the list.
> I would go as far as to say the person you work for is more important in some cases than the company you work for.
Exactly why you never want to take a job unless you have clarity on reporting lines and speak to your future manager (and also their manager if possible) during the recruiting process.
Agreed, unless you're desperate it's madness to accept a job without having had a discussion with your prospective manager. And not just to make sure they're not a big jerk, this is your chance to find out what kind of team you're joining. Ask probing questions: What happens when there's a disagreement about how to implement something? What happens when it becomes clear that a major milestone is going to be late? Has that happened recently? What goal are you currently working on for modernizing your tools, and are you making progress on it? etc.
> it's madness to accept a job without having had a discussion with your prospective manager
In a big company, you may change manager frequently. They may not even know who your manager is at the time they hire you. And it may take more than a discussion to know if they're a jerk.
This paper is super interesting and seems to agree with real life anecdata - most managers are crap and management is a hard skill that people are not trained for.
How to find a good engineering manager to work for:
1. during your interview you must learn something significant - can be technical, or about managing people or something.
2. they should not grate you even 1 second. The interview is where you and they are at your respective very very best behaviors. If they grate on you even for 1 second, you probably don't want to work for them. You should always come out feeling positive.
3. they should push you during your interview without you feeling bad about it. The job of a manager is to bring the best/most out of you. When you are on the job they will push you hard. Also they need to find the boundary of your abilities during your interview.
4. they must have better communication skills than you and you should look up to them. Everyone judges their boss and can't deal with a boss that is worse than them at their job.
Find a good manager to work for is very difficult. Because of the high stakes related to a job search - finding a good one will probably only happen by accident.
Treasure those bosses.
The worst thing that can happen (as it happened with me) is that your first boss is great at their job. Then every boss after that will be such a huge letdown. :)
I wonder as well how the performance correlates with the candidate's peers prediction of how they would fare, as this is also a big component of how managers are usually picked, and might or might not be a good indicator
Given the amount of mediocre managers promoted from good ICs, it would be interesting to see if and how they can actually become competent at managing. Maybe playing the games presented in the paper regularly as a team exercise could actually help. There is often not that much feedback going upwards.
I have had some amazing managers - who do an amazing job of allocating work and managing our time to get the best out of us. But it doesn't really matter because the C-suite usually sucks.
In most large firms there is a magical barrier somewhere between lower and upper management where quality doesn't really matter. For every great servant leader, you will also have to deal with someone who has no technical experience and have never had to work a real job in their life. And the only reason your good boss has to report to them is because through proper breeding and connections or luck they have enjoyed a career unencumbered by details.
I once worked at a large (> $100B market cap) tech company and had the opposite experience. I had several interactions with C-Suite and the level below and my main takeaway was that "holy cow, they get it!". Now, the layers between me and them were another story. It was amazing to have the experience of my manager talking about our tech/product strategy, and then to hear it from someone several levels higher in the org chart. The explanations from the former typically made little sense, but from the latter it made much, much, more sense.
When I started my career there was still a sense of agility and meritocracy in tech that made it super appealing. But that vibe feels very much gone now. Of the last 3-4 CEOs I worked under - not a single one actually built a company or rose up through the ranks. All of them started their careers in consulting or management.
So not saying they can't be good CEOs or leaders, or that there are companies that aren't exceptions, but I have now worked with enough executives at a number of medium and large companies to see that tech industry is overall shifting towards management/labor class divisions. It's like the military - even the best, most decorated enlisted has to salute the dumbest officer.
> tech industry is overall shifting towards management/labor class divisions
I think it's very easy to slip into this way of thinking, but I think it depends on the company. Any company big and rich enough will start to have the same inefficiencies and inappropriate leadership appointments as any large org or even government will. If money is easy to come by, people who don't create value can thrive.
It depends on the company but 90% of companies are this way. Which is what the parent comment was saying, it's overall shifting towards that. Which I have seen as well.
Its very common for people high up to know nothing, but they are calm and speak well in meetings. Even for VC backed startups, its really about selling a vision and having the proper pedigree, not grinding away at all hours of the night
And there may be something said for needing decision makers who are "dumb". Part of what made Steve Jobs as successful as he was was being stubbornly and intentionally ignorant on technical limitations.
The most obvious way to select a good manager for an organization is to have the workers in the organization elect their managers. Shareholders in the investment capitalist model will not like this, as they want to be the ones selecting the managers (C-suite), even though they have no day-to-day involvement in the corporation's operations, and typically are looking at quarterly returns as their metric for what is 'good'. Unexamined assumption here: define 'good'.
Workers in a corporation will instead tend to elect people who ensure decent working conditions, profit-sharing and safety, while also maintaining a positive balance sheet, e.g. in a steel mill. If they live in the local area, they're also unlikely to support dumping industrial waste in their rivers and streams. A shareholder who lives halfway around the world has no such motivation, so they'll hire managers who pollute and cut safety and health standards in the name of higher profits and dividends for shareholders. If their results are terrible they'll call on their pet politicians for a corporate welfare (bailout) to protect their holdings. Silicon Valley Bank is a recent example, but there are dozens.
Easy fixes: (1) Only allow the workers in a corporation to be shareholders in that corporation, with one vote per share, with shares based on skill and experience (2) Less radically, give worker unions the same voting rights when it comes to C-suite selection as the shareholder unions (Blackrock/Fidelity/Vanguard/StateStreet etc.). (3) End corporate welfare programs - just let collapsing corporations go into receivership and find new operators for each entity, and stop the 'fail upward' trend.
As an experienced dev I can tell whether a (direct) manager will work for me or not within about three weeks, with some variance depending on organizational pressure (in lean times you can tell sooner, in lush times it takes longer — a result of how much of the managerial skill needs to be brought to bear).
If a manager doesn't work for me, I don't care how good of a manager they are by any organizational measure, since I know I can get (and deserve) a better working environment. In this case if nothing changes, I am going to leave — which should rightly count as a demerit to such a manager.
There are even cases where people will work harder just before they quit, so as to leave a good impression or secure a pending promotion (despite present management) prior to their departure.
Seen in this way, what makes a manager good for an org seems to be different than what makes a manager good for an IC. TFA seems to be looking at it from an org perspective only (if one is being generous, since what they have studied is hardly an org), which can probably work in the short term, but will lead to ugly consequences in the long run.
Not sure how you screen for this in interviews but..
My WORST managers have been guys who fly off the handle on administrative minutiae like the formatting on an internal wiki, tabs-vs-spaces, or making lots of PR comments on trivial code changes at 10pm without ever clicking the approve button.
The common theme seems to be having no focus on what clients actually do with the product and their satisfaction.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadGood managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity.
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> Participants were recruited from the Essex University Economics Lab sample pool. ... The median participant was a graduate student with two years of work experience.
Hard to see how econ grad students play-acting boss says much about the kinds of long-term relationships / group dynamics that appear in the wild.
For example, in strength, if you take an equal group of men and women, then half of all men are likely to be stronger than all women and half of all women are likely to be weaker than all men in the group. Meaning half intermingle and overlap.
The same is true for some psychological traits. These aren't absolutes though. I don't think it should generally be a consideration for a given position myself, but there are absolute differences in most cases.
But to be simplistic, you could just count the co-authors on all those thousands of papers, take the average, and there's your answer. Draw up histograms along various independent variables if you want a bit more nuance.
We all know managers get picked by kissing the right ass and siding with the right boss. Which of course makes (most, yes MOST, but not ALL) managers incompetent, or at best barely mediocre by happenstance.
All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism.
That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of financial instrument aka “investors.”
Then there’s a third group, and this third group is “management.” Management is hired by the investors - not the employees and is generally given more equity in order to convince the manager that they are actually closer to an investor than a worker.
The true job of management is to prevent labor from having more power and more control of the financial vehicle than the investors do - find me a manager that’s empowering their employees in a way that shifts power from investors to employees and I’ll find you a manager with no job.
This is why CEOs carry the weight of all of this bullshit because investors point to them as the scapegoat person for anything that goes bad on the labor side, and employees look to this person for direction and guidance for what to do on behalf of the investors - so they pull the “I’m paid only if the company does well” smuggling in this concept that the company doing well benefits everyone (hint: it doesn’t and if the options are homelessness or death you don’t actually have options)
In cases where “investors” create the org (EIR, VC spinout etc…) they are intentionally creating a demand signal for labor, and a process for which you can grovel to them for them running a max-min algorithm to ensure they don’t pay anything more than they legally have to - going so far as to now make it a religion where it’s unethical to do anything other than this
Alternatively if a group of engineers gets together to create something, the second that they have success on it, the capitalist investors will direct all their existing financial instrument companies to go and try to capture that new market away from the small group - typically via ruthless competition, but sometimes acquisition becomes the mutually minimum cost outcome. This is all with the idea that if you can acquire your way to market dominance in a monopoly type scheme this is the ideal for investors. It is a very predictable line of income and that’s all they care about.
As long as you live inside of this model, there is no possible world where you will ever have a manager who cares about the people underneath them or the customers for more than a very brief period while the rest of the organization figures out that this manager is a threat to the owners.
If you wanna be successful as a “manager” in a capitalist profit driven organization, there is no option other than to align yourself with investors and do everything you can to prevent your employees from becoming more independent (typically by granting unvested “options” that have zero value outside of the organization)
Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)
I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.
The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.
I’m not necessarily mad at anyone for that, but at a certain point it seems like we keep coming back to the same things.
And for the record, while I am read in Marx, I’m more of a Proudhon fellow, I think worth making that distinction.
The whole point though is that if you’re a winner in the game has very little to do with being or having a “good” manager
You might be looking for them, but my conclusion after reading many "how we hire/interview" posts is most people do something and conclude it works - instead of testing. What if instead you put all the names of potential managers in a hat and drew one - what makes your process better (at least the hat selects for "lucky" people)
Just kidding, we all already know why... =3
That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.
Managers who don't realize you have to basically baby new hires until they are up to speed probably won't be very effective.
So, do as I say not as I do?
Here's a longer clip (uploaded by Andy Hertzfeld himself!) which has more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3agg64LM88
They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups.
They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.
All these numbers are then correlated with some indicators, eg age, ethnicity, social skill score, and so on.
I guess the big issue here is whether the lab task is representative of a real-world project. The big one for me is that in the real world, you don't often have an objective measure of success, and whatever you do have is not going to be independent of the environment that you're operating in. Sometimes you get to grade your own effort, other times you get graded by some fool who gets it wrong. The team changes over time. Goals change over time.
Honestly, this sounds exactly like what a group of graduate students who have never had a real job in the corporate world would come up with as an assessment of management skills.
I feel like you would need 6 months at least to really assess management.
If you treat people like cogs you're always going to be disappointed in their output. For the duration of a study I don't know how you could possibly do otherwise, and get disappointing results. You have to know something about people to figure out how to divide the labor so people are generally near their comfort zone but routinely pushed a little bit out of it for purposes of growth.
I'm not even a manager, just a lead dev, but I am what some people might call an 'informed consumer' of management skills.
i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it.
Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?
One could fight the inertia of a large firm, or simply create an entity that better aligns with your own values and customer needs.
A tax strategy driven small business teaches people how to manage projects, and see the stupid manager/worker BS for what it is... no PMP or Phd required... =3
YMMV depending where you live, and your groups financial situation.
You would be mistaken if you think only "small" firms operate this way... =)
I pointed out we bill by the hour, and if someone wants to sit there irrationally ranting at people to work though their solution... so be it... lol =3
My advice is try to always assume the best possible interpretation of any given person's motives in a workplace. Try to be friendly.
I think this is a common trigger for a lot of technically inclined people, myself included.
In those cases I generally try to focus on acceptable outcomes more than "being right". And, importantly, not focussing as much on proving the other guy wrong (which is not quite the same as proving yourself right).
Having a track record of delivery without being seen as the sore thumbs that sticks out goes a long way.
Generally, when it is your budgets being spent on payroll the perspectives on jerky behavior shifts a little. =3
I am already friendly. I am not convinced that merely being friendly will get you to your VPs 'inner circle'.
Yea you need to be a known entity to a VP in my company to get promoted beyond senior engineer.
Yes my main goal is to make most money.
In a way, that's the key: you need to be in an environment where you can operate in a way that works for you and delivers value to the organization. I'm very explicit to my higher-ups about what I'm optimizing for, and that if there's a day when my organization no longer values that, I'll step back from this management role.
I am 99.9% certain that, the overall trajectory of your career is not hinging on something as specific as "if only I learned how to 'suck up' then everything would be great". This is actually a form of magical thinking, of making excuses to avoid engaging with the real problems, and instead just lumping everything into a single excuse as to why ____ didn't work out.
The fact that you mention "too much pride, introversion, embarrassment" is also a clue to me that you might be someone with very rigid patterns of thought, and therefore likely to fall victim to black-and-white thinking (that something is all-good or all-bad, that something can ascribed to 1 single root cause to blame, etc.).
Some off-the-cuff ideas/questions, not all of them may be applicable to you, but hopefully it triggers some introspection on your part:
- Do you often think thoughts like, "I know I am right, everyone else is wrong, why can't they just appreciate my genius"?
- Is there anyone that you actually respect in your team/your org? Have you ever tried to ask them, "how did you get to where you are?" Do they mention "sucking up" as a big ingredient?
- When was the last time you asked someone to help you with something? Did you phrase it as a demand or threat? Or did you seek some kind of mutually beneficial win-win outcome?
- When was the last time you admitted to making a mistake?
- When was the last time you let someone else convince you to change your mind about something?
"90% of Fortune 500 CEOs play golf and over 80% of executives say that golf played an important role in their career"
What do you make of this.
Also, whether you are an executive or middle-manager or an IC, overall I don't doubt that socializing and networking and investing in good relationships, is helpful to one's career, but to differing degrees (i.e. for execs = a lot, for middle-managers = a medium amount, for line-level tech ICs = a much lesser amount). And building relationships or earning trust by spending time together != "sucking up".
Just the implication that you associate "golf" with "sucking up" apparently, shows that you likely have an inherently antagonistic view of personal relationships. For any given group of people, either they truly like playing golf, or golf just happens to be a convenient activity that allows for lots of downtime, and therefore encourages discussion/communication to happen, either way it's very likely that they are getting together for reasons other than "sucking up".
Why do you assume that what happens on the golf course is inherently or inevitably about "sucking up"? Have you never encountered a group of people, getting together for some event (recreational or otherwise), where they just communicate on equal footing, or debate ideas together, but with no one being fawned over or worshipped?
I presonally think "sucking up" is a better phrase because you "build relationships" with your peers and equals not with someone who can take food away from your family table just because they don't like you. What kind of relationship is that where you are always inferior.
FWIW, I actually personally hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time: I distrust capitalism and dislike the distribution of power between the capital-owning class and the working class in society, but I also understand and appreciate and respect the amoral ruthless effectiveness of capitalism. So, I can emphasize to some degree about the moral unfairness of an amoral corporation holding your livelihood over your head, but I can also build real relationships based on human connection, while compartmentalizing the human part away from the structural imbalance of capitalism part.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/superior
"one who is above another in rank, station, or office"
I am not sure why you are hung up on words anyways. I have a feeling you might be trolling me for fun.
- You aren't willing to accept feedback or alternative challenges to your base worldview. You like to twist conversations so that they happen on your terms only.
- You are unlikely to revisit a previously-held belief, or you rarely change your mind based on new information or new perspectives, or you are unlikely to admit mistakes or acknowledging that the viewpoints of others can also be valid (in fact, specifically you seem unable to comprehend that, admitting that someone else's perspective is valid != admitting yours must be wrong... it's not a zero-sum game, but you seem to think it is).
- When you try to ask for help (again, you were the one who asked for advice in the first place...), some people may try once, but they won't want to continue talking to you, because there is no mutual benefit here. Nobody gets anything positive out of talking to you in this manner, if you bring nothing to the table besides negativity and appeal to surface-level pedantry (e.g. definitions from the dictionary? simple acknowledgement that power structures exist?). If you actually learn how to have constructive conversations, where both parties get something positive out of it (aka make it non-zero-sum), then I promise you, you will find more traction with relationship-building, AND it won't feel like "sucking up". But if you can't learn how to do this, then I fear that people will rightfully avoid talking to you, because they get nothing from it except the misery you inflict on them.
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I'm sure you'll want to get a last-word in, so feel free to do that (and likewise, I will exercise my freedom to not respond and just go about my own life). But if you ever have a change of heart, perhaps when you gain a little more maturity or perspective and you somehow revisit this thread, then you may realize that:
- I already agreed with you that power structures exist esp. under capitalism, that essentially yes, "superior" or "inferior" are necessary-but-not-sufficient factually true labels. Nonetheless, these labels fail to capture the complete spectrum of human relationships, and you offered nothing substantive to refute this point either, so I assume you either don't understand it, or are incapable of acknowledging new information or alternative perspectives.
- I tried to suggest, in various ways with a few leading questions, that you lack humility and an inability to accept feedback. IMHO, this along with your reductive stubbornness about reducing working relationships into simple "boss vs underling" power structures, are the most direct reasons for your professional struggles. In other words, you don't need to learn "how to suck up". You need to reframe your entire approach to human relationships, and recast it in terms other than the one-dimensional interpretation of power structures... We live in a multi-dimensional world, but your "mental model" is too simple, because you reduce everyone to a one-dimensional vector embedding with a single boolean flag: "is_superior (T/F)".
- If you think I am over-focusing on one particular phrase like "sucking up", then you were free to offer alternative angles for discourse, if you wanted to steer the conversation in a more productive direction. But what you ended up doing was basically trying to suck me into the same pit of misery that you inhabit, where superiors are evil and holding your livelihood at threat... maybe that's a fun way to pass the time for you, but frankly there's nothing productive about going down that path, so I won't join you there (and I sincerely hope you find a way to climb out of it yourself).
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As a parting gift, here are some random resources for career growth (I don't know if you are an ...
Very kind. I'm sure it felt thankless but I appreciated witnessing it.
I believe from your response that you perceived 'sucking up' as negative for some reason. Curious about why you instinctively reacted that way. whats wrong with sucking up?
Here are some thoughts. Companies aren't always clear on who you would be reporting to during the hiring process. This isn't always intentional, but org structures are sometimes in flux as teams grow. You should at least ask who you're going to report to or who you could potentially report to and ensure you have a conversation with them.
Also when looking for jobs, instead of searching by company or job openings, look for managers you have gotten along with or would like to work for and literally contact them and tell them you're looking for a new gig and would love to work on their team. Manager's who may not be hiring right now generally are open to the idea of bringing a known quantity onto their team who want to work for them specifically, so if something opens up you jump to the top of the list.
Exactly why you never want to take a job unless you have clarity on reporting lines and speak to your future manager (and also their manager if possible) during the recruiting process.
In a big company, you may change manager frequently. They may not even know who your manager is at the time they hire you. And it may take more than a discussion to know if they're a jerk.
At one point I went for nearly two years reporting to nobody. My previous boss left, and I basically was not on anyone's radar, but still got paid.
How to find a good engineering manager to work for:
1. during your interview you must learn something significant - can be technical, or about managing people or something.
2. they should not grate you even 1 second. The interview is where you and they are at your respective very very best behaviors. If they grate on you even for 1 second, you probably don't want to work for them. You should always come out feeling positive.
3. they should push you during your interview without you feeling bad about it. The job of a manager is to bring the best/most out of you. When you are on the job they will push you hard. Also they need to find the boundary of your abilities during your interview.
4. they must have better communication skills than you and you should look up to them. Everyone judges their boss and can't deal with a boss that is worse than them at their job.
Find a good manager to work for is very difficult. Because of the high stakes related to a job search - finding a good one will probably only happen by accident.
Treasure those bosses.
The worst thing that can happen (as it happened with me) is that your first boss is great at their job. Then every boss after that will be such a huge letdown. :)
In most large firms there is a magical barrier somewhere between lower and upper management where quality doesn't really matter. For every great servant leader, you will also have to deal with someone who has no technical experience and have never had to work a real job in their life. And the only reason your good boss has to report to them is because through proper breeding and connections or luck they have enjoyed a career unencumbered by details.
I once worked at a large (> $100B market cap) tech company and had the opposite experience. I had several interactions with C-Suite and the level below and my main takeaway was that "holy cow, they get it!". Now, the layers between me and them were another story. It was amazing to have the experience of my manager talking about our tech/product strategy, and then to hear it from someone several levels higher in the org chart. The explanations from the former typically made little sense, but from the latter it made much, much, more sense.
So not saying they can't be good CEOs or leaders, or that there are companies that aren't exceptions, but I have now worked with enough executives at a number of medium and large companies to see that tech industry is overall shifting towards management/labor class divisions. It's like the military - even the best, most decorated enlisted has to salute the dumbest officer.
I think it's very easy to slip into this way of thinking, but I think it depends on the company. Any company big and rich enough will start to have the same inefficiencies and inappropriate leadership appointments as any large org or even government will. If money is easy to come by, people who don't create value can thrive.
Can you cite this?
Workers in a corporation will instead tend to elect people who ensure decent working conditions, profit-sharing and safety, while also maintaining a positive balance sheet, e.g. in a steel mill. If they live in the local area, they're also unlikely to support dumping industrial waste in their rivers and streams. A shareholder who lives halfway around the world has no such motivation, so they'll hire managers who pollute and cut safety and health standards in the name of higher profits and dividends for shareholders. If their results are terrible they'll call on their pet politicians for a corporate welfare (bailout) to protect their holdings. Silicon Valley Bank is a recent example, but there are dozens.
Easy fixes: (1) Only allow the workers in a corporation to be shareholders in that corporation, with one vote per share, with shares based on skill and experience (2) Less radically, give worker unions the same voting rights when it comes to C-suite selection as the shareholder unions (Blackrock/Fidelity/Vanguard/StateStreet etc.). (3) End corporate welfare programs - just let collapsing corporations go into receivership and find new operators for each entity, and stop the 'fail upward' trend.
If a manager doesn't work for me, I don't care how good of a manager they are by any organizational measure, since I know I can get (and deserve) a better working environment. In this case if nothing changes, I am going to leave — which should rightly count as a demerit to such a manager.
There are even cases where people will work harder just before they quit, so as to leave a good impression or secure a pending promotion (despite present management) prior to their departure.
Seen in this way, what makes a manager good for an org seems to be different than what makes a manager good for an IC. TFA seems to be looking at it from an org perspective only (if one is being generous, since what they have studied is hardly an org), which can probably work in the short term, but will lead to ugly consequences in the long run.
My WORST managers have been guys who fly off the handle on administrative minutiae like the formatting on an internal wiki, tabs-vs-spaces, or making lots of PR comments on trivial code changes at 10pm without ever clicking the approve button.
The common theme seems to be having no focus on what clients actually do with the product and their satisfaction.