In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion. They treat their reports like serfs who are obliged to burnish their image.
The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.
I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.
Frieren · 3h ago
> trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion
There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.
One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.
And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.
The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.
badpun · 17m ago
> I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team.
Is this an American thing? Here in Europe, it seems common. How else can you schedule meetings if you can't see when everybody's free?
exac · 4h ago
Anecdotal, but every Engineering Manager I've had for the past 10 years has had a calendar I could see. One EM had anonymous event names on their calendar, but I think it might have been the default setting in AD.
EduardLev · 12h ago
This focuses on what managers should do differently, but not what engineers could do differently to make the relationship better. Improve their communication skills, document and evangelize their work, etc.
Velorivox · 10h ago
When I have a poor manager who doesn’t improve quickly, what I do differently is get a different job. I understand that’s a privileged position to be in, and also that one needs to have a fair bit of experience to identify whether the manager really is the issue. Nevertheless, trying to fix a relationship one-sidedly when someone holds authority over you is not a worthwhile cause.
dragonsky67 · 8h ago
This does depend on what the engineers are being employed to do..
Are they there to be communication and documentation experts, or are they there to turn requirements into something that works?
I agree that there is benefits in having engineers who can engage with their managers, advocate for required changes and influence the management to act in a more beneficial way, but at some point the person doing this stops being an engineer and starts being a manager themself.
Managers are there to manage, that is organise, coordinate and ensure that their staff are completing tasks in the most efficient way possible. That will at time require them to communicate with both their superiors and their engineer staff. That requires them to be the the communication and documentation expert, not the engineer.
No comments yet
danielscrubs · 3h ago
If you put 50% effort on marketing yourself and 50% on engineering, the company will quickly be put out of business.
Worse, those that are good at talking are going to waste everyone else’s time.
I said half because that seems to align with the marketing budget vs engineering budget, so it might be the best spot for companies as a whole.
sublinear · 3h ago
I love how many times I've heard "communication skills" wheeled out as an excuse for management's lack of deep focus on their team's work.
gbacon · 13h ago
> Breaking the cycle
> The best engineering managers I’ve known — the ones engineers actually like — have figured out a few things:
> 1. They protect focus time like it’s sacred. […]
> 2. They stay technical enough to make informed decisions. […]
> 3. They give credit lavishly and take blame personally. […]
> 4. They make feedback actually meaningful. […]
aitchnyu · 3h ago
IME I blame Telephone(aka Chinese whispers) being the default communication between ICs and skip level manager. A skip level should address a team in writing instead of the manager vaguely mentioning things. Communications among a team should happen in a public channel instead of DMs.
dilyevsky · 2h ago
This is super underdone these days. Management likes to talk about the importance of communication till the cows come home but somehow that's mostly upward directed, rarely downward.
karmakaze · 10h ago
It's very rare for me to not find a way to work well with most managers I've had. What I find the larger problem is what's lost in communication/translation going up and down the org chart. This isn't usually a problem for small or shallow orgs, or in rare cases larger orgs that have strong technical leadership. What does happen is that there's layer(s) of middle-management that's typically where technical details are lost. The best way to combat this is to have flatter structures, or isolate divisions/units. Microservices is one way of solving this communication/autonomy human problem, by forcing system interfaces to sweat the communication details.
mock-possum · 8h ago
> Your manager, who you’ve barely seen all year except in meetings, suddenly has opinions about your “growth areas.” They cite that one PR that took too long (ignoring the context) or mention you need to “be more visible” (while giving you no time to do anything visible).
It’s taken me a long time to come around to recognizing this as the common thread in all the ‘bad bosses’ I’ve had over the years - each has felt pressure from above, but been unable to level with me about the position they’re in, and unable to sit down with me as an ally to allay upper management’s concerns. Instead, they’ve essentially sat on the issue, until they can’t anymore and find reason to let me go - and there’s always a reason if you care to look, no one is a perfect employee.
My exit interview ends up being the relief to the pressure they’ve been feeling, and then, in turn, I can imo assume they resume incubating, until they’re ready to hatch the next scapegoat.
Having one’s professional fate so haphazardly tied to an untrustworthy comrade is really only made tenable by the compensation this industry tends to offer - and between the layoffs and hiring freezes plaguing the SWE field lately, it’s definitely becoming less of a comfort. I hope I can get away with retiring before I run seriously afoul of the situation.
tropicalfruit · 3h ago
i feel strongly that most managers are redundant
you could have an empty chair and things would still get done
in general there are too many useless or noise making people in companies i worked in
when they go on holiday the work continues in peace
nine_zeros · 9h ago
The fact that management issues are so persistently reported and so widespread in tech, should be a strong signal that management practices in tech have failed - measured by the number of non-faang companies that lost their trajectory by copying corrosive FAANG practices.
shiroiuma · 8h ago
Were management practices in non-tech fields any better though?
The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.
I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.
There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.
One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.
And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.
The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.
Is this an American thing? Here in Europe, it seems common. How else can you schedule meetings if you can't see when everybody's free?
Are they there to be communication and documentation experts, or are they there to turn requirements into something that works?
I agree that there is benefits in having engineers who can engage with their managers, advocate for required changes and influence the management to act in a more beneficial way, but at some point the person doing this stops being an engineer and starts being a manager themself.
Managers are there to manage, that is organise, coordinate and ensure that their staff are completing tasks in the most efficient way possible. That will at time require them to communicate with both their superiors and their engineer staff. That requires them to be the the communication and documentation expert, not the engineer.
No comments yet
Worse, those that are good at talking are going to waste everyone else’s time.
I said half because that seems to align with the marketing budget vs engineering budget, so it might be the best spot for companies as a whole.
> The best engineering managers I’ve known — the ones engineers actually like — have figured out a few things:
> 1. They protect focus time like it’s sacred. […]
> 2. They stay technical enough to make informed decisions. […]
> 3. They give credit lavishly and take blame personally. […]
> 4. They make feedback actually meaningful. […]
It’s taken me a long time to come around to recognizing this as the common thread in all the ‘bad bosses’ I’ve had over the years - each has felt pressure from above, but been unable to level with me about the position they’re in, and unable to sit down with me as an ally to allay upper management’s concerns. Instead, they’ve essentially sat on the issue, until they can’t anymore and find reason to let me go - and there’s always a reason if you care to look, no one is a perfect employee.
My exit interview ends up being the relief to the pressure they’ve been feeling, and then, in turn, I can imo assume they resume incubating, until they’re ready to hatch the next scapegoat.
Having one’s professional fate so haphazardly tied to an untrustworthy comrade is really only made tenable by the compensation this industry tends to offer - and between the layoffs and hiring freezes plaguing the SWE field lately, it’s definitely becoming less of a comfort. I hope I can get away with retiring before I run seriously afoul of the situation.
you could have an empty chair and things would still get done
in general there are too many useless or noise making people in companies i worked in
when they go on holiday the work continues in peace