
Ask HN: How to get old manager back? - hnseekingadvice
A year ago I joined a YC company out of college. I loved my first manager. He is probably one of the smartest people I&#x27;ve met. He let me be creative, have autonomy, and his priority was ensuring we were happy and productive. I was scared of the horror stories of bad managers, but I couldn&#x27;t have asked for someone better. It doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s easy. Everyone was held accountable to their work &amp; mistakes.<p>He didn&#x27;t jive well with mgmt. He pushed back on stuff he didn&#x27;t find helpful, like yearly personal OKRs. He told us to not worry about it, and eng. should be taking most of our time. Instead of planning how we did everything, we just planned where we wanted to get to &amp; he let us figure it out. It&#x27;s not that we didn&#x27;t do planning, we did it quickly and adjusted as needed. It helped that he had a vision for us to work with.<p>As a team we did very well. We met deadlines, and we never felt soul-sucking pressure. We were a true team, not just a bunch of coworkers. But 2 months ago he stepped down. It came as a shock, and we believe he was asked to step down because afterward they brought in a SW VP.<p>Since the VP joined we&#x27;ve just been planning. We get emailed on weekends to draw up timelines. We have to do planning for the year, the next 3 months, the next month, and the next sprint, all at the same time. He&#x27;s also hiring some Agile consultants to teach us SW process. He said we need to start measuring success by velocity and accurate story point estimating. We go back and forth about whether story points should be measured in hours or work-units or w&#x2F;e. Since he joined, we&#x27;ve made so many PowerPoints but not written SW.<p>The VP hasn&#x27;t written SW in years. He can&#x27;t hold a conversation about SW w&#x2F;o turning it into a time mgmt lesson. It&#x27;s miserable. I haven&#x27;t learned anything from him. It feels like the best possible scenario became the worst. The VP wants to turn us into a machine. Upper mgmt loves him though.<p>I don&#x27;t really know what to do. Advice?
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deanmoriarty
I’ve had that happening at a startup I worked at, it was horrible and
miserable, exactly like you described, engineering went from being an
interesting craft to a mere process over a few months, after an experienced VP
was brought in and the original tech leads who effectively led the teams while
the startup was growing were “demoted” to ICs. And this is all while the
company was growing very healthily and focusing on technical scale. Internal
speculations hinted at the fact that VCs pressured the founders to bring in
“adult supervision”.

Slowly the VP started bringing in new managers (usually first tier of
management, directly managing software engineers) that were fully on board
with his vision of engineering == process, I worked with these people and they
were horrible from the technical point of view and completely uninspiring as
managers (think about people who spent the past 10 years rotting in
inefficient teams in Cisco/IBM/etc). Soon enough everything in the company had
to go through jira in a very scary, inefficient and plainly annoying way (i.e.
slack conversations were frowned upon, everything had to be tracked with
tickets). It became a chain of assembly in a manufacturing factory.

I had the misfortune to participate in a few of those internal management
meetings, and it was scary as hell: instead of talking about customers,
mission, visionary features (this was still a small/medium startup fighting to
get market share) all the managers were talking about was process and
irrelevant details related to minutiae of jira. The VP was super happy. Crazy.

------
mindcrime
_He said we need to start measuring success by velocity and accurate story
point estimating. We go back and forth about whether story points should be
measured in hours or work-units or w /e._

This individual is a clueless moron. Start looking for a new job.

Why do I say that? Because those statements flatly contradict the very essence
of what "agile" means. Story points, velocity, and the like are (sometimes)
useful tools that teams use to achieve their goals. They are _NOT_ how you
measure success though. You measure success through shipping valuable software
that customers use.

 _Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous
delivery of valuable software. ... Working software is the primary measure of
progress._ [1]

Notice that our highest priority is not "accurate story point estimation, high
velocity, properly written Jira tickets, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And
likewise progress is measured through what you actually ship, not some
bullshit imaginary metric that correlates to nothing.

If you want to work with your old manager again, look him up and ask him if he
can get you in at wherever he landed.

[1]:
[http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html](http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

~~~
hnseekingadvice
My old manager works on the team, just as an IC doing the same work as the
rest of us. I tried talking to him a few times, but he is pretty distant now.

~~~
mindcrime
_My old manager works on the team, just as an IC doing the same work as the
rest of us. I tried talking to him a few times, but he is pretty distant now._

Ah, OK. I thought you meant he quit. In that case, it's hard to say. I'd still
advice you to quit and find a job somewhere else, and maybe see if you can
convince your old manager to jump ship as well. Maybe see if you can round up
a couple more team-members and pitch yourselves as a ready-built team-for-
hire.

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rmk
Have you considered the possibility that the company may not be doing well,
which may be the reason they have brought in a Project Manager who happens to
have the VP title? If you suspect that this is the case, then your job may be
in jeopardy. If I suspected that my job were in jeopardy, I would start
looking for my next gig right away.

~~~
hnseekingadvice
What is the logic behind this? Do companies do this?

~~~
rococode
I think what rmk is suggesting is that this guy's job doesn't really sound
like a job that deserves a VP title (especially if your previous manager
wasn't a VP). So, the title of "VP" may have been included as an incentive to
take the risk of joining a struggling company.

The idea is that even if the company fails, you can at least put "VP of ___"
on your resume which will help place you at that level in future jobs. My dad
went through a similar thing in the past - the company he had worked at for
years at a middle-management level started going bankrupt. To keep him on
board for as long as they could, they kept promoting him since everyone knew
the company was dying and would leave without some incentive to stay. When the
company eventually closed, he was able to find a new job at the level he was
at after all the promotions. An easy (and lucky) way to advance your career
very quickly.

------
auslegung
It’s a crummy situation, but if you approach management with you and your
teammates’ concerns, it could fix things. A close friend of mine had a very
similar situation earlier this year, the team confronted management, had to
basically threaten a mass exodus, but they finally got it and fired the new SW
VP. But you should start looking for a new gig because it might not go well.

------
dman
Leave.

~~~
hnseekingadvice
I know I was happy with my last manager, but I also don't really know what
good product-oriented SW eng looks like. I thought we were doing good, but
maybe not? I'm confused about was whether my old manager would have been
successful in the long term, and whether the company really needed somebody to
install process.

~~~
dman
Do you think the planning being done is a temporary thing and once it settles
down people will switch to execution mode? Do you think your team /
organization / leadership has what it takes to succeed in the next year?

~~~
hnseekingadvice
I'm not even sure what we are planning. The VP doesn't give direction on
"what" or "where". He just says "write everything down and we will as a group
prioritize and eliminate". There's no overall "theme" or "motivation".

~~~
dman
Based on what you have written so far, it is unclear to me what the positives
are in the given situation. To flip this around, in a pros/cons discussion
what is the case for sticking around?

