
The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky - pors
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-joel-spolsky.html
======
edw519
I've never been very successful communicating to my customers and bosses the
difference between a "super programmer" and a "mortal programmer". It's a
critical distinction that eventually must be understood by organizations that
build software. So instead of trying to explain, I just email them this link:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html>

Then they finally get it.

Now I have another link to help them understand why their management style
isn't working they way they think it should. Thank you, Joel.

A few more Joel links like these two in my back pocket and I won't have to
spend so much time explaining much of anything anymore. I can just go back to
building stuff.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Great post. Much more eloquent than Mark Suster's[1]:

 _Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s
fine. But if everybody is looking for me to make their decisions we’ll never
get anything done._

And makes a nice complement to Swombat's _Making all the decisions yourself_
[2], and to Ben Horowitz _CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is_ [3].

Also the same point of _Delegate or Die_ [4]

[1] [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-
an-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-
entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/)

[2] <http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker>

[3] [http://bhorowitz.com/2010/07/02/why-ceos-should-tell-it-
like...](http://bhorowitz.com/2010/07/02/why-ceos-should-tell-it-like-it-is/)

[4] <http://sivers.org/delegate>

------
SoftwareMaven
I agree with this post, but it is _very_ light on details. "Don't be a douche.
Let your employees think." thanks for the tip...

So, to that end, my management tips:

1\. Make sure people are working on the right things. This is most important
and where Joel's academia argument breaks down. The problem is that everybody
in the company doesn't have a transparent view of everything in the company
(past ~10 people).

To do this, you ask questions and provide information. "Why is this the most
important thing?" "What about <some thing they may not know>?" Etc. ideally,
you are proactively providing that information, but if your employees are
always waiting for you to provide information, you are the bottleneck.

2\. Cultivate communication. Make sure the rit people are talking to each
other. Make sure the environment is sipuch that people not only want to, but
are incentivized to talk to each other.

3\. Be open about when you learn something new. Few people don't enjoy
teaching the boss something new. Give people that opportunity.

4\. (EDIT: Forgot one of the most important) Conflict resolution. At some
point, two very smart people are going to disagree. Your job isn't to pick a
winner (usually), but to make sure resolution happens.

I'm sure there are others (feel free to tell me!). FWIW, I don't think I'm
being original here. For details on how to do many of these things, Joel's
blog is not a bad place to start (though I really don't like the lunch thing
at Fog Creek ;).

~~~
dpkendal
For more detail, try Spolsky's three-part series on management methodology. It
starts with Command & Control then goes to another, Econ 101, which he
discredits similarly, followed by Identity, which he says actually works.
Start here: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/07.html>

------
petercooper
_I’ll bet more entrepreneurs model their behavior on Captain Picard from Star
Trek than any nonfiction human. [..] Turns out, it’s positively de-motivating
to work for a company where your job is just to shut up and take orders._

I like the post, but.. at the risk of sounding like I've thought about this
for too long, _Picard's_ management style wasn't of the tough "command and
control" style described here.

Picard's crew had a significant amount of autonomy and a reasonable scope to
question their direct superiors (although going too far up the chain usually
seemed to backfire). The buck always stopped with the Captain and he set the
crew's overall mission, aims and goals (with significant input and advice from
his crew) but in terms of the day to day running of the ship (and even many of
the crisis situations) he was not at the center of most decisions and relied
heavily on his crew to do the right thing.

All this makes me realize that as much as being a sci-fi show, TNG was
particularly good at demonstrating management styles and crew relationships
(with many episodes dedicated entirely to these matters or contrasting them
with those of other crews and civilizations).

------
nadam
"Command and Control probably worked great in the toothpaste factory where
Charlie Bucket’s father screwed the little caps on tubes."

I thought that it is totally obvious that the more intellectual and complex
the task is, the less the hierarchical 'command and control' approach works. I
think this is told in the first one hour in any course about management.

I once stated it here but state it again: the older I grow the less useful I
find the posts of the great bloggers (Joel, pg, etc...). Their posts are
usually good feel-good posts for us developers, but in their posts they
overabstract and oversimplify everything (overabstraction can be also called
'architecture astronautism'), when what really matters are pretty much in the
details (or at least cannot be communicated in such simple blog posts), and
depend on hundreds of parameters, and I am sure they bacame successful because
they have been taking care of the details in their everyday actions.

~~~
Duff
It's not obvious at all. The great mass of people believe earnestly that money
or a big leader will fix all problems.

Case in point: The current trend to use standardized test scores to give
teachers an incentive to make students get better grades.

Case in point: AIG gives out tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to people
writing derivatives to counter mortgage bond risk, because these derivatives
make the company money.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Most developers aren't lucky enough to work at software oriented companies.
Their management is unlikely to consider development to be creative work and
instead focus only on costs, schedules and the classic death march management
style. Many freelance job boards suffer from a race to the bottom. This is an
enormously serious problem in our industry.

------
lifeisstillgood
The Tina Fey autobiography / jokebook had an interesting comment - one of her
mentors explained that the role of a (TV) Producer was to reign in / prevent
creativity. The idea was you had hired amazingly creative people, and if you
did not provide necessary constraints the whole would be way less than the
parts. (the example was asking the props dept for a teacup. No not on a silver
platter the reflection will kill the camera, no not with sugar tongs these are
simple countryfolk etc etc)

Steve Jobs is just an extreme example of this role - provide a common vision,
explain the constraints and edit edit edit the great ideas coming at you. (nb
editing is not the same as directing, something I tend to forget I my code
reviews - an editor should accept a brilliant idea and change the other work
to fit it in, a director, directs...)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The question that can never be answered is: Could Jobs have accomplished more
if he hadn't been such a jerk? Can you accomplish the same level of editing
without demeaning people?

I think the answer is "Yes", but I'm not positive. Regardless, I'm not Jobs.
My management style will never be an attempt to resurrect him. I do strive for
his level of perfection, though.

~~~
TWAndrews
Is it possible to be uncompromising without being a jerk?

Apple's products are great because Jobs simply kept saying "not good enough"
until he thought it was good enough. Even though there are nicer ways to
convey the same message than "this is shit", the underlying message is the
same, and smart people get the idea, and I'm not sure that attempts to soften
the delivery matter much in the end.

~~~
jarrett
It matters. Smart people get that feedback is necessary when you're making
great stuff, and that feedback is useless if it's never negative. But smart
people also get what a speaker's tone means. Communicating arbitrary message X
politely shows you respect the person with whom you're talking. Communicating
the same message X rudely shows the opposite.

If you have to tell me something I don't want to hear, I'll feel much better
afterwords if you say it nicely. That's because I'll know you respect me
enough to put in the tiny bit of effort required to say it with a smile. I
won't think you're a manipulative, cynical jerk who underestimates my
intellect and assumes I can be won over with cheap psychological tricks. I'll
think you're a decent person with good social graces. Which is something from
which people in the tech world are not exempt.

BTW, I speak from experience. Every boss I've ever had has understood the
importance of _how you say it_ when managing. Conversely, I've known others
who have had bosses that didn't get it. Guess who was happier at work?

------
yurylifshits
I use the following model:

    
    
        CEO is defining desirable outcomes, defines WHAT TO ACHIEVE
        Team members are defining HOW TO ACHIEVE 
    

CEO is a resource to the team, providing knowledge, connections and keeping
project documentation up to date

~~~
Spearchucker
Can't disagree with that. The CEO defines strategy. Anything below that level
is tactical. Many have difficulty in getting those two levels to bat for the
same team - which Steven Sinofsky discusses in One Strategy.

------
brador
Someone send this to Page.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, leaders need to make a culture and
create a managament style THEIR way. Whatever works for them and their
company, not attempt a copy/paste of another CEO.

Engineers can't adopt a designers management style overnight because they
don't have the background to attain the respect their decisions will require.

Just like coders hate an MBA telling them to build the next facebook in 3
hours because it's "just a few pages and they all look the same anyway, how
hard can it be?".

------
edderly
What I'd like to understand is why is management professional training so
oriented towards 'leadership' if you believe that facilitators and
administrators are required.

Working for a large multinational tech firm, I recently saw them launch online
training across all the various disciplines. Much of the management material
is about leadership, whereas non-managers are considered 'individual
contributors'. Doesn't this seem to run entirely counter to the philosophy
espoused here?

~~~
praptak
Yes it does. That philosophy is hard on managers' egos (who wants to be an
administrator rather than a leader?) and the selection for management
positions in large multinational companies is often biased towards those with
strong egos.

And it is the management paying for the training.

------
eykanal
Excellent post on the outline of his management style, but far too short on
details. How does this management style deal with inevitable conflicts between
engineers? How does this style deal with pivots? Who makes hiring decisions
for managers in this layout?

I _imagine_ that this could work, but this would seem to scale even worse than
the traditional model; four thousand engineers, all of them "bosses", does not
a productive company make.

~~~
j_baker
Try telling that to Larry Page. Google believes greatly in the "hire smart
people, then get out of their way" method. You might be surprised how well it
works

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I worked at a startup that nearly collapsed because so many incredibly smart
engineers were brought together with no leadership (which is different than
management). The belief that engineers will always just do the right thing is,
in my experience, not true. The product came close to collapsing under its
architectural weight as so many engineers tried to build an amazing cathedral.
Better leadership would have ensured the engineers understood we needed to
start with a strip mall.

EDIT: I want to retract my leadership isn't management. In a knowledge worker
company, it absolutely should be, and if it isn't, you're doing it wrong.

~~~
j_baker
Of course any good idea can be taken to an extreme, and Spolsky probably is
doing that with this one. But my experience is that the majority of startups
will be fine. The problem is much more rarely "The engineers are getting away
with murder!" and more commonly "I told those engineers everything they were
supposed to be doing with no deviations. Why aren't they listening to me?!"
Most startup founders (but by no means all) end up being such control freaks
that Joel's advice probably won't be dangerous.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Engineers want to do "the best thing for the product". The trick is giving
them enough information to equate "what is best for the product" with "what is
best for the customer". That is when a good CEO/Product Manager earns his/her
money.

------
danbmil99
The style of management he recommends works well for companies in the size
scale of 30-100 people. I believe it breaks down after that, and, ironically,
as you grow to a few hundred and into the thousands, you actually have to
shift back to more of a command/control structure or you risk evolving into a
bureaucratic entitlement kind of organization. You still need to know how to
trust and delegate, but you (and by extension your now necessary mid-level
managers) also need to be able to shut down the endless bike-shedding (which
has now morphed into full-on ego flame wars) and make executive decisions to
prune the tree of possibility and keep things moving along productively.

I think Google is a good example of a company that is (later than most)
realizing the academic model only scales up to a certain point. They now seem
to be moving towards a much more traditional Cpt Picard/Steve Jobs-run type of
organization, from what I've gleaned.

------
wheaties
Great post. I'm going to show this to management because this is exactly the
idea that they advocate yet they keep hearing they should be more like Steve
Jobs. Not many people would want to work for a pseudo-Jobs. Problem is, there
seems to be a plethora of them out in the wilds of big corporate America.

~~~
michaelochurch
Steve Jobs was a multi-faceted person. He definitely had a difficult
personality, but I've heard he was less of an asshole than he's made out to
be; the problem is, when a person lives in the spotlight, all of his worst
moments get air.

He also had a different management style at Pixar than at Apple. During his
first stint at Apple, he was extremely young and inexperienced. Pixar was like
a research department, and he was generally nice to the people working for
him. When he returned to Apple, he came into a fairly nasty culture that had
been created by people other than him. If you've ever seen a company with a
young wolves problem, you know that sometimes the boss _has_ to be an asshole.

Also, my understanding is that he was generally very nice to the line
engineers but hard on people VP-level and above-- and that at Apple, VP is a
seriously high rank involving high-6 figure compensation (at least) rather
than a 50th-birthday present (or in investment banking, a 30th-birthday
present) as it is in most companies. I think that if you're making that kind
of money, you can take serious scrutiny.

~~~
kokey
I agree. I don't think he would have managed to retain friendships and
partnerships with engineers so successfully if he was that horrible to them.

------
Duff
I think the university analogy is distracting from the real point. He's
advocating a form of servant leadership, which is where the CEO/President/etc
is perceived more like a steward than an autocrat.

If you've ever worked for someone who had a broad array of responsibility, was
universally respected, displays humility, and available to help resolve
problems, that's what Joel is talking about. A great professor tends to adopt
this role -- which is probably where the university analogy came from.

The "catch" to this style is that you actually need to be respected,
empathetic and humble. (Know-it-alls need not apply.) That usually comes with
lots of experience.

~~~
dsr_
I think this one of the cleverest things Spolsky has ever written, actually.

All the great managers I have had acted this way. None of the bad ones did.

In a healthy organization, you can get respect by avoiding the Dunning-Kreuger
problem, giving people credit in public, and discussing problems in private. I
don't know if you can learn empathy, but you can learn to pause before making
decisions and thinking about what everyone wants out of a given situation.

Humility probably isn't necessary, but hubris has been a killer since before
Golden Age Greece.

~~~
Duff
It was a great post, but I noticed that many folks here weren't getting it. It
sounds cliche, but I knew alot about everything when I was an obnoxious 21
year old. Now as a grizzled 33 year old, I have a much better appreciation of
what I don't know -- which I find empowering.

Perhaps humility (or the perception of it) is a "symptom" of being more secure
in other areas.

~~~
groby_b
A "grizzled 33 year old". That's _so_ cute ;)

Knowing what you don't know is empowering, for a while. And then you realize
that you're mortal after all, and will never even know enough about all the
things you're deeply interested in, let alone those many things that sounded
interesting, but that you never explored.

It teaches you a lot of humility, but it doesn't feel that empowering. At
least to me.

------
twainer
In my views, it's mostly about balance rather than picking between divergent
choices. Who says one can't be a firm leader also capable of soliciting and
respecting the opinions of others?

The NY Giants won the SuperBowl as you note, with a famously dictatorial top-
down coach [Tom Coughlin]; the NY Jets didn't even make the playoffs with a
very horizontal come-as-you-are coach [Rex Ryan].

Interestingly, Coughlin didn't win any SuperBowls - he now has two - until he
learned to loosen up. And by all appearances, the NY Jets won't win one until
Ryan learn to tighten up.

Apologies for all the football references:) But I suspect Mr. Spolsky would
understand very well.

------
crb
I wonder why the CTO sits above the VP Engineering in Joel's picture? Is this
generic, or specific to Jeff as the SE CTO, perhaps because he wanted to code,
rather than manage?

------
rehack
Did not like this post. Like many others over here, I also have read all the
great posts by him over the years, on joelonsoftware. But, honestly, this one
just does not cut it for me.

He is over simplifying everything. And his extreme view ends demoting the
"top" of an Organization's chart. Heck I won't want to start a company to just
_move furniture around_.

And you can not have a binary classification for a CEO - Steve Jobs or not. In
reality there will be lot of people who are perhaps very skillful, experienced
and work very hard at the top. So their skill level might be closer to _Steve
Jobs_ than your average Joe. So you have to treat it like a spectra.

He makes a very fair comparison of developers and similar in a software
company with that of a toothpaste company. But his fairness goes for a toss,
when he compares the people at the "top". IMO just _administrators_ should
have no place being in a software product company in the first place.

He makes a good point, that its best for the organization that if all the
brains are used rather than just one brain. But he goes to the other extreme
to make this one point.

 _Experience_ does have a role after all. A fresh bright programmer might want
to code everything up in the latest shiniest thing, if you _know_ that its a
wrong decision. Then is it not your duty to explain him and convince him.

In such a situation, who has the luxury of acting like a university Chair, and
setup a committee to take the right decision? :-)

So the comparison with university is wrong. I see another comment in this
thread referring to 'architecture astronaut' in the context of this post. IMO,
this is more of 'architecture polish' ... just skims the surface :-)

------
spitfire
What's needed isn't more or better management and communication.

But to design a system whose secret lies in what’s unstated or not
communicated to one another (in an explicit sense)—in order to exploit
lower‐level initiative yet realize higher‐level intent, thereby diminish
friction.

If this is the state of the art in tech companies, I'm very blessed to have a
real durable competitive advantage.

------
_k
It's always going to be a pyramid. But you have to value and trust those whose
daily decisions have the biggest impact on the customer's experience. Whether
that's in product design, tech support, customer service or sales. It's de-
motivating when you're working for managers who don't understand what that
means. Joel is right but he's a bit harsh on Steve Jobs. I'm sure Steve Jobs
was a pain in the *ss to work for but Steve did value designers more than any
other company and he did value the people at the Genius bar more than any
other retail company ever did. And I think that's exactly what Joel's article
is about.

------
brudgers
Executive summary:

A manager's job is to make the coffee so their secretary can prioritize their
inbox.

------
skrebbel
Didn't everybody already know this? I'm not particularly in Silicon Valley,
but I really thought most startups work the way Joel describes, instead of
with the fake Steve Jobses. Was my idea of the world too good to be true?

------
demian
I don't agree with the hole post, but the "administration layer" paradigm Joel
has been proposing is kind of interesiting. In a way, it's the extreme
opposite of the norm, and that's good, it challenges the way people normally
think about "managment". It's humanistic by design. The problem is that, as
not everybody is Jobs, not everybody is Spolsky.

This shouldn't be read as a sctrict methodology or recipe to copy. In
programming, as Joel wrote, there are cheffs and there are McDonal's "burger
flippers". That analogy also applies to managment.

------
tnicola
> Seductively, it even works OK for a three person company.

 _Anyone_ who thinks command and control is a good idea with 2 other people
has got bigger fish to fry than finer points of effective management.

------
linsane
Based on this, one would think that the "support/administrative/service corps"
would receive much less compensation than the "talented individuals" who do
all the real work. A lot of organizations preach or follow this philosophy,
but I have yet to find one that puts its money where its mouth is and
distributes compensation accordingly.

------
MattyDub
I thought the Latin phrase was "post hoc ergo propter hoc". Is "cum hoc..."
also used?

------
michaelochurch
_The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young
“incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating
their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve
Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp._

I loved the swipe at the fake Steve Jobs's out there. I worked for one,
although he wasn't young and it wasn't in Mountain View. He would cite Steve
Jobs to defend defective practices. It was ridiculous.

It's a great essay, and I like Spolsky's management philosophy a lot, but I
don't entirely agree. A business isn't academia. Businesses have to ship
products and please their customers, and leaving these tasks to "the crowd"
doesn't work. "The crowd", when we're talking about software engineers,
produces brilliant chaos. That's great sometimes, and it can produce excellent
products, but it's not good when you need focus or to meet a ship date.
Sometimes a CEO or CTO needs to decide what gets worked on, how people do it,
and to motivate people to make sure it happens.

Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding
conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree
on a core question, and to look for a compromise. "Management fiat" shouldn't
be used lightly, but it's not without purpose.

That said, I think Spolsky deserves a lot of props for pointing out that the
managerial relationship is two-sided. A lot of companies and bosses don't
figure this out until they face uncontrollable talent bleed, and even then
there's a lot of self-deception (I've known some ineffective managers to
become bitter about their best reports "abandoning" them, as if it were some
ethical lapse, but never to own up to their role).

~~~
bpyne
"Likewise, sometimes a leader needs to step in and resolve bike-shedding
conflicts among two equally smart, strongly opinionated engineers who disagree
on a core question, and to look for a compromise."

The most effective people I worked for didn't try to dictate the solution to
the conflict. They were effective at moving the disagreeing engineers past
their conflict. Dictating a solution was always the last resort if the
engineers had just "dug in their heals" instead of discussing rationally.

~~~
wallflower
> The most effective people that I worked for didn't try to dictate the
> solution to the conflict

About China's presumptive next leader, Xi Jinping

His subtle and pragmatic style was seen in the way he handled a landmark power
project teetering on the edge of failure in 2002, when he was governor of
Fujian, a coastal province. The American company Bechtel and other foreign
investors had poured in nearly $700 million. But the investors became mired in
a dispute with planning officials.

After ducking foreign executives’ repeated requests for a meeting, Mr. Xi
agreed to chat one night in the governor’s compound with an American business
consultant on the project whose father had befriended Mr. Xi’s father in the
1940s.

Mr. Xi explained that he could not interfere in a dispute involving other
powerful officials. But he showed that he knew the project intimately and
supported it, promising to meet the investors “after the two sides have
reached an agreement.” That spurred a compromise that allowed the power plant
to begin operating.

“I thought, ‘This person is a brilliant politician,’ ” said the consultant,
Sidney Rittenberg Jr.

> <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/world/asia/24leader.html>

