Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great? - nightmarenate
======
TimTheTinker
I'll name the best manager I ever had, since she unexpectedly passed away
nearly three years ago to our team's (and company's) great sadness. Margaret
Thielemann was a QA manager for nearly 10 years at Esri (she previously headed
up QA at PeopleSoft before its acquisition by Oracle), and I reported to her
for all of those 10 years, during which I learned and mastered web development
by scoping, designing, and building several internal web apps. She hired me as
a kid with little corporate experience, straight out of college, and took me
"under her wing" and patiently taught me the ropes of thriving in a corporate
environment.

Margaret had all the hallmarks of an incredibly great manager. She hired for
potential (not past achievement) and gave employees every opportunity to grow
and pursue our passion as developers. This allowed me to pivot and grow into
web development, which was not in my job description or past experience. She
never micromanaged, even when a deadline was approaching. She never demoed a
project or took credit for something she didn't build herself. Like my
teammates, I had to demo every product I built -- which was challenging but
forced me to grow in public speaking skills (and she coached me the first few
times). This also allowed me and other team members to gain recognition
throughout the department.

She very effectively protected us from HR and whoever else wasn't on the team
so we could focus on our work. A few times someone tried to ask us for help
with someone else's project without asking her first--she was furious. She
also fought (very effectively) with HR and management to get us raises that
better reflected our increasing market value.

I owe my career and present livelihood largely to Margaret and the
opportunities she provided me. I'd be remiss not to acknowledge God's obvious
provision to me in her. Thanks so much Margaret, and thank you Lord.

~~~
JepZ
Most of what you say are qualities I like managers to have too, but 'someone
tried to ask us for help with someone else's project without asking her first
--she was furious.' is a quality I do not value. I mean, protecting your
people is one thing (an essential quality), but being furious because someone
in need of help asked in the wrong order doesn't foster cooperation beyond the
borders of the own team (causing silo mentality).

I don't know the companies culture and the people who asked for help, so maybe
it was a good reaction at the time, but in general, I would advise being
cooperative towards other departments.

~~~
pjc50
I've seen this go both ways. It depends on how funtional/dysfunctional other
parts of the organisation are. If they're as competent as you and just asking
for things they genuinely need, cooperation is great. If they're not, they
turn into "help vampires" and you have to put up a firewall to prevent them
destroying your productivity.

I think my current workplace suffers from too much team defensiveness + not
having a CTO or equivalent to integrate across teams.

~~~
ghaff
It also depends on you (and others in similar roles) having a reasonably well-
tuned sense of what is reasonable and what is not. I have a fairly broad
charter myself but I help out all the time with things that I could argue are
"not my job" as narrowly defined. However, they're mostly at least adjacent to
my primary responsibilities and are mostly not a big deal to do.

Were someone to come to me with a request that looked to have the potential to
be a big time sink--or if I was getting overloaded with too many one-offs--I
would definitely have a discussion with my manager at that point.

------
stevetursi
She fought for us, when there was an issue she cared and sought to understand,
she understood that family comes first before work (and lived the example),
she protected us from the politics of the large organization, and she did
whatever she could to obtain the resources we needed to do the job (a nearly
impossible task at that company.) She had a 100-200 people on her staff yet
she always made time to meet with whoever wanted to meet with her, and
proactively scheduled quarterly skip levels with each person.

When the company's executives forced her to fire 95% of her staff, I can only
imagine the turmoil she went through. She fought like hell to keep it from
happening and then they overruled her and made her do the dirty work. She was
also tasked with making sure we trained our replacements - IBM consultants in
India. In doing so she gave us everything we needed (ie time to go on job
interviews or take online courses) and was very clear that she was on our
side, likely in defiance of company brass.

As a result, before the layoffs, we were good - easily the most advanced,
innovative, and best performing group in the company. We really pushed the
envelope despite strong forces outside our group pushing the other way. We
were strapped for resources but we always made things work. She refused to
take credit for it - "It's because of you guys; I'm really lucky to have an
amazing team" but we knew better. We were really lucky to have an amazing
boss.

I was always appreciative of her but after that experience of being laid off
which was in early 2016 I feel such a strong sense of loyalty to her that if
she got a job running a trash dump I would not hesitate to quit my current job
(which is great) and go work for her picking through shit for minimum wage,
just to be on her team again.

~~~
bentoscher
“Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in
another's trouble, Courage in your own.” - Adam Lindsay Gordon

~~~
stopyellingatme
That is a beautiful quote. Thank you.

~~~
bentoscher
You are most welcome.

------
zorked
At a previous company, I joined a team that had to deliver something a year
before I joined. All previous teams assembled to deliver that had failed and
had been fired. That the company didn't have that feature was deeply
embarrassing, the competition mentioned having it in the first line of their
marketing materials. The most influential engineers on the team didn't give a
damn about deadlines and thought that being friends with the director would
save them, had elaborately set up a plan to blame other engineers they were
not friends with, who were on the way to get fired - half the team would
never, ever speak to the other half or even be in the same room. I saw a
(good) new manager get hired, see the clusterf*ck, and quit because it was
hopeless. None of the other managers wanted anything to do with us, we were
toxic. Then someone without people management experience got "promoted" to our
manager. She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's
little privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard
and typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant
against people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started
openly taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample
documentation of who failed what. Told people what to do, didn't want to know
the person's opinion about it. A few short months later we shipped.

Best manager I ever had.

~~~
messit
> She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's little
> privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard and
> typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant against
> people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started openly
> taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample documentation
> of who failed what.

That sounds pretty horrendous to me, I would wish her all the best and leave.

~~~
mattm
This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked
well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well
in a company with a good culture.

Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader
during wartime but terrible during peacetime.

~~~
awaaz
Depends on who you ask. Winston Churchill was a racist bigot who starved 4
million people in India to feed his armies.

[http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html)

~~~
whatshisface
It's not that Churchill was a different person in wartime than in peacetime,
it's just that most people's morals change from wartime to peacetime. So the
same atrocity could be viewed as an atrocity or heroic and brave depending on
what the public at large feels like their situation was like at the time.
That's the point being raised about the manager: every statement the parent
made was basically an accusation, but because the team was desperate the
success in the end overwrote the other things in everybody's mind.

If the team had failed in the end, all of the qualities that are presently
being lauded would be held at fault. True morals may not be relative and
situational, but the average person's mental implementation of morals sure can
be.

------
algog
Here is my story that I need to pass on to the next generation. I was a kid a
few years out of college- just joined a top tier investment bank. I was one of
many IT guys. After I joined I found out I was in charge of cutting over each
month's sales data to accounting. This sales data determined each month's
commission traders send over to salespeople- so that feed was a few hundred
salespeople's livelihood.

Well, the CFO that month had asked for some changes to the sales feed. And it
was my first month on the job. I think I must've tried to put in the change
requested- but came month end- I screwed up. At 5pm that day I raised my hand-
literally for help. I had screwed up bad. That month's sales feed was un-
usable. It had literally been rejected by the mainframe downstream.

My manager came over- and instead of placing blame- took over the situation.
She made the calls to the downstream people- and asked that they take the same
feed format from the previous month. Then I restored the previous month's
program and resent the feed for that month again. She covered my ass to the
CFO- and saved my hide.

She earned my respect that day- and my everlasting gratitude. From linked-in,
I see today she is the CIO of one of the federal reserve banks in the US.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It's good practice. The important part isn't who screwed up, it's how do you
fix what got screwed up and prevent it in the future. When you play the blame
and punishment game it just makes people more reluctant to admit they screwed
up and you start finding out about problems, or finding their cause, only
after even more damage has been done. Your employees should only have to worry
about their ass if they keep making the same mistakes over and over.

------
quantumhobbit
Not my direct manager but the tech lead.

This was a new team with an early standup which never happened on time because
we would always roll in late. The scrum master had the 'great idea' to start a
dollar jar. Whoever was late to standup had to put a dollar into the jar. None
of us objected because other than the scrum master, tech lead, and manager we
were all new to the company and didn't want to rock the boat.

This turned out to a huge problem for one of the engineers. She had to drop
her kids off at a daycare that didn't open early enough, so she was late ever
day. We mostly fell into line but she didn't have a choice. It wasn't the
money, but the public shaming of having to go up and put the dollar in the
jar. After a few weeks she was really stressing out about it because she was
new no the job and wanted to make a good impression.

Well the tech lead saw this and sauntered into the office at 11 the next day.
He flourished a twenty dollar bill and then announced so that the whole office
could hear that he was pre-paying for the next month. He could do this because
he was one of the most talented and senior engineers in the whole company. And
unlike many talented people who toil in obscurity, upper management knew he
was talented. The project wouldn't happen without him, or at least thats how
management saw it. He was untouchable.

The dollar jar disappeared the next day. The woman who was afraid of losing
her new job over a stupid tip jar would up staying and becoming one of the
better and most reliable engineers at that company. Even if it took them a few
more years to realize it.

~~~
YayamiOmate
Seems like an armwrestle workaround the issue. Good it got solved but it's
poor managing if a star engineer needs to extort his authority to handle
managerial problem... I wonder how much of it was display and how much a
necessity.

------
NikolaNovak
First thing to note is that it took me a decade or more to understand what
makes (for me) a "good manager". Here's my current list:

1\. Removed obstacles for me doing a good job - that could be handling
politics, ensuring requirements are readily available, logistics of equipment,
working space, whatever it may be. Turns out, a good manager handles a
trillion seemingly trivial things that add up to being crucial to smooth team
operation, but may never be visible to actual team members; kind of like
nobody pays attention to Infra until it breaks :S

2\. Made themselves available: I now understand the value, and difficulty, in
answering "Yes" to every "Hey, got 2 minutes?".

3\. Mentorship: it may be advice particular to current skillset, but typically
it's more thoughts and frameworks on things I'm not familiar with or above my
paygrade: how to work with clients or management, how to approach one's
career, etc.

Somewhere between Time & Mentorship, a personal example: in 2011, we had a
major document deliverable; every evening, for weeks running, my lead would
spend an hour or more going over the documents I produced, making horribly
annoying corrections over and over and over again. It took me a long time to
realize a) the kind of time commitment this presented on their part - it would
be so much easier for them to fix the document themselves than to patiently
guide me, but would not have advanced me; and b) how much it made me pay
attention to detail, readability, assumptions and scope ever since.

~~~
snarf21
This is a good list and I'd only distill it with the following: The best
manager is the one whose only focus is for each of the team members and the
team collectively to be successful.

In some companies or teams that may be removing distractions or introducing
accountability or getting rid of a bad apple or providing vision, etc. If the
team is not successful (over time), it is your fault. The sad part is that
most managers are more worried over self preservation and being "important"
than worrying about success. Ironically, being focused on team success would
make them even more indispensable.

------
gorm
The best boss I had was the first one. I deliver newspapers early on Sunday
mornings. When I arrived at the office in the morning he had always arrived a
hour before everyone else and done all preparation (packing and changing
subscribers in our books) so only thing left was to drink a coffee and start
running with the papers.

When it was cold he often drove around and met us on the route and gave us
another cup of coffee and cigarettes. If there was a complaint from a customer
he took it serious and often went himself to investigate what could have
caused the issue or went together with us. We were the best team in town by
far, proud and had few complaints. He had faith in his team, always nice and
always thought we did our best, values he showed us by his own actions.

Sadly he got promoted and after a while we were the worst team in town as the
new boss had a complete different style and threatened people in the team when
we got complaints.

------
gwbas1c
Honestly, my favorite managers were horrible. I got along with them on a very
friendly basis, but in hindsight, I had poor job satisfaction.

The best managers aren't my friend. The three qualifications are, in order: 1:
They shield me from the whims of upper management and the crisis of the day.
2: They give me autonomy to do my job as I understand the details better than
they do. 3: (In their current role) They take pride in people management
instead of technical achievement. 4: They are technically competent, and their
past technical experience can be relied on from time to time.

Regarding "They take pride in people management instead of technical
achievement". That's specific to their current role at their current time as a
manager. (IE, a good manager shouldn't take pride in driving refactoring or
implementing something like stylecop. Refactoring and things like stylecop
need to be driven by the team members, and the manager just needs to guide
such tasks as they fit into the schedule.)

~~~
mxwsn
Are the qualities you value in managers related to your experience of poor job
satisfaction? Are you happier with managers that in hindsight aren't as good?

------
examancer
He tore down barriers and made sure interactions with other parts of the
organization or external parties were as frictionless as possible. He would
take any non-technical chores off our plate where possible. He would give
clear and frequent feedback, good and bad, and really cared about where I
wanted to go with my career and what kind of projects I wanted to work on. He
trusted me when I said I would do something and would just make sure
everything was out of my way until I asked for help or deadlines were being
missed.

He was a shield for those of us who worked for him.

~~~
kochikame
Good managers always connect people, by breaking through silo walls and
barriers

------
joncrane
I've had several good managers in my time, and two horrible ones. But the best
I ever had, I like because he did the following:

\- managed down, not up. Constantly looked out for us and got us what we
needed, even though it was an uphill battle with corporate and the client. He
complained about this frequently, but never made it seem like we owed him
anything.

\- handled a lot of the shit work, administrative, spreadsheet updating kind
of stuff himself

\- always hustled, but never held it against us if we didn't seem to hustle as
hard as he did (in fact, he worked way harder than I did and I felt a little
guilty)

\- perhaps most importantly, put up with me. I was much less mature and had a
lot of sharp edges at the time. He constantly coached me and also tried to
cover for me. I am hoping he saw something in me at the time and that he'd be
proud of me if he saw what I was doing now (though I'm sure he'd still have
some coaching advice as well)

He is by far the best boss I've ever had and I will never forget him. Thanks,
Jeff.

------
y0ghur7_xxx
I work for someone who I can trust when he says something, he does what he can
to get it done. He tells me the goal we need to archive, and asks me how we
can do it. Then he does everything he can to make sure I have all my stuff
ready to do it. If there is a problem he helps me fix it. If something goes
wrong he blames himself. If the project goes right and the customer is happy
he tells everyone it's my accomplishment.

We are a team and we trust each other. I feel he knows I am good at what I do
and he let's me do it, and I feel he is good at what he does and together we
can accomplish great things.

We are friends, and we like each other. We disagree sometimes, but we work it
out by making compromises.

------
Nvidian
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO.

I’ve worked for many companies and no CEO comes close.

Over the past 2 decades, there have been ups and downs, but his belief in his
company, his employees, and his product was always there.

Every three months after quarterly results, he stands up for 2 hours+ to
explain his vision, long term goals, short term goals, where to improve,
celebrate successes.

His vision that GPU computing would lead to something big at some point,
investing in in starting in 2004 and never giving up.

The internal culture of the company to not waste time, to be intellectually
honest about your work and that of others.

The efficiency of making decisions. Multiple times, I’ve seen him cancel chips
that were weeks from taping out: the market had shifted, let’s reasses and do
something better.

E.g. one mobile chip was cancelled on January 10, 2007. The day after the
iPhone was introduced.

At other companies, we’d waste months knowing that our project was essential
dead before the hammer finally came down.

His technological knowledge, which is still top notch.

The way he deals with low level engineers. I suspect that he learns their
names before entering a meeting to put them at ease. (The higher up, the more
demanding he becomes, or so I’ve heard.)

The benefits that were introduced over the years. Very long maternity and
paternity leaves. Better than minimum wages for custodial and kitchen
employees. I love how the internal employee survey results are really used to
make things better.

A culture of not assigning blame. This is a huge one. He has said multiple
times on the (internal) stage that he doesn’t want accountability.
Accountability results in conservative decisions. Risks must be taken to
survive in this industry.

I could go on forever.

He’s not a perfect human by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s a
fantastic CEO.

~~~
JepZ
OT: Any idea why he doesn't seem to like the idea of an Open Source Nvidia
driver for Linux?

Does he see it as a risk, distraction or something?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
There could be a liability angle, regarding patents.

------
edw519
3 things he said:

1\. "I only worry about 2 things: getting our work done and keeping our
people."

2\. "Every senior dev I hire must have done one of two things: either ran
their own business or was a one-person shop. That's how I know that they know
how to do whatever it takes to get software built and deployed."

3\. "Our customers can buy this stuff anywhere. They buy it from us because of
the value we add. That value includes the ones and zeros that we developers
add to every product. The sooner everyone understands that, the sooner they
will see I.T. as an indispensable component of our product and not an overhead
department."

~~~
jrm2k6
2\. "Every senior dev I hire must have done one of two things: either ran
their own business or was a one-person shop. That's how I know that they know
how to do whatever it takes to get software built and deployed."

Were you getting a lot of new senior hires? That sounds hard to achieve. I
agree those people would probably be great, but also really really hard to
find.

------
ken
I don't have a single "most favorite" but I worked for someone a couple weeks
ago who began by saying "I just want you to get the job done _right_ and I
don't care how long it takes you".

I knew right away I was going to love it there. That's the way to my heart.

~~~
scarface74
I would think that’s the worse kind of manager. One of a manager’s job is to
manage resources. There are always trade offs between doing things “right” and
delivering. If you look at the old Joel quadrant of smart / gets things done
(delivers value to the business), someone who “doesn’t care how long it takes”
runs the risk of gold plating features instead of delivering. A deadline is a
great focusing mechanism.

And no I’m not a manager.

~~~
kerng
One big demotivating factor is forcing people to deliver mediocre stuff.
That's the way to loose the best. Many folks are motivated by delivering high
quality, higher even then the market wants/desires. No need to push or force
them - just letting them build the best does a lot of good. There is a book
called Peopleware, that discusses that aspect.

~~~
scarface74
It’s even more demotivating to not have a job to come to because you aren’t
delivering value to your paying customers or you didn’t have a product that
convinced your investors to keep pumping money into your business.

There has to be a balance. The company can’t exist without both customers
(either internal or external) and employees.

~~~
tremon
Speaking purely for myself here, but no, that's not as demotivating. Having to
deliver crapware is demotivating, because you know that either the customer or
yourself will get burnt by entirely preventable problems. Having to chase a
new job is stressful, but not as demotivating since you know (or, have faith
that) the stress is temporary.

------
wjnc
My favourite attitudes in my managers (plural) over the years:

-Intellectually curious / stimulating - This gave the team the time and awareness that science mattered in our jobs, pursue intellectual journeys that actually made our work better and more rewarding. I got to learn R in the aughts, work with academia and create products the company didn't have a real use for at the time, but are their bread and butter nowadays.

-Being totally lean (in the Toyota sense) - There's so much support you can get from a manager that is aware of the hidden cost to rework and not first-time right. He would actually go out on a limb talking to other departments and managers who would make our work less productive. This guy actually bought and brought a pie to another team after they failed us multiple times to try and help them to remember there were others dependant on their work.

-Being appreciative of outsiders trying to suggest changes to the status-quo. This is a big one. You could call this humility. Teams, roles and the surroundings change constantly. Better to change from the inside out, than only when faced with external threats. But it's a hard one since the status-quo and office politics on a day to day basis seem so important.

Whether or not these skills help the manager up the corporate chain depends.
For the first one to succeed you need a surrounding that's appreciative for
research and new things to come out of the team. The second is a awesome
middle manager skill that will be mostly in demand in change roles, but not so
much in regular management roles. I am sad about this, but most environments
the one who rocks the boat is the one the outside. The third is a more common
subset of the second and a true leadership skill, but again managing change in
a stagnant environment is hard. People expect your team to do the same thing
every day.

What trumps all these great traits is: communication. Each manager should have
the skill to communicating what he is doing with his team to his higher ups
and surroundings. Only then can what he brings to the team flourish in the
corporate environment.

------
themoat
He took blame for every bad thing that our team did. He gave credit to the
individual team members for every good thing he did.

He understood that the success of his team was his success, and didn't need
the praise.

------
sevensor
A technician in a factory where the management were all engineers. He rose
through the ranks to run my group when nobody else could handle it. Never
indecisive. Knew exactly what he wanted from us and trusted us to figure out
how to make it happen. Sat through what I later discovered were absolutely
hellish weekly managers' meetings where the directors would take turns raking
the managers over the coals, individually and collectively. Didn't complain
about it or take it out on his subordinates. When it was absolutely necessary
to make us fall in line with B.S. from above, he was matter-of-fact about it.
We were expected to abide by the policy, he was going to enforce it, but he
wasn't going to expect us to like it.

When, in the end, office politics lead to him taking the fall for a large
manufacturing incident, he accepted a lateral demotion gracefully. I worked
for people with much more formal education both before and after, but he was
both smarter and a better leader than any of them.

------
chrisaycock
He actually cared about making money. (I'm amazed at how many bosses care
about everything _except_ making money, even at hedge funds.) He gave me total
autonomy to build whatever I wanted as long as I made money.

~~~
lozaning
I had a sales job like this for a while at a small VAR. We were an HP, Netapp,
cisco, etc Gold partner, but my boss didnt care if I sold any of that, only
that I generated enough profit to cover my base salary through literally any
means.

Ended up writing my own software to interact with the Amazon Marketplace
sellers API and all our distributors nightly inventory data and just drop ship
stuff in mass, and send a couple product I had the best pricing on to Amazon
for FBA.

I got it down to maybe an hour of real work a week and was crushing my
numbers. After a year or so of that I got bored and jumped shipped though
because I didnt see any additional personal growth to be had at the company.

~~~
sleepychu
What did you do with the rest of your time?

~~~
lozaning
A lot of refactoring my code for the sake of refactoring, adding in more error
handling and edge case protection, trying to make it only 30 minutes of work
instead of an hour the next week, and a fair bit of HN and reddit and youtube.

The skills I taught myself in doing that largely lead to the position I've got
now.

------
candeira
I loved a manager I had who would listen to all arguments and allow himself to
be persuaded. He also said sometimes "you're right, but we have to do it my
way this time", and had earned so much trust that, when he said it, I knew the
reasons were good.

------
mrleiter
He actually cared about me. Asked me how I was feeling, how life is besides
work. Then from time to time he'd take us for lunch or dinner (we were a total
of 6 people in his team). Felt great, everybody was really productive and
happy to go to work.

------
rjzzleep
I remember going to an Erlang conference where Basho was a sponsor. One of the
engineering managers held a presentation on something new in Riak and had a
small error in it. One of the other basho guys in the audience corrects him
and his reaction to that was the following:

"That's Ryan Zezeski, he's awesome and if he says that, you should listen to
him". My immediate reaction was: "wow, I want to work for this guy" (funny
sidenote: because this was in DC, I thought everyone wore suits, so I showed
up with a jacket. I felt like an MBA and never so out of place as an engineer
in my entire life).

I have another one where I was working in a startup that was doing telco
stuff. This is about 10 years ago, so I was a bit younger. I'm sitting there
next to the founder, listening to my music with my huge Sennheiser headphone
and the founder taps me on the shoulder. He says: "Reza, we need to talk". I
look at him and say: "What do you want, you don't have a clue about this stuff
anyway." He just says: "That's right, I don't, that's why I hired you". So I
just shut up and listen. It's also not entirely true, he follows a lot tech,
he just lacks the knowledge when it comes to the implementation.

Over the years the handful of really good leaders I saw all had the same
quality. They all knew when to get out of the way and making a decision when
it counts. It's what I strive to do these days. Seems to me that the best way
to build trust is to let a person that's a specialist in his field take the
spotlight when needed.

~~~
ambicapter
> I look at him and say: "What do you want, you don't have a clue about this
> stuff anyway."

I know you specified this was 10 years ago, but I can't think of a single
situation where this would not be a douchebag move.

~~~
rjzzleep
It's great making assumptions when you know nothing about the dynamics between
two people, their social interactions, their history and basically anything
else isn't it?

I mean, you could have just asked. But insulting random people you know
nothing about is much less of a douchebag way to deal with it I guess.

~~~
cannonedhamster
I read it much the same way, as a rather insulting thing to say, especially
since you didn't go into what was said afterwards and you didn't preface the
kind of relationship you had. It's not on the reader to understand what you
meant, it's on the writer to write what they mean in a way that the reader
understands the intent.

------
bswitzer8
The former lead developer at the place I work now was my favorite manager. He
was great and a valuable resource for learning from. Since his departure the
environment hasn't been the same. He definitely was always able to ensure that
when reviews were done that he was critical but also genuinely cared about the
other developers.

What qualities make a good CEO/Manager/Supervisor?

1) Passions/genuine caring. If the person in charge doesn't love what they do,
or genuinely care about you and the company then you're going to have a bad
time.

2) Competency/Consistency - Being able to do you job, and do it well. A person
in such a role is the Guidance (tm). Anyone can do a good job if they put in
the time, they also must be consistently good (That's what makes them
valuable).

3) Critical when it counts. You have to crack the whip every so often and tell
people when something can be done better. Criticism is important to deal out
when it is needed, but the right amount that is used for making sure that the
other developer/designer/delegatee is growing in their skills/experiences.

That's my three C's for what makes a great overlord. My previous supervisor
ticked all boxes.

------
squirrelicus
Unambiguous. Approachable. Genuine desire to help. Clear objectives. Holds you
accountable and offers stern feedback. Notices when you grow. Places you with
people and problems that challenge you personally and technically. Completely
capable of understanding complex tech. Insulates you from noise. Interrupts
you when shit hits the fan. Demands answers, but gives you appropriate time to
get answers. Makes risky, even costly decisions when time is of the essence
and tradeoffs aren't clear.

Never blames you for something that isn't your fault.

Edit: by "placing you with people that... challenge you personally", I mean
recognizing that your interpersonal skills need to grow. I'm rough around the
edges and very direct, and I'm placed with an overly sensitive team member and
expected to have a highly functional team, for example. What I definitely
don't mean is "come rock climbing bro".

~~~
BuildTheRobots
> What I definitely don't mean is "come rock climbing bro".

Ironically, one of my best managers was someone who invited people to go
climbing with them. We had some very experienced climbers and some extremely
novice ones and yet they were some of the most positive and friendly evenings
of my life.

A mix of self effacing attitude ("well of course I found it easy, I've been
doing this 20 years more than you and I'm also nearly a foot taller!") tied in
with making sure people were only competitive against themselves ("well you've
done that in half the time it took last week...") and honest useful advice
made it a great experience.

I think there's also something to be said for working with someone who you
literally trust your life to once a week... Never used the word "bro" though -
that might be where we were going wrong ;)

------
CamperBob2
Whenever I stepped out of his office, I'd always have _fewer_ problems than I
had when I stepped into it. That's a managerial attribute that shouldn't be
taken for granted.

------
pkaye
I always liked managers with strong technical skills.

I had one manager, when one of his engineers fumbled up a project for month,
singlehandedly rewrote the code and had it running in 2 days. A file that had
1000 lines of code was reduced to 20 lines that was clear and worked correctly
on first attempt.

Another was the VP of engineering who had years of technical experience plus
was gifted in working with customers. When a major customer was yelling at us
due to some performance issues with our code, he went over to meet then and
soothed things over. They agreed to give use a few months to rework the code
and they were willing to pay a NRE for this. And they were happy in the end
also.

------
bsenftner
In a company with a dress code of t-shirts and jeans, he wore a fine tailored
3-piece suit. We were doing interactive art history documentaries, and he was
a Belgian music history phd brought in as our producer. He was a classic old
world European in a 30 something body, with a careful, articulate vocal style
that sounded like an actor reading a book on tape. He always explained why
things were they way they were, both in the content of our documentaries and
in the production process when dealing with outside agencies, licensing, other
departments and so on. He's "deal" was total transparency of operations, to
the degree everyone understood how everyone else's roles and duties support
and enable other team members. We all became a supportive family. That guy was
so good, he went on to be the CEO of Philips NV.

------
scarface74
I’ve never had a great manager. I look for a manager to serve a few purposes -
remove obstacles, communicate the priorities of the company, get the resources
a team needs, and provide a level of technical/career leadership depending on
where you are in your career.

But, let me focus on the two most of important purely selfish things for me. I
want a manager who provides an environment for me to grow technically and
fights for me to make more money. Everything else is secondary.

I’ve had good technical managers that I learned a lot from but had no
political abilities to get thier team raises so I had to take the skills I
learned and get another job and I’ve had overly political managers that would
throw you under the bus to get ahead but if you made them look good, you could
enjoy the ride until they stabbed you in the back.

------
threeseed
They were my personal combination janitor/talent agent.

They cleaned up the technical and political messes that me and my colleagues
would often made and they helped to sell the virtues of our team and our work
around the company.

------
orcs
Letting me get on with my job, no micro-managing; trust really.

Knowing they had my back if the shit hit the fan.

I've only experienced this once unfortunately.

------
ramblerman
I read about 3 metrics that make a good manager 10 years ago in HBR or some
similar publication. Since then I have run the list against my good managers,
and the bad ones, and it always holds up.

A good manager must:

1) be Competent

She doesn't have to be the best coder, or even able to code, but she needs to
be competent in her area of expertise. Nobody can stand working for an
incompetent for too long

2) be Consistent

If he is not there next week the team should reasonably be able to continue
and predict his decisions. Nothing is worse than having someone constantly
flip flop on their decisions, or worse just blowing in the wind to please his
superiors.

3) Care about you - genuinely.

You have to believe they care about you, genuinely. This person has your best
interest, and your career advancement in mind.

------
aqswfvgb720
No names to protect privacy. Used to work for a multi-billion dollar
datacenter company. Met my gf there who's daughter was diagnosed with lukemia
at age 3. CEO heard through her, then boss, and gave my gf 6 months paid leave
to spend time with her daughter and paid for 1 year of chemo out of his
pocket. Her daughter beat cancer.

------
manorie
My greatest manager hired me for my potential, was always honest and open
about everything, he was a great listener and great guy when giving feedback
(0 ego). He was lacking empathy, obsessive at times but being open and seeing
the goodwill in his every behavior was compensating all of his bad sides. One
time he told me "I am not that smart, but at a young age, I have found a way
to trick people that I am really smart" (he was Harvard grad with full scholar
and worked with best names)

After many years I am still using things I have learned from him and those are
saved my ass countless times.

------
pommers
My favorite manager taught me how to navigate the workplace. He managed 20
very different people and always found time for one of us if wee needed it. He
would fight other people to say that we (graduates) were valuable to the
company and would always feed back to us the responses he was getting.

One thing I am really grateful for is that he expected me to be able to find
and point out the policies and procedures for anything I needed him to do.
This meant that I could keep him honest, and he could learn from me instead of
having to search himself whenever I came up with an unusual problem (like
being a graduate and getting called for an incident while not on call). I
still do all my own reading before I go to my manager now with things I need
them to do, and it helps me to help them help me (for the most part).

He was also always there for me if I was getting beaten around inside or
outside work (even after he stopped being my manager). He is the best manager
I have had by far, and I would work with him again in an instant.

I am still amazed how he managed to do so well after being thrown into the job
managing a large group of people working across the department, while other
managers I've had who have only needed to look after a small team (10 people)
seem to never have time for us.

------
ninkendo
We were good friends. He knew every one of my strengths and what I could
accomplish if given the freedom. And he gave me it in spades, enough to see a
shared vision into a very successful end product.

He helped evangelize my work and got people excited about it, and had as much
a part in the success as anything because of the barriers he removed, the air
cover he gave me to allow the time to fix the biggest issues of it, all while
helping me triage bugs and provide end-user support.

He was highly technical, and understood my code. He didn’t step on my toes or
try to force any technical direction in any way, he knew well enough to
delegate, and trusted my decisions. But provided amazing advice when I needed
it.

Eventually he had too many people on his team and needed help managing, and I
ended up getting promoted to a manager (still under him) mostly out of a favor
to help him out.

That was the beginning of the end though, because eventually a reorg moved my
new team to a different side of the larger org. And everything kinda went to
shit after that and I left the company.

Lesson learned: Don’t become a manager as a favor to someone if you’re not
ready for it.

------
glonq
Let's be honest: the ones that helped me get the biggest raises. I work to
live; not live to work.

------
alsetmusic
Within a few days of taking the reins, the first company-wide email from the
new CEO was a reversal on an issue about paychecks and tax donations. It was
to be more flexible. (This has been a mildly contentious issue.)

What a great way to say “I’m running the show,” without stirring things up or
causing debate. I was immediately impressed by the degree of awareness this
person displayed.

------
k4ch0w
No micro-managing

Clear direction

Trust

Let me choose my own hours

Blocks meetings I don't need to be in

------
jacobwilliamroy
He tricked a fishing boat captain into letting himself and a film crew follow
them out to the north pacific to document the destruction caused by dragnet
fishing boats. He wined and dined the captain and told him that he was a big
shot hollywood producer making a film about large sea creatures. Then my boss
filmed them killing seabirds and dolphins and whales, presented that evidence
to the UN along with statistical data predicting a complete and total crash of
the northern pacific salmon population and got them to outlaw the practice of
dragnet fishing.

------
rishabhd
What I learnt from the best managers i have worked under - 1) Don't be a
condescending ass 2) Give autonomy to your reportees 3) Listen carefully, give
your attention to your team 4) Lead not direct 5) Go beyond office in terms of
relationship 6) Give them a clear career path 7) Praise in front, give
feedback in private, softly

The rest of my WIP list is here

[https://www.theprohack.com/p/what-not-to-do-when-you-
become-...](https://www.theprohack.com/p/what-not-to-do-when-you-become-
manager.html)

~~~
Sophistifunk
I have no idea what you mean by 'addressing "Track changes" and "comments" in
the reports', care to elaborate?

~~~
rishabhd
These are features in MS Office which allows a user to track versions of
documents with changes.

~~~
Sophistifunk
Oh right, of course. Cheers :)

------
drakonka
He was only my manager for a year, when I started my current job. One of the
things that made him so great is that he didn't need convincing about my
competence and ability to take on responsibility. He knew I wanted to do (more
programming heavy tasks) and knew what needed to be done on the project, and
gave me the kinds of tasks that formed my attitude and outlook on how we do
things even now that he's gone years later. He didn't doubt my ability to do
the job and set me up to take on a lot of responsibility.

Specifically he showed me the importance of autotesting and set me up to take
on the responsibility for maintaining and improving our autotesting framework
and implementing our team-wide autotest policy. Since he was the TD on the
project he was also able to give me the backing with the rest of the team to
enforce some pretty strict policies, and that continued for the rest of the
project even after he was gone. This became my area of special interest and
expertise on the project even though it didn't fall into my original job
description and helped me grow into the direction I wanted at the company.

I think because this was so long ago and I only had him as a manager for maybe
a year there may be things I'm viewing through rose-tinted glasses, but I
still remember him as the best manager I've had.

------
setquk
Best manager I had was basically never there. He was out keeping everyone off
our backs.

------
franrull
Hi, I work at Mobile Jazz, a 100% remote "devshop" and I think the single most
important thing that I can point out from my managers (both the CTO and CEO)
that make them and the company so great is their constant focus in empowering
others pushing people to be proactive and self-managed.

We enjoy a level of autonomy that I've hardly ever seen anywhere else. Being a
100% remote company, this is super important as it means you have to trust
that your employees are doing the right thing and the most important way to
make sure they do is to actually empower them to make decisions and being
responsible for them while reassuring them them you have their backs.

Besides this specific thing. There are other things that make them stand out
like the fact that they reinvest most of the profit of the company back into
it while splitting some of that margin amongst all of us in the form of
dividends. They also invest a lot in the happiness of the team, organizing
gatherings several times per year both for working together (like a
"workation" month in Cape Town) but also for pure fun (like skiing in the
Alps).

Hope these insights help and light up the debate!

------
tehlike
Not my direct manager, but someone i worked with.

He approached problems from different angles than most. He understood what our
business is and didnt get lost in details that didnt matter. Thanks to his
decisions, efficiency on things he was involved improved significantly.

More importantly, he managed chaos. And he embraced it. From technical pov, he
saw experiments as an opportunity, and set a goal to team to run as many as
they can fit into cookie mods. This allowed team to learn what works and what
doesnt, and gave them immediate feedback. Almost everyone else sees it only as
a way to be conservative (slow roll out that is safe), this guy saw it as an
opportunity.

I guess tl;dr; sees the bigger picture and doesnt get lost in details,
embraces enthropy and sees it as an opportunity.

------
systematical
Almost never lost their cool. Always seemed to know the direction we needed to
go.

------
Topgamer7
They fought for me salary wise, allowed me to grow and learn. Did their best
to insulate each of us from outside pressures/scrutiny.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I worked remotely at a small company of 10 people. The founder who preferred
to keep the team small was one of the most admirable people I’ve ever met.
Besides having a best friend type of attitude he did an amazing job of
motivating people to do their best without you ever realizing it. He was kind,
caring, thoughtful and super detailed. He had a go getter type of attitude and
just got shit done without delay or procrastination which motivated the hell
out of me. I never knew a person could be so kick ass until I worked there. It
makes sense though - his success and success of the company is entirely his
doing. It was clear to me that no matter what industry he worked in, he’d make
a business out of it and be successful. I left the company for higher paying
position but I always think back to the great times I had at this company and
how I was constantly challenged, pushed to be my better self without ever
feeling direct pressure. I admire this person greatly to this day.

~~~
techsin101
Can you be more specific

------
kirantikari
I worked for an unlimited design company for my summer internship. This was my
first instance of a job interaction with any company.

What amazed me was the founders spent most of their time teaching designing to
all interns/designers in the company. Considering interns are temporary, and
yet investing time in teaching interns was what made my experience so great.

------
kleopullin
My favorite manager was a new store manager at a box store I worked at while
finishing my degree. I generally haven't had great tech managers. This store
manager was great because he was an outstanding team player who knew the rules
of the game and who identified and trusted the strengths of his employees. He
didn't micromanage. Sometimes he let you fail.

As a team player, he was out on the floor during the busiest retail times. The
best floor associates in retail work well with each other as team players and
pass tasks around, but you have to know which other members are competent and
reliable. This guy was 100% both and let you know he was another team member
and available for anything; if you were running to get a forklift, you could
send him to an aisle where you saw a customer looking lost, have him haul
goods to checkout, grab him to help load a car.

He trusted his employees and identified and rewarded excellence. I was a
customer service queen at my store, and he saw that and told me, then gave me
an award for it, and a raise based on it. One time when we had an unusual
customer mess-up and a cashier called me to fix it (because she knew I would
do everything to make it work), I pulled a team together and got it done, but
he gave just me, not my team, an award for it, when I really thought it was
team work. Later I realized he was right, that the task had first required a
team builder (and, yeah, I got my teammates awards, also). The few times I
called him as a manager to resolve a customer issue, he just stepped in and
took over, never requiring me to explain my side (which didn't matter, the
customer wanted something I couldn't provide, so I got them a manager),
because he not only let you do your job, he understood what his was. He paid
attention. He knew who was contributing and how much.

Mostly though, if you were good at your job, he knew it, he acknowledged it
through opportunities, awards, and raises in addition to telling you, and he
let you do it, while he did his job.

Oh, eventually some startup snagged him.

------
windexh8er
There are specific qualities you spot quickly after years reporting to the
good, bad and mediocre. Qualities that stand out to me are: empowerment,
defense and support.

Empowerment means a lot of things: not getting in your way (removing
roadblocks), making sure you're content (tools and otherwise) and the most
important - trust. If you don't feel like your manager trusts you, it will
never work. But that road is (or should be obviously) bidirectional.

Defense is when you know your leader is on your team. Not making excuses for
you but making sure you're not getting steamrolled. Good managers do this with
foresight and take them on the chin when and where appropriate for team
failures or misses (Extreme Ownership is a great book outlining this).

Finally support is a culmination of the other two. Knowing you can get help
without undue recourse or that your leader will take over a problem
distracting you from your main task and complete it with totality and not hold
it over your head after the fact. Good leaders are unsung heroes and the two
best I've had have also been highly charismatic on top of those other things.
I don't hand out the charisma badge easily because I think people self-
proclaim being charismatic far too often. But if your leader isn't a people
person they can turn people away, shame them inappropriately or even worse.

A friend, who's an engineer asked me for advice the other day as he was
considering moving up into a management role beyond his individual contributor
slot he had been fulfilling for years. I went through these things and also
said that his new role was not to be super-engineer now, but to help them get
their jobs done more efficiently and take on battles he has little experience
with. I think that surprised him slightly so I offered up another great book:
Zapp. It's trivial, short and old. But the context is 100% relevant today and
a big miss by many "managers" who think their role is something other than
supporting and fostering their team.

edit: mobile removed my formatting, fixed

------
_Codemonkeyism
She helped me with my strengths and weaknesses. She told me my career limiting
weakness. She talked about my feelings which is rare in backstabbing C-Level
executive country of large enterprises. On top of that she was very bright,
very demanding and very analytical.

I would always work with or for her again.

------
epx
They pushed the envelope; made me build things that I didn't think I was
capable to build.

Made "constant pressure": kicked asses to move things forward but it was not
"exponential". If failed to reach a milestone in time, it was ok, shit
happens, no big scolding etc. but it was made clear that the milestone would
have to be reached one day, so better keep walking.

They were very smart in detecting early signs of burnout and stress. "Go gome
and fuck the deadline, tomorrow is another day." In another instance: "It
doesn't make sense for you to quit, take some days off and see a psychiatrist"
[Diagnosed with depression, took medicine, improved.]

Fought for their commanded, shielded them from politics.

Personal integrity that transcended the job relation.

------
kulahan
My favorite manager was a commander when I was in the military. He was easily
the best leader I've ever worked for, hands down.

The man was sharp as hell - he always seemed a step ahead of everyone around
him. He'd sit us down and explain his strategies in relatively good detail so
we knew what was going on and why we were doing things in a certain way. He
welcomed criticism and was generous with the compliments. He ensured everyone
got to leave when the day was done, and wasn't afraid to say "No, that's
stupid. I'll take the heat until this is fixed." Zero micromanagement, tons of
trust, and he was _nice_ , too.

If managers on average were half as loyal to their workers as he is, the world
would be a much better place.

------
kreitje
Saw we were generally unhappy working with our biggest client. When the client
called for a pricing review with us, and other agencies for their "go to"
team, my boss decided to not participate and part ways with the client. Thy
were shocked to say the least.

------
Taylor_OD
My favorite managers are the ones that made me better at what I do. The ones
that I was able to learn incredible amounts from. I joined the company to
learn from them, I delivered on what I promised (solving the problem their
hired me to solve / filling their need), and they delivered on helping me
build my skill set and career.

That's the most important thing for me personally. If they can also be
friendly and we have a friendly working relationship (can joke around and grab
a beer once in a while) that is also great. However that's absolutely
secondary to the first point. In theory I'd be fine with having a boss who I
don't really click with personally at all but am still able to learn from.

------
nandkeypull
The best manager I ever had was the polar opposite of a micromanager. Very
laid-back, offered insightful ideas, but not in pushy way. He gave us a lot of
freedom to get the work done and didn't constantly check in every day.

What I really admired about him was his ability to keep his cool and "Don't
Panic", even when everyone else was worked up about an emergency. He always
just took the bad news in stride and suggested some possible courses of
action.

It also helped that although he had some of the stereotypical engineering
awkwardness, he liked to make off-hand comments that were often hilarious and
Star Wars-related.

I never thought of our standups as the Jedi council.

------
youdontknowtho
We were on a business trip. We had a drink one night and the subject of a
coworker who had a spouse die. He said "we have to protect him" casually as we
were talking about some of the upcoming projects. It was just assumed that we
would make sure that this guy got whatever he needed.

Of course, you are probably saying...that's just the right thing to do...it's
also the law to some extent...you must not work in America. I've seen people
treated very poorly in a variety of situations. So had this guy and he was
going to make sure that it didn't happen to my co-worker.

------
coolandsmartrr
On a side note, how likely is it to encounter a good supervisor in your
career?

~~~
examancer
I was lucky that my first technical role was where I found the best manager
I've had. He was my 2nd supervisor in that first role.

After that I got to be pickier than most about where to go next, so my results
might be rosier than others. In total I've had 7 "supervisors" in my technical
career. 2 of them were amazing and I would take a (small) pay cut right now to
work with either. 2 were good, mostly hands off, and easy to work with. The
other 3 were nice people with good intentions, but significant managerial
shortcomings. None of them were bad or insufferable.

In one case, an extraordinary mentor almost entirely made up for shortcomings
of the manager. Working with great people alongside you often makes the
incompetency of the people above a little less relevant, or at least more
tolerable.

------
forinti
The best manager I ever had was the best because he simply would leave our
team alone. We knew what we had to do and he knew we would do it. He would
sometimes ask if we needed anything and things worked great.

~~~
imsofuture
Yeah, exactly this. Managers make a huge impact when they're needed, but
rarely is that in the day to day. My best managers have always set clear
objectives, and moved mountains for our team in the larger organization, but
when it comes to executing they've always known it's best to get out of the
way (obviously barring situations where things go wrong, or they do need to
help).

------
thom
Not sure my favourite manager _was_ great. But at one startup our CTO was so
completely devoted to agile and TDD that he somehow completely protected us
from deadline pressures and technical debt. It was the least stress I've ever
experienced in my career, and the best code I have ever written. That said, I
don't really think the business case or costs on the project ended up making a
lot of sense and the product never launched (the problem it mitigated against
was actually solved by EU litigation in the end).

------
Insanity
I think the fact that he has both domain and engineering knowledge.

We work in a university hospital and he has both medical training as well as
software engineering. So we can talk to him with software specific terminology
and doctors etc can do the same with medical terminology.

That, combined with having passion about what we are doing and actually caring
about the team goes a long way. (Our team occasionally does things outside of
work together, like going to the movies or something).

The team (and leadership of said team) are one of the best things about my
job.

------
40acres
In my first 1:1 with my current manager (who is also my favorite manager,
albeit only my 2nd "real" manager in my short career) I expressed my career
aspirations and my style of work / learning / contributing. I expressed my
ambitions and he was able to guide me to projects that I could contribute to
and/or lead to earn promotions.

He does a great job of communicating top level decision making to us and
keeping us in the loop, he's also great at shielding us from upper management.

------
jetset15
My manager goes out of his way to allow people who have passions for things
onto smaller teams that work on those passions. Our company and our products
are built because someone wanted to fix a problem and were given the time to
do so. Playing to our strengths and helping us work on our weaknesses. No
micro-manging involved, just trust and encouragement. Will lay the hammer down
if needed in edge case situations but will also defend the team to the death
from outside pressures and obstacles.

------
viggity
He embodied the "Leader as Servant" mentality. He wasn't technical but was the
manager over 30 devs/qa/PMs. There wasn't a single request that I had that
wasn't immediately validated by him (even if he couldn't necessarily "fix it"
for me). He was like the penultimate "border guard", he didn't let stupid
politics interfere with our work. He let us decide on technical direction AND
methodology (tdd, bdd, pair programming, etc).

------
ratsimihah
My first boss ever was someone I could rely on. As a technical CEO and
founder, he's both knowledgeable and has great leaderdership skills. He's
trustful and gave me a lot of freedom in my work, and was able to put me back
into place when I wasn't on point. He even helped me when I got in trouble
outside of work!

As a sidenote, I've had stubborn managers since who can't see the big picture
and/or can't think critically, which made me appreciate the good ones even
more.

------
hazbo
I'm at a place now where I'm really happy with my manager, and my manager's
boss, the CTO. I can sum this up pretty quickly. They listen. Like, actually
listen. They are very easy to talk to about both work related issues and
issues outside of work. It's like they can see what everyone is doing and even
if your job for the day is to push a small bug fix, credit will be given for
that. I'm recognised here as are my co-workers. It's a wonderful place to be.

------
maksa
\- He provided high quality input and got quality output in return.

\- He removed obstacles.

\- He never let shit that was raining on him just fall down on us. He was
basically an umbrella.

------
misabon
* Gave me autonomy in execution

* Pushed responsibility on me

* Trusted me to be capable of doing things

Didn’t realize for a long time that I was volunteered for things. Advanced my
career super fast.

------
jaypaulynice
You’ll know it when you’re best buddies...and you wouldn’t genuinely mind
knowing their family and hang out with them...mutual respect to start!

~~~
basementcat
I have found that "best buddies" and "good manager" are not always correlated.
That is to say, sometimes having a good personal relationship with a manager
is a sign of a good manager and sometimes not; one does not imply the other.

On the one hand, being good friends with a manager may prompt one to go the
extra mile because you're helping your dear friend (and perhaps vice versa).
On the other hand, a deep friendship may cause you to ignore or downplay flaws
or problems (that may seriously impact the customer, etc).

------
btschaegg
"Boss, I was tasked to do X. Doing that manually is error-prone, tedious, and
takes forever. I googled and found tool Y which solves that problem. A license
costs $40."

"How many hours do you save by using this?"

"Right now? I'd say about 3-4. Plus the same again if we need to do X again
(maybe next year)."

"No-brainer. Send me a link."

Edit: Just as an example. Let's say he was very pragmatic. :)

------
unclefester90
My last manager made sure that he honored the open door policy. I was allowed
to step in whenever and ask him a question or discuss anything work/non-work
related. Despite all the stress he had to deal with he made sure all questions
went answered. That's a true leader.

------
ryneandal
Empathy. A drive for understanding technical issues (not part of their
domain). Challenging the team to do their best through
gamification/incentives. Wholly available to talk, for any and all issues both
personal and business.

All in all, just being a good person, first and foremost.

------
thisisit
My favorite, probably not the best by many standards, was someone who was not
versed in the tech we were working on. He listened when people talked. If
there was something bothering us he got us what we needed, sometimes even
spending his personal time on it.

------
bsvalley
(Direct Managers for many years). I’d have to pick between mediocre, bad,
dishonest and useless. So I would go with mediocre as my best pick because his
intentions weren’t bad. It’s just that he wasn’t performing well.

------
a_imho
Never met a great manager, the least harmful were smart/dumb enough not to
interfere with the day-to-day work too much and let the people do their job.
I'm still skeptical of the value added by m&ms.

~~~
dbt00
Sometimes the most important job a manager can do is make sure you have a full
queue of day to day work to go do and stay the F out of your way. :)

------
sizzle
I've seen managers talk big talk about fighting for us when otherwise not the
case behind closed doors. I wouldn't trust any one person in a highly
political organisation, be it Manager or top brass.

------
RobertSmith
My manager in my past company gave me opportunities to try new things. Even if
I did some mistakes, he removed the fear of failure from me. Whenever I was
down, he had motivated me and helped me to grow

------
olleholleh
She didn't micro-manage anybody - gave everyone trust to do their job. She
were honest with mistakes and worked on solutions to correct in dialoge, not
monologue.

------
codingdave
They had a very simple relationship with me:

1) Inform me of the strategy.

2) Set expectations on deliverables and timing.

3) Go away.

At the same time, they were there if I needed them, either professionally or
personally.

------
meddlepal
I have been really lucky to have a number of great bosses in my career past
and present. All of them have shared common traits (to varying degrees) of
being available to listen and talk when needed, having a vision and a plan,
empathy for life situations, missed deadlines and goals, and finally a desire
to invest in personal growth even when it might not immediately be in the best
interests of the organization.

------
adrianmonk
Great technical skills, hardworking/motivated, _and low drama_. The
combination is possible!

------
mychael
\- Taught me a lot.

\- Treated me like an equal.

\- Offered me a ton of new opportunities which resulted in lots of salary
bumps.

------
koonsolo
Great managers are at the service of their team, not the other way around.

------
lr4444lr
Not only did he triumph when we triumphed, he suffered when we suffered.

------
sleepychu
No bullshit, ever.

Had my corner.

Didn't get in the way.

------
xfitm3
Anyone who inspires me to be better. Highly subjective.

------
phaedryx
Gratitude and appreciation, simple as that.

------
justifier
managing situations stead people

------
cgriswald
My best manager allowed me to be both right and wrong. He'd give honest
feedback about what he thought would or wouldn't work and why, but if I
disagreed I was free to prove him wrong or right. I can't remember him ever
forbidding me from taking an a specific approach, and I can only remember one
time going against his advice and being wrong (mostly because I learned from
that experience, not because I think I was usually right).

In contrast...

I worked as a computer operator and most of the time was "down time" waiting
for jobs to finish. We had little bits of busy work that none of the operators
did, so I did cleaned out the backlog and kept us up-to-date. Documentation
hadn't been touched since it was originally written years before I started. I
rewrote it, updating it and fixing errors.

Then I tackled rewriting the Microsoft Access application we used to schedule
jobs. This was only something we used internally so we knew what jobs needed
to run on what nights. It wasn't up-to-date, so we had to manually change the
schedule every night, and it wasn't user-friendly, so our FNGs always made
errors that required programmers or DBAs being called at 3:00 am to clean up
mangled data. I rewrote it to model our current processes and even added some
color coding and included recommendations to help FNGs.

My boss "caught" me doing this and told me I had better things to do with my
time. I was young, so I asked him, un-politically, "Like what?" He told me to
rewrite the documentation. I told him I had done that months ago. He opened it
up, looked at one random piece of it, and found a flaw that wasn't really a
flaw. I probably rolled my eyes, wrote a macro to make the change to all the
pieces of documentation, and then started working on the Access application
again.

He "caught" me again, and startled me by basically sneaking up behind me while
I was working on it. He said, "I thought I told you not to work on that." I
was like, "No, you told me to rewrite the documentation, which I did." Then he
told me he didn't want me working on that at all because it was a 'security
issue'. Two things about that. The first is that I was told when I was hired
that this was a great place to move up the ranks, that other operators had
moved into programming after showing what they could do.

The second is that I had access to the entire network, compilers, home
directories, everyone's email, all company sales data, payroll, server room,
you name it. I ran the backups. I was often alone in the building for periods
of over 12 hours. There was all kinds of equipment and merchandise I could
have easily stolen, etc.

Now that I'm closer to his age and have more experience, I just see that he
was grossly incompetent, in way over his depth, and just trying to coast until
his retirement and any changes I made felt threatening to him, despite all the
actual improvements I made.

------
groupthinking
Trust

------
nf05papsjfVbc
The best boss I had is many times better than anyone else with whom I worked
before or after working for him. He is someone who is well known in the
graphics and chip design industry but I prefer not to name him solely to keep
my semi-anonymity.

I'll list a few of the things he did that really kept me (and everyone else in
his team(s)) driven. I was about to say 'motivated' but it doesn't seem to
express the intensity as well as 'driven' does.

Here are some of them:

\- Was involved in hiring for his team and trusted whom he hired

\- He set up 'connections' in such a way that the new folks were always being
mentored by people of varying levels of tenure and seniority. This wasn't a
direct "so and so will mentor you". It was more that he set up the
dependencies and interactions in ways that there was a gradient on which you
could keep going to gain further and further expertise from people.

\- Was politically adept. His teams never encountered any rubbish that was
irrelevant or would slow them down. He would say "if that doesn't work, I know
which buttons to press" and he'd make things happen.

\- Where I work now, I have to justify before _and_ after going to a tech
conference. When I was working with him, he was like "there is this
conference. XYZ is visiting there and I need your_teammate and you to help him
with some logistics - just take the hardware from your team. I realised after
a long time that this was his way of connecting us to XYZ (who's a veteran and
highly respected person in the industry) and it was a golden opportunity. He
strongly believed in having people who work in different countries and offices
getting to meet now and then and would find excuses to make them happen.

\- If we messed up, we'd go to him and say "We messed up! This is what
happened..." and he'd just say that it wasn't something to worry about and
would instead ask about things that were more 'big picture' and 'long term'.
This only made us even more resolved never to sully his teams' reputation.

\- I once asked for access to the codebase of a project I was interested in to
see if I could port it to another OS. Instead of doing that, he instead
connected me to the team who worked on that project and asked them to see if I
could help them. Again, he was connecting people and giving me much more than
I had asked for.

\- He was a visionary and would always speak about his vision in a very matter
of fact manner instead of making it a grand thing. So, it made it easier to
believe in it and think about it.

\- He always maintained that he didn't believe in managers who "just manage"
\- i.e someone without a sound technical understanding of what we were working
on, could never be a manager in one of his teams.

There are many more things and for the moment I'll end the list there.

I realise now that no amount of 'process' can generate this kind of drive in
people. I hope that some day I can grow up to be 1% as good as he is.

People follow leaders who free them from chains - they don't thrive in systems
which artificially-constrain them.

------
fallingfrog
He was me

------
mx15602
The best CTO I worked with, ran a meritocracy. The freshest low level hire
could come up to this guy and disagree with him, and he would listen to their
arguments and accept them if they were compelling.

He had all the usual requisite skills, but his passion for technology and
willingness to be proven wrong were instrumental to the success of the
company. We were able to iterate quickly and find workable solutions to big
problems because the CTO created a culture of facts over status and an
environment where everyone could safely express their ideas, no matter how
stupid, so that the best idea may win.

------
OkiiEli
Some qualities from past manager: \- push you to your limits in targets
delivery

\- shield you from management

\- hire better people than themselves

\- don’t take credit from you

\- Inspire and always give you opportunity to grow

\- Execute stuff with speed

PS: I just launched a productized content-as-a-service
[http://contentiskey.co](http://contentiskey.co) which enables businesses to
get unlimited content for only $250/mo.

------
RandomGuyDTB
He shot his car into space.

DISCLAIMER: I don't work for Elon Musk or his associates.

------
pankajdoharey
Amazing systems knowledge. My previous senior was the chief architect, and a
life long C++ developer. His systems knowledge was amazing, unlike all the
people i knew previously who were either Java or PHP or Ruby coders. Dynamic
language folks have almost no knowledge of the system their software works on
which makes them script kiddies at best. Experience isnt enough to be a
senior, your knowledge domain should also expand with time. Which for may
doesnt and they are still developing in Ruby/Rails or PHP or Java. They havent
tried writing or learning any other language. But the C++ guy since had learnt
maybe 3-4 new languages. Including elm, js , Haskell etc. I feel that Knowing
the latest Ruby/Rails API isnt enough to qualify as an architect because it
changes every yr. That isnt an indicative of how good a programmer you are or
how you think. I had .NET and Java language colleagues earlier who i had
discussions like why are you starting two docker containers when one is
enough? And i had a hard time explaining them the purpose of docker or process
isolation. I feel a good systems knowledge is crucial to developing software
including webapps. The managers with good systems could identify problems
quickly while with others i had discussions like lets just deploy 1 docker
container to what is docker etc..

~~~
nnq
you're describing a "tech lead", not a manager

~~~
pankajdoharey
Nope unfortunately i am describing a manager, our techlead was no good Ruby
Developer with no idea about anything. We cleared our doubts from our
architect/Manager.

~~~
holocen
You cleared your ideas with the technical lead of the project. That doesn't
necessarily include the manager.

~~~
pankajdoharey
I guess your expectation from the manager is the MBA types? Well they can
never be good project managers in Tech, atleast what i have seen. Only tech
people can lead good tech companies.

