
Ask HN: Who has had a great Engineering manager? - bsvalley
I&#x27;ve always had very bad managers in the past, even working at some of the big 5. It seems that it&#x27;s going downhill year after year. Every time I believe we hit the bottom (can&#x27;t get worse), I get someone even worse. There are ways to find out about a hiring manager style during the hiring process, but it usually takes about 6 months before getting the full picture.<p>Am I the exception to the rule??
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laurentl
I’ve had 2 great managers, 2 average to bad ones, and the rest falls in the
average to ok category. I’m a manager myself and I think I fall on the good
side of the fence (actually I’m pretty sure of it but it’s always difficult to
judge oneself so I’ll err on the side of caution).

Beyond good and bad, I believe a lot of the fit or lack thereof is linked to
behavior (which can be worked on), motivation (which is pretty hard to change
so you better make sure it’s aligned with the job’s objectives) and
communication (which you can never work on too much).

As a team member, understanding your boss’s objectives, pain points, and
default behavior / failure mode is a good place to start. A great manager will
spell those out to you when you join the team so you don’t have to guess at
them; if not, I absolutely encourage you to ask these questions as early as
you can (during the hiring process if you can).

Discovering MBTI has been tremendously helpful in figuring out manager-managed
relationships. In particular, there are 4 sub-categories (NT, NF, SP, SJ) with
markedly different behaviors, motivations, and managerial expectations.
Reading about these and making connections to past managers (and the people in
my team at the time) was a lightbulb moment for me. Often you can take a good
guess at your future manager’s category in the course of an interview,
especially if you know what questions to ask. Based on this info + your type
and preferred way of working + the role you’re applying for, it’s possible to
detect a potential misfit and steer clear.

Of course, all the items above assume a modestly competent manager to work
with; they don’t do much good when you run into clinical cluelessness,
unabashed douchebaggery or the aftermath of the Peter principle (although they
do help you rationalize the situation).

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YuriNiyazov
I am an engineering manager.

Some of the people I manage/have managed seem to think I am great. My evidence
for this is two-fold:

1) multiple people that I have managed before have moved on, and yet treat me
as a friend/mentor: invite me to social events, still reach out to me on a
regular basis with requests for advice, etc.

2) I get regular feedback via performance reviews as a manager that some
people I am managing think I am great.

Likewise, some of the people I manage seem to think I could improve. My
evidence for this is likewise, two-fold:

1) Some people tell me directly what I could do to improve in my style of
managing them specifically.

2) Some people only give feedback on areas where I could improve anonymously
via previously mentioned performance reviews.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that I am a mixed bag, but I am not
universally terrible, and therefore my opinion shouldn't just be dismissed as
"oh, you are just one of them". With that preamble out of the way:

What do we think of someone who, for example, says "I've never had anything
but bad boyfriends / bad girlfriends". Well, the common wisdom is that if you
are consistently having shitty personal relationships, you are at least part
of the problem.

Likewise, If someone says "I've never had anything but bad managers", I apply
the same pattern: you are probably not really putting in much effort into your
professional relationships with your managers.

~~~
bsvalley
I actually had one good manager, we're friends beyond just our professional
environment. So indeed, that seems to be a valid case. Unfortunately, all the
other managers felt much less friendly and kept spreading their authority
rather than trying to elevate individual contributors. There's so little a
manager can do when it comes to making big decisions. After all, a low level
manager is more of a dispatcher rather than a decision maker. It is a role
where you have to say "no" most of the time. That "no" usually looks like "let
me see what I can do and I'll get back to you... never" or "there's a long way
to go still but in the mean time, could you look at this because that's what
we need to do..." type of answers. It's a good shield for senior managers so
they don't have to deal with all these requests and can focus on the roadmap.

It's a pull relationship versus a push relationship from IC's to managers,
these days it feels like IC's don't get anything unless they ask for it. This
should be the other way around. There's no team building anymore, no more team
spirit we're almost in competition mode with our colleagues rather than
learning from each other.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
I’m sure that if you thought of a way to help your manager spread his/her
authority you’d be mentally promoted to “trusted sidekick” category rather
than kept in the “dumb peon” category

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reggiepret
Following this, what did the great engineering manager do? Also, what are some
of the traits of the bad managers?

Thanks!

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topkai22
I’ve largely had managers I thoroughly were very good to great managers,
although about 10% of my time was spent with a miserably bad mananger (who was
unceremoniously let go for being terrible)

Importantly, I’ve managed to have good relationships with my managers even
when the rest of my team thought they were terrible.

The key has been figuring out what is important to your manager for them and
their career and trying to align to that, as well as generally being
empathetic and friendly to them, and delivering strongly on the work I do.
Which, of course, are the same activities that I find make a great manager.
It’s a two way street.

Then again there was the guy who gave 6/8 people on his team a bad review.
That guy was just a clueless jerk.

~~~
bsvalley
"what is important to your manager for them and their career and trying to
align to that".

I think that sums up pretty much everything. I don't believe it's the right
approach at all for a manager and that's exactly what I mean by bad
management. A manager is successful if his team is successful. The goal of a
team is not to make a manager happy or to work for someone specifically. The
goal of a team is to help the company achieve its business goals and a manager
should be the one putting directional signs and building roads for people to
help them reach their destinations.

~~~
topkai22
You are right that that is the ideal manager, but managers are flawed human
beings like the rest of us. What’s more, a managers view of the company’s
business goals and an individual contributors view of business goals aren’t
always the same (great managers succeed in making them so, but see the flawed
human comment.)

An example of why investing understanding your managers world can pay off- a
few years ago my team needed some servers for a reason I don’t recall. Our
manager had said no because she (legitimately) didn’t have the budget. I knew
there was a huge push to people in her role to utilize our cloud environment,
so I reframed our request to get access to that.* She put in the request, we
got our virtual servers, she got to check a box on her review, and everyone
was happy.

Point being, while you can’t always have a amazing manager, you can still have
a great relationship with an adequate manager that gets you close to what
you’d have in the best circumstances. You just have to work at it more
(although if your manager can’t do organizational politics you might be in for
some hurt regardless.) And there are some truly awful managers out there who
you just leave.

* Ok, it wasn’t just me who worked winning her over, but the story got weird writing in the plural.

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mabynogy
No most managers are bad. Some says less skilled people are promoted because
they are useless at their previous position.

My advice is to take the leadership as soon as you can. Don't fear the
responsibilities. Better be in charge than have an average incompetent
manager.

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chrisbennet
I don’t think I’ve ever had a truly bad manager. One manager was exceptional:
I don’t remembered him actually telling me to do a single thing. Instead, he
would say something like: “Could we make it do this?” or “It would be great if
it could that.” He acted more like a target designator pointing out what we,
as a team, wanted to hit. In addition to that, he was a fun, happy guy and
very smart.

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koudos
Maybe you can comment a little on what makes the managers so bad?

~~~
bsvalley
I originaly wanted to avoid negative feedback. This thread is more about
positive feedback, I’d love to hear about good experiences and what made these
experiences so great. I could rant for a while... not sure it would be
uselful.

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WalterSear
"At the big 5"?

IME, larger companies have the worst quality employees.

~~~
bsvalley
I agree and disagree :) Sometimes smaller companies don't have time for career
growth because of work overload and lack of budget. Having a manager in this
kind of setup does not bring anything special to IC's besides an extra layer
of dispatch from the top.

Though you are totally right. In order to become a manager in a larger
corporate, you have to push a lot of people to the side in order to make your
way up. Meaning you're not necessarily the most friendly person to hang
around.

~~~
WalterSear
:)

The last smaller company I worked for knew they couldn't compete on salary,
and knew they had to rely on training up novice coders. So, they made the
environment as positive as possible, with weekly group training, pair coding,
and round-robin technology presentations from the entire team.

I'm currently contracting at a large company, refactoring code that was
clearly written by people with no time or motivation to learn their tools, who
were just trying to get their feature to 'pass' the tests. New technologies
are incorporated without fully reading the docs, and then never upgraded as
fixes and improvements got published. Time for training and development?
Nobody has making the time for refactoring. And, the source code is evidence
that it has been this way for years.

