
Ask HN: What was your biggest challenge when you became a team leader/manager? - tmoravec
What was the biggest pain you faced after you were promoted or hired for the first time to the leadership position?
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j_s
Daisy-chaining a couple bigger recent related discussions that might be
helpful since this one didn't get much juice:

Ask HN: Just made Director, now what?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937290)

Ask HN: Developers who became engineering managers, how was the experience?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15463612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15463612)

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tmoravec
Good idea, thanks for the links!

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hok9
The number of Engineers in denial about their serious mental health issues was
my biggest challenge. Getting people help and convincing people, esp high
performers that they need help was how I lost most of my hair. Remember kiddos
- being good at technical work and being good at life, both require the same
levels of effort.

~~~
tmoravec
Wow, this is an interesting point! I can see how difficult it could be to
convince people that they need help with a problem they might not even realize
they have.

May I ask you, how did you find out about the mental health issues?

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tmaly
For me it is still having programming responsibilities and having to manage
the team.

~~~
tmoravec
Is your boss expecting you to do the programming? Or do you do it because you
enjoy it or don't want to delegate?

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AnimalMuppet
It's easier to debug a program than a person's programming habits.

~~~
tmoravec
Oh yeah, great point. I have similar experiences. Humans are mewling,
disorganized, and miserably analogous :-).

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segmondy
If you love writing code more than anything in the world, you will be a shitty
manager. You must give up your love for writing code to be a great manager.
You must learn to love dealing with people more. I have folks rolleyes
sometimes when I say this, but I firmly believe it.

You must learn to communicate to people effectively in all forms. You must
learn to inspire & motivate your team. It's not enough to tell them what needs
to be done. Even when people understand, they might not be in the mood to do
it. You must connect and paint a bigger picture between the code that has to
be written and it's value be it how it's changing other people's lives or
bringing in profit for the company. Yet after painting this picture and they
buy it, you might be shocked to see no sense of urgency. You must learn to
instill a sense of urgency and ask them to go the boring route to move
quicker. When they want to use the new shinny framework or language but yet
something as boring as plain PHP or Python will do. You must beg and plead.
Based on where you find yourself, the culture might be working against you,
and you might find yourself working really hard not just to delegate but to
build a positive culture. The team might not like working together, too many
egos, you have to figure out how to get them to work together. Perhaps instead
of cooperating, they like to compete, and it shows in the way they slay each
other's code reviews instead of pairing. You have to figure out how to tame
the ego.

Your job is no longer to program computers, but to program humans. You must
enter the right input to get the right reaction, except unlike computers
humans are very fuzzy. What works with one person will completely fail with
another. You will realize that any failure truly comes down to you. Even if
someone failed to do their job. It's all you. Team of 10 people? 10 ways to
possibly fail, including your personal short comings.

You are not in the business of managing people really, but yourself. You must
be properly organized, get a great time of time management. Learn to trust and
not redo what they have done. You are there to serve your team. Give the
choice between exciting work and boring, you gotta do the boring work. You
gotta go to the meetings. You can't read that new tech book or play with that
new tech. You need to read more business books, things that will make your old
tech friends question your friendship. :D Books like "High output management",
"The Manager's path"

The biggest challenge is that you MUST become an entirely new person and be
comfortable doing so without suffering from an cognitive dissonance. It's a
whole different game and the things that made you a great developer/whatever
will not make you a great manager.

~~~
tmoravec
Thanks for the insights! It rings very true, but scary at the same time.

I particularly like the point that we must give up our love for writing code
to be great managers. It sounds like the biggest mistake managers make - when
they keep doing the technical work, instead of focusing on people.

