> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it.
This part is good.
I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but like.. can we be more specific here?
The other side to this is - don't ask for feedback if you don't plan to action any of it. I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given. Not like personal stuff either, but structure/length/schedule of meetings, standups, etc.
The "strong ideas loosely held" type guys need to be careful when they become management, because while it may work with peers (if they also love arguing), it doesn't work with a power imbalance. All your "strong ideas" will become "permanently held", congrats.
I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.
"What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's articulating what you'd like to change.
Once teams get used to this, it comes part of the vernacular, "I'm only 6/10 on this idea". The follow up is always, "What would get you to a 10"
I always feel there is an alterior motive when managers ask me these sorts of questions. Like the GP post, I'm rarely honest; I tell them what I think they want to hear. This has been learned over years where being honest resulted in the manager getting defensive, a lecture about "getting with the program" or at best an attempt to pursuade me to see it their way. Rarely have I ever had critical feedback accepted and used to improve anything.
I am a manager, but when I was an IC, I held your view. I learned that giving even softened feedback resulted in being at best ignored for a week, at worst, becoming a marked man.
I resolved to change this for my team. Ask for feedback broadly, and about projects, not me per say. Peoples end up commenting on the project/ sprint, and they feel safer. Much of what they talk about however, I have power over, so I view it as a comment on me and my execution.
Second thing, never once have I reacted negatively to negative feedback. Not in a team meeting, not in a 1:1.
Third, my boss has 1:1s with all my reports monthly. If I stop accepting negative feedback, my boss will hear about soon enough. I wish every manager had this hanging over their head. As an IC, all my code was reviewed. Managers need to have their performance reviewed frequently as well, not just bi-annually.
The one thing about my method is you have to be careful not to let the team become so free with criticism they just start ranting all the time and increase negativity where it isn’t warranted.
Sincere question. While you're sure you aren't doing what you remember managers doing back when you were an IC, do you actually know that your ICs don't think of you the same way that you used to think about managers?
In my experience the managers who are most convinced that they are doing well who are least likely to take negative feedback well, and are likewise least likely to recognize that they actually just did all the things they think they don't do. It is only the ones who have a lot of self-doubt that I've seen actually do well on this.
And skip level meetings are scary. Because if I have any positive feelings at all about my manager, their manager is the LAST place I want to tell anything negative to. (I only made that mistake once...)
I've been told before that I 'have a healthy disdain for authority'. I have always been honest, but not an asshole. Promoted many times.
'Harshly negative' sounds like being an asshole. My question to you would be do you want to be right or effective? It can feel good to be right and stick it to someone, but how often does that lead to effective change?
You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
It honestly sounds like you’ve got an axe to grind in this comment. Plus, “harshly negative” is both ambiguous and loaded. Not to open up the “radical candour” can of worms too much, but there’s a difference between being honest and being a dick.
I don't have any particular axe to grind. Agreed about being a dick, but there's the thing right? Shooting the messenger is a trope for a reason, and there are some people, who cannot receive some messages, no matter how wordsmithed they are, without reaching for their sixgun.
The SNAFU principle[1] is a joke, but it's one of the "haha, only serious" ones. It's entirely impossible to avoid the SNAFU effect altogether. So perhaps I should have said "when was the last time you rewarded a bearer of bad news with a highly desirable outcome like making staff?" In any event that was what I meant.
It's a fair question to ask. It's easy to be trapped by a false sense of security.
You know you're doing well, and everyone only has small improvements to suggest. Why keep digging? There's nothing bad to find. After all, you're doing well.
I feel sorry for other answers to this question. I feel they mostly duck the point and put the manager in the position of "right by default" too much.
Look, in professional setting truly being a dick - especially regarding this question - is relatively infrequent. Often someone doesn't understand that his arguments - or general actions - are off by substance (i.e., he's wrong and should be able to see and correct the mistake) or form (often he's telling not enough, assuming people will understand the way he means, and the form is such that they understand it differently than intended). Harsh criticism could be a lack of form - when the person doesn't put it in a shape somehow convenient for understanding, acceptance, analysis - or substance - when the person is wrong because either he doesn't know something, forgot something he did know... Truly being a dick professionally is to be "lazy enough" to systematically make these mistakes without taking care to fix them, or "evil enough" to do them on purpose. A decent organization has ways to hire and keep professional people, improve less professional and leave those not improving; the level of dickiness is under some control.
Sheep can be skinned once, but people aren't sheep, and power imbalance requires those wielding more of it to have the ability to grow that skin. Your question is valid and rather to the point, and I would like to learn more of the answer.
I tell my team that they are my first priority and I 100% mean it. When difficult situations arise I explain to them the pressures that are on me and ask them to do their best to help, and in return I try to make their lives easier the rest of the time. Of course I play the upward game, but in my mind it's in service of the team. This has the intended effect of having a very productive and functional team that seems (to me) to be honest with their feedback.
I’m a new manager. I say this too, and I mean it. I understand that the reality is that people are naturally skeptical of it, and that part of the gig is to overcome that skepticism, deliver value regardless. Part of me trying to overcome that skepticism is…writing this very comment. I don’t operate adversarial-by-default with my boss. I’m quite often quite honest, and I’ve certainly gotten value from that.
> Almost nobody ever says 10 [...] "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?"
But I mean, "it's not perfect" doesn't imply "I want you to change something", right? To exaggerate a bit to get my point across: I'd love our meetings more if they included pony rides in the middle, but that doesn't mean I think we should incorporate pony riding sessions into our meetings. It feels weird to take all "this isn't perfect" messages to mean "you can/should be doing better" - things might not be perfect but they might just be good enough.
One has to accept that you cannot verbally discuss everything into being a 10, and take note of some of the risks&issues that get raised. Which re-reading your response.. I think is implied, just not stated.
Another thing is you may also get interrogation fatigue and not always get real participation in this process. Kind of like the agile stuff only works when everyone is buying in, and as soon as people are going through the motions its hours of wasted meetings.
That said, not to be negative here..
This method of collecting feedback in a way that feels low risk, if participated in only sometimes, is way better than the standard methods.
> I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately.
I could potentially see myself responding well to this if it was from a manager I already had enough experience with to know and trust, but at that point, I wouldn't really need extra prompting to give honest feedback. If a manager who I only started working with more recently tried this on me, it would probably make me even _more_ hesitant to be candid with them. Not every manager in the world has their employees best interests at heart, and I'm not going to risk rocking the boat if I don't know whether the captain might react by throwing me overboard. Pressuring people to trust when trust hasn't been earned doesn't just magically work; at best, it might result in the appearance of trust, but it will actually just foster resentment that they'll go extra lengths to hide for fear of repercussions.
A similar idea in a group setting is the fist-to-five idea suggested by Marquet. On the count of three, everyone shows either a closed hand (lowest score) or anything up to five fingers (highest score) and then you can discuss both what would get people to a 5, but it's usually also very instructive to dig into why different people make different assessments. (As long as you don't do it in an adversarial way, of course.)
We have a similar feedback system at work, and I'm always wary of giving my true opinions, mostly because of the "beware what you ask for, you might get it" possibility.
What if other people don't give feedback, and my feedback stands out, and in turn management makes decisions based on my feedback and everything gets worse?
I don't want to be responsible for management failures, even if only indirectly.
Mine is: No people discussions, how do you feel about the project, if there was one thing that could change in 5 mins what would that be? If there was a very complicated thing that might need years but we could magically change instantly what would that be? Which are open risky things?
> I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given
One of the hardest parts of getting feedback is simply listening. Everyone's nature is to defend. When I get feedback I nod, listen, and try to never sound defensive - even if the feedback feels wrong at the time.
I am working on a new product, my idea and implementation from start to finish.
Yesterday I asked my spouse to use it and tell me what she thought. Anything she had an issue with, I was like a crab - just claw claw claw. One has to resist the impulse.
One of the best ways I have found to resist the impulse is to own all feedback. If your wife has an issue with something it's either a real issue or you failed to communicate it properly or it's a combination. My wife and I have a relationship where I explain something and she has issues forcing me to rework communication, the something, or a bit of both. Ends up being very helpful.
> The other side to this is - don't ask for feedback if you don't plan to action any of it.
It's fine to ask for feedback without planning to do anything about it. Balancing the feedback of multiple people means sometimes not every opinion can be accounted for.
If we analyse the sentiment a bit, we discover that there was no point asking for feedback - the course was already locked in and there was nothing to change. The feedback was useless.
Providing feedback has some risk for employees (maybe they'll get blowback) and it is easy for a manager to "ask for feedback" as a power play because they just want to show they can ignore it. It isn't nice to ask unless the intent is to treat the feedback respectfully and act on it.
I can imagine getting surprising feedback that can't be acted on. But that should be genuinely unexpected.
You might not know whether the feedback is worth acting on until you get it. If I ask my friend what he thinks about a new car I'm buying and he says "I don't like the color blue" then I might ignore it. If his feedback is that the transmission on this model explodes after 10,000 miles then I'll change my decision.
You might, but if you are your friend's manager instead of just his friend then you should take the opportunity to get better at asking for feedback to do a better job of managing the relationship.
Because what a manager should take away from that is that they weren't prepared enough - they could have asked "what do you think the most important aspects of buying a car are?" first and if "color" was the answer then either not asked for feedback or asked for feedback on something that would lead to a decision being made. The question was too vague.
If you ask someone for their opinion, learn they don't like blue cars, then ignore it and buy a blue car ... you could do more to be respectful there. You don't need to do special work to respect your friend - presumably the relationship is strong and they can just walk out if they don't think the respect balance is good. But really things are better if a manager respects their reports.
I feel this response. If voicing your opinion is a risk that needs calculating, it's not worth trying. It's sad to see a small team's chat be bullied into a stream of just :eyes: :raising_hands: :party_popper:
I found it difficult when working with American companies, as they can be purified by positivity. A saving grace of software work is the retrospective, those were at least a moment of honesty.
While I do appreciate the upbeat attitude, I found it made people hide small issues to not ruin the vibe, and anyone with major concerns with approach risks getting backbenched.
I think it comes down to a 'trust thing'. Managers have to prove to their reports that they are trustworthy. Until the ICs know that the manager will actually listen, let alone do anything, without the ICs job becoming more at risk, then nothing will come out.
As for how to build trust? That's a whole other blog, not just a few posts.
> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it.
"How was school today?" vs. "How was the class discussion on that book you were reading?"
> The "strong ideas loosely held" type guys need to be careful when they become management, because while it may work with peers (if they also love arguing), it doesn't work with a power imbalance. All your "strong ideas" will become "permanently held", congrats.
As someone who loves a verbal spar and almost certainly falls into this category, this one resonates with me and I will be taking it to heart going forward. Thanks for pointing this one out!
The principle also goes hand in hand with opposite-direction feedback.
Instead of "Thanks for the help!" ...
... say "Thanks for stepping in to help diagnose my bug, without being asked. I really benefited from your timely support, and for keeping track of that suspicious Login Field credential validation concern. I lost track of that detail and you held onto it."
It's the snafu principle at work. People in positions where they can ruin other people's lives will generally get told what those other people think they want to hear.
This is a great way of describing one of my biggest peeves in the office: So many unnecessary conflicts/dramas can be avoided by simple and honest communication.
There’s a related dysfunction where managers are (wrongly) convinced that they must answer every question in the most positive and upbeat way possible. I had to leave a company once because my manager was frustrated with many people, including me, but he was too nice to actually explain what he thought we were doing wrong. He thought it was best to try to gently encourage us with hints and rhetorical questions and vague allusions to what he was actually thinking, but when you’d ask him for a direct answer he’d switch to “everything’s great” mode. The faux positivity turned into toxic positivity and destroyed morale across the team.
I had to work hard to avoid being the "angsting" type of manager. I care deeply about the people around me and it can feel (to me) like I'm attacking them when saying things that might be challenging.
The first time I fired someone, I was completely crushed. But I was lucky to have that go particularly well in the long run. It was clear to me why this person wasn't going to succeed with us. I offered to give advice during their ensuing job search and they took me up on it. They had two offers at two very different companies. It was clear to me that they would have the same trouble at one but would fit the other. They had the same sense and they immediately found more success than they'd ever had before. A year later they reached out to tell me that firing them showed more care than any manager / mentor / teacher had ever shown them and it helped them take the next big step in their career.
It's still not easy for me to say things that I think might make people uncomfortable. But the experience of firing that person is a constant reminder that speaking hard truths is the deepest kind of caring a manager can show.
Managers don't want to end up in the bottom right, because no one wants to be an asshole. Everyone remembers the negative impact of assholes, and it's very hard to challenge directly without being a dick. A common management failure (and definitely a personal challenge for me) is avoiding directness instead of building empathy. But I've seen a lot more aggregate damage done by large numbers of managers being stuck in the two left quadrants (ESPECIALLY ruinous empathy) and causing a lack of progress from excess entropy.
> So many unnecessary conflicts/dramas can be avoided by simple and honest communication.
It's really not that simple in my opinion. The flow of information is "upper management wants this a certain way/at a certain time, I'm just the enforcer, if you don't work to accommodate/comply at a high priority, it's a problem" more often than not.
There are worlds of problems in teams and organizations that have nothing to do with what upper management wants, especially as a company grows.
Disputes between two developers on a team, disputes between two teams, disputes between a developer and a team, a bunch of teams dogpiling on another team, etc...
The above ones aren't always the same as the "what do you think of me" example for "angsting over asking" but are generally still problems of communication - the other team isn't doing what you would want them to do because they don't know what makes things easier/harder for you, vice versa, etc.
Angsting instead of giving negative feedback is an extremely common one too, and leads to people being pissed off and blindsided at performance review time.
The way I've seen it: you should aim to be the developer avoiding disputes at all cost. If you are responsible for a dispute whatsoever, you're the problem child and will be dealt with (by management)
> disputes between two teams,
At my last job, managers were proxies to teams. Engineers were basically encouraged not to talk to other engineers because it would "distract them from whatever they were working on" and any ask you had for them needed to get approved by their manager/other management anyway.
> disputes between a developer and a team,
Again, teams didn't talk to each other. You tell your manager, they go talk to that team's manager. And that team's manager's main job is to say "no, we have no capacity for that", shielding the team at all costs, unless upper management says something/asks something. All initiatives had to come from above, not below.
> a bunch of teams dogpiling on another team, etc...
The problem I described was the opposite, actually: We often couldn’t tell what upper management wanted or was upset about because the manager was too “nice” to communicate it. We had multiple situations where something we built was unsatisfying to upper management for some reason, but couldn’t address it because the manager was avoiding negative communication or anything resembling confrontation.
Getting it out in the open so we could at least do something about it would have been better.
Yeah I like to call these types of management "smile f**ers".
My last org was like this. All smiles, everything great, everyones doing a great job.
Except that behind the scenes senior management was very unhappy about certain things, and our entire org got its clock cleaned over the following 18 months. Senior managers moved aside, others downgraded to IC roles, pushed a few people out, new leads hired from outside, etc etc.
In some worlds there are experienced managers that know processes and systems inside and out. they clearly stand out as leaders. But in areas where there is a lot of ambiguity, change and innovation, sometimes NOBODY knows whether something is a good idea or not. What else are you supposed to do other than say "it's sounds reasonable let's go for it". Only later to get the results back and find out it was a flop. Now changes have to be made to make it look like effort is being made to reduce flops. Could it also be something like that?
If these are the only sorts of problems you identify in your workplace, you are certainly running the risk of being on the wrong side of the other ones.
So many unnecessary conflicts/dramas can be avoided by simple and honest communication.
Communication isn't enough. If neither side is willing to compromise then knowing what everyone is thinking doesn't help, and often makes things worse. There has to be a culture of openness and willingness to change in order to avoid drama.
> You upset them so deeply that they respond by unleashing the incredibly vicious-yet-perceptive tirade that they’ve been stewing on since the incident, reducing you to tears. Congratulations on hiring someone in the bottom ~2% of professionalism? At least your conscience can be clean at this point I guess.
"Well your reaction was bad, so it doesn't matter what I did"
This sort of discounts what the manager did to piss the person off, and if it's a recurring thing. A tirade isn't usually the first response. Maybe consider that you've overlooked some cues leading up to it.
I am not sure I agree with this assessment. A tirade isn't the first response and it deserves attention and a degree of empathy, but it is unprofessional almost universally. You generally don't need to do it (it is not competitively advantageous to try) and does not make the tirader nor the tiraded feel better.
This is not to say a colleague should be a zen automaton that never feels discontent. However, learning not to get too upset when giving feedback, and similarly, giving feedback before you are that upset, are professional skills.
So when the author says they can feel better about the interaction, it might make more sense to read that as "yes, I did something wrong, but this was also quite a silly exchange and it sort of lifts the intensity off a bit". Which, considering the author is indicating that they're worried they said the wrong thing to begin with, would make sense (since they are attempting to empathise).
The persons reaction doesn't negate any problem with the managers behavior.
For what it's worth, I don't think there's a shortage of malice, passive aggressive, instigating behaviors that occur in the workplace that can lead up to a such reaction.
> The persons reaction doesn't negate any problem with the managers behavior.
Tirades immediately discredit one's point. Having a tantrum is not the path to solving workplace issues.
> For what it's worth, I don't think there's a shortage of malice, passive aggressive, instigating behaviors that occur in the workplace that can lead up to a such reaction.
If you'd actually like to move the needle on solving those issues, having a tantrum is not the path forward.
I particularly liked the "managing the wrong amount". I hate being micromanaged. So I told myself when I could manage people that I would not micromanage them. Big mistake, some people need more of a guiding hand.
One glaring missing point from this though that I would add is "don't think because you are a manager people will listen to you or respect you". You still have to earn that kind of relationship with people and a lot of people think they can do better than you if they had your title.
>So I told myself when I could manage people that I would not micromanage them. Big mistake, some people need more of a guiding hand.
I am fighting this same issue. I want to give as much autonomy as possible, but some are woefully ill-prepared for it. Sadly, it feels the best option is to over-manage until proven otherwise.
This sounds like the words of an a good manager, simply because of the healthy amount of self-doubt. It’s a strange status quo that management is something you’re expected to handle simply from experience as an IC, which is absolutely not a guarantee. The predictable result is that only those with great mentors or willing to self-learn the hard way actually become good, after much trial and error. It’s unfortunate and borderline insulting to genuinely good leaders to say that popularity, company loyalty and/or domain experience is enough. So we end up with what we select for.
Otoh, what ICs often overlook is that managers often lack the hard and soft power to manage effectively, which of course is a leadership problem in itself. I’ve had well-meaning managers who still were bad for me because they didn’t have enough influence or respect in the greater org. Just like with engineering, even the best can’t do a great job if they are unable to access the right tools.
The article reminded me that I don't understand what managers are for :-) Especially if a manager is in fact a software engineer promoted to that role. The promotion likely occurs because a) the person is good at being a developer, and b) the manager's position is better paid than his previous one. Which combines a perverse incentive (of course anyone would like a raise) with a completely different set of responsibilities that the person hasn't been trained for.
I do like the ideas coming out of scrum, some of which would fit well with what the author is describing.
For example, the anecdote about a junior engineer struggling with documentation for a new feature sounded like an opportunity for pairing with a more knowledgeable team member, and talking through the feature while planning the documentation for it. When the author said that he instead would write a design doc and the engineer would implement it, he was not acting as a manager, but rather as a software engineer.
As another example, the author talks about planning the work, which, in a scrum environment, would involve a product owner (someone from the business side), and the rest of the team, to collectively identify and plan the next set of features. In a (sprint) review, the team, together with other interested parties, can inspect their progress and talk about the roadmap (something that the author is trying to do on his own).
I understand the purpose of senior software engineers, or of a product owner. Of a manager, not that much.
You've never witnessed an underperforming developer? Who among a group of peers is going to deal with that?
What about conflicts and disputes? Adults can become quite childish over the smallest issues and sometimes an impartial mediator needs to step in.
And when budgets constrict, do you just draw short straws to decide who quits for the greater good or do you all volunteer to take equal pay cuts? You all openly share your salaries right? When budgets increase, do you all slice the pie equitably?
And what about a good developer not realizing their potential? Who will nudge them to take the next step and sign up to a training session or apply for a promotion in another group, or even look for new jobs because you know they've hit a ceiling here? Your teammates who rely on you are very unlikely to send you packing for your own good.
And when someone has a personal crisis, does a peer or product manager get consulted about their private issues? Bob from the API team just had their teenage son overdose on fentanyl, do you think he's going to be super talkative about needing a couple weeks off on short notice and in a state of mind to perform some transition planning?
I do not know how a team of peers can deal with a bad team member; this is a good point. But on the other hand, I've seen teams that do have underperforming developers despite also having a manager. So a manager is no protection against underperformers on a team. Getting rid of people is hard.
As for conflicts or personal crises, what _does_ a manager do? If Bob from the api team doesn't tell the team he needs a couple of weeks off, and the team does not collectively plan for what to do in his absence, then how does a manager help? I've been on a team that had a developer whose contract was running out and could not be renewed because of the max number of years a person can be employed by that organisation. This was known years ahead. No transition for the ownership of the library he was developing had been planned, despite the crucial nature of that library, and despite a manager being around. Two, in fact.
As for a good developer who has hit the ceiling in an organisation, I find it hard to believe that a manager who relies on that developer to move the project forward will be any more likely to advise him to look for a better place elsewhere than his teammates would be. I think it's up to the developer to appreciate his situation and how happy he is where he is (and to start looking if he isn't).
And, since you offered different scenarios when things go sideways, how does a team of developers deal with a manager that is underperforming?
In unexpected absences a manager may have options you as a dev do not, like asking another department to temporarily reassign someone or using contracting budgets or the ability to negotiate project delivery expectations differently. Likewise Bob in distress may be more comfortable confiding in a single person to relay information to than trying to meet the demands of an entire team, while someone else might not want any time off at all because they need the mental distraction. It all depends, and if you're a dev focused on developing a product you may not be correctly focusing on supporting a person who may not even realize what they really need from you for support.
In the events of an underperforming manager, CYA. Put stuff into writing, document failures or consequences of inaction, note who was present and how decisions were made, email it to yourself to build a case to defend yourself from them. If it's a scenario where the manager isn't taking corrective action you eventually will need to escalate or go over their head, so you'll be dealing with two HR problems at once. Ideally you have an open dialog and skip levels with a bad manager's boss to raise concerns with and also ideally you have treated your HR reps with kindness because they are now your ally. If their management is good they'll either get mentored to improve, sidelined into a different scenario they're better fit for, or coached out of the org.
Or you bail and find greener pastures. A bad manager that's tolerated means there's bad upper management too and calls into question the value of trying to stick it out. Even in the current market, software is still in demand. A single exit interview about a bad manager isn't going to get them fired but a few people that lay their departure at their feet will get noticed.
On the other hand, many places will have job performance descriptions or criteria for management just like they do for a developer. It's entirely possible that someone you perceive to be underperforming is actually still meeting expectations for a coaster and you're comparing them to nearby overperformers trying to move up, or maybe you're conflating personality or management approach mismatches you dislike for performance, or that their hands are tied and they're just as frustrated as you are (maybe more) but can't overtly say that to you. Politics can be tricky and people management is a soft skill, it's hard to objectively measure differing scales of underperformance.
FWIW, as a manager I haven't necessarily tried to get rid of my high performers but I've always been transparent and realistic about promotion potential and when someone wants more than what's available I've encouraged them to train or grow in those ways and have been happy for the people who've given me resignations to move on to something bigger and better. Acknowledging the limits of the job or career growth I have to offer someone seemed unavoidable.
Yep. All part of the idealistic “let’s just sit together and do the code” pipe dream. Which I honestly see as part of the developer superiority complex, where somehow we don’t count as…imperfect…people.
I've been there, in small cohesive high functioning teams there is a sense that a manager isn't really needed, and to a degree that's true while things are going well, right up until shit inevitably hits the fan in one of these scenarios.
A medium or larger business also usually wants planning and reporting and analysis that devs usually hate to create, present, or maintain because it eventually takes a big chunk of time away from developing. It doesn't make them bad devs but the management aspect gets neglected and the business suffers as a consequence, leading to eventual layoffs or shuttering. I think the amount of management needed is a wide open discussion, but questioning if it's needed at all is naive.
Using Twitter likes as a "thing to make you feel good about yourself" might give you a short term dopamine rush, but probably leads to long term unhappiness IMO.
Sure, we can agree social media news and zero cost information dissemination is an Existential Evil, but ... if author had said "shout into a bag", "pound head against wall", or "drink a beer". Maybe we could just let it ride, for once.
People need validation. Its an inherent human trait. But I feel validation from living breathing humans in proximity of your life >>>> validation from twitter likes.
I've been managing teams for 16 years, I think it's actually really beneficial to stay hands on in lead or director roles. After that it's usually not possible given the work load. It improves team alignment, you can evaluate people's work better, understand their issues better and help level them up.
Some of the companies that promoted the hands-off style of management, like Twilio are currently really struggling. Datadog is a great example of a more hands on approach and they are crushing it. If tech is more core to a company, people should stay hands on.
Can you dig in more on the twilio front? Current and long term twilio employee. I've never worked where a manager also codes. Definitely not directors. That is where the tech lead comes in. As a manager, you are responsible for multiple teams. How could you even have time to code? Config changes and super small bug fixes maybe, but you can't own a story or feature as you would be a bottleneck.
I was a director with 3 sr. managers reporting into me. They had 4-5 ICs. I found being hands-on pretty much impossible even with fewer than 20 people.
Honest question, I come from an industrial background where you have Work Package Manager in charge of the work of roughly 10 persons but not their actual manager with all the bureaucracy associated and an actual manager with less than 25 reports don’t exist.
Is 4 reports common in the US? How do companies survive with so much management?
I'm not in the US, but 4-5 reports is about the right size for a tech lead that wants to stay hand-on. With 8-10 reports you might struggle to sneak some personal contributions in, and if you have more direct reports than that, then you're a full-time manager by necessity.
Ok, so it's more or less what I'm used to. WPMs are indeed not expected to contribute and a tech lead for a team of 5 is what I would expect.
I was more surprised by the idea that you could both be a tech lead and deal with all the issues surrounding budgeting, hiring, company goals alignment and career development issues I associate with being a manager. It seems to me like that means having a lot of people to train and have to keep in the loop.
Well I’ve never seen anyone below director (or vp in larger orgs) meaningfully decide anything related to budgeting beyond some stupid team offsite thing. Hiring you can scratch off too right now lol. Company goals again this is vp level, everyone below is just a messenger. And finally most management dont stay long enough to meaningfully participate in career dev unless you mean handing out promos at review time (sounds like that should only take a few weeks a year)
It's a fair question. At least speaking from my experience, the figure varied depending on the type of work and the employment classification.
I should also add that 3-4 is number of full time employees, not contractors.
For example, it wasn't unusual to see engineering managers with 20 direct reports as long as most were contractors. They usually had couple of full time employees who were senior or leads.
Wow. the level of mistrust and fear shown by reactions here is ... at least I am not alone :-)
We (most of us) live in democracies with clear rules of law and strong defence of individual rights.
But we work in feudal hierarchies with arbitrary rules and love by whim of the powerful.
I think that's the first thing to chnage rather than hoping the training middle management to be "better communicators" will improve things. Would Britain still have a colony in the US if we had handled that Tea situation better?
Some experiments to try:
- executive management (C-suite) to be elected annually by all FT employees voting anonymously.
- annual project plans (do we build a new CRM or do we fix the existing one) again voted for by employees (one is referendum one is representative elections?)
- stop remote working. I am fairly convinced the best most effective e means to build software is to put the right developers in the same room as the right business owners and let them fix it. Every step away from that, each time the business owner has to go to a different project, the time zones mean that a daily stand up is communication, every step back is a cut in efficiency. just stop it
Voting on EM isn’t a bad idea, but one year is too much potential turnover and if it never turns over then you’ve just built a Potemkin democracy and we’re back we’re we started. You would also end up with even more politics as all the narcissists would campaign to be elected and would use every little trick in book just as they do in public elections today. You could also potentially end up in a situation where no one takes any ownership bec they think, “it’ll be the next person’s problem” (again something you see today).
Rather than everyone voting for a few people at the top, what if each level voted for the one above and the one below? That way, people would be voting for the positions and people that they know the most about.
Like the other response said, when people with only a surface-level understanding get involved, democracy devolves into a surface-level popularity contest.
I'm a new manager and am facing a conundrum over a supposed super star who joined my team but, at least from what I can tell, is far and away the least productive member of my team. Any ideas?
You have probably fallen in to the trap of believing that every developer is the same, and that all of them can thrive in every team. That is absolutely not the case. A superstar on a team where they're doing work they want to do, that they find interesting, and that suits their skillset won't be a superstar somewhere else where some part of that equation isn't working.
Talk to them and figure out what's different between your team and their previous team. You might be able to change things to get more from them. If not, let them move on to another team where they can be better.
Not a superstar but this fits me pretty well. I was hired by a pretty well-known cool company after having apparently "aced" their interview. It was just that their interview suited me well, it was both designing big stuff and solving small problems which is what I had done previously at several companies when I always was in a team of two or three developers with technical ownership of a complete product.
Pretty soon after I started, it dawned on me that I would probably not partake in designing "the big" stuff. Partly because most of the big stuff was already done and whatever remained would probably be solved by some of the more senior devs. Any semi-large stuff would need to be fought over by the rest of the devs. What was left was drudge-work compared to all I had done before. Also most of my tech-skills (besides the programming language in question) were not needed and when I helped a colleague in another team working on something I knew pretty well, my manager reprimanded me after, telling me that our team couldn't spare the 2hrs I spent.
I was pretty unhappy and during this time was pretty far from living up to my own expectations. My manager never told me I was falling behind however so I don't know about their expectations. I quit soon after.
In my case I was moving from the experience of small companies and being "forced" to do everything, to a large company and only allowed to do very few things.
One suggestion: Give it time. Many (myself included) are “slow boils”. Probably every manager I’ve ever had was kicking themselves for hiring me 6 months in, but past the 12 month mark and things have turned a corner. Anecdotal for sure, but every previous manager I’ve had continues to randomly ping me about job openings.
I disagree with the other person who said, “Give it time…”
Read the book Difficult Conversations.
From the book, you need to prep by looking at the situation from your perspective and the other person’s. This has been very helpful for me in figuring out these tough situations. Then you look for the difference in those stories, hear the other person’s story from their perspective and work towards a solution.
Generally the more you put off these conversations the more you’ll regret it. And honestly it’s a weight off your shoulders when you do have them and you’ll often wish you had them sooner.
And most people in my experience hate starting these kinds of conversations so more often than not, in some way, they appreciate that you as their boss are starting it for them.
I'm also new to manager role, but I think the first thing is you need to talk with him. Try to understanding what's going on about him, maybe it's just he had some bad time for whatever reason now. You can talk with him based on the fact of his performance and tell him your expectations. Just try to find out what's going on first before making any judgement.
I recall one time when I had a manager tell me that I was not performing up to expectations. I had no idea. I thought I was doing pretty well. At the time I was pretty young and inexperienced, so not a huge surprise. He was calm but direct, did not turn it into a personal attack, and had some specific examples of things that needed to improve. I apprecated this, I worked on the things that he wanted me to improve upon, and ended up getting top perormance reviews not long afterwards.
superstars survive on and value their reputation above all else, you can use that to motivate. Review with the team how productivity is measured and the goals the team is striving for. Then, call out someone on the team by name who is doing the most to get the team where it needs to be and give them a reward. It doesn't matter what the reward is, a random sticker will work just fine. Your superstar will see the writing on the wall and step it up so they get the callout and reward next time.
I've seen this at work with a Managing Director and her direct reports. Direct reports to a Managing Director are hyper competitive and cutthroat. Think of them like the velociraptors in Jurassic World, if you can keep them focused and not killing each other or everyone around them they're a very powerful force. This MD would just hand out verbal "gold stars" on an all hands call. The DRs would get noticeably upset when they did not get the "gold star".
Don't approach it as a performance review as there are a lot of people who take some time to get up to speed. If the quality of work is good, then it can be a casual discussion over a coffee on challenges they might be facing and the sort of productivity targets you would like them to meet within X period of time.
In that context you could ask again if there are any issues they have or if there are any challenges they face that might make this difficult etc.
This way you can get your message through without it becoming confrontational or the other person getting overly defensive.
What are the full set of responsibilities of the team member? Are they being tied to previous projects? Is there something that is getting in their way? Is there a culture clash?
Also, understand that the new person is learning the context and team culture, and will take some time to get up to speed. How long have they been on the team? How long have you been on the team? The other team members?
There is a lot of context to consider. We can make a lot of assumptions based on our own experiences, but may end up sending you astray.
I spent some time as a manager and decided I'd never do it again. Many of the places I've worked and observed have directors, principals, architects etc who've never been a manager, and do not include managerial experience as a component of hiring for those roles, so I personally have moved on from thinking it's a required step in the Path to Engineer Leadership. In my experience (a decade, many companies including multiple consultancies) Manager is very directly a "Middle Manager" type position. Meaning, mostly, there is no leadership or autonomy but instead a position derived purely from all the administrative "did you do your job" type checks and balances. "Did you update Jira", "Did you respond to Steve", "Are you stuck?" Everywhere I've worked, the actual "software" or "engineering" components of "Engineering Manager" are handled by someone else.
I am glad I spent the time, though, as I have a much better understanding of workplace politics and interpersonal scheming. Telling someone something specific that is also almost-untrue, just so they get out of your business. Having different narratives for different units of work, depending of who's asking. The ridiculous concept of "dotted line managers". The process was pretty illuminating, both in terms of how unnecessary most workplace hierarchies are and how low the bar can be for individual contributor competency.
After writing all of this, I think it'd be easy to say "Well this person just did a terrible job as a manager", but I received extremely positive reviews from both my reports and my superiors. Once I gave up trying to do a "good" job and just kind of let the ridiculousness flow, everything improved dramatically (on paper; my mental health plummeted).
This has turned into a bit of a rant, and I suppose I apologize in advance for what turned into kind of a scathing venting.
The author seems to have a lot on his plate. One way to improve the situation is to delegate more technical leadership work, such as code and design reviews, to principal engineers and rely on them keep you appraised.
I agree. He/she has a ton on plate. He's still acting wearing engineering lead hat, which is understandable if he were a high performing IC. He wants to make sure the quality of the team's output is on par with that of his own.
I worked as a manager for the past year and fell into a lot of traps this article describes. I've realised that managing people isn't for me and I'm moving onto a technical role but I've gained a lot of respect for engineering managers. It really is a tough job that I think many commenters on here don't fully appreciate.
It was helpful to see here a couple of the same issues I grappled with (to know "I'm not crazy"): feedback loops, prioritization / importance, communication.
On the topic of the dreaded Micro-Management, I read recently somewhere, "better to micro-manage than to not manage at all". That also resonated.
No. If the only way you can manage is via micromanagement then you shouldn’t be a manager, end of story, period.
The bar is far too low for managers already. The technical, communication and delivery bars are clear for developers at different levels. Managers have these too.
You don’t settle with dog shit management skills. If I ever saw a manager doing this and didn’t improve they would see the door in short notice.
Stop being lazy, provide your team with tooling or ways to help you gain insight. Make it clear to them what you need and how you can help them get there. Basically, do your job.
Both no management and micromanagement are failure states. The parent is comparing two failure states.
But I think the key to point out is that most line managers have fewer than 5 years of experience. The good ones move up the chain and the bad ones return to IC work. Sure, some will stagnate in an organization but it's more common to see it as part of the early career. (In smaller organizations, directors and senior managers will also have teams, but they usually have larger swaths of experience and end up delegating a fair amount to tech leads.)
I will also point out that few engineering managers have proper training. Most of us had to pick it up as we went. You talk about a manager seeing the door in short notice: if you were their boss, would it even cross your mind to give feedback and training?
This is a good article, and matches my experience and my mistakes :)
I would argue that the workload part ("delegate or drop what you can't do") is not ideal tho.
IMHO your default should be to delegate, and only do what the rest of your team can't do, or what you can do much more efficiently (e.g. manage a tricky stakeholder, gather information at the management level).
If you were an IC promoted to management you likely were good at delivering and proactive but this will bite back when you're a manager, cause your instinct is that you can do all that you were doing before, plus whatever your old manager was doing.
Taking the default stance that your team can handle things on their own helps with preventing the "I'm in the middle of the road" issue and at the same time reduce your risk of burning out.
Reading that article really makes me never want to go back to being a manager. It was almost everything I disliked and found stressful about the job. That I don't really understand why others find being a manager appealing is probably the best sign that it's not for me.
Most of this advice applies to non-managers too. Even "staying on the critical path" is not entirely manager-specific. Line employees also sometimes stay on the critical path when they shouldn't.
I recommend experienced engineers dip their toes into management to see if it's the right career path for you. But make sure that you're able to back out if you hate it, which is a very likely outcome.
I'm trying to move my site to this theme and got it working locally but too lazy to transition with my tweaks, and additions or rather the removals to the bare minimum with just Pandoc and Make (or something simpler) that I'm thinking. Not in a hurry.
You did upset them, but they are unwilling to admit it and will passive aggressively sabotage you for the next 3 years, all the while smiling and assuring you nothing is wrong.
First of all, being in a managerial role is usually not enjoyable (expect manipulative antics). Here are a few styles/philosophies on how to accomplish a profitable department:
1. The Dictator: Follow orders, report regularly, or you are fired. If productivity under-performs, than do fire someone in case people forget who is in charge
2. The Coach: How do we win as a team, who has the best skill/will to take on the big challenges, and if individuals bring down our team they are fired
3. The Cult leader: Listen to the customer, how can we serve the customer better, how can we indoctrinate our brand into people lives, and if you violate our doctrine you are fired
4. The Con/Sociopath: Make money at any PR cost, scam the consumer/shareholders/departments, and if you won't break ethical norms you are fired
5. The Masochist: How should I manage the team, what should we be focused on, why are we burning budget and still failing, you are victimizing me with costs, so we had to cut costs and you are fired
6. The Idealist: An irrational infatuation with the impossible makes all other features irrelevant, and everyone still gets fired when the budget expires
Depending what the company does, each role’s style has its strengths and weaknesses.
I have told this story here several times (never in this much detail) but why not once more.
I had worked at my first software company for around five years when our lead developer left for greener pastures. Soon thereafter as the most senior developer on staff I had a meeting with the owner of the company and his assistant talking about the need to interview people to fill the lead position and it was kind of half floated “I don’t suppose you would want it” and I champed at the bit. I was young and desperate for what I saw as career advancement. They agreed and drew up a new contract.
I moved out of the bullpen and into the office. Pretty quickly started trying to fix things I saw as “wrong” with our process by laying down decrees.
One of the biggest being trying to get people to use version control (git) - it was 2009 and it was frankly still “acceptable” not to use version control. I had a lunch-and-learn where I taught everyone how to set up and use git. They didn’t understand the why. We had nightly backups, isn’t that good enough? I tried incentivizing them with a literal weekly “whoever has the most commits by the end of week gets a gift card“ and the same very green junior dev won it every week because she was the only one who bothered.
At this same time a developer I had considered a friend was vastly underperforming. Prior to my time as lead, his desk had been moved to be in public view to try to keep him on task, it had not worked. He would mess around all day every day and when due dates rolled around he would turn in half completed rush jobs. He was already on notice when I took over. After a talk with the owner it was very clear we were trying to get rid of him. I had to be the one to place my friend on an improvement plan he was fully expected to fail. It was very difficult for me emotionally. A couple days later we were both working late and I called him into my office and I basically told him on the low down that the owner was gunning for him and he should start looking for a new gig. He was gone very shortly thereafter and I thankfully never had fire him.
Around the same time as this, a developer told another developer a joke with exceedingly mild sexual innuendo - something not at all out of place in an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle hidden for the parents. Well a third developer overheard the joke and put in a formal complaint and after bouncing off our HR person I was tasked with formally reprimanding the joke teller and the intended joke recipient. Joy.
This entire time I am doing a very poor job of delegating, working 10 hour days and weekends and falling further and further behind. Hardest I have ever worked in my life, even to this day. And then my yearly review comes due. The owner’s assistant conducts it. It is the first negative review of my career, I am not getting enough done.
I am working harder than ever, being put into positions I hate, and being told I am not doing enough. I went from loving my job to hating it. My stress level reaches 9001 and something in me just breaks, I get the worst headache of my life followed by what I would describe as jolts of “face lightning” followed by numbness and facial weakness. I go to the ER.
They suspect stroke and do a CT scan, but find nothing. I end up getting diagnosed with stress induced trigeminal neuralgia and put on a drug to relieve apparent inflammation of my nerves.
I had a former colleague who regularly tried to recruit me to whatever gig he was working at the time. Literally the next day I text him asking if he’s looking for a developer. He is, he sets me up with an interview with his boss. Within a week of the negative review and the trip to the ER I am putting in my two week notice.
As one final insult, the owner points out that in my contract I had agreed to three weeks notice. I had planned to take a week off between jobs, but that’s gone I guess.
And that’s why in the last 14 years since, I’ve made zero new attempts to become a manager again. I am a firmly believe I was not built for the task. I just want to build cool things.
There are so many HN posts along the lines of "I'm great at building software and love it, but after 5-6 years became a manager because of pay/promotion/expectation. I hate it and don't do anything technical now, but here's how I cope."
I have a hunch that the industry is losing lots of poductivity because of such perverse incentives.
Because the people good at managing don't spend time complaining on HN. I strongly recommend that if you "are great at building software and love it" to learn managing. It's just a force multiplier. Like using an even higher level language. Programming people basically.
Bro, reframe this "I have so many entrancing growth opportunities for my attention that I find it hard to take value from someone else's experience".
Really, his bullet points are pretty basic management 101 - - but most managers don't know them and if it helps even one person be a better manager it's worth this time.
This post didn't feel particularly braggy to me. Also, having connected with Ben (I cold emailed him about something he referenced in one of his earlier blog posts), he seems like a person who is genuinely just trying to help and share his knowledge when useful.
I share some of your criticism. I don't believe there is the one universal style to management. There aren't even styles that fit certain types of employees. There is making good decisions in the face of problems and being able to communicate with your team. The what is much more important than the how.
Maybe that is just my personality type or whatever, but I often don't see the thr essential wisdom. The post isn't braggy though and it is appreciated that the author shares his ideas.
Always remember: as a manager you are still an employee, and you are still required to observe the law.
Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default. It does not mean you cannot receive feedback from your managees.
Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.
We should sue managers more, when they indulge in bad habits such as lying about performance and making false accusations.
Some managers realize that their opinion is authoritative truth and abuse this to fork reality, creating a psychopathic fiction where everything they say is true.
We should sue each and every of these entitled tyrants.
> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.
Genuinely curious: do you have an example of a manager who was personally held financially liable after firing an employee? I couldn't find an example in some brief Googling, but IANAL and I'm curious if this is even a possibility.
Even if it is possible, though, it seems... pretty stupid, frankly: you'd get a much higher payout from suing the company rather than the manager directly, and the manager could use corporate policy as a shield. Plus, in most organizations, HR is the one who pulls the trigger, not the manager; so who really fires you? HR could have always vetoed after all, or anyone else further up the management chain. Seems like it'd be very tough to prove that a single direct manager was unilaterally responsible for damages.
Anyway, this is why most medium-and-larger organizations now have documented processes with PIPs and such. As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole.
I am a lawyer. I guess it's technically true you (or more likely your company) can get sued if a manager lies about his reports' performance to their detriment (usually we'd call this discrimination) but the general notion that it is or should be more common is stupid.
> As long as there's a paper trail, you as an employee don't have much of a chance of winning a lawsuit, even if you feel like you were fired due to your manager being an asshole.
Yeah, if you want to win a wrongful dismissal lawsuit you're gonna have to have a hell of a paper trail yourself, or some smoking gun evidence of other wrongdoing like drunken voice mail recordings or something.
And even then, realistically, this sort of things settles out of court more often than not.
This doesn't answer my question, and I didn't say anything about "freedom of expression" because it doesn't apply here.
Again, do you have a documented instance of an individual manager, preferably at a company larger than ~100 people, getting personally sued after a dismissal of one of their direct reports?
Claims of defamation are often part of discrimination and wrongful termination suits.
Nowadays there are forced arbitration clauses that prevent you from suing your employer in a regular court. Instead, you have to go to a private kangaroo court where they make their own rules, often not published in advance and that can change at any time for any reason.
yeap and we should sue individual employees for lying about estimates and delivery dates and making false promises. We should sue when the technical design isn't right and not delivered on time.
If you say to a company you can deliver on a date and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages.
/s
If you say it's an estimate then, it's not exact as per definition. If you are upfront regarding what assumptions were used to build the estimate, even better.
It would be different if you signed something, establishing a legally binding contract to deliver something at a given date.
Plus, a late delivery is not defamation. What I am talking here is condemning defamation as an accepted way of doing business.
So that means direct reports/ICs can be held liable if they write harsh 360 reviews of their managers? or when they talk to other people about their manager in critical ways?
You seem to hate managers, whatever experience(s) that you had must have been pretty bad, I don't think what you are proposing is an answer or makes much sense or would have any impact. I truly hope you, in time, reach a healthier place.
Proving this is a very high bar to meet for performance reviews.
Most formal performance reviews will be on a carefully worded standard form where literally nothing the manager selects can be libel, and even for informal references, most criticism (even if unwarranted!) is not libel.
If a form asks "How satisfied are you with 29athrowaway's performance this year? " then answering "1/10" is opinion, not fact, and also likely to be true opinion. A written statement "29athrowaway has absolutely not met my expectations this year" is very difficult to be proven false, it's plausible that these expectations indeed were not met. "29athrowaway has never ever done anything right since they were born" is rhetorical hyperbole and generally not treated as libel despite being technically not true. "I think 29athrowaway should be fired" is not purporting to be fact. "29athrowaway was rude to customers three times in the last week" is extremely hard to prove as false even if it is pulled out of thin air; even if you have all the interactions recorded, there's probably something which can interpreted that way. "29athrowaway did not fulfill their tasks in project XYZ" is a tricky one (and so most formal performance review forms will never include statements worded like that, at least if they're approved by HR/legal), but depends mostly on how well documented the assignments were, and if they can somehow be stretched to assert that you performed only 99% of them, that's not really libel.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
When you are given authority, some will use it fairly, others will not.
Some will use authority to advance their own careers at the expense of the careers of others, and create a system where loyalty, not merit, is used to rank employees.
People with psychopatic and narcissistic traits are entitled to become managers. We need psychological testing to weed them out of companies.
Psychopaths create a psychopatic fiction based on manipulation and lies. We need to make it costly so it stops.
As soon as one person tries that then it'll just mean managers are exceedingly careful with their words, and there will be zero difference in the resulting action that comes out of perf reviews. The threat of suing won't mean you get a better pay review, it won't improve your promotion prospects, it won't stop people getting pipped or fired if needed.
There are A LOT of places in the world where lying is rewarded dearly. Including certain types of businesses in the US where lying a lot is basically a pre-requisite for company survival, growth and employee survival: banking, hedge funds and financial markets. The 2008 derrivatives crash was a concequence of that, the upcoming hyperinflation is a (predictable) consequence of that.
More generally: ads lie all the time.
Where does your assumption come from that lying has bad consequences for people?
I agree with you that lying is not nice and extremely annoying, but in my opinion the level of corruption globally (and in financial markets in the US specifically) shows that lying constantly can have extremely positive outcomes for those who lie and do crime. It doesn't seem to me like law is trying very hard to stop them either.
As a society we should punish lying, not reward it or glorify it.
There is corruption in politics, academia, institutions of all sorts, such as what led to the 2008 crisis, but our goal should be to make it harder. We should aim for less corruption.
If your fantasy is to be one of the bankers that got rich in 2008, my fantasy is to see those bankers in jail.
> Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default.
It means the company you're working for is giving you the autonomy to decide paths forward for yourself and those that report to you. "Correct" is not binary.
> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation.
If you believe something, is it a lie? If you get fired because your manager _believes_ you're bad at your job, even if you believe you aren't, who's lying? Are there any lies?
> We should sue managers more, when they indulge in bad habits such as lying about performance and making false accusations.
This feels like you're speaking from a very specific position (ie, on the wrong end of perceived lies about performance). "Performance" is subjective (and is usually defined by one's manager).
I was going to go on but honestly this post feels very very....I don't really know, delusional? By this same logic a manager can (and should) sue an employee over workplace performance. The whole concept is just ridiculous (and as another person claiming to be a lawyer said below, just plain stupid).
If you are a serious manager, you should be able to articulate your opinion regarding someone's performance in terms of qualifications, experience, role fit, hard skills, soft skills, specific situations, etc. It's not just an intuition, feeling or belief. It's management, not astrology.
If you have not met a person and "believe" they have bad performance, that's discrimination. If you make up or mischaracterize situations as a part of your evaluation, that's defamation.
Your employer has degrees of freedom with regards to setting up a path to you, sure. But that employer operates in a territory where there's legislation, which will often include defamation laws. Your employer cannot do whatever they want.
These are just more non sequiturs though. Vague platitudes that avoid actually meaningfully discussing what you're suggesting.
> It's not just an intuition, feeling or belief. It's management, not astrology.
Facts aren't intuition, feeling or belief but their perception _can be_. Being late to work every day for a month _can be_ firable, or not.
> If you have not met a person and "believe" they have bad performance,
If you haven't met a person but have observed their behavior, it's literally not discrimination.
> If you make up or mischaracterize situations as a part of your evaluation, that's defamation.
If you mischaracterize your manager as making things up, that's also defamation, no?
> But that employer operates in a territory where there's legislation, which will often include defamation laws. Your employer cannot do whatever they want.
And as I pointed out in the previous post, this goes bidirectionally (and functionally means nothing).
This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but like.. can we be more specific here?
The other side to this is - don't ask for feedback if you don't plan to action any of it. I worked for a guy who must have read a book that told him to ask for feedback, but he was so rigid that he would vehemently defend against any feedback he was given. Not like personal stuff either, but structure/length/schedule of meetings, standups, etc.
The "strong ideas loosely held" type guys need to be careful when they become management, because while it may work with peers (if they also love arguing), it doesn't work with a power imbalance. All your "strong ideas" will become "permanently held", congrats.