The way people on HN sometimes talk about "management," you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.
The economic cards seemed more stacked against workers, so resentment for managers builds more quickly than the opposite direction. Management who resents their workers can also fire them. Workers who resent their managers must go find another job. And offshoring/nearshoring for workers happens more than managers.
Would be interested in comparing the interview processes for ICs vs. managers at Amazon. Probably no leetcode-equivalent for managers?
A lot of women complained about the "boys only club" in the 70s/80s/90s. While things have gotten better for women, there is still a lot of "club" going on.
I think you also need to account for the amount of bad.
Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.
But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.
Like I have only seen a terrible management culture in 2 of my employees, but for 1 of them, it lead to:
30 or 40 careers damaged, internal stalinist purges.
Months wasted on drama.
21 million yearly recurring in wasted IT expense. Probably close on 500 million in non recurring waste over 4 years.
4 million yearly recurring in executive waste.
Significant brand damage, significant resume damage for people who worked through it.
Actual end user harm.
> Like a bad programmer can push terrible code, get caught at review and performance managed.
But a bad manager can cause much more harm. An organisation with bad management can punch itself in the face very hard and cause significant issues.
Ironically every place I've worked, a lot of these bad programmers got placed into the management pipeline, because they had not the skills to hack it as an IC, so it was a worst case scenario of "fake it till you make it".
You could be the most incompetent programmer in the world, but a suave bullshitter is a shoe-in for management, where they now get to tell the competent programmers how to do their jobs.
In all fairness, a bad programmer can do a lot of damage. They can create attack vectors, destroy data and cause production outages. None of that is good. There are things in place to prevent that, but if those also fail, it'll be a busy week. Ask Crowdstrike.
Bad managers can also lead to a lot of bad programmers because all the good ones left. I reckon a bad manager is a multiplier of bad programmers. Bad is just bad no matter what level you are in.
I think the main difference is that programmers have (or should have) more transparent processes that they go through (code reviews, design doc reviews / signoffs, CI/CD to catch mistakes) compared to managers. Granted, I'm an IC so I know more about those - maybe managerial roles have similar ways to ensure you catch the "bad" early enough.
I think its genuinely harder to measure the squishy productivity / collaboration / delivery output stuff that managers are supposed to own, but also .. managers aren't as incentivized to create processes to measure managers ..
It's just negativity bias. We're hardwired to remember our wounds and avoid getting them again. And apparently we're hardwired to engage with those more than praising the great ones.
For a lot of people, the difference between a good manager and a benign manager is smaller than the difference from benign to bad.
If you are working for an emotionally unstable shouter, the negativity seeps into your work and quality of life. I've seen bad managers make adult men cry (rarely for any good reason) and still last 2-3 years.
If you work for a good manager, you learn a little more stuff, maybe.
Maybe it's because this isn't about looking at other people's toupees?
At the least a bad manager can make the place you spend a majority of your waking hours a worse place to be, and at their worse they can permanently harm the trajectory of your career or even your mental (and by proxy physical) health.
Some analogies are limited by the weight their original context conveys. I wouldn't let a surgeon get away with "the ethics board will only talk about this heinous thing I did, when most of the time they don't see me at all".
>>you'd think the universal experience is 1% good, 9% benign, 90% actively seeking the downfall of civilization
It might not be a grand conspiracy or might not come from meticulous planning, but what happens is they just work for self preservation. Its no secret that people who work on a thing are bound to know things about them better than some body who just approves leaves, or makes abstract decisions. You will get replaced if you don't assert authority often and proactively kill the biggest threat to your position. This also means maintaining pets, and rewarding them more than people who are performing better.
All of this resembles a pattern of behaviour over the years with managers sabotaging everything good around to save themselves.
Over years I have seen managers are the biggest reason why companies go down. There are few other reasons.
Right and there's asymmetry between what a good & bad manager can do.
A good manager can motivate people, but in absence of interesting projects or budget to pay people, they can still lose talent.
A bad manager can make even interesting work and good compensation intolerable and lead to a revolving door of B players as no one with better options wants to stick around.
The through line for me of genuinely bad managers is guys (always guys) who are emotionally unstable and/or have anger management issues. Whether it was being put on as an effect to get a result, or they genuinely had no control, it doesn't matter.
Shouting at people, berating people in public, praising in private while criticizing in team meetings, going on tirades over petty stuff (formatting of internal non-user facing documentation), etc.
Managers seem like a good example of the "toupee problem" -- the ones you notice, and really remember, are the bad ones; the best, you might never see at all.