Ask HN: What mistakes in your experience does management keep making? - <AUTHOR> Lessons from Mythical man-month aside, what mistakes does management keep making and what do they never seem to learn? And of course the effects on those on you and your peers? <comment><USER3> I'll add one that even after 200 comments I don't see: Failure to explain the reason _why_. Coming down to their developer with a list of tasks without explaining why those tasks are the most important and will lead to company success.

You might think startups are small enough that this couldn't happen but that was actually where my _worst_ experience was. The founders are visibly in a meeting with a couple people, maybe "suits", maybe not. They come out of the meeting and the next day your priorities are rewritten. Cool beans, that's a thing that can happen and that's not my issue. My issue is, _why_? What are the goals we are trying to hit now? What's the plan? Why is that better than the old plan?

This is especially important IMHO for more senior engineers responsible for architecture and stuff, because those matters can greatly affect the architecture. Telling me why lets me start getting a grasp on what parts of the code are long term and what can be considered a short term hack, what the scaling levels I need to shoot for, and all sorts of other things that are very hard to determine if you just come to me with "And actually, our customers need a new widget to frozzle the frobazz now more than they need to dopple the dipple now."

Not necessarily the biggest issue, there's a lot of other suggestions here that are probably bigger in most places, but this is one that has frustrated me.

(I'll also say this is one you _may_ be able to help fix yourself, simply by _asking_. If you are in that senior role I think you pretty much have a professional obligation to ask, and I would not be shy about working that into the conversation one way or another.)

<comment><USER4> > _This is especially important IMHO for more senior engineers responsible for > architecture and stuff, because those matters can greatly affect the > architecture. Telling me why lets me start getting a grasp on what parts of > the code are long term and what can be considered a short term hack, what > the scaling levels I need to shoot for..._

This right here has been the biggest problem in my experience. We'll have unforeseen issues arise in production, and the business side will come up with methods to fix the issue. Without context, all of these fixes to our products have been fine, but they never take the future into consideration. It makes me paranoid.

I used to adhere pretty well to the adage "Write code for what you have now and not some mystical thing that may arise in the future" while still maintaining enough abstractness to extend things. New requirements would come in, we would implement them, and everyone is happy. 3 months later, a new set of requirements that destroys how we wrote something else. If we knew a road map before we started designing and implementing, we could have saved everyone time and money by designing for X + Y instead of X alone.

I get that you can't know everything that is going to happen. I get that there will be times where you must refactor the code. That's fine. However, tell me where the product is going. It may seem like a trivial change to you as a business person, and the only way we devs can keep the change trivial is by proper design.

<comment><USER3> I think of YAGNI as a very important principle, and encourage young developers to practice it rigorously, but as you grow in your arts you should eventually be able to reliably predict _some_ elements of the future, and as you approach the middle of your career you should be able to start successfully heading such things off at the pass.

I think it is important while young to be very aggressive with the YAGNI because otherwise you will have a much harder time developing that prediction skill, as the data set will be much noisier.

<comment><USER4> This is something that I struggled with at first. I kept gravitating towards abstract solutions, and returning to that code was always annoying. Too many layers for so little payoff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * Killing things that are low profit margins, under some misguided Pareto Principle approach. Sometimes these things are loss leaders designed to pull customers for other products.

* Spending too much on marketing/sales before people want the product. They usually just end up burning their brand if the product is too low quality.

* Too much focus on building multiple small features rather than focusing on the value proposition.

* Trying to negotiate deadlines for product development. "We don't have two months to finish this. Let's do this in one." In software estimation, there's the estimate, the target, and the commitment. If the commitment and estimate are far off, it should be questioned why, not negotiated.

* Hiring two mediocre developers at half the salary of one good developer. They usually can't solve problems past a certain treshhold.

* Importing tech talent, rather than promoting. Usually the people who have built the product have a better understanding of the tech stack than someone else they import.

* Startups that rely on low quality people to skimp on the budget. These people later form the DNA of the company and make it difficult to improve, if they're not the type who improve themselves.

<comment><USER6> > Importing tech talent, rather than promoting.

is often at odds with both the point above and below it. When a company is in rapid growth, there may be a point where the talent they relied on is not quite ready for the promotion they are hiring in for. Without expanding that search outside, you may become stale in the organization, and not provide the right mentorship to ensure that those interested in getting promoted will be able to do their job properly once there. I think the point should be, that you would want to ensure that those you import will be able to help promote from within as things progress.

<comment><USER7> Here's another one - promoting without advertising the role first. Come annual review time: 'I am pleased to announce that x, y and z are now Senior Consultants and will be managing a, b, c, d, e and f' (who were never given any chance to apply for the role).

<comment><USER8> At review time, when you're asked what your goals are, mention the promotion. Ask what you need to do to get there. 90% of the time, the manager is more than happy to help you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr.

There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude.

Until "management" realizes this, the only way that a developer on the upper end of the productivity scale can capture their value is to found their own company. I sometimes wonder what would happen if some company simply offered to pay 3X the market rate and mercilessly filter the results.

<comment><USER10> In my experience, the 10x programmer is a bit of a myth. Where I have seen people do some incredible feats of productivity, it usually came with a clutch of bad stuff, too. Like:

\- they didn't work well with others and soaked up a lot of management time dealing with their shit.

\- they had really limited areas of expertise where they were amazing, but couldn't fill in for a sick colleague.

\- they worked in 2-3 day sprints for ridiculous hours, and then stayed home or might as well have.

I'm sure there are incredible people out there who can 10x and also be great team members, and I'm sure management are idiots if they don't pay them 10x.

But in my experience, the people who claim to be 10x are usually just insufferable egotists who have no idea of the pain they cause for everyone else.

<comment><USER11> I think it depends on perspective. I don't think there's a 10x programmer, but I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers. If your organisation is not doing a good job of managing your developer team you may have a very skewed view of what 1x really looks like.

<comment><USER12> > I've worked with plenty of 0.1x programmers

I think the -1x programmer is even more common, the ones that have negative productivity and actually create more work for other programmers. I've encountered many of these types over the years.

They are usually the very hard working type too. The kind who when encountering a problem always solves it by piling on more code, never refactoring, never taking a step back and thinking about the problem. You don't want to be seen idling at your desk, better keep typing.

<comment><USER13> I've worked with this type. In this case very outgoing too and favoured by management. Man that code though! That code!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Want to jump ahead a few years from Mythical Man-Month? Let me recommend Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.[2] It's painful that we haven't crawled far out of the 80s practices.

The first chapter says: "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." Sorry Google Memo Dude. DeMarco and Lister called it in the 80s.

Speaking of DeMarco, he also wrote a book about controlling software projects before Peopleware. Then in 2009 he denounced it. [1]

        To  understand  control's  real  role,  you  need  to
        distinguish between two drastically different kinds
        of projects:

        * Project A will eventually cost about a million
          dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million.
        * Project B  will eventually cost  about a million
          dollars and produce value of more than $50 million.

        What's immediately apparent is that control is really
        important for Project A but almost not at all important
        for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that
        strict control is something that matters a lot on
        relatively useless projects and much less on useful
        projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control,
        the more likely you're working on a project that's
        striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

I always think about that when I'm doing a Sprint Review.

[1]: [https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homep...](https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams)

<comment><USER15> Fascinating.

Is the A/B situation DeMarco describes about knowing ahead of time that A will turn minimal profit while B will turn maximal profit?

If so, the conclusion reached seems right: tighter profit margins require tighter control. And control requires resource, which is a cost that further diminishes returns.

But if the described scenario is about _not_ knowing ahead of time whether A or B will turn a large profit, how should this be handled? Regular review, and a scaling-down of control as confidence in profit increases?

Of course, profit is only one metric. There may be others that are more critical.

<comment><USER16> My metric for projects is that if I'm not returning near-term value at least double my billing rate, it's probably not worth doing.

If you are, the difference between 2.2x, double, and 1.8x is pretty negligible - non zero, for sure, but not worth the additional 20% effort to minimize variance.

If you aren't, as he says, no amount of diligence will fix it, because it's simply the wrong project.

It's the classic penny-wise pound-foolish.

So by my conclusion, many of the 'project management' activities that people do are at best wasteful or indeed actively harmful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Working for a company building heavy hardware, I see the following happen time and time again:

* Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing. Result: Every time the new organization has settled somewhat and people know who to interact with to make things flow smoothly, everything is upended and back to square one.

* Trying to make our products buzzword compliant without understanding the consequences - we've on occasion been instructed to incorporate technologies which are hardly fit for purpose simply because 'everyone else is doing it' (Where 'everyone' is the companies featured in whatever magazine the CEO leafed through on his latest flight. Yes, I exaggerate a bit for effect.)

* Misguided cost savings; most of what hardware we use, we buy in small quantities - say, a few hundred items a year, maximum. Yet purchasing are constantly measured on whether they are able to source an 'equivalent' product at a lower price. Hence, we may find ourselves with a $20,000 unit being replaced by a $19,995 one - order quantity, 5/year - and spend $10,000 on engineering hours to update templates, redo interfaces &c.

* Assuming a man is a man is a man and that anyone is easily and quickly replaceable (except management, of course) - and not taking the time and productivity loss associated with training new colleagues into account.

Edit: An E-mail just landed in my inbox reminding me of another:

* Trying to quantify anything and everything, one focuses on the metrics which are easy to measure, rather than the ones which matter. As a result, the organization adapts and focuses on the metrics being measured, not the ones which matter - with foreseeable consequences for productivity.

<comment><USER18> > a man

"a person"?

<comment><USER17> >> a man

> "a person"?

-Definitely a person; however, the gender balance in my immediate surroundings is -ahem- slightly skewed and I all too easily fall into the trap of calling any person a man.

(Judging from the time clock (whose logs are openly available on the intranet, presumably through oversight rather than by design), there are currently 217 people working in the hall I currently sit in. Of those, one appear to be female.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are some very common ones;

* Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new).

* Rewarding productivity over quality.

* Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to lower overall sales and that leads to lower overall revenue. Had they managed to overall revenue they might have caught the decline sooner.

* Creating environments where nobody trusts anyone else and so no one is honest. Leads to people not understanding the reality of a situation until the situation forces the disconnect into the mainstream.

* Rewarding popular popular employees differently than rank and file. Or generally unevenly enforcing or applying standards.

* Tolerating misbehavior out of fear of losing an employee. If I could fire anyone in management who said, "Yeah but if we call them on it they will quit! See what a bind that puts us in?" I believe the world would be a better place.

There are lots of things, that is why there are so many management books :-)

<comment><USER20> > Tolerating misbehavior out of fear of losing an employee.

What if said employee pulls in 10x, 100x more revenue/value than average worker for the company? Would you fire him because the rule book say so? That said I trust in effective communication as soon as possible to manage difficult situations or misbehaviour. Often the reasons can be deeply personal or family related and people are preoccupied with stuff outside work. We are human and human relations are variable, not absolute.

<comment><USER19> In my experience only (all disclaimers apply) I have never seen an employee whose productivity outweighed the damage they did to the rest of the team if their misbehavior was tolerated by management. I understand how scary it can be to have to let someone like that go, but the dozen or so cases that I had good visibility into over my career the ones where the employee was accommodated all had worse outcomes than those where the employee was let go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have held management and non-management careers in roughly equal proportion over my career. My list would look like this:

1) believing you can dramatically change the performance of an employee -- it's very rare to save someone and less experienced managers always believe they can.

1.5) corollary to the above: not realizing the team is aware and waiting for you to fix the problem and won't thank you for taking longer to do what's necessary.

2) believing that people don't know what you're thinking -- people see you coming a mile off.

3) thinking you can wait to fix a compensation problem until the next comp review -- everyone waits too long on these.

4) believing HR when they tell you that you can't do something that's right for your team -- what they're really saying is that you have to go up the ladder until you find someone who can force them to make an exception.

5) not properly prioritizing the personal/social stuff -- at least this is my personal failing, and why ultimately management has not stuck for me.

6) believing your technical opinion matters -- I've seen way too many VP's making technical decisions that they are too far from the work to make, trust your team!

It'd be fun to see a list of these from the non-management point of view. I'd start off with the inverse of #6 above:

1) believing your technical opinion matters -- the business is what ultimately matters.

<comment><USER22> You can't change it dramatically overnight, but you can certainly change it enough that it's worth it.

It's a boatload of work. Expect to spend as much time per week as you usually spend on 3-5 people. Then make the call if you can afford to do that. It's buying you a _lot_ in terms of employee goodwill and team morale. (The second one only if you don't neglect the team over it, obviously :)

<comment><USER21> In our current job-hopping world, where you are lucky to even get 4 years from an employee, you can take someone from good to great, acceptable to good, or bad to acceptable in the time you work with them. Your investment should almost always be on the first two, especially because the last one is a much bigger investment of time and energy. Keep in mind many times what you're fighting is not just lack of experience or some other easily fixable thing, you're fighting personality traits the person has had for years, and will continue to have (to a lesser degree) even if you _do_ "fix" things.

It is one of my signals of inexperienced management that they believe they can/should take on this sort of challenge.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, ~10 years as a manager (and 30 in the industry) is not a lot of experience. But it's enough to know that "focus on the stars" mostly aims at making the managers life easier - anybody can manage a team of great performers.

Of course it's a judgment call. Some things, you cannot fix. But some things, you can, and the cost of doing so is _much_ less than rehiring. Good management means making those judgment calls, not just saying "meh, I don't care about low performers, too much work".

Maybe, just maybe, that's a tiny part of the reason people on my team seem to stay longer than 4 years. Because we don't just treat them as disposable cogs.

<comment><USER21> I'd be happy to discuss over a beer. I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules in life, and I've tried to help people more than once in my career (currently I do it in a non-management capacity which is arguably harder). But I think we can agree some situations aren't going to be saved. Good management is knowing how hard to try and when to stop.

<comment><USER21> Oh and an addendum: the error bar for inexperienced managers is way too far in the "this is fine" direction.

<comment><USER22> _That_ , I'm not debating. Rule of thumb for new managers: Assume the world is on fire, just in case ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Trying to write code alongside their devs.

Here's what happens when a manager tries to fill tickets himself: his sense of control of the project is derived not from relationships of trust and cooperation with his reports, but from direct involvement in the code. So naturally, any challenging or critical piece of code ends up getting written by him (because otherwise, how could he be confident about it?)

The manager is essentially holding two jobs at once so they end up working late or being overly stressed at work.

The devs will feel intimidated to make architecture decisions, because they know if they do something their manager doesn't like, it will get refactored.

They will also feel as if they are only given the "grunt work" as all the challenging work is taken on by their manager.

The code itself is in a constant state of instability because there is a tension between the manager needing the other employees' help to get the code written on time, while also needing to have that complete control and mastery over the code that can only come from writing it yourself. So people's work gets overwritten continually.

This is very bad and it's very common - managers should learn to delegate as that is an essential part of their job. If they can't delegate they should remain as an individual contributor and not move into management.

<comment><USER24> Interesting, as a manager, I try very hard to do as much of the grunt work as possible and the devs do more feature coding. Out of curiosity, where do you rank data modeling?

I tend to want to either design or review all data design, either relational or other, partly because of my background in data engineering and partly because I have business awareness that the devs don't have. It's just not possible to convey every nuance of a constantly evolving business to each dev on the team without it being distracting.

How would you like your manager to handle being involved in data modeling? Develop a spec and then review? pair modeling?

<comment><USER23> Maybe data modeling is something that's officially a "manager-level task" at your company, so it's something you have to be involved in. But I would try to err on the side of delegating too much, rather than too little. If you have knowledge in a certain area that gives you special insight into how to improve implementation of code, I would challenge you to try to disseminate that amongst your team and hold them accountable for following it themselves, rather than setting yourself up as a gatekeeper.

All this assumes you trust your team to be thoughtful and do good work. If not then that's a whole 'nother issue.

<comment><USER24> Thanks that's helpful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The biggest recurring issue I have with my managers over the last twenty years is their need to add unnecessary complexity to projects. I think a good manager stays out of the way and just monitors employees for any obstructions that are preventing them from meeting their goals. Yet, my experience is that when a manager sits in on a project meeting, they can't help but start giving input on the project itself, adding complexity to defined business rules or adding obscure use cases to the system. Too many managers can't help but dominate meetings because their dominant personalities is how they became managers in the first place.

The worst is when you get two or more managers attending the same meeting. Then nothing will get done as they eat up all of the meeting time arguing about business rules, magnifying the complexity of the system until you end up with some Rube Goldberg chain of logic that they will completely forget minutes after they've left the meeting. A good manager knows to trust their employees and only intervenes to make sure those employees have the resources they need to do their jobs. The most effective managers are humble and respect the expertise of the experts they hire.

<comment> le-mark The best manager I every had was famous for telling his guys to give him the easy 80%, and worry about the hard stuff when someone will pay for it. That person was pure gold, highly effective.

The worst, there have been many. These guys just complicate simple task so no one knows what they're supposed to be doing anymore. Managers should ruthlessly limit scope wherever possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> \- Trying to "create a buzz" around the office, asking for a "sense of urgency," and other things that result in an illusion of productivity.

\- Focusing on fixing problems, rather than preventing problems

\- Acting as yes-men to bad upper-management strategy, thereby creating a layer of indirection between the people who think it's a good plan vs the engineers who can explain why it's not quite that easy

\- Trying to use software tools (e.g. Jira's burndown charts) to quantitatively/"objectively" measure engineers

<comment><USER10> Jira management :(

I've seen so many "managers" spend all their time staring at Jira instead of talking to their actual team or reading the code.

I'm convinced Jira is an anti-pattern for management

<comment><USER6> Jira has a lot of bad use cases around it, but I don't think it's a bad tool. I rather be looking at the board to get status updates than interrupting someone to see where things are at, and basically resorting to micromanagement. It should however not be used as a replacement to talking to the team or reading the code - but it should be one of the tools in the shed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Promoting technical people with no management experience into management jobs, without providing them with any training or guidance. (Happened to me.) Writing code and managing people require very different sets of skills, and just because you're good at the former doesn't necessarily mean you'll be any good at the latter (or that you'll enjoy doing it).

(Similar problems can happen when a bunch of people with no management skills decide to found a company and start hiring people.)

<comment><USER28> What kind of things did you do to self educate, given you lacked formal training or guidance?

<comment><USER27> I read lots of books about management, I tried to emulate what managers who I thought were competent were doing, and I made lots of mistakes and tried to learn from them.

There were some mistakes that I was never able to recover from, like being too friendly with the people who reported to me - that makes you really dread the prospect of having to lay someone off, makes it hard to give difficult feedback, etc.

Eventually, after being a manager for several years, I decided to go back to being a developer, and now I'm much happier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A few patterns I've seen:

* Preaching about the virtues of a flat organizational structure, but making unilateral decisions.

* Hiring people for a particular challenging job, but have them work on menial unchallenging tasks.

* Creating multiple layers of management for a tiny team.

* Facilitating post mortems that would be better facilitated by a neutral third party.

* Using vague management speak as a deliberate strategy to never be held responsible for anything.

* Rewarding politics with promotions.

* Marginalizing experienced employees.

* Talking too much about culture.

* Trying to be the company "thought leader" instead of helping people do their best work.

* Assuming that everyone underneath you views you as a career mentor.

* Negging employees.

* New hire managers: Firing incumbent employees after you've only been on the job for a few weeks.

* New hire managers: Not doing 1:1s with everyone who reports to you.

* New hire managers: Create sweeping changes like re-orgs after a few weeks on the job.

* New hire managers: Doing things a certain way because it worked well at a previous company.

* New hire managers: Changing office work hours to suit your personal life.

</comment><comment><USER30> The worst mistake I've seen management make over 20 years of software development is not listening to the technical people.

Estimates get shortened. Technical decisions are overruled for business or political reason. Warnings about undesirable outcomes are ignored. Sheer impossibility deemed surmountable.

I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it. Overtime, inferior software, frustration, technical debt, lack of quality, are all things management doesn't really care about because they can always just push people harder to get what they want.

<comment><USER31> >I feel this is the worst mistake by management because the technical people are the ones who suffer for it.

How is this a mistake then? It seems As Planned. It'd be a mistake if the management suffered for it.

<comment><USER30> In every case the companies they were trying to build up failed. Being vested owners, they lost money, and time.

<comment><USER31> I agree that makes sense, but the statement was "technical people are the ones to suffer for it". If that was true, it'd be as intended

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Overly optimistic schedules. Even with a known gelled team, being constantly overscheduled is a nightmare. You cut corners, and are always stressed and tired. Other teams that believe the optimistic schedules may become angry or blocked on you. Over time this just leads to burnout, but since nobody seems to stay anywhere for very long, nobody seems to care.

<comment><USER33> This! In the same vein, believing that "this time" the team will work faster because of lessons learned. Refusing to accept that historical performance really is the true performance of the team. Failing to account for the previous project completing almost on schedule only because of major overtime. Etc etc.

On my first project I learned that every time a PM said the word "hope" (as in "I hope we can meet this deadline") that we were screwed. It was said a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I had a corporate job, they were overly controlling about schedules and how much you could earn in a way that was completely unnecessary and that I felt came back to bite them. People who wanted more money would take on part time jobs for evenings and weekends. Then, when management tried to put a gun to our head and insist we work overtime, these people had prior commitments and couldn't be there. Bonus points for the whole atmosphere of fear with the entire approach of trying to pressure people to work overtime on demand, at the convenience of the company.

None of this was really necessary. Every single year, they watched the backlog of work gradually climb over the course of the summer. Then, around September, they began insisting on overtime at psychological gun point to try to clear the backlog. It would have been entirely possible to allow people who met certain quality standards to work some overtime during the summer and cap how much could be worked. People could have competed for overtime slots instead of feeling forced into it. It would have worked vastly better for everyone.

Of course, an elegant solution like that takes a bit more planning on the end of management. Simply demanding extra hours at a certain point is a simpler, brute force method. But, I felt it had a lot of downside to it and was mostly avoidable for the company in question.

It makes me wonder how many companies basically create drama of this sort. Because this crisis was entirely created by management, IMO. There was zero reason they had to wait until it hit a certain volume and then force overtime on us.

</comment><comment><USER35> #1 in my book is sunk cost fallacy.

Everywhere I've worked, the folks running the show have too much ego and political capital invested in products or projects that are turds. The result is massive financial losses for the business.

<comment><USER36> My experience has been similar in the past. In more recent times I've seen numerous products rewritten from scratch by completely new teams on different continents - the mindset being that they would do things "properly" \- only to encounter all the problems that the original teams had to deal with, and re- implement the same mistakes, but in a different language. In one case, the new team quit to a man ( and obviously, the old team were nolonger around either ), resulting in the loss of two complete product implementations, and all the domain and implementation knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Something I see a ton is management by crisis - 20 people from an organization could tell certain managers that there will be performance issues in 3 months if we don't pay down tech debt, but nothing actually sinks in until there is a performance crisis in 3 months.

<comment><USER38> The corollary to that is that many technical types will make things work despite management ignoring the fundamentals. Sometimes its better to let something fail sooner than to make it work, when it's clear the fundamentals will eventually overtake the effort.

<comment><USER37> Ya, great point, though at big companies it can be very hard to just let things fail. Though that reminds me of another answer to the parent question which is managers who reward people who fix broken stuff, but don't reward people who didn't build fragile things to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> * Acting as if employees are fungible rather than taking advantage of their relative strengths

* Short-term thinking ("we don't have time to fix the tech debt, we have to get something on the board this quarter")

* Over-resourcing projects from the start, rather than letting a small number of employees germinate it and set it on the right path

* Punishing people, often indirectly, for taking risks, conducting experiments, doing quick prototypes, etc

* Frequent shifts in direction, priority or emphasis. If "everything" is important at one time or another, then nothing truly is

<comment><USER29> > Punishing people, often indirectly, for taking risks, conducting > experiments, doing quick prototypes, etc

You hit the nail on the head with this one. People seem to forget that so many important parts of our daily life were once upon a time passion projects and 20% time projects (Gmail, Adsense etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 1\. Arrogance (only do what I say, don't think for yourself)

2\. Fear (you're getting a lot of attention and praise, this somehow makes _me_ look bad)

3\. Short sightedness (that's a good idea, we can't use it here, now go do something productive)

A good manager loves his team and opens doors, prevents road blocks, and facilitates approvals for them. He is a steward of their success. He removes fear of failure. He is not self absorbed but finds joy in the team. So, without these attributes, the negative effects are too sad to write about.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think management fails when they don't understand that the nerds hired them and not the opposite. We are the technology, we did it in the first place. We hired managers to help us. By default, we know better than them (because we are the one who do the tech), they should listen to us and not the opposite. Now, when everybody knows his place, we can collaborate and do great work.

I got the luck to work with great managers at amazon. From what I've seen, programmers are driving the company there - or at least, they have their word to say, often, and power that comes with it. On my team, decisions relative to product development were clearly strongly driven by us. Seems to work pretty well for amazon.

<comment><USER42> The tone you use here helps make my point: just because "nerds" are experts in everything tech does NOT equate to good decision making / good management for the company as a whole. Sometimes it does. Often times it does not. Things aren't usually that black and white; "I built it, so I should run it." Just had this convo with a coworker the other day. He was telling me about all the complaints from the dev team and how we should let them drive the bus. I had to remind him of all the good-tech-but-bad-business ideas several of them have offered in the past. In my experience, the rare "nerd" who also intimately understands the nuances of every day business (relationships, the board, profit margins, brand experiences, etc.) is hard to beat.

<comment><USER41> _just because "nerds" are experts in everything tech does NOT equate to good decision making / good management for the company as a whole. _

You think a programmer's job and abilities stops where they don't. Programmers do understand what the customer want. They ship to customers. I'm not saying programmers don't need help though.

<comment><USER42> False. I was directly reacting to what the OP said (below), which said nothing of a relationship w/ customers. Personally, I'm a proponent of having devs closely involved in every step of the product, including messaging and marketing. But that's not what this post was about.

> We are the technology, we did it in the first place.

> By default, we know better than them (because we are the one who do the > tech)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Security comes last, if at all.

This was back when I was a junior dev, but I had to demo how an unprivileged user could delete every user in our system before I could work fix that section of code without getting fussed at for trying to discuss something unimportant. Even then the immediate response was, well we have a nightly backup so we're fine.

</comment><comment><USER44> 1) Trying to solve lack of skill with More Rules For Everyone.

One of your teams write messy code? Don't try to educate them. Instead enforce strict coding standards that forbid all but the most basic complexity. Everyone else now have to make their code more verbose and objectively _worse_ , while the problem team still writes bad code but now they make even more of it in a neater formatting.

2) Raise wages only for people who threaten to leave.

3) Run a high tech software development shop but have an IT department that assumes everyone only ever need Excel and Outlook.

Ports are blocked. Local computer admin is locked. Updates are forced, delayed and centralized. Hardware is underpowered. Network blocks ping.

4) Demand to be in full control.

Make sure nobody does anything you don't understand. Shoot down experiments you can't see the point of, even if they're small. Hire skilled and experienced people, but demand that you can understand everything they do.

5) Let random people deal with hiring and interviews.

Hiring is both a hard and sensitive process. On one hand you are giving people an impression of your workplace, and on the other hand you are trying to evaluate the skill of someone who has a different skill set than yourself.

Giving this job to some burnt out elitist asshole who throws resumes in the garbage because they did or didn't include a cover letter, or a wannabe drill sergeant who tries to be "tough" and "test them under pressure" during interviews, gives you a bad rep in tech circles and doesn't help you hire skilled people. Giving it to someone who can't be bothered to reply to applicants or update them on rejections is also shitty.

6) Open fucking landscape workplaces.

Fuck.

</comment><comment><USER45> There is one cardinal mistake that management makes (and development blithely accepts):

* Management is always right.

This truism is built into the entire fabric of software development: whether your process is an agile one where the product manager has ultimate knowledge of what is needed and on what timescales; the project that is delayed not because of bad planning or poor company organisation but because the developers are not working hard enough; that the only variable that affects the business is how productive / expensive the developers are - all the factors that describe how effective the management is are completely ignored or irrelevant. The list goes on and on and described in better detail in all the comments here.

Of course the solution to all of this is better data. You can be sure that the volume of data is inversely proportional to the strength of belief of the above statement. This leads to the second fundamental mistake that management makes:

* Not reading High Output Management by Andy Grove.

</comment><comment><USER13> Task mastering. Ie a Focus on pumping through the JIRA tickets or equivalent as fast as possible. Meaning no time for respite or learning. Meaning lots of shitty metrics and pressure / humiliation if you don't meet them. I get a weekly report of tasks that took more than 25% over estimate within the team and names, for example. It doesn't help that anyone else can log time against my JIRA either. A three person meeting could burn up all the time.

<comment><USER46> At my company we had a good manager. Whenever we saw a problem in the systems, even a minor, low priority one, we opened a JIRA ticket for it. After all, JIRA was there for the convenience of the workers in the IT department.

Then a new manager came in. When he discovered we had JIRA, he told us he was going to use JIRA to evaluate us on how fast we fixed tickets and how many tickets we fixed.

We in the IT department maintained JIRA. That night I completely purged virtually all tickets of tasks that could not be done quickly. I put those tasks in a directory on my laptop only visible to me. From that time on, we only opened tickets for simple tasks we could do quickly. As volume counted as well, we would open multiple tickets for a multi-step task, whereas before we would have opened only one.

Eventually there were some office politics between divisions at the company and I and others were laid off (which I knew was coming, but decided to stay for the severance). When I left, the files containing all the the system flaws I had noted were erased.

The new manager was laid off shortly after I was.

<comment><USER47> Honestly, poor management aside....I cannot believe you are bragging about this. Rather than confront and address the problem, your solution was to actually delete shared knowledge?

<comment><USER48> Confront and address? You ain't gonna get your boss fired without a scratch. He's just bragging that he achieved a local maxima, and I think he's correct.

Maybe during the exit interview he could have said, "oh by the way, there's a file on my computer..."

But then he might suddenly find the severance offer is retracted.

<comment><USER47> I respect your point, but I still could not disagree more. Actions like this only serve to increase dysfunction, not improve.

<comment><USER48> Do you have the insanity and the tenacity to un-rot the fish from the bottom up?

> Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? > An insane employee.

[http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers- mind.h...](http://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html)

<comment><USER47> What about the rest of that paragraph?

> Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will > repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop these things. > Especially someone who spends their own political capital, hard earned doing > things management truly values, on doing work they don't truly value – such > a person can keep fighting for a long time. Some people manage to make a > career out of it by persisting until management truly changes their mind and > rewards them. Whatever the odds of that, the average person cannot > comprehend the motivation of someone attempting such a feat.

In answer to your question: yes, I do. Just like the rest of your link states, it pays off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Not firing people fast enough when:

* the employee isn't good and everyone knows it. Manager lacks discipline or has a low talent bar.

* the person is very talented, but a jerk. Manager is worried it will hurt productivity to get rid of them.

</comment><comment><USER50> Giving junior devs all the greenfield applications as "learning experiences". Because groundwork should always be laid by those with the least experience.

Haphazard task assignment - I build a feature, then when they need an enhancement, it often gets given to someone else with no understanding of how it works, even though I am free.

Cargo culting in general. We do "Kanban" just to say we do, despite it having zero relevance to how we actually work. It's buzzwordy. Insistence on daily standup despite having very good communication and everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, were a small team in an open office.

Pushing for faster code review and generally treating it as a negative thing that just slows us down.

Previously we actually hired more devs to "help" get a project out the door - I think we all know what the mythical man month has to say about that.

Having to argue about basic security practices. I got in a heated argument about how we needed to encrypt temporary passwords even though they were system generated. I'm still angry. They wanted to be able to look them up for users. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER51> \- Bouncing a developer from task to task without ever finishing a task

\- Letting whatever customer screams the loudest dictate product behavior, and then effectively alternating product behavior based on which customer is angry this month

\- Deferring technical debt until a customer screams

\- Hiring unreasonable product managers who have unreasonable expectations. (This just leads to a lot of time being burnt in haggling and a much worse product delivered.)

\- Treating software as an art project, getting obsessed with pixels and fonts instead of functionality

\- Not paying enough

(edits)

\- Interrupting programmers constantly for trivial matters

\- Allowing the entire organization to interrupt a developer at any time because he's unofficially become a "go-to" person

\- Not backing up critical processes when departments interact. (This is the information needed when there is a bug, support escalation, ect.)

\- Expecting developers to handhold people in other departments

(more edits)

\- Micromanaging task priority, assuming that a developer jumped on a specific task and completed it instantly

<comment><USER50> > alternating product behavior based on which customer is angry this month

This strikes way too close to home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Reinventing the wheel when new management come in, i.e. don't check their ego at the door. The new management think they have to make their mark/impact/whatever in the products/processes by throwing out the old's. I've seen new VP/CTO came in, canceled a release pending product, and promised to rebuild the product quickly with his oversight. As with any rewrite, the project dragged on and on. The product ended up delayed for a year and half. The company bellied up shortly after.

</comment><comment><USER53> There is people/resource management and there is also technical management, and most companies really struggle with the latter.

What I mean by technical management is the following:

* onboarding new developers: showing them how to get the dev environment going, how to debug, how to use testing infrastructure, configuration management

* propagating information about design rules: documenting and evangelization of contracts between different different pieces of code, and all the various rules -- what must be authenticated, what must be logged, how to consistently check for access rights, which common module/library to use for what, etc.

* enforcing software development lifecycle: making sure there are design reviews/sign off/etc

It seems that managers offload a lot of the above to senior roles who rely on force of personality and personal effort to get this done, which creates a lot of randomness and also stress. Devs often don't learn these things except by creating breakage and then relying on experience or institutional knowledge.

It's very strange that on the one hand when it comes to corporate policies such as vacation time and provisioning productivity software, or even using the bug tracking system, there are handbooks, mandatory trainings, lots of online resources, etc. But when it comes to the technical rules such as which library to use, we pass to a medieval guild system of ad hoc 1 on 1 mentoring over Slack.

But perhaps I've just been working in the wrong companies.

</comment><comment><USER54> Assuming that because someone shipped software that looks good , that they're good.

Everywhere I worked, there's always one "super star" who keeps getting promoted for shipping something quick that looks good on the surface, but did so either by introducing massive amounts of tech debt (beyond what would be acceptable for an MVP), or by shitting on everyone else (working in a corner, ignoring any request for help, ignoring their direct reports, or generally at the cost of all of their other duties).

Makes everyone else look bad and them look good, and generally creates a pretty toxic atmosphere until management gets it (at which point its usually too late).

</comment><comment><USER55> From the trenches in large corporate (aka 'enterprise') tech departments:

* Technology decisions in large organizations will often not be made based on technical evaluations or merit. Some other arbitrary thing will influence a decision. You will get stuck with technically inferior product and have to deal, some call this job security.

* If you propose something and it gets floated up the management chain, chances are good that management will not "buy in". Not until they hire consultants to come in at $300-500/hr to spend 6 months or more and come back with the same decision. Possibly using a technology the consultants are pimping out, see point above.

* Buying COTS (customizable off the shelf software) with a 20% yearly maintenance/support fee to do basic IT functions is viewed as being cheaper than hiring software developers to build and maintain it. Even when there are open source solutions.

* Maintaining a list of "approved" vendors. This really narrows your possible solution set. When the vendors know this they will keep increasing fees.

* Offshoring work to save money. Many times this is not really done to save a department money. They will use accounting loop holes to track the offshore work as a 'service' and not labor. It will cost your department more in terms of delivery time but they don't care.

* Decision making by committee. Your job is to make decisions and the dysfunction is so bad that people will not work together. Not in a dramatic way, just passive aggressive, ignorance, etc. Every decision takes forever because they have to confer with multiple peers, go through management hierarchy for some, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> \- Not knowing what is important and what is not (micromanaging at the expense of team happiness and autonomy).

\- Negativity.

\- Not changing their minds often enough.

\- Generalising past negative experiences and applying them to new situations without properly acknowledging key differences.

\- Not recognising the strengths and weaknesses of individual employees - <USER2> prefer to just throw more engineers at the problem as though they were rocket fuel.

\- Not letting engineers feel a sense of ownership over a part of the product that they're building out of fear that they might leave.

\- Not giving raises until it's too late; seriously undervaluing the long-term acquired knowledge of their engineers.

</comment><comment><USER57> Not knowing the difference between "high performer" and social biases. Eg. Is your top person your top person because they are really doing good work on their merits, or do you just like them personally and therefore give them important projects, attention, recognition? Are your lesser favorites the ones doing real work? If they had equal opportunity, would they outperform the "top" people? Maybe they are outperforming them already?

</comment><comment><USER58> There are several mistakes that I keep seeing over and over again.

Short term-ism. It seems to stem from the need to report financially on an annual basis, which means everything gets tied to that - bonuses, sales discounts, hiring, project deadlines. The reality is that many extremely worthwhile things take longer to do than whatever time is left in this financial period and are harmed by trying to shortcut, sometimes irreparably. Tying everything to an arbitrary accounting period often encourages behaviour from management that is counter productive in the longer term. Yes a company has to report, but it doesn't have to treat those end of year numbers like they are the basis for everything.

Distrust. Often management simply do not trust their employees to know better than them. I've seen senior management who haven't got their hands dirty for two decades overruling far more qualified and experienced people on technical and operational decisions inappropriately with disastrous consequences (e.g. a new product suite developed over five years for a 9 figure sum arrives on the market on a legacy platform with far less functionality than what it is attempting to replace). Usually this stems a senior manager assessing risks poorly where they are in unfamiliar territory.

Lack of empathy. I've lost count of the number of initiatives and re- organisations and changes introduced top down style which fail miserably because there is zero engagement from employees. Usually the management have simply forgotten to think about what a change means to them and how it will affect their work. The assumption seems to be if a change makes a business easier for a manager to manage, it must be the right thing - even if that makes the people that do the work less effective. Often there's a drive to make revolutionary changes for the wrong (career enhancing) reasons. Usually it's better to encourage change to happen organically at all levels of the organisation and often it's better to evolve. People are people, if you don't take that into account and empathise you will have a bad time.

</comment><comment><USER59> Analytics Team of Captive Organisation (X shared functions) :

* Management (Manager) hardly aligns their goals with the client/partner (X) for whom we support instead they're primarily interested in filling up their Kpis in their ppt for their own organisation (XSF) even when we're fully funded by X.

* New Projects and tasks are kicked off just to make more number of slides in the weekly meeting rather than delivering valuable insight on time that could just go on in an email.

* Employees are just another data point in their Kpi sheet, empathy for wasting employees time and career doesn't seem to exist.

* Fresh grads out of college has been taken into the organisation with no clear idea about how to help them with a successful career and nor this responsibility exists.

</comment><comment><USER60> Stressing and emphasizing employees to give trust to a company but not giving any in return.

Loyalty and "Do it for the team" sentiments are commonly paraded, but if you hide company performance and important developments, you not only have employees making decisions without context, but also sow seeds of distrust and signal you don't see your workers as capable minded adults.

</comment><comment><USER61> Incomplete targets.

For example, I used to work in a support department where the key metric agents were graded on was "replies per hour". Naturally favoring this above everything else led to a couple issues:

1\. Little time spent on reply quality

2\. No care given to handling a ticket after the first reply, because sending a stock first reply to a ticket is much faster and easier than working through the individual challenges of each ticket.

Management identified these as problems, but never changed how they graded staff in performance reviews, so the problems persist. From what I've read of other companies, this seems the rule rather than the exception.

Everything else I can think of's already been mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER62> Not wanting to take the time to evaluate if the decisions made at the start of the project are still the right ones. It somehow feels safer to say "we aren't going to change anything" and keep accelerating toward the cliff.

</comment><comment><USER63> Thinking they can bend reality through sheer force of will (aka managerial edict), right up until reality smacks them in the face. Example:

M: How long will this take?

D: Three weeks.

M: That's too long, we have to demo at a trade show in two weeks.

D: Fine, we can take out half the features.

M: No, we have to demo in two weeks, with all the features, end of story.

D: It can't be done, end of story.

M: Do it anyway.

D: We can't, what your asking for is literally impossible.

M: Fine, I'll loan you three more developers.

D: No, that won't help. Haven't you read _The Mythical Man Month_ for crying out loud?

M: Of course it will help, how can it not help?

D: Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

M: That's not really relevant, get all the features done in two weeks.

D: Then why did you bother asking me how long it would take in the first place?

M: Just do it.

D: ~grumble~ -- storms off in a huff.

...

...

...

...

...

...

2 weeks later.

M: Is it done?

D: No, I told you it wouldn't be done.

M: Oh, OK. Well how long will it take to finish?

D: Another week.

M: OK, fine.

</comment><comment> Arcanum-XIII \- Agile/scrum (any methodology in fact) as religion : even if it doesn't fit the objective, that's the way...

\- not take into account the maintenance // evolving stuff part. The more legacy and problem you have, the more your ignore the issue.

\- judging performance based on spurious criteria or worse affect

\- micro management

</comment><comment><USER64> * firefighting instead of building resilience

* fear of senior devs/architects, not holding them responsible for keeping stuff in order

* playing blame game instead of looking for structural solutions

* information compartmentalization to keep leverage, like we're running a spy cell and not a dev team

</comment><comment><USER65> Managers making tech decisions without the input of the people who work with systems every day who are in the best position to determine whether that's a good decision or not.

True story:

A deployment of a distributed application at $dayjob a long while ago had "must have RAID6 or equivalent fault tolerance" added to its project requirements by clueless managers. The engineer who specced out the system, who was responsible for its POC, and had spent many, many hours setting up the environment and tweaking it for performance protested, since the application had fault tolerance built in. The idea being that if a node loses a hard drive, we don't care. We just throw a spare drive (that's kept in stock) in, rebuild the node (a literal 10 minute process), and no data is lost.

Protests, backed up with data, that long RAID6 rebuild times on TB+ drives _increased_ the likelihood of data loss (a restripe takes longer than our average rebuild-the-damn-machine-from-scratch time and leaves the cluster degraded longer) went ignored.

The RAID6 requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project, and ended up having to be thrown out around ~6 month mark since the cluster write performance was unable to keep up with the RAID0 that the engineer had originally specced out. We now use the engineer's original idea, even though he long since moved somewhere where presumably, his experience is trusted rather than insulted. This incident was a contributor to his decision to leave.

To this day, RAID6 is an inside reference to management cluelessly screwing up a project against the wishes of people who know better.

</comment><comment><USER66> Mistakes by Management:

* Accept that the Internal IT sabotages External IT (using politics/compliance/HR).

Background:

Interesting projects are often handed to external IT, while the internal IT is perfectly capable to implement most or parts of it, they're held back from the project by the management. However internal IT is very often the only rep the external IT can talk to. Management never allows true of co-operation of internal and external IT to restrict costs and to 'benchmark' the internal IT.

Real Story:

1) I'm the "external IT" and the internal IT together with their project- manager (senior enterprise architect) block all my communication to the client and want to be aware of everything beforehand.

2) They're unhappy with my progress, but blocked my selection of a cloud- computing instance via HR.

3) Just got access to their lowest tier EC2-instance via a ridiculously complicated connection processs.

4) I'm not error free, but my consultant manager is on the customer's side, by principle.

5) The data I received is a very small and useless fraction that can barely be used for machine learning (at least with my limited skills).

6) I'm so frustrated and work remotely, away from both offices I've to report to.

7) I see me failing in this settings and I'm afraid of that. I don't know what to do.

<comment><USER67> Internal IT here. Points 1-3 are all very understandable from a customers point of view and do not strike me as sabotaging. Your other points are not relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I believe that nearly all mistakes that management make are largely due to empathy. I think this is effectively why we've seen so many large, uber successful, companies being started by people with comp sci/software backgrounds. Worth noting - conversely, it doesn't mean that all comp sci/software people have the ability/capability to lead technology teams.

<comment><USER69> Too much or too little empathy?

<comment><USER68> Too little. Sorry should have clarified that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Would just like to add one in addition to the points already made in the comments: Offering you a significant raise, a different and more interesting project/location, when you have put in your papers. Asking you to rethink your decision of quitting.

Seems like I didn't exist for the manager until I put my resignation.

</comment><comment><USER71> Putting their own compensation and bonuses way above what decent people would do for employees. Their short-sightedness and selfish thinking does a lot of harm to thousands of people in every organization. Why am I calling these as mistakes and not just brushing these off as "it's a capitalistic system, just live with it"? I do so because good management that doesn't do all this keeps many more people happier than bad management. But this is the norm, and management that doesn't do this is a rare animal.

What's the point of making profits and more money if we can't increase happiness levels among more people, especially the ones who work on building the stuff that makes the money in the first place?

P.S.: My point is concise and can be counter argued in many ways. This is what I wanted to say without writing a whole book.

</comment><comment><USER72> Sticking around and believing that they're essential.

When organisations are formed of people with perfectly aligned incentives, they don't need to be managed. Such people know what needs to be done and have the expertise and autonomy to make it happen.

Of course, such an organisation is hopelessly unlikely to retain this utopian state as the number of employees rises above 2. And it becomes vanishingly improbable if outside funding is involved.

So management is the act of taking care of something which can't take care of itself. A symptom: like an antibody, it arises when a system gets of out whack and its continued presence indicates a chronic condition.

The best thing management can do is to put systems in place to make itself redundant. So, by this definition, anything it does which promotes the opposite goal is a mistake.

</comment><comment><USER73> 1\. Focused on project management/process (agile) while remaining clueless about actual software development.

2\. Obsession with development costs being a capital expenditure (CAPX). All code must be new features.

3\. Project deadlines created by management and sales only, always aligned with a fiscal quarter.

4\. Projects, not Products.

</comment><comment> super-serial Not doing their job - as in not getting requirements and understanding workflows of clients, then having me directly answer calls from these clients.

I'm not particularly fond of the phrase "no one told me it needs to work like that" but I must have said that at least 10 times this year.

</comment><comment><USER74> The same ones. For many years. I don't dwell on them because people generally don't learn from other peoples mistakes, they have to make those mistakes themselves. There have been businesses and business management for many thousands of years. If people learned from other peoples mistakes we would have business perfected by now. Instead we are constantly starting over making those same mistakes. I left the rat race many years ago to run my own business which has been successful; for variety I am looking at returning to the corporate world, I know exactly what to expect because it doesn't change.

<comment><USER75> You may be a "zebra" = Belonging to 1% top IQ but not succeeding to communicate with people who don't notice patterns and second degree concepts that are obvious to you. There are help groups, although they won't help you with the groupthink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Treating different departments differently in a company. In my experience the sales and marketing teams get the new toys, shiny offices, and budget for fun. Tech teams (this includes eng, ops, it, etc) get whatever's left.

</comment><comment><USER77> My list:

1) Re-orgs upon re-orgs believing they'll fix underlying problems

2) Related to 1), lack of accountability when it comes to decision making, like when no one is accountable for the previous, failed re-org when deciding to re-org again.

3) Spending way too much time trying to make perfect decisions, especially around product vision. Much better to decide quickly, be flexible going forward and iterate.

4) Providing perverse incentives. As an example, one place I managed didn't give lower-level managers a budget, only a headcount. So, of course, everyone hired only senior and above developers. This created logjams during promotion time and forced a lot of turnover which could have been avoided with a more balanced hiring plan that included more junior devs.

5) Seagull management, especially from the C-level. For those not familiar, it's swoop in, shit all over everything and then leave others to deal with the mess. Either provide minor course corrections or devote a significant portion of your attention to that area until it's stable.

6) Being too good of a motivator. This doesn't sound like it should be a problem, but I had one manager who was so good at selling shitty ideas to the team that we kept working on the wrong vision. A good vision should largely sell itself.

7) Not caring enough about their employees as people. When the difficult conversations need to be had, it's a lot easier to deal with it if there's an underlying relationship where the employees feel appreciated and considered. It doesn't mean you have to be their friend, just that they believe you care about them. The easiest way to make them believe that is to actually care about them.

8) Not devoting enough time and energy to hiring. This was my secret as a manager. I put a lot of time into recruiting (lots of after-hours meet-ups and mixers) and was picky with who I hired, built a great team, worked to keep them happy and focused and then spent 3 years getting awesome reviews for doing basically nothing but shielding them from unnecessary distractions.

9) Rewarding busy over good. Who deserves most organizational praise, the employee who valiantly wrestled with a production issue until 4am or the employee who pushed a non-event release to production and went home at 4pm? I'm amazed at how often managers recognize and reward the former when the latter is giving customers a better experience.

I could probably come up with another 20 or so, but these are the ones that have cropped up the most in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER78> Hiring non technical people for roles that are becoming increasingly more technical.

Many fields such as hr, payroll, etc have become far more technical in the implementation and use of system.

Management isn't realizing how much how quickly their business is changing and the impacts to their business.

Sometimes I wonder if perceived non-tech roles need to introduce an excel competency test not to measure excel talent, but the ability to work with data and details at a baseline level for the organization, or become the weak link.

If you can't work with the details of a business in a basic sense....

</comment><comment><USER79>
      * Micromanagement of skilled people.
      * Over-investing when things have gone badly
        wrong, and being sluggish to invest in a team
        which is having success.
      * Hiring unskilled engineers to develop features
        which are meant to be reused by other teams.
        Bad or complex architecture leads to lots of
        workarounds and bugs, which destroy efficiency
        in other teams.
      * Not investing in fixing inefficiencies, instead
        just asking people to work longer hours.

</comment><comment><USER80> One of my favourite books on management is _Extreme Ownership_. The classic mistakes I've seen made are: _bypassing the chain of command_ and _forgetting the mission_.

There's a process by which my team accepts change requests, error reports, and feature requests from stakeholders. We plan our development in cycles and I co-ordinate efforts between teams so that people aren't getting blocked or stuck. The mistake here is when stakeholders bypass the chain of command and directly assign tasks to people on my team without telling me.

They don't realize the impact this has on productivity, momentum, and due dates. Not to mention morale! My developers don't like it when they have the next couple of days planned out for themselves and someone comes over and interrupts them to work on some non-related, trivial issue. They feel like they have no ownership or autonomy.

This all segues into _forgetting the mission_. A group of people need a clear mission in order to prioritize and co-ordinate work. Often times management will forget what the mission is and prioritize a customer's change request and delay important projects in order to meet their goals of keeping the customers happy. Sometimes you have to remember to say _no_ when doing the opposite harms the mission.

</comment><comment><USER81> I work for an agency. The one I see most often is promising a specific deadline and/or budget at the beginning of the project, before we even know what the MVP is.

</comment><comment><USER82> All these : [http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

</comment><comment><USER83> I have worked as an Android developer for 2 years at a startup and the worst thing is the micro-managing part. Companies take so many tests for developers and hire project managers or product managers who don't know shit about tech or how anything works. All they know is to ask "When will it be done?" and don't care about the complexity of the implementation or the time taken to do something the right way , an optimised solution. Another issue is releasing app/software without thorough testing and then blaming the developers for any bugs and crashes. Third and very important aspect is the "Why?". Nobody cares to explain why we are doing things certain way, why are we changing the designs, why are we moving the button, etc. Developers are not robots whom you can give any task and expect them to complete it in a ziffy. Developers want to understand the reason behind the changes, the results of these changes so that they know they are doing something worth the time and effort.

</comment><comment><USER84> Everything I can't stand about management revolves around agile methodologies for profit. Agile itself is a good thing, but once you throw in companies trying to profit off of its processes you end up with this weird dogmatic dumpster fire that inhibits people from really doing anything besides keeping track of the current sprint or planning for the next sprint.

</comment><comment><USER85> There is no such thing as "done" software. Everything program that is written must be maintained but PHB's never even consider maintenance costs.

Consequently, there is no such thing as a "build" and "maintain" phase of software. Something that takes 10 developers to build will take 10 developers to maintain.

</comment><comment><USER86> The manager of my current team came up with some complex way of solving a problem that we're facing as a business. He implemented a proof of concept and showed the business without involving anyone else in the dev team at all. Now the business wants to roll with this "solution" to a key part of our software we've been desperate to refactor with foresight of incoming requirements. Instead we're ploughing forward, saving refactoring for later to implement this proof of concept. No design work is to be done - only implementation because we're on a tight fictional deadline. He's throwing more developers on it to "help" and even micromanaging the implementation.

The same manager expressed displeasure that he wasn't involved in discussions with the business about a new project that rose whilst he was away on holiday.

Follow this guide at your peril.

</comment><comment><USER87> * Everything must be done urgently and asap.

* Moving developers on and off of projects in the middle of development.

* Not listening to the lead developers' time estimates

* Focusing on the quickest possible development time instead of quality (and then complaining about going over-budget when bug fixing takes way too long).

* Worrying more about for how long you're sat in your seat rather than the quality of your work.

* Doesn't reward exceptional work.

* Gives developers work that they're not skilled in without adjusting the time estimates

* All 7 hours of the day must be billable time spent coding.

* Constantly wants to change what technologies are used for projects

* Over complicates tasks and/or tries to add their own 'good ideas' which are actually a nightmare to do.

This is my current boss. My stress levels are off the charts. Fortunately I've found work elsewhere and will be leaving soon.

</comment><comment><USER88> Not enough one-on-one time with the coders. As a coder, it's very easy in a stand-up for any coder to say "yeah yeah yeah, I've got this covered". Then a week before release everyone realizes that person has a month's worth of work ahead of them. I've been all three: the "yeah yeah" guy, the manager, and one of the other coders that has to take the slack. It's a situation that seems easily avoidable just by a little better teamwork. Oftentimes "yeah yeah" can just mean "I have no idea what I'm doing", but dev2 (or mgr) could do and teach that task in half an hour, but dev1 just doesn't know who to ask.

</comment><comment><USER89> * mistaking agile for not having to make up their minds what they want.

* thinking projects can be planned back-to-back with no rework, maintenance, slack or anything calculated in.

* mistaking the end of a development cycle with the actual release moment. Last code commited == app is live.

</comment><comment><USER90> Believing that they are too important to remove impediments from people doing the actual work.

</comment><comment><USER91> I honestly think that being a manager 1st layer is the least enjoyable job in a tech company. So I wouldn't blame them too much since they're already dealing with a bunch of problems:

* Managers are easily replaceable because they don't have any expertise but people skills. My grandma has those skills, could she take on a manager role? Of course.

* You often get promoted internally to manager. So it's hard for you to move horizontally between different companies since they don't know you. You need to prove yourself again. Plus there is 1 manager job out there versus 10000 dev jobs.

* You get away from coding, far away from product then have to deal with expenses, HR issues, infinite meetings, etc.

</comment><comment><USER92> One simple and subtle thing: not being empathetic.

There are a lot of process problems, a lot of productivity issues and lack of strategy, but the cold relationship kills the team's vibrancy and drains the energy, preventing people to do more in a better way.

</comment><comment><USER93> There are some amazing responses here.

My number one pick is always finding the next new thing in management from a New York Times bestseller. Then sending an email on the greatness of the process to the whole team and lo-behold expecting everyone to embrace it.

2nd for me is getting stuck on project names. It seems finding a cool sounding name is somehow more necessary than how it works.

To quote an example, we were using the waterfall model for our development. Then somewhere management read about "Rapid Application Development or RAD" and we embrace it ASAP. But not before dissing that RAD was not the word they wanted because rad the word had negative connotation to it so we needed a new name.

<comment><USER94> What negative connotation?

<comment><USER95> It's SoCal surfer/skater slang, which sounds unprofessional in a formal business environment. So, stuffiness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Management who incorrectly see IT as a cost center cause a lot of problems.

Every business is becoming or is a software business in that software of one kind or another is increasingly tracking the details, data and processes of the business.

Failing to realize this shift, technology is not utilized as an enhancement and leverage tool for competitive advantage, instead their competitors do.

Business technologists who both understand business and can solve problems with tech will likely become a new class of business professionals like accountants.

That, or technologists will inherit the jobs of hr, accountants because the existing folks are not able to keep up and innovate constantly.

</comment><comment><USER96> Some very important mistakes are made by management that is non-technical, and too much management-oriented. I'll explain with the following list:

* creating extra administrative burden around daily things, and trying to commit devs to that

* favour management roles over engineer roles

* ...thus effectively limit technical career: higher positions are non-technical and managerial only

* create two "islands": management and technical, with limited interactions

* treat engineers as easily replaceable parts, keep one or two experienced ones (for extinguishing fires) and forget the rest.

</comment><comment><USER97> Assuming that saying 'Do X' is really 'Do X'. Truth is I have to fix 10 bugs before I can even set up a test case for 'X'...

Also just the general cluelessness of the state of the software.

Managers need to convince the higher-ups that the software is in good shape (because their job is on the line), meanwhile the devs know its got 1000 bugs in the ticket list plus 3000 bugs that didn't make it to the list.

Failure to explain management objectives. 'We promised company X feature Y in Z days'

</comment><comment><USER16> Sort of a meta-statement, but an inability to learn from past mistakes.

You can't just throw water on the fire until it's out and then go "Whew, isn't fire bad?" and leave.

</comment><comment><USER98> They don't make decisions based on data, despite believing themselves to be a data driven company. All decisions flow from the top, and are ego-based, not data driven.

</comment><comment><USER99> not sharing company goals with engineering - engineers have to second guess whether it's the moment for building or polishing, for adding new features or for consolidating before a big push etc.

this cause a wealth of secondary problems like deadline that seem arbitrary, focus on random features that need to be rushed every stint without logic or order, developer burnout and the need for ever-increasing micromanaging.

</comment><comment><USER48> Becoming managers to sooth their self-esteem issues.

I don't mean this as a cynical joke at all. In my experience too few managers see the job as a job, and instead they see it as a power and status boost --- a way to be "winning" in the game of life.

It should be a calling. It should be the thing you were put on this earth to do.

Of dozens of managers I've encountered, I've only met 1 or 2 where it seemed to be their calling.

</comment><comment><USER100> A book recommendation: [https://www.amazon.de/Heretics-Guide-Best-Practices- Organisa...](https://www.amazon.de/Heretics-Guide-Best-Practices- Organisations- ebook/dp/B00D5S7C5K/ref=sr_1_1/257-6578943-3771904?ie=UTF8&qid=1502959460&sr=8-1&keywords=heretics+guide+to+best+practices)

</comment><comment><USER101> Management have the misguided notion that if you adopt the Agile methodology (TM) you will deliver successful software projects.

Loads of people uninterested in software engineering and technology follow agile training and the end result is loads of pictures of walls covered in Post-it notes, disgruntled developers and no working software or product to show for it.

</comment><comment><USER102> Failure to focus on the logistics surrounding the team, while relentlessly pushing out carrots and sticks for more productivity.

If you have the right skills, training, tools, and processes; things get done well. When there are gaps in these areas, no amount of discipline or incentives will make up for it. Don't make the cheese bigger, make the maze smaller.

</comment><comment><USER103> Dont lie. In any way. Nothing is more upsetting then (the longer the worse) your manager/boss who has been lying to you.

</comment><comment><USER104> Complexte denial of technical debt, to the point of making products irrelevant and any kind of market fit impossible.

</comment><comment><USER105> * Not including the right technical resource when interviewing new hires.

* Failing to identify when they need and don't need micromanagement.

* Basic PM tasks like meeting protocols and case management.

* Not listening to technical resources to recommendations on scaling.

* Penny pinching when dealing with redundancy and scaling.

* Not communicating with their team.

* Not being honest when failing.

</comment><comment><USER106> This guy's having the worst luck ever…

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sW8HGonB8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sW8HGonB8o)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4s6faeBSGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4s6faeBSGk)

</comment><comment><USER107> I wrote a post with some lessons I've learned (from mistakes I've made) on management

[https://email@example.com/leadership- meditations-d29868a8...](https://email@example.com/leadership- meditations-d29868a899a3)

</comment><comment><USER108> Not training managers on how to manage.

When devs are promoted into management or team lead positions they are not given adequate training on what it means to manage / lead. Thus devs don't learn what good management is, and the stereotype of the bad manager perpetuates.

</comment><comment><USER109> \- Acting like 1:1s and performance reviews aren't the most important aspect of your job by putting them off, ignoring them or saying you dislike them to your reports

\- I'll repeat: "misusing agile in order to micromanage"

\- Requiring all decisions to be signed off on

</comment><comment><USER110> 1) Underestimating the complexity of the problem

2) Closing down a project as soon as the o/p pops out without thinking about scalability

3) Lack of courage to say 'NO' to the client

4) Highly optimistic deadline

5) Daily meetings to ask how much work has been completed. Give me a percentage.

</comment><comment><USER111> * Multiple items on the priority list that are priority #1.

* Micromanaging, always the micromanaging.

</comment><comment><USER112> Massive problem in tech: Valuing easily-quantifiable metrics for productivity over "softer" forms of productivity. Current tech culture reminds me of a random idiot who makes claims like "Xavi wasn't much of a midfielder because he rarely scored goals".

On one small project I was on (6 person team), we had a guy -- we'll call him Carl -- who was right at the bottom of the pile of commits. I mean, maybe 20-30 over the course of a 6 month project. From an earlier collaboration, I happened to know that he was a very good programmer, but he wrote practically zero code for this project. And Carl wasn't that popular with our bull-in-a- china-shop director, who claimed that Carl was dead weight slowing our fast- paced team down. He constantly asked the rest of us what Carl was "contributing".

So, after months of pressure, Carl "left" for a separate team as the project wound down, in spite of our vociferous appeals to management to keep him on. He quit a few months later.

Why were we so desperate to keep him?

Because Carl was the glue that kept the group working so productively. He managed the egos, kept focus on the goal, and fostered respect for everybody on the team. He intervened during technical and interpersonal disputes. He was calm and quiet and rational. During design discussions, when the more outspoken members of the team were trying to ram through their visions of the world (guilty!), he would bring brilliantly insightful and cogent questions about the long-term and medium-term ramifications of said designs. He was an unofficial liaison to our internal customers. He volunteered to break bad news to management when there was a delay, but deferred to other members of the team when it came time to claim credit for our progress.

Carl was, in short, our unofficial PM, and a damn good one. He realized that his social skills were more valuable to the team than his technical skills. But his contributions weren't valued by management because they weren't as visible as our commits. Our team fell apart in a matter of months after he left, as we quickly became overwhelmed by all the stupid shit -- and toxic politics -- he had deftly absorbed and deflected. We wasted two of those last months working on a feature that he had opposed, only for none of our clients to use that feature upon release. Just as he had predicted.

In general, all the things he brought to the table -- humility, empathy, patience, foresight, listening, respect, selflessness -- are the sorts of pro- social traits that tech companies (and especially SV tech companies) aggressively select _against_ , in spite of the fact that they are precisely the kinds of traits that lead, in my experience, to far greater productivity.

The current culture is borderline toxic. In all the talk of "10x" programmers, people seem eager to overlook that a 1x programmer might have a 10x positive impact on their team in other ways.

</comment><comment><USER113> Failing to "build great things really well". Even a boring accounts system that has good scaffolding like build and test rigs can be a joy to work on.

Just keep building great stuff really well.

</comment><comment><USER114> Continuing to use methods and behavior that has never worked efficiently before and expecting changes in details to have large improvements in efficiency.

Not looking for root causes for issues.

</comment><comment><USER115> I think there is inverse proportionality of development speed vs code quality + maintainance cost which management does not take into a count, ever, no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER116> Not thinking about team morale until it becomes a issue. Negative mindsets can spread through a team quickly, and once they take hold they can be hard to root out.

</comment><comment><USER117> No mistakes. "We don't do any mistakes, if you are not happy here, you can leave". All other mistakes are usually caused by this one.

</comment><comment><USER118> Leaders need to learn to give freedom to people and create responsible leaders that can operate on their own. Not give orders to followers.

</comment><comment><USER119> Outsourcing (and loosing the knowledge), almost always ends up more expensive in the end, compared to in house teams...

</comment><comment><USER120> i don't think they make too many mistakes. from their perspective its about minimizing cost and maximising earnings and i think they do this reasonably well. some managers can get a bit fanatical about this, which can shoot them in the foot sometimes but that is not the case at any company i worked for.

<comment><USER121> _don 't think they make too many mistakes_

Nailed it. Customers, employees and shareholders may be unhappy but managers are always happy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> Lack of listening (I am not talking about "hearing" here!). Like most of the problems in this world.

</comment><comment><USER123> That reading ".NET programming for dummies" to the last page makes him/her an expert programmer

</comment><comment><USER124> "It's not about technology"...and then racks up technical debt that has to continually be paid.

</comment><comment><USER125> Instead of posting these here where they will sink into a black hole, leave them on mplyees.com.

</comment><comment><USER126> Not terminating non performers

Not forcing coasters to retire to make room for rising (or risen) stars

</comment><comment><USER127> Management, like most people, is bad at saying no. It takes practice to do it well.

</comment><comment><USER128> What core principles or values does or would good management abide to?

</comment><comment><USER129> Sticking with bad ideas too long and abandoning good ideas too soon.

</comment><comment><USER130> Rushing new features before we finish fixing existing ones

</comment><comment><USER12> Not understanding your own product.

</comment><comment><USER131> Using other human beings as tools.

</comment><comment><USER132> Moving to an open office plan.

</comment><comment><USER133> just read the basic findings W. Edwards Deming. Same mistakes he talks about.

</comment><comment><USER134> #1: Management cutting corners in the budget in areas that need the money, but keeping the money flowing in areas that don't. For example, I was a one-man- miracle show brought in to do an infrastructure upgrade for a company drowning in technical debt. I managed to impliment what would have been a $45-70k$ system for ~$19k, at the core node level, but when requesting a ~$8k horizontal cabling job to be done by a contractor, all I got was "no, it's not gonna happen". Which brings me to...

#2: Not putting more effort into communication and discovering needs of departments they have been unable to communicate properly to get approved. I'm a senior sysadmin (taking a break and transitioning to data science), but for a long time all I wanted to do was be in the datacenter with my head in a terminal and doing good work. In retrospect since my break, I have realized that as a senior that's not my role anymore except in case of escalation no one else can solve. I was not playing the board-room politics game to get what my department needed, and that was a failure on my part. Generally, I am now calling for high investment in the CTO/CIO position because they should be the people who can talk to the technical people who don't need to spend all day in a meeting room, and spend all day in the meeting room advocating for them and the things they and the department need. Execs like to stay on their pedestal and force others to rise to their level, but they need to spend at least some effort on actually listening to the middle-men and "going down to their level" so to speak.

I don't care what industry you are in, those two things alone would vastly improve the workplace for workers of all types (not just IT) and business in general. Those two misteps, particularly combined with lackluster reward systems (once spent a year working overtime-exempt salary hoping for a raise, and instead, after having spent the overtime while salary fixing up a place, got shifted to hourly once I was no longer working late and on weekends,) are recipes for hemoragging good talent. Good talent might temporarily forget how good they are, are be stuck for some other reason, but it's only a matter of time before they drop your company like hotcakes and move on. Pay them fairly, and as far as retention goes, real, substantial bonuses can make all the difference.

Never forget, that regardless of industry, your internal IT team is much more critical and important than you can imagine, and ignoring IT as your bastard- child _will_ come back and bite you in the ass. Removing technical debt should be a #1 priority.

It's one reason I am so thankful for being a senior sysadmin for so long. As a senior, since we touch so much of a company, I got to see the internal non-it mechanisms of so many companies I think I have gained a level of macro- business insight not many have.

[https://youtu.be/2e9xTsOoqmw?t=1116](https://youtu.be/2e9xTsOoqmw?t=1116)

</comment><comment><USER7> * Zero career direction and zero technical speciality for devs

* Underestimation of difficulty whether through cynicism (burn the devs) or cluelessness

* Inadequate training and expectation devs can just piggy back learning technology x from scratch whilst writing production software using it

* Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products

* Insistence that all devs time must be billable and trying to defy gravity in ignoring skills rot etc. through lack of investment in training

* Expectation that devs can be swapped between technologies without problems

* Swapping people in and out of projects as if this will not affect progress

* Deliberate hoarding of information as a means of disempowering devs

All of this inevitably leads to a bunch of pissed off devs. The ones that are happy to eat it become the golden boys and get promotions. Those that point out the bullshit leave once they can and are replaced with the desperate at the bottom who sooner or later arrive at the same position of wanting to leave once they realise what's going on. I think tech can be pretty miserable if you are not in the upper echelon of lucky types that can score a position at a Google, Facebook etc.

Oh and a couple more:

* Give no feedback unless things go wrong

* Treat your highly educated, intelligent and motivated devs like children by misusing agile in order to micromanage them

<comment><USER135> > * Trying to use one off contracts as a way of building resellable products

Can you tell me why? Sometimes, asking a client for 50k instead of 80k with a "spin-off" agreement can pay to both parties. The client can get long-term support with new features without the need to pay for it.

<comment><USER136> This was the one that really struck a chord with me. You start of trying to take the product you created for one specific client and then generalising it.

You end up, in practice creating a individual bloody application for each client.

(Not a coder, more a manager who created specs and tried to shield the coders from the worst of the shit-storm).

<comment><USER135> It is not individual applications. It is SAAS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>