5 ms·

As an engineering manager, you'll need to put company first, team second and your team members third. I disagree with this a ton. The best managers I've had fl

As an engineering manager, you'll need to put company first, team second and your team members third. I disagree with this a ton. The best managers I've had flipped #1 and #2. When your team is performing, the company profits. Far too often I've seen the manager put the company way ahead of the team, and that leads to attrition within your team or a major lack of motivation.

smaller 9y ago
As with most management things, there’s probably a lot of nuance to how you can approach this. I’ve had managers make it clear that me and my teams were a distant #2 to the company needs. It was pretty demotivating (as you said). On the other hand, part of a managers job is to align their teams with the organizational priorities. Maybe it comes down to how you achieve that alignment?
- mdns33 9y ago
  you have to always learn how to take care of your subordinates. That is the secret behind a good manager. people quit managers and not companies majority of the times.
throwmeaway32 9y ago
I agree with your disagreement. If you don't care about your people and team and don't put them first then it's highly unlikely you'll actually be in any way productive to give the company what it needs. I guess the way I view it is that company is the destination and team/people is the journey. This way isn't the only way though, I've seen teams run 'company first' it generally involved a lot of unhappy people and I didn't like it, so I avoid that style personally. A friend of mine seems to pride himself on being a 'hard driver' and being 'brought in as the hammer', ; but to each their own.
celim307 9y ago
This 100%. The best manager I had I likened to a good platoon commander. Understood importance of morale, respected and trusted us, was transparent when he asked us to do something hard, and would never ask us to do something he wouldn't do himself. Many a times he went to bat for us against upper management and pushed back on death marches, and fought for resources like dinner and extra time off for us after a late night deploy. He understood we were a team, and we weren't stupid. Your employees are working in a technical, educated field. They can smell bullshit a mile away. If you try to take advantage of them they will shit your bed and leave
- JamesBarney 9y ago
  My favorite managers were always similar to the one you describe. But I also noticed these managers didn't get promoted as the more "pointy haired boss" types.
  - osullivj 9y ago
    That's the difference between "managing up" and "managing down". The PHBs and those who get promoted rapidly spend their time kissing ass...
    - xerophyte12932 9y ago
      I would disagree. My boss has the record of fastest promotion of junior developer to executive and he fights for us against other department/team heads and upper management on a regular basis. Its because he makes sure to deliver such value to the company that the management can't ignore him and his team
- cmdkeen 9y ago
  In the military junior leader's get taught Adair's theory of Action Centred Leadership: that Task, Team and Individual are separate things to deal with and yet mutually dependent. Which to make the primary focus can and should switch up. If you are firefighting on a submarine all that matters is the task - the team are all dead if you fail. The individual does not matter there and then. Back in the land of computers we have less extreme but analogous problems. There are times when you do need to focus on the task, however if you're a good leader you've used the times when that isn't the case to focus on building a Team and developing each Individual so that they can, and are willing, to dig out to achieve the Task.
feistypharit 9y ago
Agreed, first rule of management: take care of your people.
bbarn 9y ago
It's really great to think your team is the most important thing, but you don't pay their salaries, the company does. Your team's health can absolutely be the number one vehicle you use to get the company the results they are after, but you can't forget the fact that the company employs you, and them for reasons other than their happiness.
- sidlls 9y ago
  This is very much the case. Also, though many on HN might not like it, software developers are not special. There are many, many people with sufficient skill and interest to replace most developers in most companies. That said, it's a mistake to treat developers like commodities or to dismiss their concerns and desires as second to the company, in my opinion. Churn hurts, and demoralized teams have negative impact on develpment.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - donovanm 9y ago
    If software engineers are really so easy to replace then why hasn't it happened? They're currently paid more then most professions so clearly businesses would take a cheaper path if available.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      It happens all the time, especially outside of anomalies like the Bay Area. Even in the Bay Area it happens frequently enough. Pay is higher in the Bay Area and similar locations because of artificial constraints from the demand-side, not because of a lack of supply. Outside the Bay Area (and similar places) developers aren't paid that much better than any other college educated, skilled worker. I came from outside the Bay Area. This world is...very different from the software world in most other places.
      - donovanm 9y ago
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
A huge confounding factor for this discussion is the big-5 personality trait Agreeableness. It's essentially how people make tradeoffs between their own needs and short-term interpersonal conflict. "Put the company first" is another way of getting at "Engineering managers need higher trait Agreeableness in order to succeed". It's not maximizing Agreeableness, just putting it at a higher level than individual contributors. And for good reason. The overall goal is to make smart tradeoffs and find win-wins. You've got yourself, your managers/executives, and your team. They each can get varying amounts of acclaim, compensation, and terms of employment (ie, hours worked). I kind of want to say that the company matters here, but it doesn't really. Well, at least not until you get to a large enough company scale that your reputation among people at the company starts to matter. Say ~100 people or so.
Iv 9y ago
Usually #1 and #2 are not in conflict. The whole role of a manager is to translate company goals into engaging team projects. The point I think the author makes is that it is not the desires of the team that set up priorities at this point, and that it is contrary to what you are expected to do at the dev level (i.e. advancing your team projects first) The thing is, if a manager does not set goals for it's team, it will find some by itself (refactor that old code, clean the doc, improve that funky demo, test out the latest shiny equipment) that are not necessarily the best choice for the company. My experience has been that in that situation, very often, the team is relieved when it receives new instructions. It is not a "team or company" thing It is just an ordering of priority goals that makes sense to everybody.
- deepGem 9y ago
  Thank you for saying this. I just want to add how this becomes super hard in an early stage startup. People underestimate how hard it is to translate company goals to engaging team projects, when a startup is in a lot of flux. The goal post moves so much. It's super super hard to keep an eye on the goal post, translate that goal to the team, and a couple of weeks later tell the team that no the earlier tasks are no longer valid, here's a new set. Rinse repeat until you hit PMF.
mikekchar 9y ago
I think this is a red herring all the way. Before you think about this problem, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: "Why do we have managers"? Let's start a thought experiment. We'll start a company with one person. What will that person do? Manage? Of course not. There is nothing to manage, because there is only one person. Instead, although they have to plan and prioritise their work, if they aren't actually spending most of their time working, then nothing will get accomplished. What if we have 2 people? Should we make one person a manger and have the other person do the work? Of course not. The manager will have virtually nothing to do while the working person will be overwhelmed. Although you may shift some responsibilities depending on who likes to do what, or who has various skills, unless both people are working then you will have lots of problems. At what point do we need a manager? Well, we need a manager when the communication overhead and day-to-day chores impacts development. We only need that manager when there is enough work that they will be able to spend almost all of their day doing that work. So what will they do? Basically anything that is stopping the workers from getting their job done. If there is a problem with communication, then the manager needs to organise things so that everybody has the information they need. If there is a lack of prioritisation, then the manager needs to prioritise/plan the work. If there is conflict on the team, the manager must find ways to resolve the conflict. I'll stop here as there isn't much point enumerating all the things a manager must manage. The point is that everything a manager does is a result of coordinating large numbers of people or disparate information sources. Their job is to coordinate, prioritise, reduce conflict and communicate so that the workers can concentrate on getting their work done. The manager is there to "take one for the team" so that the team doesn't get embroiled in drama, trivia, or complications. Getting back to the original problem: "you'll need to put the company first, team second and your team members third". Sorry to be rude, but that's just naive. Your function is not, through force of your will, to make all the workers do what the company wants. Your job is to coordinate information and reduce conflict so that the members can be successful. Your job would not exist if you did not have team members or teams. And as impolite as this is, I can't finish without asking managers to contemplate the following: Is there more or less drama due to your actions? Are you demanding team members organise information for you, or are you organising information for the team members? Are you resolving conflict as it occurs, or are you creating conflicts in order to get your way? Do you ask your team to jump through hoops in order to solve a political problem, or do you jump through hoops to solve political problems for your team? As an engineering manager, you can not succeed if the team does not succeed. It is true that your team can succeed for short periods even if some team members do not succeed, but it is an unsustainable condition. If your team members are not successful, then you have failed. <- Notice the full stop.
chi18 9y ago
> Far too often I've seen the manager put the company way ahead of the team Hear! Hear! This completely, followed by managers being too lazy or being too ignorant and just never "getting it". After many years, I've come to the conclusion that: 1. I sucked as an engineering manager. 2. Most people suck as engineering managers. 3. The only thing that works is a flatter structure with really exceptional managers as actual engineering managers that do what's right and stand up for the team, with a set of people under them that don't actually have management authority, but they can organize things, stay on top of efforts, and communicate status to those that can. This works because really exceptional managers are extremely hard to find and are paid well, so if you try to do anything but this, you will hire bad managers.
Vinnl 9y ago
> When your team is performing, the company profits. F Not if it does so at the cost of another team.
gregdoesit 9y ago
Op here. I agree team morale is absolutely essential. At the same time, as a manager you should understand how your team adds value to the company - and if it doesn't, fix that. I write this from personal experience, having seen teams been disbanded who did a great job shipping... stuff that brought in zero value to the company. This is something I personally would want to avoid if possible, hence me putting "company first" as #1. Of course no two situations and companies are the same, so there might be cases when having a healthy team trumps doing what the company (thinks it) needs. For now I'm personally sticking to aligning all three where I can: have a great team building things that matter with satisfied members.
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  > I write this from personal experience, having seen teams been disbanded who did a great job shipping... stuff that brought in zero value to the company. How do you get to this point? I have never been on a team where someone further up the business wouldn't come up to us at some point and ask, "Uh, what is the business value of what you are doing?"
  - lozenge 9y ago
    "We need this refactoring/migration to enable feature X"
- chi18 9y ago
  > have a great team building things that matter with satisfied members. Cherish this, and secretly examine every nuance of its ups-and-downs while you can. The basis of all of your future management efforts will be to get back to something similar to this point. Just remember, a manager is a well-organized servant leader who is ultimately never responsible for success.
laythea 9y ago
I don't think assigning a pecking order and then debating it is important because in my opinion, an Engineering Manager has the job of connecting the business to the engineers. For this to work he/she needs to engage both. What to do when "conflicts of interest" arise is the measure of an Engineering Manager and where the line is drawn is defined by the individual at a personal level.
wiz21c 9y ago
My motto is : if it succeeds then it's the team, if it fails then it's me. (now go figure why I'm burned out :-))
meddlepal 9y ago
Agreed. I'm going through the motions of a tranistion and the team is far more important than the company. If you focus on the company first you will lose the pulse of your team and if you lose the pulse of your team you're compromised in your ability to lead effectively especially when you inevitably need to debug your team.
wdr1 9y ago
The devil may be in the details. If your team is excited to build a service (say, for the technical challenge or the potential reputation gain) that objectively should be done by a different team (say, they have the right background, have already started, or whatever) -- do you put the teams interest first (and do it) or the company's (and don't). I've faced this situation a lot. I used to pick the former. If we have more impact, how can that be bad? Good for company & so on. It frequently did end up good for my team, but not always good for the company. Once I adopted the "good for company" mindset, I found I could often achieve what was good for both, but I did find value in putting the company first. To put another way: the local optimum is not always the global optimum. As a manager, you need to think about the global & favor that over the local. My two cents.

smaller 9y ago

As with most management things, there’s probably a lot of nuance to how you can approach this. I’ve had managers make it clear that me and my teams were a distant #2 to the company needs. It was pretty demotivating (as you said). On the other hand, part of a managers job is to align their teams with the organizational priorities. Maybe it comes down to how you achieve that alignment?

mdns33 9y ago
you have to always learn how to take care of your subordinates. That is the secret behind a good manager. people quit managers and not companies majority of the times.

throwmeaway32 9y ago

I agree with your disagreement. If you don't care about your people and team and don't put them first then it's highly unlikely you'll actually be in any way productive to give the company what it needs. I guess the way I view it is that company is the destination and team/people is the journey. This way isn't the only way though, I've seen teams run 'company first' it generally involved a lot of unhappy people and I didn't like it, so I avoid that style personally. A friend of mine seems to pride himself on being a 'hard driver' and being 'brought in as the hammer', ; but to each their own.

celim307 9y ago

This 100%. The best manager I had I likened to a good platoon commander. Understood importance of morale, respected and trusted us, was transparent when he asked us to do something hard, and would never ask us to do something he wouldn't do himself. Many a times he went to bat for us against upper management and pushed back on death marches, and fought for resources like dinner and extra time off for us after a late night deploy. He understood we were a team, and we weren't stupid. Your employees are working in a technical, educated field. They can smell bullshit a mile away. If you try to take advantage of them they will shit your bed and leave

JamesBarney 9y ago
My favorite managers were always similar to the one you describe. But I also noticed these managers didn't get promoted as the more "pointy haired boss" types.
- osullivj 9y ago
  That's the difference between "managing up" and "managing down". The PHBs and those who get promoted rapidly spend their time kissing ass...
  - xerophyte12932 9y ago
    I would disagree. My boss has the record of fastest promotion of junior developer to executive and he fights for us against other department/team heads and upper management on a regular basis. Its because he makes sure to deliver such value to the company that the management can't ignore him and his team
cmdkeen 9y ago
In the military junior leader's get taught Adair's theory of Action Centred Leadership: that Task, Team and Individual are separate things to deal with and yet mutually dependent. Which to make the primary focus can and should switch up. If you are firefighting on a submarine all that matters is the task - the team are all dead if you fail. The individual does not matter there and then. Back in the land of computers we have less extreme but analogous problems. There are times when you do need to focus on the task, however if you're a good leader you've used the times when that isn't the case to focus on building a Team and developing each Individual so that they can, and are willing, to dig out to achieve the Task.

feistypharit 9y ago

Agreed, first rule of management: take care of your people.

bbarn 9y ago

It's really great to think your team is the most important thing, but you don't pay their salaries, the company does. Your team's health can absolutely be the number one vehicle you use to get the company the results they are after, but you can't forget the fact that the company employs you, and them for reasons other than their happiness.

sidlls 9y ago
This is very much the case. Also, though many on HN might not like it, software developers are not special. There are many, many people with sufficient skill and interest to replace most developers in most companies. That said, it's a mistake to treat developers like commodities or to dismiss their concerns and desires as second to the company, in my opinion. Churn hurts, and demoralized teams have negative impact on develpment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- donovanm 9y ago
  If software engineers are really so easy to replace then why hasn't it happened? They're currently paid more then most professions so clearly businesses would take a cheaper path if available.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    It happens all the time, especially outside of anomalies like the Bay Area. Even in the Bay Area it happens frequently enough. Pay is higher in the Bay Area and similar locations because of artificial constraints from the demand-side, not because of a lack of supply. Outside the Bay Area (and similar places) developers aren't paid that much better than any other college educated, skilled worker. I came from outside the Bay Area. This world is...very different from the software world in most other places.
    - donovanm 9y ago

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

A huge confounding factor for this discussion is the big-5 personality trait Agreeableness. It's essentially how people make tradeoffs between their own needs and short-term interpersonal conflict. "Put the company first" is another way of getting at "Engineering managers need higher trait Agreeableness in order to succeed". It's not maximizing Agreeableness, just putting it at a higher level than individual contributors. And for good reason. The overall goal is to make smart tradeoffs and find win-wins. You've got yourself, your managers/executives, and your team. They each can get varying amounts of acclaim, compensation, and terms of employment (ie, hours worked). I kind of want to say that the company matters here, but it doesn't really. Well, at least not until you get to a large enough company scale that your reputation among people at the company starts to matter. Say ~100 people or so.

Iv 9y ago

Usually #1 and #2 are not in conflict. The whole role of a manager is to translate company goals into engaging team projects. The point I think the author makes is that it is not the desires of the team that set up priorities at this point, and that it is contrary to what you are expected to do at the dev level (i.e. advancing your team projects first) The thing is, if a manager does not set goals for it's team, it will find some by itself (refactor that old code, clean the doc, improve that funky demo, test out the latest shiny equipment) that are not necessarily the best choice for the company. My experience has been that in that situation, very often, the team is relieved when it receives new instructions. It is not a "team or company" thing It is just an ordering of priority goals that makes sense to everybody.

deepGem 9y ago
Thank you for saying this. I just want to add how this becomes super hard in an early stage startup. People underestimate how hard it is to translate company goals to engaging team projects, when a startup is in a lot of flux. The goal post moves so much. It's super super hard to keep an eye on the goal post, translate that goal to the team, and a couple of weeks later tell the team that no the earlier tasks are no longer valid, here's a new set. Rinse repeat until you hit PMF.

mikekchar 9y ago

I think this is a red herring all the way. Before you think about this problem, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: "Why do we have managers"? Let's start a thought experiment. We'll start a company with one person. What will that person do? Manage? Of course not. There is nothing to manage, because there is only one person. Instead, although they have to plan and prioritise their work, if they aren't actually spending most of their time working, then nothing will get accomplished. What if we have 2 people? Should we make one person a manger and have the other person do the work? Of course not. The manager will have virtually nothing to do while the working person will be overwhelmed. Although you may shift some responsibilities depending on who likes to do what, or who has various skills, unless both people are working then you will have lots of problems. At what point do we need a manager? Well, we need a manager when the communication overhead and day-to-day chores impacts development. We only need that manager when there is enough work that they will be able to spend almost all of their day doing that work. So what will they do? Basically anything that is stopping the workers from getting their job done. If there is a problem with communication, then the manager needs to organise things so that everybody has the information they need. If there is a lack of prioritisation, then the manager needs to prioritise/plan the work. If there is conflict on the team, the manager must find ways to resolve the conflict. I'll stop here as there isn't much point enumerating all the things a manager must manage. The point is that everything a manager does is a result of coordinating large numbers of people or disparate information sources. Their job is to coordinate, prioritise, reduce conflict and communicate so that the workers can concentrate on getting their work done. The manager is there to "take one for the team" so that the team doesn't get embroiled in drama, trivia, or complications. Getting back to the original problem: "you'll need to put the company first, team second and your team members third". Sorry to be rude, but that's just naive. Your function is not, through force of your will, to make all the workers do what the company wants. Your job is to coordinate information and reduce conflict so that the members can be successful. Your job would not exist if you did not have team members or teams. And as impolite as this is, I can't finish without asking managers to contemplate the following: Is there more or less drama due to your actions? Are you demanding team members organise information for you, or are you organising information for the team members? Are you resolving conflict as it occurs, or are you creating conflicts in order to get your way? Do you ask your team to jump through hoops in order to solve a political problem, or do you jump through hoops to solve political problems for your team? As an engineering manager, you can not succeed if the team does not succeed. It is true that your team can succeed for short periods even if some team members do not succeed, but it is an unsustainable condition. If your team members are not successful, then you have failed. <- Notice the full stop.

chi18 9y ago

> Far too often I've seen the manager put the company way ahead of the team Hear! Hear! This completely, followed by managers being too lazy or being too ignorant and just never "getting it". After many years, I've come to the conclusion that: 1. I sucked as an engineering manager. 2. Most people suck as engineering managers. 3. The only thing that works is a flatter structure with really exceptional managers as actual engineering managers that do what's right and stand up for the team, with a set of people under them that don't actually have management authority, but they can organize things, stay on top of efforts, and communicate status to those that can. This works because really exceptional managers are extremely hard to find and are paid well, so if you try to do anything but this, you will hire bad managers.

Vinnl 9y ago

> When your team is performing, the company profits. F Not if it does so at the cost of another team.

gregdoesit 9y ago

Op here. I agree team morale is absolutely essential. At the same time, as a manager you should understand how your team adds value to the company - and if it doesn't, fix that. I write this from personal experience, having seen teams been disbanded who did a great job shipping... stuff that brought in zero value to the company. This is something I personally would want to avoid if possible, hence me putting "company first" as #1. Of course no two situations and companies are the same, so there might be cases when having a healthy team trumps doing what the company (thinks it) needs. For now I'm personally sticking to aligning all three where I can: have a great team building things that matter with satisfied members.

vonmoltke 9y ago
> I write this from personal experience, having seen teams been disbanded who did a great job shipping... stuff that brought in zero value to the company. How do you get to this point? I have never been on a team where someone further up the business wouldn't come up to us at some point and ask, "Uh, what is the business value of what you are doing?"
- lozenge 9y ago
  "We need this refactoring/migration to enable feature X"
chi18 9y ago
> have a great team building things that matter with satisfied members. Cherish this, and secretly examine every nuance of its ups-and-downs while you can. The basis of all of your future management efforts will be to get back to something similar to this point. Just remember, a manager is a well-organized servant leader who is ultimately never responsible for success.

laythea 9y ago

I don't think assigning a pecking order and then debating it is important because in my opinion, an Engineering Manager has the job of connecting the business to the engineers. For this to work he/she needs to engage both. What to do when "conflicts of interest" arise is the measure of an Engineering Manager and where the line is drawn is defined by the individual at a personal level.

wiz21c 9y ago

My motto is : if it succeeds then it's the team, if it fails then it's me. (now go figure why I'm burned out :-))

meddlepal 9y ago

Agreed. I'm going through the motions of a tranistion and the team is far more important than the company. If you focus on the company first you will lose the pulse of your team and if you lose the pulse of your team you're compromised in your ability to lead effectively especially when you inevitably need to debug your team.

wdr1 9y ago

The devil may be in the details. If your team is excited to build a service (say, for the technical challenge or the potential reputation gain) that objectively should be done by a different team (say, they have the right background, have already started, or whatever) -- do you put the teams interest first (and do it) or the company's (and don't). I've faced this situation a lot. I used to pick the former. If we have more impact, how can that be bad? Good for company & so on. It frequently did end up good for my team, but not always good for the company. Once I adopted the "good for company" mindset, I found I could often achieve what was good for both, but I did find value in putting the company first. To put another way: the local optimum is not always the global optimum. As a manager, you need to think about the global & favor that over the local. My two cents.