6 ms·

Learning to be managed

98 points by zemike 3y ago

zemike 3y ago
Hi HN, First time sharing anything I have written. Lately I have been wondering about how to be managed properly. I feel like I have not gotten what I wanted out of my career. This is my attempt at learning more about the subject, and sharing with people that are going through a similar struggle. Hope that it is useful. :)
- ffsm8 3y ago
  I think you're mistakenly equating mentoring with managing. A manger inherently isn't your friend nor on your side, a mentor is. It's straight up in the name: the goal of a manager is to remove your individuality from the perspective of the person above the manager. The manager is essentially an abstraction layer if you're looking at it from a software development perspective, so the caller doesn't need to worry about the implementation details. Your manager can also be your mentor, but the manager can't mentor everyone they're managing. That's just impossible from a time perspective
barrenko 3y ago
Thanks, we need more articles like these.
tra3 3y ago
That's an interesting post, especially in the context of being promoted. After being in the industry for many years, I'm just now becoming aware of this stuff, particularly as it relates to the promotion culture and "making impact". Google is famously known for shipping, but not maintaining. "Managing up" is a useful concept for how to interact with your managers. Post from a few years back that has useful sources: Design Patterns for managing up [0]. Hand in hand goes this Australian Gov't work book for Assertiveness: > Assertiveness means expressing your point of view in a way that is clear and direct, while still respecting others. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 1: https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself/Assertiveness https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-You...
- zemike 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing these sources with me! I will have a look. I would not say I am trying to "manage up", but I am definitely trying to be a lot more active in my growth process. In the past I kept waiting for things to happen, and thought my manager would have all the answers. Now, I want to be an active part of that conversation and find the right path.
  - spangry 3y ago
    This is a very good thing to do. Managers have to split their attention multiple ways across multiple people and so they end up neglecting you by default. They're also time poor. You will actually be helping them if you can package up "asks" in a way so that all they have to do is hit reply on an email, type "approved" and hit send. There's often an asymmetry between the value you get vs. the cost to your manager which you can exploit. For example, where I work they provide financial support for certain forms of further study (e.g. master's degree) in certain domains. If one of my direct reports sent me an email explaining they want to study X and the policy covers them studying X, here are the details etc. etc. I will say "approved" pretty much every time. The money doesn't come out of my budget anyway, so it's free additional remuneration frommy perspective. Heck, even when it is my budget I often don't care because it's not personally coming out of my own pocket, and we lose that money anyway once the next financial year ticks over, so better to spend it while we can. But if they just sit there quietly hoping that I'll one day come to them with an offer for them to do further studies in X, they're going to be waiting forever. I want to give my team members stuff but I've got 50 billion other things to content with so I don't have the time to plan their career for them. The worst are the people who think I'm their mother and they come to me with "I want this thing, now you go figure out how to do it for me." The thing is, I'm lazy: I like to do easy things, and I don't like to do hard things. And that request sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Easier to just say no. So remember: (1) If you don't ask you don't get, (2) It's almost never my money anyway, and (3) If you make it easy for me to say "yes", I almost certainly will.
Aurornis 3y ago
Great managers will feel natural to work with. You won't have to learn how to work with them because they'll meet you as a person and guide you toward succeeding in your role as needed. Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful. My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to learn what books and other resources they used to teach themselves management, then study what those books portray as the ideal employee. Your job is now to play the role of that ideal employee and set the stage for the manager to feel like the ideal manager. It takes a bit of restraint and the performance can feel fake at times, but as long as you play the role they want to see and you make it easy for them to play the role they think they should play, you're going to do well in their eyes. At minimum, I suggest every employee read a couple books like the Manager's Path book linked in the article so it's easier to identify when weak managers are trying to implement things they read from a book. It's like a cheat code to navigating managers who outsource their thinking to books and try to reduce every situation to something they read or heard a podcast about. In my last case, my manager read a book about all about how managers shouldn't solve problems for their employees, they should only give coaching for employees to solve their own problems. He went full cargo cult on that advice and literally stopped helping us get things done within the company. His only response to any issues we raised would be a long string of leading questions and coaching, but he refused to actually do anything. I fought this for a long time until he mentioned the name of the book, I read it, and I realized that I had to start making him think that he was coaching me to a solution whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job. It took some mental gymnastics, but after I unlocked his secret I became good at navigating around him to get things done.
- onthecanposting 3y ago
  I really admire those with the ability to conform themselves to a work place to be successful. I've always been candid, and I am occasionally at odds with management when polite lies are expected. Those I've managed appreciate the sincerity, but I would hardly describe my career as successful.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Genius idea, though I feel like you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. Like, I've been criticised by people for editing "their" code without talking to them first (in a shared project that we're all working on). My boss's ideal solution is for me to kowtow to their egos so he doesn't have to deal with it. No thank you. You go and tell them to stop being possessive of code that they don't own; they just happened to write. It's not my job to deal with their issues.
tomcar288 3y ago
the management techniques mentioned in the article are all valid but i'm going to play devils advocate here and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure, rather the goal was not realistic. Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform really well and it won't get you anything. and sometimes you can perform mediocre and still get lots of promotions and bonuses. and why do you really want to get a promotion? if you just want more money, the most effective way to achieve that is to look for another job. doing that, you'll get far larger raises far more quickly.
- mettamage 3y ago
  I did my best at not being promoted. Promotion equals change. I really liked my salary and remote position. Any extra responsibility would require me to do more work. Sure, I'd get paid more but the stress would outweigh the pay. If you're ever down with not getting a promotion, just know that there are ways to think about it that might be constructive.
  - frakt0x90 3y ago
    This is where I am. I'm remote senior level and got offered principal but 3 days in office which would mean moving cities and WAY more pressure in a department that's had issues. Probably a 50k raise but I'm doing fine as is. I'll keep my sanity.
  - zigman1 3y ago
    Cool, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of conversation.
    - mettamage 3y ago
      > and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure I thought it was because of this part. I gave another view of how not getting a promotion would not necessarily be a failure.
Havoc 3y ago
These are good high level points, but personally I found the key one to be much more low level. An employee saying I'm not following what you want me to do. Sure sometimes an individual is just dumb as rocks, but when I hear anything along those lines my working assumption is that I as manager fundamentally fucked up. Things should fail at execution stage, not at me giving instructions stage. ...employees that just nod and walk away confused on the other hand...that's my textbook definition of failing to "Learning to be managed" because it fundamentally robs me as manager of the opportunity to fix an imminent trainwreck.
alphazard 3y ago
This is a little too rose tinted for my tastes. In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. In a large company, management is essential to the adversarial system. Workers can and should take advantage of the company's inability to tell who is contributing. Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output. The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things. Promotions, raises, growth, performance reviews etc. is all a psyop to get you to stay for longer and do more work. It's about what you can negotiate, what that promotion would signal to your peers, how much of a flight risk you are. It's never to incentivize good choices concerning how to hone your craft, get rich, or do work you consider meaningful.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. +1 > Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output. I had friends whose company went from "high-performing small" to "large", and the way they described the transition was "we thought adding management was going to be like adding an internal skeleton, a structure that'd help get all the functional parts of the company pulling in the same direction. Instead it turned out to be like an exoskeleton, a carapace that served mostly to constrain and put hard limits on the functional parts of the company."
  - szundi 3y ago
    Like flowing into all direction would be good?
    - 3y ago
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
If you want to be promoted, every single thing you discuss with your manager should center around that goal. Any conversations about things going well, feedback, etc should always be framed as "am I getting closer to Senior?". You really need to understand what the delta between where you currently are and where you are aiming for looks like, and make everything about closing that gap. Many people do not even pass step 1, which is defining the delta with your manager. This can actually be fairly difficult, because it requires your manager to both understand your current level and have a strong understanding of what Senior looks like so they can explain the areas where you are lacking. Once you have a delta you need to figure out what success looks like. If I'm currently bad at X, what does being good at X look like? Ideally you should be able to demonstrate and discuss progress between every 1:1. If you can't, your feedback loops are probably too short and it will take you a long time to improve. I think SMART goals largely don't fit with skill growth, because operating at the next level is about learning new behaviours. They tend to be highly contextual, not specific. They do not tend to be measurable. They do not tend to be things that you can set timelines for, like "I will operate like X in 1mo". It's a holistic change in the way you function. Level matrices are extremely poor representations of the behaviours for each level. They tend to describe the outcomes of the behaviours, rather than the behaviours themselves. Also, the reason this takes time is exactly because it's about learning new behaviours not following a checklist of things that Seniors do. You need time to make them habitual and build the intuition associated with them.
- voiceblue 3y ago
  If you want to be promoted, find a manager who has a track record of getting people promoted and transfer to them, then do the above. Many managers (and to be fair, environments and factors outside of their control) are awful in ways that boggle the mind, and no (sane) amount of effort will help you in that case. The other method is to quit, if you are actually better than your level but your company fails to acknowledge it for whatever reason.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  I don’t think that proper leveling can really be broken down in this way. It is more of an ape brain reputation score within the group. I think when managers are made to outline a concrete path to the next level, a gradual level inflation may occur at the company. This is because a manager is never going to say “I don’t know” when you ask them this, even if they don’t know, and then they are forced to advocate for you to promo after you satisfy whatever they told you. If they don’t advocate for you at that point, they end up looking like a terrible manager to you and anyone else you tell your true story to (including their own manager). If the level inflation is not identified and accounted for, this can lead to a company collapsing via inept leadership from bad internal promotions.

98 points by zemike 3y ago

Hi HN, First time sharing anything I have written. Lately I have been wondering about how to be managed properly. I feel like I have not gotten what I wanted out of my career. This is my attempt at learning more about the subject, and sharing with people that are going through a similar struggle. Hope that it is useful. :)

ffsm8 3y ago
I think you're mistakenly equating mentoring with managing. A manger inherently isn't your friend nor on your side, a mentor is. It's straight up in the name: the goal of a manager is to remove your individuality from the perspective of the person above the manager. The manager is essentially an abstraction layer if you're looking at it from a software development perspective, so the caller doesn't need to worry about the implementation details. Your manager can also be your mentor, but the manager can't mentor everyone they're managing. That's just impossible from a time perspective

barrenko 3y ago

Thanks, we need more articles like these.

tra3 3y ago

That's an interesting post, especially in the context of being promoted. After being in the industry for many years, I'm just now becoming aware of this stuff, particularly as it relates to the promotion culture and "making impact". Google is famously known for shipping, but not maintaining. "Managing up" is a useful concept for how to interact with your managers. Post from a few years back that has useful sources: Design Patterns for managing up [0]. Hand in hand goes this Australian Gov't work book for Assertiveness: > Assertiveness means expressing your point of view in a way that is clear and direct, while still respecting others. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988939 1: https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself/Assertiveness https://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-You...

zemike 3y ago
Thank you for sharing these sources with me! I will have a look. I would not say I am trying to "manage up", but I am definitely trying to be a lot more active in my growth process. In the past I kept waiting for things to happen, and thought my manager would have all the answers. Now, I want to be an active part of that conversation and find the right path.
- spangry 3y ago
  This is a very good thing to do. Managers have to split their attention multiple ways across multiple people and so they end up neglecting you by default. They're also time poor. You will actually be helping them if you can package up "asks" in a way so that all they have to do is hit reply on an email, type "approved" and hit send. There's often an asymmetry between the value you get vs. the cost to your manager which you can exploit. For example, where I work they provide financial support for certain forms of further study (e.g. master's degree) in certain domains. If one of my direct reports sent me an email explaining they want to study X and the policy covers them studying X, here are the details etc. etc. I will say "approved" pretty much every time. The money doesn't come out of my budget anyway, so it's free additional remuneration frommy perspective. Heck, even when it is my budget I often don't care because it's not personally coming out of my own pocket, and we lose that money anyway once the next financial year ticks over, so better to spend it while we can. But if they just sit there quietly hoping that I'll one day come to them with an offer for them to do further studies in X, they're going to be waiting forever. I want to give my team members stuff but I've got 50 billion other things to content with so I don't have the time to plan their career for them. The worst are the people who think I'm their mother and they come to me with "I want this thing, now you go figure out how to do it for me." The thing is, I'm lazy: I like to do easy things, and I don't like to do hard things. And that request sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Easier to just say no. So remember: (1) If you don't ask you don't get, (2) It's almost never my money anyway, and (3) If you make it easy for me to say "yes", I almost certainly will.

Aurornis 3y ago

Great managers will feel natural to work with. You won't have to learn how to work with them because they'll meet you as a person and guide you toward succeeding in your role as needed. Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful. My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to learn what books and other resources they used to teach themselves management, then study what those books portray as the ideal employee. Your job is now to play the role of that ideal employee and set the stage for the manager to feel like the ideal manager. It takes a bit of restraint and the performance can feel fake at times, but as long as you play the role they want to see and you make it easy for them to play the role they think they should play, you're going to do well in their eyes. At minimum, I suggest every employee read a couple books like the Manager's Path book linked in the article so it's easier to identify when weak managers are trying to implement things they read from a book. It's like a cheat code to navigating managers who outsource their thinking to books and try to reduce every situation to something they read or heard a podcast about. In my last case, my manager read a book about all about how managers shouldn't solve problems for their employees, they should only give coaching for employees to solve their own problems. He went full cargo cult on that advice and literally stopped helping us get things done within the company. His only response to any issues we raised would be a long string of leading questions and coaching, but he refused to actually do anything. I fought this for a long time until he mentioned the name of the book, I read it, and I realized that I had to start making him think that he was coaching me to a solution whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job. It took some mental gymnastics, but after I unlocked his secret I became good at navigating around him to get things done.

onthecanposting 3y ago
I really admire those with the ability to conform themselves to a work place to be successful. I've always been candid, and I am occasionally at odds with management when polite lies are expected. Those I've managed appreciate the sincerity, but I would hardly describe my career as successful.
IshKebab 3y ago
Genius idea, though I feel like you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. Like, I've been criticised by people for editing "their" code without talking to them first (in a shared project that we're all working on). My boss's ideal solution is for me to kowtow to their egos so he doesn't have to deal with it. No thank you. You go and tell them to stop being possessive of code that they don't own; they just happened to write. It's not my job to deal with their issues.

tomcar288 3y ago

the management techniques mentioned in the article are all valid but i'm going to play devils advocate here and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure, rather the goal was not realistic. Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform really well and it won't get you anything. and sometimes you can perform mediocre and still get lots of promotions and bonuses. and why do you really want to get a promotion? if you just want more money, the most effective way to achieve that is to look for another job. doing that, you'll get far larger raises far more quickly.

mettamage 3y ago
I did my best at not being promoted. Promotion equals change. I really liked my salary and remote position. Any extra responsibility would require me to do more work. Sure, I'd get paid more but the stress would outweigh the pay. If you're ever down with not getting a promotion, just know that there are ways to think about it that might be constructive.
- frakt0x90 3y ago
  This is where I am. I'm remote senior level and got offered principal but 3 days in office which would mean moving cities and WAY more pressure in a department that's had issues. Probably a 50k raise but I'm doing fine as is. I'll keep my sanity.
- zigman1 3y ago
  Cool, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of conversation.
  - mettamage 3y ago
    > and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure I thought it was because of this part. I gave another view of how not getting a promotion would not necessarily be a failure.

Havoc 3y ago

These are good high level points, but personally I found the key one to be much more low level. An employee saying I'm not following what you want me to do. Sure sometimes an individual is just dumb as rocks, but when I hear anything along those lines my working assumption is that I as manager fundamentally fucked up. Things should fail at execution stage, not at me giving instructions stage. ...employees that just nod and walk away confused on the other hand...that's my textbook definition of failing to "Learning to be managed" because it fundamentally robs me as manager of the opportunity to fix an imminent trainwreck.

alphazard 3y ago

This is a little too rose tinted for my tastes. In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. In a large company, management is essential to the adversarial system. Workers can and should take advantage of the company's inability to tell who is contributing. Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output. The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things. Promotions, raises, growth, performance reviews etc. is all a psyop to get you to stay for longer and do more work. It's about what you can negotiate, what that promotion would signal to your peers, how much of a flight risk you are. It's never to incentivize good choices concerning how to hone your craft, get rich, or do work you consider meaningful.

082349872349872 3y ago
> If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. +1 > Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output. I had friends whose company went from "high-performing small" to "large", and the way they described the transition was "we thought adding management was going to be like adding an internal skeleton, a structure that'd help get all the functional parts of the company pulling in the same direction. Instead it turned out to be like an exoskeleton, a carapace that served mostly to constrain and put hard limits on the functional parts of the company."
- szundi 3y ago
  Like flowing into all direction would be good?
  - 3y ago

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

If you want to be promoted, every single thing you discuss with your manager should center around that goal. Any conversations about things going well, feedback, etc should always be framed as "am I getting closer to Senior?". You really need to understand what the delta between where you currently are and where you are aiming for looks like, and make everything about closing that gap. Many people do not even pass step 1, which is defining the delta with your manager. This can actually be fairly difficult, because it requires your manager to both understand your current level and have a strong understanding of what Senior looks like so they can explain the areas where you are lacking. Once you have a delta you need to figure out what success looks like. If I'm currently bad at X, what does being good at X look like? Ideally you should be able to demonstrate and discuss progress between every 1:1. If you can't, your feedback loops are probably too short and it will take you a long time to improve. I think SMART goals largely don't fit with skill growth, because operating at the next level is about learning new behaviours. They tend to be highly contextual, not specific. They do not tend to be measurable. They do not tend to be things that you can set timelines for, like "I will operate like X in 1mo". It's a holistic change in the way you function. Level matrices are extremely poor representations of the behaviours for each level. They tend to describe the outcomes of the behaviours, rather than the behaviours themselves. Also, the reason this takes time is exactly because it's about learning new behaviours not following a checklist of things that Seniors do. You need time to make them habitual and build the intuition associated with them.

voiceblue 3y ago
If you want to be promoted, find a manager who has a track record of getting people promoted and transfer to them, then do the above. Many managers (and to be fair, environments and factors outside of their control) are awful in ways that boggle the mind, and no (sane) amount of effort will help you in that case. The other method is to quit, if you are actually better than your level but your company fails to acknowledge it for whatever reason.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
I don’t think that proper leveling can really be broken down in this way. It is more of an ape brain reputation score within the group. I think when managers are made to outline a concrete path to the next level, a gradual level inflation may occur at the company. This is because a manager is never going to say “I don’t know” when you ask them this, even if they don’t know, and then they are forced to advocate for you to promo after you satisfy whatever they told you. If they don’t advocate for you at that point, they end up looking like a terrible manager to you and anyone else you tell your true story to (including their own manager). If the level inflation is not identified and accounted for, this can lead to a company collapsing via inept leadership from bad internal promotions.