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From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for." This is the kind

• zoeysmithe 10mo ago
  Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.' I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
• Forgeties79 10mo ago
  >Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate. One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.
  • eithed 10mo ago
    Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done. Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.
    • Forgeties79 10mo ago
      Yeah like I said if we are straying in to over-reliance/not really doing our job, he clearly lays out what to do and says "there go take care of it" a few times. He does a good job of not fostering a culture of constantly playing CYA
  • phil21 10mo ago
    I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.
  • rootnod3 10mo ago
    My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces. He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".
  • bena 10mo ago
    Reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote about on his blog. The best managers were those who "moved the furniture out the way". Basically clear the way for the people working on the problem to do so.
    • Forgeties79 10mo ago
      Like that metaphor
• dasil003 10mo ago
  That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos. All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.
  • brabel 10mo ago
    > All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, That's not being charitable, that's just having basic interpretation skills of the very next sentence of the article.
    • dasil003 10mo ago
      Huh? The next sentence is: "The difference lies in what to do once one has rendered oneself redundant."
• FuriouslyAdrift 10mo ago
  If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control. Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
  • exogenousdata 10mo ago
    This is a wonderful, succinct way of capturing this danger to businesses as they grow & jump the gap!
  • lowboy 10mo ago
    Being responsible for something while having little/no control is so demoralizing & infuriating.
    • stego-tech 10mo ago
      As someone once again in such a role, it really is, and it never gets easier.
    • nlawalker 10mo ago
      Ah yes, the need for "influence without authority", i.e. "the real challenge of this project is that you have been organizationally set up to fail, and we expect you to find a way to succeed in spite of that."
      • jghn 10mo ago
        This is what removed any lingering thoughts I had about moving up the corporate ladder. If in order to succeed I either need to do certain things or at least get other groups to do those things, and if I'm not allowed to do those things, and if no other group is willing to do those things, and if no one above me is going to change the circumstances, why on earth would anyone think this could be successful?
    • OsrsNeedsf2P 10mo ago
      Isn't this what a PM does
• nlawalker 10mo ago
  When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it. I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
  • psunavy03 10mo ago
    This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs. They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery. Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
    • BobaFloutist 10mo ago
      Also makes for a poor metaphor, because coaches in sports are supposed to be absolute experts in absolutely everything about the sport without the physical ability to implement it. Imagine if a football player told their coach "I'm not sure how to deal with this specific opponent's strategy" and the coach was like "Well have you tried thinking about it more?"
      • 10mo ago
• reactordev 10mo ago
  It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.
  • marcus_holmes 10mo ago
    Came here to say this. What he describes is not really servant leadership. Servant leadership is more or less just the concept that the leader's job is to make sure the team are working to their full capacity. This is in contrast to authoritarian leadership which says that the team's job is to do whatever the leader tells them to do. A lot of leaders have a problem with the "servant" in servant leadership, there's an ego hit in the title that doesn't sit well with people who have more authoritarian ideas about what leadership is. That doesn't seem to be the author's problem, though. The author's idea of transparent leadership seems centred around the idea that the team doesn't need a leader, in that the leader should be trying to make themselves redundant and should be training everyone else to be able to function without them. I agree that this is an absent manager. If they succeed in making themselves redundant, the team will have selected another, informal, leader. Possibly a dynamic set of leaders who each take up leadership in different circumstances. Humans just do this, it's how we work together. I think the author just doesn't want to be a leader at all, and would prefer it if they could go back to solving technical problems. This is perfectly valid. Management isn't for everyone. I suggest the author looks at Dyad Leadership [0] where the management role is split into two parts; one part provides the leadership role (setting the vision, coaching, quality, behaviours, etc) and the other provides the administration function (approving holidays, organising events, handling HR, etc). This is used in the healthcare industry a lot, and works in the right situation. It might work for the author because they're obviously providing leadership but don't seem keen about the management part.
• michaelcampbell 10mo ago
  > it starts with a straw man argument ... Perhaps they have, but there are also no shortage of middle managers that are adequately described by it. I worked for one for a few years.
• jf22 10mo ago
  One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises. The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress. My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss. I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations. Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth." Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.
  • parliament32 10mo ago
    There's a good chance he was an executive's nephew or some other protected class.
  • cj 10mo ago
    You're describing one end of an extreme. The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene. E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly. Obviously there are cases where it's appropriate for you and a coworker to address a problem directly with each other. And there are cases where it makes more sense for your boss to intervene. The problem is the culture at some jobs gravitate towards either end of the extreme. The ideal is somewhere in the middle. A good manager will find that balance.
    • jjk166 10mo ago
      > The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene. What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters. > E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly. The author should not be coming to you directly, going through the boss is the appropriate route. If the author's complaints were unreasonable, it should be the boss telling them that, not you. If your boss is coming to you, it means they feel the author's complaints are at least partially valid, and you should be hearing that from your boss, not the author. It's not necessarily a bad thing if people bypass the manager to settle things directly, so long as both parties are comfortable with that, but it's not a happy medium.
• SoftTalker 10mo ago
  For me the worst of this is organizations where employees have to write their own performance reviews. Eff that. You're the boss, you tell me how I'm doing. If there's one thing a manager should be accountable for it is the development and evaluation of the people the manager is responsible for.
  • xkcd-sucks 10mo ago
    No - Performance reviews are important legally, it's the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc. Also - If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter
    • TeMPOraL 10mo ago
      > Performance reviews are (...) the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc. Wait what? I never heard about this in nearly two decades of working. Is this jurisdiction specific or a general case? You'd think this would be no. 1 thing advice given to new joiners, or given by career couches, or given in all these threads where people ask how to deal with "Github history as proof of work" when you worked on proprietary code for years. > If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter That is a good point to keep in mind, I agree.
      • xkcd-sucks 9mo ago
        > Wait what? I never heard about this in nearly two decades of working. Is this jurisdiction specific or a general case? It was a surprise to me too!!! I heard this from my employment attorney in Massachusetts USA.
• venturecruelty 10mo ago
  Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.
• skeeter2020 10mo ago
  >> but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate. Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.
  • ryoshu 10mo ago
    The reward is helping people hone their craft and grow in their careers. Being a shit shield sucks, but the trade-off is worth it.
• moogleii 10mo ago
  It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it: "A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler." While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
  • CodeMage 10mo ago
    First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions. That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one. Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill. But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc. The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career. I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.
• Spooky23 10mo ago
  In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power. I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power. As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders. Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
• HWR_14 10mo ago
  The biggest issue in the post is "creates direct links between supply and demand". One of the more important things to do as a manager is sit in hours of meetings so your reports can get a fifteen minute synopsis about the decisions made. And represent your reports in those meetings.
• ddingus 10mo ago
  >solving all the other problems I(we) call that running interference, and it has always been an extremely high value activity. The people who see the benefit rarely complain. I myself have always recognized it as valuable.
• ericdykstra 10mo ago
  There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed. The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution. The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible. How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
• KurSix 10mo ago
  If everything gets labeled as empowerment, that's not transparent leadership, that's abdication
• ChuckMcM 10mo ago
  Very well said.