[binarytox1n]

I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly - It’s easy for technical people promoted to a people management role not to realize that their words now have a significantly greater affect on morale.

The author did a good job expanding on situations that are now not funny, but here’s another one that I see all the time:

Butts in seats. As a manager, anything you say about the clock, the vacancy ratio of an employees chair, anything about time management really is not a joke. It is making the employee feel as though the work they do is not valued and that you expect them to be meat decorations prettying up an office chair.

I used to think that when I was promoted I could still be “one of the guys” - and I try hard to get quality time with the team, joke around, etc - but over time it’s become clear that I can never escape the new context in which my words and actions are perceived.

I can no longer shit on bad code like I used to - I now need to discover how we ended up with the deficiency, plan to correct it, and assure the rest of the engineers that we do have high quality standards we need to live up to.

[groby_b]

Yep. And it only gets worse as your scope grows.

There comes a point where you'll say something like "Huh, that looks interesting, I wonder what would happen if X", just because you still have some engineering thinking left in you, and three weeks later you'll get word that somebody spun up a working group to investigate X.

If you ever wondered why manager emails to a large team always look super-formal? We've touched that particular live wire, and would rather not do that again.

[papito]

Hit and run management. Suggest to your engineers how to do things and then disengage, leaving them to follow your directive, while knowing that you are dead wrong.

Twitter had to scrap their entire rewrite that took one year, because the dev manager told the team HOW to do it, triggering a death march project.

Bottom line: if you don't trust the people who are down in the trenches to make technical decisions, be a manager at Chipotle. But probably goes for Chipotle as well.

[groby_b]

This is a beautiful illustration of the misunderstandings I mean. Nobody was talking about "making suggestions". This is typical engineering musings aloud. ("I wonder what would happen if...")

I've made it clear in the previous post that there's no intent to direct the team anywhere, and yet your ideas about management led you to interpret it as somehow ordering the team to do things. As not trusting them to make technical decisions. As triggering a death march project, for crying out loud. (fwiw, the project got stopped the moment I realized what had happened, with apologies on my part. We're not all monsters :)

I don't fault you for it. Your past experience shapes you, and heaven knows we have enough bad managers in this industry to trigger severe PTSD in many of us.

But that's the reason to word things extremely carefully, depending on audience. There's a good contingent of people who give management words a lot of weight, and so we need to be very cautious what we say when it affects a wide audience, especially if it includes people we haven't built deep trust with.

And while I don't know about Chipotle, I can confirm that all my managers in food places had a tendency to micromanage ;)

[JoshTriplett]

> There comes a point where you'll say something like "Huh, that looks interesting, I wonder what would happen if X", just because you still have some engineering thinking left in you, and three weeks later you'll get word that somebody spun up a working group to investigate X.

This is somewhat avoidable. You can communicate this to your team. You can make it clear you invite feedback and corrections, and demonstrating that in practice by responding well when people take you up on that. You can ask questions in a way that invites answers. You can make your relative level of expertise clear in an area when you ask questions.

And on the occasions when this still happens, sometimes it'll be because your musings sparked an idea in someone, and they thought it was a good idea to investigate X.

[groby_b]

Yes, you can avoid this to some extent. But as team size grows, the scope for misunderstanding grows. And so your communication has to become as clear as you can possibly make it.

Which means musings, mumblings, funny remarks, sarcasm, and snarkiness are right out. All of those require shared context, and the bigger the audience, the less shared context there is.

[ryandrake]

I worked in a place once where, when you met with any of the senior execs, you had to have 2-3 notetakers present, so that every word the guy said could be jotted down and turned into actions. Everything that came out of an exec's mouth had to be turned into a project, because nobody was willing to stick their neck out and try to distinguish between "random musings" and a "command to do this thing". It was a very toxic environment. It was kind of like those guys always following Kim Jong Il around with notepads recording everything Dear Leader says.

[camjohnson26]

Reminds me of the sticky bear sketch from Silicon Valley https://youtu.be/uAxAVusStCg

[pyb]

That's because some managers do express their instructions like this, by dropping "hints".

[justin_oaks]

Not quite the same thing, but this reminds me of my last boss who would send me what seemed to be a random comment about our infrastructure or code. Or maybe he would send an article about something that happened at another company.

I had to guess at what he meant by it. Did he think I didn't already know about what he sent? Did he want me to take a specific action about the situation?

It was super annoying, and of course I usually had to ask point-blank: "Did you want me to take a specific action about XYZ?"

Heaven forbid he actually ask me "Can you do XYZ?" or "Do you think XYZ would be helpful in our organization?"

[amznthrowaway5]

> you'll get word that somebody spun up a working group to investigate X

That "somebody" is often one of the yes-men of the manager, these are the types of people that management usually rewards so of course they are going to take your suggestion as gospel. Upper management often does not appreciate when you point out they have no idea what they are talking about, even if you try and be polite about it.