[mynameisslim]

I would like to see the other perspective, why it is good to micromanage.

I’m a non tech founder And I outsource my teach overseas. I don’t trust my team.

I really feel over billed (I pay US prices (over six figures per year per programmer) even though this team is in South America) and they have failed over years to really provide a quality service. Not only that but they over bill me and I frequently catch it. Why don’t I switch forms - well, I’m scared I’ll have a worse experience with another firm, that I’d have to share the code base with someone else, and it would take another team a long time to learn the code.

So, I micromanage my billing, which sucks. Then I also micromanage the team - the design, the dev progress, etc. Why I do this is they don’t get it. I tell them to organize projects better and they don’t. I tell them how customers are interacting with the software and why we’re building new features and design doesn’t get it. I get software and it’s full of bugs which I have to personally test and the dev team says we should just launch.

I’m not going into super details here, but I’m on burnout constantly trying to deal with these people. If I were to let them just do their thing, my project would have failed long algo.

When you hve a vision, micro manage. If you’re at some firm where you are struggling to spend your overly massive budget every cycle, dont micro manage.

Big difference in big companies and small ones. If you’re not micro managing as a small startup, you will fail.

Ever seen a real rich person outsource to another firm, share their idea, and let the firm create everything in their own - that’s a bit fail waiting to happen. And the dev firm knows it and is happy to take as much money from you as possible.

[bawolff]

> Why don’t I switch forms - well, I’m scared I’ll have a worse experience with another firm, that I’d have to share the code base with someone else, and it would take another team a long time to learn the code.

Well that seems to be your first problem. If someone isn't doing their job, and they don't get better after having a talk about their performance, you find someone else. Watching their every move is not a viable solution.

It sounds a bit like you're not setting clear/reasonable acceptance criteria, and as a result are not getting what you want.

> Ever seen a real rich person outsource to another firm, share their idea, and let the firm create everything in their own - that’s a bit fail waiting to happen. And the dev firm knows it and is happy to take as much money from you as possible.

Yeah, and they probably deserve every penny. People who want something very specific, but don't really know what it is and can't explain it, are miserable to deal with. Running a business is a skill, it takes more than just an idea + $$$$

[stefanmichael]

"I’m a non tech founder And I outsource my teach overseas. I don’t trust my team."

This is the least surprising sequence of sentences you could have possibly come up with.

"If you’re not micro managing as a small startup, you will fail."

This is patently, provably, and demonstrably false.

[yowlingcat]

> they have failed over years to really provide a quality service. Not only that but they over bill me and I frequently catch it. Why don’t I switch forms - well, I’m scared I’ll have a worse experience with another firm

You could be making the classic mistake of throwing good money after bad money. If you try a new firm, you still have a chance of things going wrong. But if things are going wrong with your existing firm and you can't pinpoint/address the root cause, you can be a lot more certain things won't change.

> Big difference in big companies and small ones. If you’re not micro managing as a small startup, you will fail.

Success is a better teacher than failure, so are you sure you should be speculating about what kinds of management styles succeed or fail when by your own admission, your micro-management leaves you burnt out and without results? Based on my experience, it's almost always the case that startups only succeed in scaling by avoiding it. It has to do with delegation.

Micro-managing is tacit acceptance of an inability to delegate. A team which fails to master delegation will fail to scale past the team lead's individual communication bandwidth capacity. That happens really quickly if you hit hypergrowth. You basically guarantee failure in a way that will make it really difficult for you to learn how to run a team any more effectively.

It looks like that's your experience. Could you consider the possibility that an alternate approach could get you mileage? Why not find a trusted advisor to help you select a better firm? Perhaps you might have difficulty selecting a good firm, but it's possible that someone you know who has more experience with software could help you. After all, by your admission, you spend a lot of money on this purchase. Why not experiment with different approaches and see if you can get more ROI out of it?

I'd bet money that if you found a good engineering leader and delegated delivery to them, you'd save money, time and headaches. Of course, you'd need to be willing to take the risk to invest in that, which is something you could fail at. But running a business these days is all about figuring out how to take risks successfully and improve your ability to do so.

[k__]

The problem I saw with startups that had technical problems were always related to founder having no insight to the technology that was used. I even saw very technical founders fail, who just happened to have skills in a different technology than their team.

Such people try to get away with this by micromanaging because they panic, but that's usually no solution.

That said, it can work if the non-technical founder is lucky and just happens to get a good team, but they have no way to evaluate the required skills themselves.

[nicoburns]

It sounds more like a cautionary tale against outsourcing your tech to me. If you had an internal team you could trust then you wouldn't need to micromanage and you could focus on running your business.

[holoduke]

I am usually not directly accusing people here on HN. But this post of yours makes you the exact manager not a single employee in world would prefer. And therefor noone will be ever motivated for his or her job. Your style leads to a guaranteed failure of any startup.

[lgas]

Micromanaging is not the only way to get from results you don't like to results you do. I don't claim to be the world's best manager or anything but the approach that I have been successful with is that I try to be very clear about the results I expect (and why) and then when the results I receive don't match what I expected I communicate about the delta in results (the what as opposed to the how) and try again.

Using this approach can be a little slow in the beginning or when adding new team members, etc. but over time you and your people come to understand how to communicate with each other and trust each other and the team will be happier and more productive because they are given the space to work the way they find most effective and enjoyable.

People that are micromanaged are almost universally miserable and it's hard to reach the highest levels of productivity with a miserable team. At least (in my 25 years in business) I've never seen anyone do it.

[redis_mlc]

Outsourcing software development is very difficult to do successfully.

Some things to keep in mind:

1) Having a project manager on-site that works directly for you helps.

2) Keeping the productive team members and not renewing the rest works well.

3) Outsourcing items with a past history of success and keeping other items that failed on-shore can work too. For example, I outsource web design and QA, but keep development local.

4) Dumbing down items to match abilities helps. (One PM I know told some members writing bad code to do Stackoverflow research for the project instead.)

5) Beware of common outsourcing games.

[andrekandre]

another thing about outsourcing is, if its not in the spec, it literally wont get done

i was once on a project where an app didnt even have images that were the correct (not even proportional) size becuase "sqaure images" werent mentioned in the spec!