The power dynamic between managers and those they manage is the differentiator. Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
> Sure it's a spectrum but half of that spectrum (from average to god awful) have power over your career/work, to your detrement.
It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work.
If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.
If your manager is only adding a marginal value to your career it is time to have a conversation with them. A manager that isn't advocating for their team isn't a good manager at all. They're something else.
A manager can only add marginal value to your career. ONLY.
You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.
100% agree that they need to be advocating for you/your team, finding the right projects for you/your team, etc, etc. But at the end of the day your career is your responsibility, and it's only a fraction of your manager's responsibility.
I'm not sure I agree here, because the manager has the ability to impact all those other hours.
A good manager helps remove the hurdles that will make those 40+ hours immensely more productive. A bad manager adds to those hurdles, potentially whittling productive hours to nothing.
> You spend 40+ hours a week on you and your career. Your manager spends a small fraction of that directly on your career.
If your manager has little more leverage than you do, that's true. In many orgs, managers have considerably more leverage than their reports, and their help is mandatory to get some things (promotions, pay increase, access to conferences and trainings, changing teams, passing messages up the chain or laterally, support for escalation, etc).
The only trump card the report has is leaving, but they pay for that by losing all the social capital acquired at the current company.
I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing.
But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.
Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity.
> means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything
You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing.
> If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.
By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.
> By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.
Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.
im saying things based on my experience, but if yours is different and you see high quality and effective managers being created from engineers thats cool. can i send a resume over?
> managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support
This support im questioning. Its all on the job training. I went to business school, i actually have a business degree. I didn't leave that school feeling like i should manage or lead. The "training" is on the job, the people who teach are your small peer of manager peers and maybe some corporate style training. Corporate training has never been effective from what I have seen.
I don't agree. There is a good line in the book "Impro" about good and bad teachers. It says that we think of "good teachers" as providing a lot of some substance called "education" while "bad teachers" provide only a little. In fact bad teachers can and often do not only fail to provide education but actively make students less educated by, for instance, teaching wrong ideas, punishing arbitrarily, etc etc. The same is true of managers. They can easily drop below zero and start to have a negative impact on productivity and their employees.
This is very true. I've seen a single bad manager destroy an entire wing of an engineering organization in a couple of months. This person wasn't even a particularly mean or bad person, and had apparently been a successful middle manager for Pac Bell in their previous role. But they had no feel for the team they had taken over at all, and tried to impose a new structure all at once (basically boiled down to all of the senior devs were now technical project managers and wouldn't be coding). Everyone left within a couple of weeks.
I think this is the sign of inexperience/immaturity.
What you're describing is a universal aspect of life. From parents, to teachers, to managers all the way back to chieftains of prehistoric tribes there have been power differentials between people and the more competent person has not always been the more powerful.
And we're honing in on the pain point of that aspect of life. I'm not having a revelation here, I'm lamenting the fact with my peers on a site dedicated to technology/engineering.
It is always your responsibility to advocate for yourself, your career, and your work.
If you are an engineer you should view your manager as a marginal value add only. Some managers add more value to your career than others, for sure, but it's still marginal relative to the effect that YOU have on your career. If you find yourself on a team with a truly bad manager who is having a negative affect on your career, get out...but this is truly a rare occurrence in my experience.