[bl4ckm0r3]

I have been a swe for most of my life then transitioned into a manager (corporate and small/mid startups) for a while and am a director now (scaleup unicorn). The politics is something that always bothers me, the higher you get in the ladder, the more people are obsessed by "just following the process", and there's always so many inefficient processes that are applied in environments that definitely do not require such overkill, but make people feel like they are "doing the right thing" by following as many processes as possible - if you follow the rules you don't have to think. Hours and hours of group meetings (that definitely could have been a slack message, with better outcomes), so many reports no one read, different and often incompatible styles of management, a complete switch from trust-and-ownership to micromanagement from upper management. But the thing that always bothered me the most is being in the middle between the people you care about (your team) and the people that tell you to do things because they can't be bothered actually doing them (upper management).

I still miss those days where I could put my headphones on and code, solve real problems with my team, ideate and create and focus on the user, not on "making the machine run".

[dasil003]

> the higher you get in the ladder, the more people are obsessed by "just following the process"

This is definitely not universally true, and it's a red flag if you're hearing it a lot. The tricky part is understanding whether it is subtle feedback from skilled leaders (I can think of a half dozen reasons why this feedback might legitimately be given), or whether you are dealing with muppet leadership who are leaning on a rote processes to mask their own incompetence. The truth is generally somewhere in between, and very hard to ascertain with a good amount of diverse experience and enough time working with the individuals in question to understand their strengths, weaknesses and styles.

> But the thing that always bothered me the most is being in the middle between the people you care about (your team) and the people that tell you to do things because they can't be bothered actually doing them (upper management).

This comment is a sign of immaturity. The point of a hierarchical organization is to be able to maintain some direction while scaling the workforce. Every manager needs to make a decision on how to best spend their time, and delegation is a critical piece of that. Obviously you can and will have differences with your boss from time to time, but fundamentally if you don't have some general faith in leadership above you that their reasons are good, then you're going to be in a rough spot. The belief that you serve your team while leadership is a nuisance to be tolerated and worked around is a toxic mentality. Your job is to create harmony between those perspectives, so the right information is flowing both up and down, and you can't do that if you don't understand where leadership is coming from.

[bl4ckm0r3]

> This is definitely not universally true, and it's a red flag if you're hearing it a lot.

not hearing it, seeing it. people don't really have time, will to change processes. In private settings they comment and complain about the inefficiencies, but no one spend time rethinking how things are done. (this is literally what pushed me to go higher in the ladder, so i could change that attitude and environment)

> This comment is a sign of immaturity

thanks for the free judgment.

> Every manager needs to make a decision on how to best spend their time, and delegation is a critical piece of that.

I am not saying i want to code, and I am not saying I am the saviour of the team. I am saying having to deal with things like your manager asking you to force your team to come to work becase he wants to see the office alive, but not bothering to take the responsibility on the decision. I have had colleagues (managers) taking every day note on who would go in the office and who wouldn't (precovid).

[dasil003]

> I am saying having to deal with things like your manager asking you to force your team to come to work becase he wants to see the office alive, but not bothering to take the responsibility on the decision.

Moving up the ladder means dealing with requests that may be ill informed from a ground-level perspective, your job as a manager is to reconcile those things. It's impossible to make an accurate read on the situation based on what you're posting here. On one hand, maybe your boss is incompetent and not doing his job, on the other hand maybe he's making a reasonable ask and it's you that's failing to see the big picture and how to navigate the situation. Either way, you should be getting on the same page privately. Make your case 1:1, but if you're not able to influence then you have to disagree and commit.

What doesn't help is to air your dirty laundry publicly—either within the team or anonymously in a public forum like HN. It might feel good to vent in the moment, but it doesn't help morale of the team, and ultimately it does not help improve the situation so the team can do their best work.

[bl4ckm0r3]

I did not say where I work or who these people are, I am not publicly airing anything, it's an example I gave to explain the problems people may face "moving up the ladder" which are much more complex to deal with as the personal opinions and management style are much less comparable in short term, compared to coding, and end up easily becoming a religious war (just like this conversation) and obviously the team is shielded and not aware of these discussions, but it sucks to be in that room and having to commit on doing things that go against your beliefs around culture and how to manage people. At the same time some people are cut for the corporate mindset and easily align or deal with these type of situation with a more detached approach, I am glad you handle this better than me. I still care about my values :)

[dasil003]

This is not a religious issue for me, as I stated I don't have the information to judge the situation, my goal was just to reflect how your initial message struck me as someone who has been in software engineering for 25 year and seen a lot of failure modes from all levels of leadership, management and ICs. Feel free to take it or leave it.

[bl4ckm0r3]

It's less than 25 years (about 15) but very intense, and yeah I have had the luck to work in very different environments, countries and type of companies and I have seen amazing leaders and ICs and pretty average middle managers (the "average" part has nothing to do with personal performance, but average processes win over great individuals every time). I wanted to highlight that the higher you get in the ladder, the more the processes get you and suppress the individual qualities (good or bad). Sorry if my answer came out a bit negative, I am just saying that as an IC you are not exposed to these type of problems (as a matter of fact I have never experienced these types of problems as an IC). thanks for sharing your opinions!

[abtinf]

"With the storehouse of skills and knowledge contained in its millions of unemployed, and with the even more appalling underuse, misuse, and abuse of skills and knowledge in the army of employed people in all ranks in all industries, the United States may be today the most underdeveloped nation in the world." - W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

[opportune]

Has that happened at all your workplaces and from manager to director? This sounds almost identical to how an IC would experience a bad manager. It just sounds like you have or have had bad managers yourself.

I’m but a lowly leaf node in the corporate hierarchy ATM but I’m curious about the “do things because they can’t be bothered actually doing them” - isn’t delegation down the tree like the entire point of being a manager? If you could elaborate I’d be quite interested

[bl4ckm0r3]

Every workplace, 5 different companies. Definitely the bad manager part happened, but it's very common and it's easier to name managers/companies/projects/teams that don't have this environment than the opposite!

[blackshaw]

Isn't "scaleup unicorn" a contradiction?

[bl4ckm0r3]

why?