[ZephyrBlu]

> The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things

Have you ever had a good manager?

Assuming equally competent people, feedback from a senior peer is likely to not be as good as someone who's full-time job is to be a people manager. Good managers are very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of people in the team. Senior peers do not have to be aware of this and as a result, don't tend to be able to articulate these kind of things. They may be able to give good task-specific feedback, but holistic and personal feedback is difficult.

The median senior is just as poor at giving feedback as the median manager, and management in large companies isn't inherently adversarial. It's very environment dependent.

[alphazard]

> Have you ever had a good manager?

Yes, I have had managers that I consider to be good. But my definition of good is closer to "the person responsible for hiring and firing me, but otherwise leaves me alone" than the definition provided in the OP.

I have had managers who match the definition of good provided. It's clear these guys had read too many books and listened to too much Tony Robins. Being a dummy for their management-fu is draining, and every interaction gives NPC vibes.

The former got literally 10x more out of me than the later.

There is this bad meme going around that because managers are often technically incompetent, they must make up for it in some other way. There's no law of nature that says that must be the case. You can be lacking in many skills, and slip through the hiring process and into a manager role.

> The median senior is just as poor at giving feedback as the median manager

I didn't say feedback, I said advice. The advice I'm looking for might be how to understand a technology or technique, or how to negotiate a raise. Why would I seek either from someone technically incompetent who has to negotiate against me?

[ZephyrBlu]

The way you describe managers makes it abundantly clear you have never worked with one that is good, or great [0]. It seems like you think they are actively harmful.

> There is this bad meme going around that because managers are often technically incompetent, they must make up for it in some other way. There's no law of nature that says that must be the case. You can be lacking in many skills, and slip through the hiring process and into a manager role.

I'm not sure why you are so focused on people who are clearly terrible. If they're technically incompetent, managerially incompetent and "slipping through" the hiring process they are obviously not good.

My managers have all been technically competent and brought enormous amounts of value to their teams. Providing structure, facilitating the creation of team processes and rituals, correctly dosing chaos and scope for each team member, shielding the team's focus, etc. They also all encouraged me to look around for other jobs and see what I am worth.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/you-havent-seen-greatness/

[alphazard]

I'm familiar with the ideas in that article (more in the context of Product Management though). You seem to be focused on proving that great people exist, which is obviously true.

I'm more concerned with the average case because that reflects how an organization should be structured. It doesn't matter if there is theoretically a great manager out there, what matters is the distribution seen at the bottom of the hiring funnel.

This is trading one set of problems for another. You want a manager to make one set go away, but now you have to set up a process that identifies good (or great) managers. And unless you can do that, hiring a manager isn't likely to solve your initial problems, or it creates different problems that are worse than the initial set.

If it's true that great managers are huge multipliers, but they are so apparently rare that I've never encountered one (as you suggest), then companies should still avoid hiring for all the roles in that article "* managers" unless they know of a great one through a referral.

[ZephyrBlu]

> You seem to be focused on proving that great people exist, which is obviously true

I would not know it from the way you talk!

> I'm more concerned with the average case because that reflects how an organization should be structured

Average in an org is very different from population average. The average professional is bad at their job. The average employee in a company can be pretty good.

My perception is that maybe only 20% of people are somewhat competent at their job, and maybe only 1-5% are very competent. Assuming managers are default bad is correct, but also useless because people in every role are default bad.

If you are competent and you care, the solution is to find a company which values that.

Problems that companies in the bottom 80% deal and the associated problems they deal with are utterly uninteresting, because it's like talking about how water is wet.

Yes, hiring people who are incompetent creates issues. Especially in managerial roles. Yes, hiring good people is difficult and creates another problem for the org. Most companies never get past dealing with these problems and they don't really give a shit about them, which is why it's so boring to discuss.

For an individual, the first step towards having a better manager is joining a better company. After you've done that is when the conversation becomes more interesting, because even at better companies not all managers are good or great.

---

To me this whole thing very much sounds like the situation described in this article:

"Over just the past two weeks alone, I have talked with several people at different pure feature team companies that have told me, in so many words, that the empowered product teams I describe sound like some mythical and utopian world, which can’t possibly exist in reality.

Yet in these same two weeks, I’ve also spoken to people at strong product companies working in empowered product teams, that have asked me why in the world I would spend so much energy talking about these feature team companies, that they have never seen, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to run their company that way, and further, why anyone would want to work there? When I tell them that not only do they exist, they’re clearly the majority, they think I’m exaggerating."

https://www.svpg.com/best-vs-rest/

[bitwize]

The fictional company Initech from Office Space is depicted as a blandly oppressive corporate hellscape -- but it's fundamentally more honest than most corporations in the real world, do you know why? Because there's a big banner hanging over the offices that reads "Is this good for the COMPANY?" It's the question that all employees should be asking themselves at all times.

Being able to engage in personal feedback that cultivates fruitful relationships with their reports that make them happier and more productive is a nice-to-have. But ultimately a manager's responsibility is to the business, not their reports -- and sometimes what they need to do is implement whatever measures of process, control, or guidance the business demands and just cull the ones who don't get on board.