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by roenxi
142 days ago
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> The point is the wolf does not need managment. If some dev rolls up to work and claimed that "I don't need to do anything to be a high value programmer" because he has mastered the zen of not getting in the way of good code, is anyone going to buy that? It is a lie for those who were born yesterday by someone justifying not being very good at their job. Ditto when a manager says it, even if they are important enough nobody is going to call them out directly. Under no circumstances is what the narrator describes a good response. All managers have limitations so sure maybe it is the best response he can muster and he's still a great manager otherwise, fair enough, but the story then isn't that wolves are amazing, but that the writer has a massive blind spot, it hasn't caused a big enough problem that they had to fix it and they've settled on tonic immobility as a strategy because they haven't figured out the productive action. The situation is an employee is doing great things. Employees manager-once-removed agrees. The middle manager is trying to stop the employee. That isn't a story where the key is an amazing employee. It is a story where manager-once-removed doesn't know how to manage the middle manager, and the middle manager is either being undermined, is incompetent or both. That is reading a lot into 2 blog posts, so I wouldn't go down on that ship. Maybe there are a lot of extenuating circumstances that aren't being written down. But the most likely fit of the facts in a software business is that management are flailing. Which is cool, management sometimes flails. But the focus should be on improving managers so they can do their job properly, not pushing the stress of dealing with their flailing down to the employees. It is unfair and stressful for the lower tiers of the org tree, and flailing management can get a lot of people fired. |
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I suspect the author has failed to explain enough to get readers outside of their preconceptions based on their experience.
In particular I think management and leadership have been conflated in most interpretations - his inaction is a form of leadership to promote personal growth for line manager and IC. The absence of management is the application of this leadership.
(But who really knows...)