[vinceguidry]

It took me awhile to realize that management is, generally, not a skilled profession. Not saying that certain skills can make you better or worse at it, but that you don't need them to be effective.

In a skilled profession, not having them means all the difference. You can't wire up a house without the skills. You can't build a web app without knowing a whole lot of stuff, at least not within any time frame someone would pay you to make one in.

It doesn't mean that management is stupid or boring. It means that you can bring more of yourself to it because there's not this huge body of best practices that you have to adhere to in order to succeed in it. There's lots of room for eccentric practices, The Office showed that exquisitely.

You can carve out a place for yourself. If your days are taken up by meetings, take your laptop to those meetings, listen with half an ear so you can still contribute, and code whenever you can't. Don't ask for permission, you're a manager, you're busy. You're always busy, you decide what you're busy with.

There's this hierarchy I've noticed of office workers. You can be paid to do stuff other people tell you to do, I call these drones.

You can have responsibilities, in which case you can justify doing anything so long as it fits into the responsibility and you can make your bosses believe that. I justify posting on HN this way.

If one of your responsibilities is someone else in the company, then you're in management, and you have a lot more latitude to order your day, if only because you can simply order your subordinate to take care of your responsibilities. You generally use this power to think and strategize about how to improve your department's role in and contribution towards the company.

Once you get promoted into management, this is how you're expected to spend your days, but you don't have to. You can still code if you want to, so long as you're meeting the additional responsibilities that are thrust upon you by managing others. They're your responsibilities, you can meet them however you see fit. That's what management means.

If you don't know how to do this, you might get stuck attending pointless meetings. If you do, then you can avoid most any meeting that you weren't personally asked to attend by someone you report to. If you're at a meeting, your job is to contribute to the shared understanding of whatever business situation they're having the meeting about. If you can do that while coding, so much the better, you're multi-tasking.

Even if you don't have any direct reports, even if you don't have any responsibilities, you can create them. You can't make people report to you, but you can sort of take responsibility for them if you notice they're slacking or whatever.

You can also take some role the company needs filled and start taking it seriously. There was this great segment in The Office where Pam, as part of the sales staff, starts taking on "Office Manager" roles, and eventually leverages it into a newly defined role and salary, in hilarious fashion.

You don't have to use subterfuge to gain responsibilities, you can simply ask your boss for one or notice something that needs attention and tell your boss you're taking care of that from here on out. If your boss notices you taking responsibilities, then they'll start to re-categorize you from a drone to someone who can take charge of something. Managers call this "initiative".

[nostrademons]

You are describing bad management. You don't need skills to be a bad anything. There are plenty of bad programmers going around who don't actually have any useful skills either.

There is a particular set of skills involved in not getting fired even though you don't actually have any skills. However, this skillset will not save you if the company institutes blanket layoffs or goes out of business, nor if you ever need to look for a job with no skills. And if you're getting by without any tangible skills or output, chances are everyone else around you is doing the same. This makes the chance of the company going out of business and you needing to find another job quite a bit higher.

YMMV, but I've found it's a significantly less risky strategy to just go learn the skills, practice them, and refuse to work with people who are obviously faking.

[vinceguidry]

Most companies have bad management. I would go so far as to call it the norm.

You're obviously better off with skills. I never said you weren't. But you don't absolutely need them to be an effective manager of other people's efforts. In fact one of the best ways is to just get the hell out of their way.

[saraid216]

> In fact one of the best ways is to just get the hell out of their way.

One of the fundamental purposes of management is to help other people get the hell out of your way. In software, the purpose of a manager is very often to stare down requests and reject them on your behalf because you're busy doing something more important.

[Agathos]

> just get the hell out of their way.

That is a skill.

[vinceguidry]

Not one you can learn from any textbook or 'theory of management'. That's what I meant. Just because there are skills involved doesn't make it a skilled profession. That would be like saying collecting baseball cards is a skilled profession just because it takes a certain amount of knowledge to know which ones to collect. Sure, but that's doesn't make it a skilled profession.

[nostrademons]

"Skilled profession" isn't defined by what you can learn from any textbook or theory. Just try mentoring a fresh CS grad out of MIT or Stanford - they will know all the theory and textbook algorithms, but there will still be huge gaps in their knowledge of how that translates to solving practical programming problems.

A skilled profession is one that involves skills, i.e. things you can practice at to get better in. Retail clerks and fast food workers are generally not considered skilled professions because no matter how much you practice or improve, the customer will generally not care. Management or even something like professional basketball is a skilled profession, because there are large differences in the performance of workers based on their level of experience and practice.

[arielm]

As a founder I manage various teams full-time. I don't consider myself to be a manager because ultimately I don't report to anyone, but I disagree with most of what you're describing.

Skills - You may have only worked with bad managers because to be a good manager, much like anything else, requires certain abilities. While some have those it's practice and experience that make you really good.

> You can't wire up a house without the skills. You can't build a web app without knowing a whole lot of stuff, at least not within any time frame someone would pay you to make one in.

You sure can wire up a house without skills. The house will probably end up burning down due to the many mistakes you'll make but it doesn't mean it won't work. On the same token you can manage without skills, but those you manage will burn out, produce less, be unhappy, and pray that you'll disappear one day (or get fired).

Delegation isn't as simple as just telling others what to do, that's a gross misconception.

> You can have responsibilities, in which case you can justify doing anything so long as it fits into the responsibility and you can make your bosses believe that.

Really? Don't you feel behaving in such a way won't help the company you're helping build?

I do agree that finding things to do and potentially developing something that may not get the attention it needs is a good idea, but that's good for any stage of the business.

[vinceguidry]

> Really? Don't you feel behaving in such a way won't help the company you're helping build?

You're helping the company by meeting your expectations and goals, which are set by your higher-ups who have clawed their own way up the hierarchy and so are presumed to know what they're doing. So long as you're doing that, you're a good employee.

What you do with the rest of your time is up to you. Certainly don't start working on side projects or screwing around, but you can do stuff like investigate future profit centers for the company, catch up on industry gossip, take people in your company and other companies for lunch, (networking) do personal / life stuff like taking your kid to the doctor.

All of these things are things that help the company in a roundabout way and may be overlooked by someone who doesn't properly understand what managers do.

[UK-AL]

The secret to clawing up hierarchy is that you don't claw your way up the hiearchy. That's a path to middle management.

You become a entrepreneur, you network and get hired directly into a position(Cofounder). You get into finance, and enter VC/Private equity firms so you get placed on boards etc

So i don't assume that the top people, are the best skilled.

[genericresponse]

I quibble with your stating that you can be a manager without some critical skills. I think the skills defined under the (now defunct) concept of emotional intelligence are vital to being a successful manger. Without empathic skills you can't get anyone, but the most committed employees to perform well. It seems self-evident, but many people I've met including very poor supervisors lack the ability to really put themselves in others' shoes.

[tfigueroa]

I'll quibble with this. There are plenty of managers that wield authoritarianism and plenty of subordinates that yield to it.

I'd agree that managers with soft skills perform better, but even the old-school ass-kicking types can still eek out a performance. And even be rewarded by the higher-ups for that attitude.

[vinceguidry]

> I quibble with your stating that you can be a manager without some critical skills.

Why couldn't you? All that would need to happen is a company asks you to take on the role.

[alexitosrv]

one question, why do you say that the concept of emotional intelligence went south?

[dnautics]

This is seriously one of the best comments I have read on HN. Thank you! What I think is important is very often no one tells you these things, and programmers are often systematizer types - if they're not explicitly told "this is how things work" they are slow on the uptake or conjecture reasons why you're not supposed to do them.

[kristiandupont]

What you are describing is a completely redundant role. If that was all managers were, why do companies, including smart ones, have them at all?

[Klockan]

What do you believe that middle-lower managers do then?