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Manager's Handbook (2020)

254 pointsby bspearabout 3 years ago

13 comments

rebeccaskinnerabout 3 years ago
I really dislike the idea that people should be required to have their cameras on for all meetings. I think for people who rarely see one another in person, it can be good to try to encourage people to be on video occasionally, but when and how often should really be left up to the individual.<p>As a manager, I make it a point to try to turn my own video on most of the time, but I&#x27;d never ask someone to turn their camera on in any particular call. I want people to be able to do their best work. Building a solid team culture means you should see one another from time to time, but it doesn&#x27;t have to be every call, or even most calls, and there are a lot of people who struggle from time to time to do their best work on camera.<p>Sometimes people are in a messy room or feel self conscious about their appearance. Sometimes people are just distracted staring at their own image on a call. Some people have to share their workspace with a partner or roommate who might be distracting in the background. Sometimes people are running something compute intensive in the background while taking a call and their computer gets too bogged down trying to encode video while also running whatever more important task it should be doing. Whatever the reason, I want people focusing on the work they are trying to do and if having their camera off lets them focus better, I&#x27;m going to encourage them to do that.
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ericbabout 3 years ago
&gt; The first time someone doesn’t meet an agreement, you point it out to them immediately. If they apologize, you respond that apologies are not needed, and all that is required is that they only make agreements that they can commit to and that they meet all the agreements they make. If the person continues to fail at these, there is only one consequence that makes sense: they can no longer be part of the company.”<p>This reads like a toxic culture playbook.<p>Managers can commit to nothing, or commit to things and fail when there are inevitably things they can&#x27;t control and face &quot;consequences.&quot;<p>A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
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charles_fabout 3 years ago
The more time passes, the less interest I see in line manager (aka m1) roles. I&#x27;ve been m1, m2 for some time, then ic, then m1 again. Now that I&#x27;m being on track to be m2 again, I think I&#x27;ll just drop the towel and get back to ic. The only thing that&#x27;s been keeping me from doing so so far is that I never had a manager I actually deemed competent in that they were trying to understand the underlying technical aspect of the job in a way that actually helped me as an ic. The only ones I have liked were those just leaving me alone. The impact of bad management is marginally lesser for managers themselves, and at least I can try to do some good in my team. But the admin cost of line management, added to having to deal with people&#x27;s emotions all the time, the context switching, constant interruptions, politics and general vaporware BS remove any true possibility to be &quot;strategic&quot;, or genuinely have time to coach people through anything significant. I find the effective job closer to a mix of hr, with exec admin role, with catchall person who needs to produce the decision juice when people don&#x27;t want to. It&#x27;s just not worth it.<p>I also really dislike the notion of being &quot;promoted&quot; into management. It&#x27;s another profession altogether. You&#x27;re not promoted, you&#x27;re transferring. At best its a graduation if you actually succeeded in some form of training. But let&#x27;s get real, people get slapped with a manager title, and one in a thousand will care enough to open a book or even just a blog post about anything related to learning the job. Most new managers are &quot;trained&quot; by a combination of their own clueless bosses, and inspirational memes on LinkedIn telling you should be a leader rather than a manager. Stop pretending there is a real notion of hierarchy between managers and ic, managers are equally incompetent as anybody else (well, that&#x27;s not true, they tend to be worse since lots are driven by ego and power hunger rather than a genuine interest in the job), thinking that it is a promotion is stupid.
Kototamaabout 3 years ago
Oh no, it has a whole section on enneagram, which is pseudo-science.
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dominotwabout 3 years ago
Being a manager in modern day means you have to accept being a devious person to a certain degree. You are in the middle of managing two conflicting goals of company and the employee. Each wants to extract as much as possible from the other.<p>Promotions for example are always based on nebulous criteria that are often made up on the fly. Yea there are career ladders and stuff but those are totally ignored for all practical purposes. As a manager you have to make up BS on the fly when an employee asks you why they were not promoted despite doing everything you asked them to do. Pomotions aren&#x27;t really in your control as a low lever manager.
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mkl95about 3 years ago
&gt; With a top-grading interview, you are working through the candidate’s last five positions (in chronological order), asking a set of questions to determine how successful they were. It&#x27;s important that the hiring manager responsible for the role is the one who conducts this interview.<p>I&#x27;ve gone through this step countless times and every time I just reword what&#x27;s already on my LinkedIn profile. If you like what you read there, there really is no reason to have this conversation.
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lifeisstillgoodabout 3 years ago
Coders are the new managers<p>Ok - so quick thoughts - companies are moving to run all processes on software. software is eating the world and if they are not already (manufacturing) the essence of a business (core competency) is becoming digitised.<p>that means you need to be a coder to create the core competency, monitoring it or chnage it. Some people will be experts who learn to code, more often it seems coders will learn to be experts (mostly because you cannot create the code if you don&#x27;t understand the job)<p>(side note I argue that software is a form of literacy so substitute &quot;able to read and write for coder)<p>This leads to a number of issues - the first one here is that managers in say the 1960s bestrode the world, before digitisation one person had to be the nexus for information in order to make day to day decisions. but software replaces that (cf the bank manager replaced with algorithm) and all managers are going that way because it allows more efficient decisions - and so we have the Google manager - not a decision maker but a coach for the real decision makers - coders.<p>which leads us to - management only applies at the level of hiring and firing (i mean if a non coder is telling coders what to write it&#x27;s already broken). so if you are not the person with hiring &#x2F; firing &#x2F; internal team allocation you are not a manager - and if you are and you are not focused on pull requests and automated testing you are doing it wrong<p>Which also leads us to managers are the new VC&#x2F;investors - funding teams for results.
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ms4720about 3 years ago
I get an unexpected error, seems about right
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kkfxabout 3 years ago
There is a lesson from the history, especially from the IT history about how people do not understand tools they use and so they try to mimic old paradigms used in old tools with them. I suggest seeing old General Magick, Magic Cap UIs for instance <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iw4mi6SKNp8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;iw4mi6SKNp8</a> there is NO point in try representing a virtual office with a virtual desk with a virtual file cabinet, suspended folders etc it&#x27;s just useless clutter that slow down the work. But people try to mimic that and keep doing the same for decades before a small change followed by another small and various other crappy solution to make the situation even worse.<p>Remote work and office work are different, there is NO POINT in mimicking the latter in the former, like there is no point in making big north-facing windows in cold climate because that&#x27;s normally done in hot south and vice versa. That&#x27;s just blind ignorance and fear of change.<p>I can understand both, but please do not encourage such behaviors, instead try to craft a REAL new remote paradigm too many have no idea about how to shape it.
hnthrowaway0315about 3 years ago
The idea of &quot;Managing yourself before managing a team&quot; sounds true to me. I cannot manage myself very well (lack of discipline, not long term target, barely surviving mentally due to numerous issues, etc.) and indeed I cannot really imagine how do I manage a group of 10.
kuharichabout 3 years ago
Past comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25549856" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25549856</a>
leeabout 3 years ago
I really like how the book&#x27;s website is structured.<p>Does anyone know what app they used to create the handbook?
thenerdheadabout 3 years ago
I went through half of it. I think it has promise, but not really sure I would call it a handbook. Some things are just strange to me:<p>&gt; A senior employee comes to you with a competitive offer in hand, asking for a promotion. You investigate the situation and decide that, since you really don’t want to lose this employee, you will cave and give them a promotion.<p>&gt; You have just created a strong incentive for political behavior.<p>Hard disagree. People look for more responsibility &#x2F; jobs all the time and when they come to you saying they want to stay and this is their condition, you better honor it and not call it &quot;politics&quot;. They don&#x27;t have to do that at all and now you&#x27;re back to hiring or backfilling.<p>This is also literally the opposite of the highlights saying:<p>&gt; Attract, nurture, coach, and retain talent.<p>&gt; Keep an eye on your team&#x27;s health and happiness.<p>&gt; Give your team a clear path to progress in their careers.<p>Also this section on remote work is so out of touch:<p>&gt; Always have your camera on for meetings and touchpoints. Please ask others to do so as well. This is non-negotiable. There should be no state in which you are working where your camera can&#x27;t be turned on. If you look like ass, own the fact that you look like ass and understand that at some point the people you are talking to will look like ass too. If you don&#x27;t want to turn the camera on because you are sitting in bed and it&#x27;s all messed up, then get out of the bed and go sit at a table or something. This isn&#x27;t rocket science. Be 100% of yourself at all times, but be professional.<p>An executive definitely wrote this. I bet they don&#x27;t show their face to every call they take. The pandemic has made this normal, but prior to it I think this would be challenged. I don&#x27;t need to see your face to work with you. Sure let&#x27;s do it often, but not 24&#x2F;7.<p>&gt; The terms “management” and “leadership” are often used interchangeably, but they are actually two distinct things. In short, management is tactical and leadership is strategic.<p>This attitude I think harms the merit of what management really is. Management is a noble profession that people think is separate from leadership. They are the same regardless of what you think. I think Clayton Christensen said it best:<p>&gt; “I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But….I [have] concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.”<p>I would overall call this a generic self-help guide for someone who happens to be a manager. It literally includes word for word ideas in the most random places like GTD, stoicism, and even a section on sales?
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