I know this is suppose to be self-soothing for a managers ego, but unfortunately you are responsible for their failures if their failures result in projects going over budget or over schedule. You are responsible for creating an environment in which they can thrive AND also not f-up momentum for others. Thats a tricky task with a lot of nuance.
At the end of the day, as a manager, you are responsible for the teams success and failure. You don't really get to say "sorry we delivered late and/or over budget, a single contributor on our team is failing to execute well and thats not MY problem". A manager is responsible for a projects failure or success which, yes, means being responsible for employees who seem to be failing at the task.
What being responsible means is the more complicated question completely brushed over in this article. Do you fire them? do you 'create a better environment' - how and how do you do it without impacting the team, projects, or budget.
Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately.
Managers are responsible for project failures, that is true.
And they have a mechanism of achieving it: hiring and firing.
The author is right, managers are not responsible for individual’s success, their ability to persevere, time manage and so on. We work with adults, they have their parts to do.
> Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately.
This is me, and I completely agree. I'm on the road back to an IC role. I could continue with being a manager; I'm okay at it, and there's enough room for me to grow into the role. I've been given clarity on a career path and confidence that I can take that path.
But I'm not _good_ at it, not really, and a lot of that badness is in the disjoint of skills that I didnt bring over from technical leadership. Those skills I'm actually quite poor at and, while I can continue to improve, I don't want to because I don't enjoy exercising them.
One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique.
I'm a fairweather manager and as a result I don't think I can be a good manager without living with a lot of discomfort and accepting a lot of deficit in my skills that will be more difficult to overcome given this discomfort.
> One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique.
I'd rather have this, I might the only person, otherwise things are going to take longer and you end up not being that good. I harsh to myself because of this, It's not fun I know. but otherwise....
It's definitely preferable and the right thing to do, I wouldn't suggest that doing things my way was the right approach just because of my own discomfort.
One way I've thought of it recently is in terms of Radical Candor and it's concept of "ruinous empathy": if it means changing myself so significantly in my core beliefs and feelings, I think I'd rather be ruined by empathy. Equally, I need my own manager to not be ruinously empathetic, so I appreciate it makes me a bit of a hypocrite.
first rule of Leadership - "Everything is Your Fault" . YES.
but leadership is not management.
And i fully agree that management is "nuanced social and political task" . And politics is contradictory to most structured stuff, esp. software.
But still, if someone does not want to know/grow, no point pushing. It's painful at both sides. May need completely different approach, mostly outside the scope of team.
I personally don't have a problem with the concept of firing people, getting fired etc... I've been fired 3 times in my junior years (and 2 times were really unfair in retrospect) but it was all a very useful experience in retrospect.
What I do have a problem with is ensuring that the industry is fair and founded on merit so that if a company fires someone, that the industry will quickly re-absorb them and make use of them.
Some companies need mostly people who can get stuff done quickly, some companies need engineers who can build stuff to a very high quality standard the first time with a focus on long term maintainability and ability to handle requirement changes with low risk. Most companies need a mix of both people with different proportions.
A fair market is really good at finding peoples' strengths and seeing through credentials as well as past 'failures'. Getting fired should not be a big deal. It can be a positive for the employee. Think about what kind of company will hire an obviously smart person who was recently fired... The recruitment filter works both ways; sometimes as an employee candidate, you actually WANT the company to reject your resume as it signals something about how they think. I wasted so much time in my career working for rigid companies which were ill-suited for me - Just because I was good for them doesn't mean they were good for me.
As I'm getting older and my work history is being written on my LinkedIn, it creates a kind of signalling/messaging about me which more closely reflects my identity and aspirations. This made my last job hunt much more successful.
> ensuring that the industry is fair and founded on merit so that if a company fires someone, that the industry will quickly re-absorb them and make use of them.
Surely there exist people who are close to (or exactly) entirely incompetent at programming. Fair and founded on merit means that such employees should not be quickly re-absorbed into new positions in the industry. Sure, the competent should be able to be hired reasonably quickly after a financially-driven layoff, but a firing for terrible performance or lack of competence isn't something that is easily wiped away at the next interview.
Can happen but I suspect that it's unusual for someone to completely suck at every aspect of their chosen area of work. Probably 99% of the time it's mismatched skills/interests.
Even in these cases though, firing people is good for them. Maybe they should find something else to do in a different industry. It must be torture to suck at your job every day while simultaneously depriving better suited people of that role/opportunity which you occupy... All while there may exist better opportunities for you in another industry where some other low-performing fool just like you is occupying what should have been YOUR dream job.
Of course this is assuming a functioning free market. If the market is overly manipulated, you could find yourself locked out of opportunities which you would be really good at while some mismatched fool has your job and gets paid your salary (which they use to pay a shrink to help them cope with their impostor syndrome...)
I had a coworker that I tried to help out, but he barely knew some common programming terms like what a type was, or how he had to declare something beforehand in order to use it. We never really found out why he didn't know these things because he was so softspoken and shut down at any attempt to understand why he was having trouble. I don't talk to him much anymore due to some team restructuring, but other coworkers still see the same so I don't know if he can be helped honestly.
> but he barely knew some common programming terms like what a type was, or how he had to declare something beforehand in order to use it. We never really found out why he didn't know these things because he was so softspoken and shut down at any attempt to understand why he was having trouble.
I had the same when applying to several jobs as web developer, bother me a lot, since they were making money, but had no idea how to explain the most basic things, such as that React is a library not a framework. It's literally on the landing page.
Second thing for applying for a job is... if I don't get accepted I want to know how to improve, but I haven't heard anything.
Interesting, how does he pass performance review? Usually ppl get some help to pass the bar. The bar doesn't need to be high. But if he is not up to the task he will be put through pip then fired
At the end of the day, as a manager, you are responsible for the teams success and failure. You don't really get to say "sorry we delivered late and/or over budget, a single contributor on our team is failing to execute well and thats not MY problem". A manager is responsible for a projects failure or success which, yes, means being responsible for employees who seem to be failing at the task.
What being responsible means is the more complicated question completely brushed over in this article. Do you fire them? do you 'create a better environment' - how and how do you do it without impacting the team, projects, or budget.
Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately.