Comment by simonw
1 month ago
Instead he would spend his day pairing with different teammates. With less experienced developers he would patiently let them drive whilst nudging them towards a solution.
That's not a management activity - that's the kind of coaching you would expect from a senior IC ("Individual Contributor" - I still hate that term.)
Generally I would expect a "manager" to have authority over other people in the company: run performance reviews, handle promotions and hiring and firing.
I think it's important for companies to provide a career structure that allows for influence, decision making and leadership roles that don't also require taking on those management tasks. Management tasks are extremely time consuming and require a substantially different set of skills from being a great team coach or force multiplier like Tim in the story.
I can't quite tell what the manager in this story should have been doing though. Where is their value add? If its just MBA fluff playing psycho games with metrics then I'd argue they can get fucked.
It could be a big company. There might be some layers of C-levels, the a layer of managers to listen to them and turn their commands into concrete things, and then a couple crumple-zone layers of management to make sure that the concrete bricks from the top don’t damage actual productivity when they hit.
I would agree, but the manager probably should be in touch enough that they could see the teaming behaviour themselves.
They did… that’s the whole premise of the article
A lot of people seem to have zeroed in on "the manager's decision" and completely missed that it referred to the department manager, not the team manager, and the story is told from the perspective of the team manager.
Not sure the story is even real but apparently that was going on long enough without his manager knowledge that the manager was dead set on making tims exit preparations