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Comment by ethbr1

1 month ago

> The soft skills involved in doing that wind up being completely invisible to the status universe.

Are you referring to the work the managers are doing or the devs are doing as being invisible?

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ethbr1

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woooooo  1 month ago

Both, actually, but in the case I'm thinking of the devs with the strongest leadership skills in terms of organizing their peers to make things happen were completely invisible to management who were playing a different game. Just like their game was invisible to the devs shipping product, who didn't understand the implications on their careers. Saw a couple of great unofficial leaders get fired and a bunch more leave due to the disconnect. It caught up to the managers later, turned out their people skills weren't good enough after execution ground to a halt.

(Not all managers, this was a special degenerate case, but it's worth considering that different people have different goals/incentives/values. It's not always a straight line to "delivering customer value" that is only held up by a lack of people skills.)

  • ethbr1  1 month ago

    I was trying to subtly point out that the information asymmetry goes both ways: most devs aren't aware of what their managers are doing for the team either. More transparency in both directions is healthy (and skip-level meetings, for god's sake).

    • woooooo  1 month ago

      Yeah, I hear you and I also added a parenthetical that the incentives aren't always the same.

      In an organization of high-minded individuals, the information asymmetry goes both ways, I've been a manager and a dev and I tried to be high-minded and do my best to smooth that assymetry for the greater good in both roles.

      But sometimes, especially the last 3-4 years since it got tough, there's a lot of people trying to hold on by any means necessary. Information asymmetry isn't the problem there, it's incentive assymetry. What if you're just not that good at tech and got promoted to 1st, maybe 2nd level manager in the good years? What's your incentive?

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