Management

WORKPLACE

• smile 🙂 relax! it’s just a job
• you see your colleagues more than you see your family
• you spend the best hours of your day with your colleagues, instead of your family
• you take your work home, whether you notice it or not (ask me how I know)
• so actively make your workplace positive, it’s in your interest
• do more social stuff than your manager encourages

HIERARCHY

• bottom-up > top-down (see The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
• ban dotted-line reporting
• flatten the hierarchy as much as possible
• developers are closer to the coalface, they know better than you
• give managers comprehensive ownership/responsibility of their domain (including all NFRs)
• (this means ten comprehensive teams of eight, not one team of eighty, btw)
• use a small hierarchy of role titles, pay people instead
• if an engineer would rather have a “senior” title than a pay rise, the company may like it (no cost), but it may have a negative impact on the team (…do as I say, I’m a senior)

INTERPERSONAL

• trust, then verify (thereby testing capability and honesty)
• disarm with a smile (this is critical)
• don’t be the smartest guy in the room; it’s not your job, and it makes you a target
• delegate to your experts
• hire people smarter than you
  • this is a good tell
  • if managers only hire yes-men and non-technical staff, it’s because they’re afraid
• never talk over people
  • it’s strategic to let people unload their clip before you respond
  • it will make them feel heard, and it will give you time to consider a response
• disarm with questions
• ask for feedback, especially when it’s negative (you can’t do anything with positive feedback)
• don’t message before 9:30 or after 4:30 unless it’s a production issue
• no emails outside of office hours
• schedule emails for tomorrow morning
• schedule teams messages for tomorrow morning
• no meetings 12:00-1:30

MEETINGS

• respect people’s time
• set more people as optional
• set shorter meeting durations
• avoid recurring meetings
• always supply meeting agendas (half the problem will be solved with a clear agenda)
• as a manager, you will bust heads that need busting. but will you get in touch with people when things are going well?
• as such, 1:1s are for staff, not managers
• use 1:1s to listen to your staff
• ask permission of people, whether they report into you or not

CONFLICT

• listen first, solve the problem second
• this is a typical trap for engineers
• “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” – Simon O’Leary
• if your boss hires a difficult guy, it’s not the guy’s fault, it’s your boss’ fault.
• so don’t resent your peers too much, it’s not good for your blood pressure
• probation
  • you should know whether it will be a “yes” or a “no” in the first few months
  • don’t wait until one month before probation is finished to get rid of people
  • “if there is any doubt, there is no doubt” – Emil Koutanov

HIRING

• the most important job in the company is hiring
• (this was a motto at google during the “don’t be evil” years)
• hire nice people first, geniuses second
• you can teach tech, it’s harder to teach nice
• nice == honest == capable building on fundamentals
• promote internally if possible
• it shows the company there is trust in the current staff
• it motivates the entire group
• as such, don’t restrict hiring to “the finished product”
• i.e. train your staff, fill their gaps
• building people up is the essential attribute of a people manager

MANAGING UP

• senior managers are so far away from the coalface that they know nothing from first-person experience
• i.e. they operate entirely on gossip
• e.g. “[redacted] says your relationship is improving”
• e.g. “[redacted] says your team is hard to work with”
• as such, it is vital that you have excellent personal relationships with *all* staff (up, down, and laterally)
• have peers that you can trust, such that you can take time off, etc (and they can too)

• the most important developer skill is reading code
• so give the team necessary capacity to review PRs every sprint
• don’t bundle stuff into PRs
• if it can be pulled out into a separate piece of work, do that
• use PRs for sharing learning, not for beating people over the head
  • use a different communication channel for that
• don’t let people with big egos use PRs as a place to show off, at the expense of team happiness