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Geeks in Management?
The Other Side of the Coin asks: "I've been doing a relatively interesting job until now, but they've pushed me into management recently. Although the new position is pretty boring (I manage normals), I do still have time for all the geeky stuff I used to do before. My problem is: I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training. Sure, I'll read a lot about it (and take some education), but what are your experiences as geeks in management? For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least. What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
I was just offered a management position yesterday. Being an engineer who will be going into management, I am also curious to what the responses will be.
100% Insightful
Treat your "normals" as you would like to be treated if the positions were reversed.
Will solve a lot of problems that way.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
It is absolutely crucial to read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. That will turn anyone into a good manager. Best manager I had was an analytical type like us back at GE. He read lots of books and practiced what they preached. The Carnegie book is the most important!
Employee hammocks!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Always works for me. But then again I only manage myself and others believe I manage other people.
fp?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Don't think that others use their brains like you are used from other geeks, because most non-geeks simply don't!
If they say something or propose something, always check it yourself.
www.weberseite.at
Assimilate them. Seriously management is 75 % personality and 25% ability.
if you can do the job of the people you're managing, you have an advantage. I cannot count time times where I've been in a job and the pinhead that was hired to be manager was just that - a manager... a manager that had absolutely no idea how to do the job I was doing. They were just a buzzword spouting talking head.
You really do subscribe to the borg management philosophy....
Biggest Hurdle = Keeping Friends.
What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump
Remember that people have different capabilities. Not everybody wiil be able to do the job the way you like/want it. That's where your skills will be tested whether you can take it and teach them the way you want it or be a typical PHB.
"Not everybody can dunk from the free throw line" is the mantra that MJ forgot when he went to Washington Wizards office.
Free XBox, PS2
ABC - Always Be Coding!
WHEN MORALE IMPROVES
Just watch the british series "The Office" and learn all the correct ways to manage a team. Basically you can't put a price on comedy.
For me, the toughest part of getting "bumped up" was giving up control. Let people do their jobs. Let them make their mistakes. Yes, as management, you are responsible. But you are also building a team for the long term. Encourage and correct, don't micromanage.
My problem is: I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training.
Everything I ever needed to know about management, I learned from Dilbert.
Now, granted, I don't actually have a job. . . .
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
No, REALLY.
Sometimes I have to say to hell with it and just eat my jellybeans.
He always insists that we call him Darth Vader. And on casual Friday, he dresses up in a Tron costume.
You are likely to be better at something if you enjoy it. If you feel like you were "pushed" into management and don't want to be doing it, then find a role as a technical lead, architect or similar where your primary responsibilities are still deeply technical, not managerial.
Nobody wants to be managed by somebody who doesn't want to and doesn't know how to be a manager or a leader. You don't need formal training, unless you want to advance to higher ranks, then it might help. But for most purposes, you just need a willingness to listen and to talk and to think about things from a non-technology-driven perspective at times.
I am not sure what "Borgish" management methods are (you must be a graduate of Starfleet Academy's MBA program?), but it certainly sounds like something that nobody would enjoy being subjected to. Not everybody is as smart as you, but if you go around treating people like they are a different species ("normals" from your own post) don't expect to develop a good working relationship with them. If this is what you mean by your "personality", then no, that won't be an advantage in a management role, period.
I think of myself as a "geek" in certain ways, I enjoy understanding and creating technology, I like to take things apart and hack on them, and I can spend hours focused on a task intently. But I realize that when I'm operating in a management role, decisions are driven by the best long term interests of the business and the team, not by technology in isolation. And you reap what you sow with the people who work for you. If your team respects your intelligence AND likes you, there is nothing they won't do for you. That's a strong, loyal team. If they think you are a smart geeky asshole and they shit on you regularly behind your back, don't expect them to achieve very good results for you, and don't be surprised when *your* manager realizes how ineffective you are and gives you the boot.
1. Get banner printed, "All your bases are belong to us!" 2. Hang banner where everyone in cube farm can see it. 3. ? 4. Profit
Geeks in management make for a pretty good structure, though they may have little vision for the direction of the organization, rather like having accountants run the company. Dow Chemical used to have engineers at the top and was a pretty decent company to work for. Now it's all suits and they're more concerned with Profit(!!!) & Loss and Stock Value, like too many companies.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How about you stop calling them "normals"?
You've crossed over to the dark side, and there's no turning back. Manager != geek. No more serious coding for you, and no more peer equity with other geeks. You'll only be given status info on a need-to-know basis, and even then, you'll only get a high-level dumbed-down version.
No, kiss your geek hat goodbye, unless you decide to take a new technical position.
Hammocks!
When you want output from your team, hit the hammock district.
Think about what you like most in the managers you've had over the years. You probably did your best work under those who didn't "manage" you at all, who just tried to help you to remove hurdles.
Try to emulate that.
to be "Honest, Fair and Consistant". He was an executive VP of a large multi-national corperation and seemed to get a lot of praise from the "normals".
It's hard to "become" a manager. You need a lot of people skills and you will need to challenge them a lot, but the basis would be to show respect to those reporting to you it will help your position a lot.
This is totally insecure, but very convenient.
I asked the same question to a former manager of mine and his reply was that managing a business or people is a lot like managing complexity in software design. Of course you can't treat people like objects(pun intended) but principles of modularization, etc. still applies. Just as you don't put all your logic in one method, function, or object, you shouldn't do everything yourself. Delegate stuff out and have some people concentrate on certain things. The old *nix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it really well still applies. Trust your employees to do the right thing without you micro-managing it. In the end, you become the thing that brings all these pieces together.
Good programming practices/philosophy goes beyond CS. It's all managing complexity after all.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
That will affirm your dominant position and noone will question your authority.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
you say "pushed" .. do you want to manage? personally i prefer a manager with a geek background - they tend to understand what we're talking about. unfortunately, deep geeks rarely go for management ( i wouldn't take a manager position for any reason .. i'd say my goodbyes if that path were forced on me )
:)
if you Don't want to manage, cut your losses and go. If you Do want to manage, don't forget your roots. The old axiom of a person rising to the level of their own incompetence has to be broken by the rare competent person that also has the capacity to manage.
good luck! all of us geeks who do not aspire to management hope to find a good geek manager
i see, like posting on /. :)
You MANAGE a business. You LEAD people. If you want to make the most of your staff you need to be more than just compotent in the ways of yor business (Management) you need to be able to LEAD. You need to be able in instill in others (or select for) a sense that their efforts are meaningful. No one wants to feel like they're an engine for turning a pile of paper in an in-box into a pile of paper suitable for an out-box. You must be careful not to micromanage. Many who are promoted from technical/service positions into management show up with a "I've got to get work done" outlook. When a they enter management they won't feel soo much like they're getting anything done because they SHOULD be leading others. Do yor best to stay out of peoples hair when they're working productively, afterall, they were the same as you before your promotion and you wouldn't want your boss micromanageing you.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
1. Treat people who do what they are supposed to do (and make you look good) really well.
2. Put foot directly to the ass of those who don't.*
Make sure you are a type 1 from your boss's point of view.
It's worked for me. OTOH, I'm getting out of Dodge in the next few weeks. (Tech job, WOOOHOOO!)
-Peter
* If you find this really difficult there is a good chance you are a nerd or a dork, not a geek.
-P
Be consistent, set realistic goals, reward good results generously and find out what kind of manager you prefer to be.
Books on the subject are plentiful and you'll find it worthwhile to spend a little time reading about management styles and techniques. Many bright minds have studied this subject and have some good insights. You might start with "Contemporary Management" by Jones & George. You should be able to pick up a copy on ebay cheap.
Everybody's different, and have their strengths and weaknesses. Until you study the subject a bit with yourself in mind you won't know what needs improvement.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
Obviously, during your tenure, you were a geek who was managed by a possible normal, who possibly had no skills in management. Just remember how such people make their way through life, identify the most talented but yet insecure geek working for you, and terrorize him (and its gotta be a him, no woman would ever put up with it) into carrying the entire operation on his shoulders while you attend to important "meetings" (usu. involving golf, martinis, mistresses, or some combination thereof). W. will be calling you Cliffy Boy in no time!
His name was Robert Paulsen.
The first thing you need to know is what exactly is expected of you. You need to know this for two main reasons. First, you need to know the extent of your job and second you need to make sure you meet managments expectations.
Every company is different and will have some things that are more important than others. Look and adapt from other peer managers.
Read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey?).
Most importantly, if you don't know, but you think you should, ask your boss. It's better to establish a clear line of communicaiton with your boss than to sit there and worry about not knowing.
Oh, and have fun with it, and turn the cell phone off when you get home.
My sig left me for a younger user id.
AKA, really, unless you are senior level mgmt, there really is little you can do to really influence the workplace, and some general ideas would be useless in many places. How about give everybody an office with a door!
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
If you start from that tenet - expecting the best from your employees and expecting them to want to do a good job - you'll be way ahead of the pack.
Add to that a habit of telling them "Thank You" as often as you can.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
I'd say the biggest hurdle would be the obvious frontal lobotomy required as part of the management migration.
I found disconnecting my brain from the job worked VERY well.
Another excellent read is Leadership secrets of Atilla the Hun (no joke) the man turned yak herders into a formidable force.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For starters, I'd get rid of the geeks vs. normals mentality. Look at the individual characteristics of the people you're managing. Figure out what parts of the job they like and what parts they don't like. Figure out what they like to do outside of work, as that will give some insight into what makes them tick. Think about what you have in common with them. Basically, just treat them like people.
Trust in your employees that they will do right by you as you will do right by them. If you can develop this symbiotic relationship between you and your employees then you will go far.
Trust that they will be doing their work, don't harp over their shoulders.
Trust that they will show up on time, not standing by their cube with stopwatch.
Trust that they will be responsible with their actions, don't be another mother to them.
If you can build the levels of trust that coexist between employee and management your life will be easier, but not easy, and your employees will be more productive.
As management of past jobs, I've managed to piss off my employees and them hate me, but on others I followed the above laws and they became one of the must functional and useful teams on the job site.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Endeavor to be the type of manager that you'd want to work for.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I've moved into Project Managment myself, voluntarily. What I've found is this:
1) Remember all those things that managers did that you hated? Be open to the discovery that some of them actually made perfect sense but you didn't see it. Your Geek perspective may have been more limiting than your realize.
2) After you get through #1, take the things that still don't make sense and don't do them. Your Geek perspective can also be liberating.
3) People skills, people skills, people skills. If you can schmooze, talk, flatter, cajole, comfort, query, and chat - and get results, good. If not, start working on your people skills. You will need them.
4) Business perspective. Stay informed of business issues, policies, plans, and news. If you did previously, good.
5) Your Geek past is a great building block. You have an area of strength, start with what you learned in that.
You will have to change, but coming at a job from a different perspective is also a great advantage.
A fantatic technique I was taught - go to people you respect and ask them to list
1) Your two best traits.
2) Your two worst traits.
3) The two best traits of a manager.
4) The two worst traits of a manager.
You need to query at least 4-5 people, but it'll give you a perspective on yourself, on management, and what you need to do to do it well.
Will you get widely differing answers? Yes. But reconciling those answers is part of the learning process.
Good luck.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The geeks bite the heads off chickens in meetings. It's very distracting. Moreover, carny folk are kinda scary!
What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump
Going out to lunch with other managers. 'nuff said.
I don't know what your specific responsibilities are, however, there are a few easy to follow guidelines for any IT Manager:
1) Treat your people like you want to be treated. Simple and the most effective method.
2) Underestimate your budget requirements by about 5% for every 1/4 issues. Nail the budget right on for the other 3/4. This will allow you to increase your budget year after year without making you look incompetant.
3) Pick your fights carefully. You might want to goto bat for your 'normals' all the time, but this is a bad move, don't forget you are entering a new 'peer' group, and you want to fit in with them.
4) Be a sycophant 40% of the time, but rely on your knowledge and experience for the other 60%
5) You either have it or you don't, don't think you can just read a Tony Robins book and be the best manager ever. If management choice you to become one of them, then they must see something in you. Find that strength and build on it.
Thats all I can think of now. YOu'll probley never read this because likes to troll his readership to -1 land like a BAD manager.
The thing I learned while managing poeple is that the goal is is more important than the method. You would be amazed at the myriad of ways that something can get done. If you give one of your folks a project, a deadline, and reasonable easy to understand standards, then you should be able to turn them loose. Don't fall into the trap of telling them how to do it- trust them to get it done. If they don't get it done, or they make mistakes, then you can help them a learn a better process. If they get it done though (even if its through a bass-ackwards method that makes your teeth grate) then they have fulfilled their duties.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
And you may hate yourself.
After being part of the "mobile work force" for more years than I can remember, the biggest problem encountered in larger companies are people that have been promoted to management based on seniority as opposed to training or skill.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to start a flame war, because I've worked for some people that have no training that were great, and conversely I've worked from BComms where I wanted to go postal.
Managers who are technical sometimes have the tendency to still poke their fingers in where they can. DO NOT POKE. Delegate. Otherwise you are discounting your minions and taking on more than you can chew.
The best manager is the one that recognizes accomplishment, delegates, and rewards. Micromanagement is a trap many fall into - so remember what it is all about: facilitating people who work under you to feel empowered, and be empowered to do the work. The day you complain some guy is always 5 minutes late, when he is twice as productive as the guy next to him, is the day you need a smack upside the head.
I've worked for so many clueless managers that either have sales backgrounds or technical backgrounds... the sales guys always promise more and the client, not the worker, is their priority. The technical guys usually have stale skillsets and think they can do everything better with PowerBuilder.
Remember - work your people skills. Some people shouldn't be management. Some belong in the trenches.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
The most annoying thing I get from management is non-geekiness. So yes, I would say if the people you are managing are geeks then be a geek with them. When I offer an engineering solution to a problem and get turned down because the "managerial" solution seems to suit the managers, it pisses me off. Kinda like the PHB and Dilbert.
Of course with management you have one level of higher management to report too and I think they would be happy as long as you have keep your productivity within the normal range.
We've all seen it, or borne the brunt of it. A very skilled coder/plumber/accountant/scientist gets promoted into a management position and turns out to be a lousy manager, who makes life difficult for his underlings with his incompetence. Why does this happen?
Because, even though you were (and still are) a great coder/plumber/accountant/scientist, a high level of competence with code/pipes/money/mesons does not automatically give you the competence in the skills of budget and/or personnel management, like motivation, encouragement, discipline, conflict resolution, appropriately rewarding the good and punishing the bad, etc.
Go take a class like Introduction to Supervision, Conflict Resolution in the Workplace, Budget Process 101, etc. It sounds like PHB-type stuff, but guess what? You're a suit now. If you flail around trying to figure it out on your own, you'll end up a lousy supervisor, and you'll just make your own job harder.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I think Scott has some good things to say on what's wrong in business, but I haven't read enough to see ways to fix it. Check out the books by Scott Adams: Dilbert Principle and such.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump"?
The bodies of your fallen.
I too just started a new life as a manager.
You have to read The One Minute Manager . It's a wonderful read on how to get people to want to work for you.
Yeah, it's short, and yeah, it's a little cheesy in some parts, but the over all benefit you gain is enormous. This should be the first management book you read.
The sole purpose of managers is to provide the resources and motivation for the people you manage. The only reason you are there is to make it easier for them to get their jobs done. If problems come up, you're a dumping ground.
One more word of advice: treat your secretary very well. S/he will run interference for you and make your job that much easier.
Now, go sign the purchase order some more pens. You're running low.
May I suggest you NOT call them "normals". They're people, for f*ck's sake.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I am lucky in that I have capable and self motivating staff. And you would be amazed how rare that actually is . . . Communicate, don't dictate. Talk to people about where they are and what problems they are having. Stress that there is no blame for problems and that you want to catch them quickly to correct them. Reassure and praise where appropriate. From dealings with other companies and departments I am aware that competency is not necessarily the minimum level that you can accept. Tell people when they do things right. Praise them when they do them well. Understand and appreciate what your staff have to do and what their job likely entails. Being able to do their jobs is actually a bonus as it means you can train them if necessary, and dive in if their workload is too much and needs redistributing.
How to be managers, simply should not be managers. I've found that the best managers know their people, strengths and weaknesses well enough to employ them to complete a specific task.
Geeks are inherently poor at this because it requires a social finese few of them seem to have. The fact that you are asking other geeks for advice proves that you should probably turn down the management position if possible or ask other existing managers for guidance.
How high up the chain do you want to climb? If you don't want to go much further then take the advice of everyone else: be cordial, treat your subordinates fairly, consider their abilities.
If you're driven to make it to a corner office on the 22nd floor with a grand view of the golf course... be ruthless and quiet. Don't tell _anyone_ your plans. Be as ambiguous as possible. Be subservient to those above you. Stay focused. If you get a subordinate who requires grooming or work then use them up until they're frustrated beyond wits end and then have them kicked out the door for disrupting the team. Obviously this setup scenario takes some planning and effort but, with the way workplace rules and courtroom laws run, it is fairly simple to accomplish at no risk to the company (you can even deny them unemployment benefits if you set it up correctly). Be wary of kicking out more than one subordinate in a year, though. The upper management tends to notice attrition. If your output is moving forward by leaps and bounds and you've been invited for a round of golf a few times then you can give less consideration to attrition. Keep exceptional performers only as long as they continue to devote themselves to furthering your managerial kingdom. The moment you notice them taking any interest in their personal advancement then wheel on them with the bait and slap routine. Write their goals hard then stick by those goals to the end (again, this requires careful planning to prevent HR from stepping in to moderate). At the end of the year light the employee up like the 4th of July and browbeat them with,"You can't meet your goals!" You'll find out it's very easy to both 1) use up an overachiever quickly and 2) eliminate any possible competition for the next departmental promotion.
I've never been on the managing end of the ruthless plan... But I sure know that my former manager is doing quite well and I'm still clawing to pay rent.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
I was a geek 6 years ago than became a manager. I would say the most important thing to do is understand the difference between being a manager and a leader. The key difference is a manager will tell you to do something. You will only do the action if it is in your best interest. A leader will convince you to do something that isn't necessarily in your best interest and you will do it. I haven't read any management books and I wouldn't recommend any. Just treat your people with respect and remember that they are always watching you .
The biggest hurdles that I see are the needs of people. If you are an outstanding technical performer, don't expect everyone else to be the same. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The key is to put people in positions that focus on their strengths. This is far from easy. It is easy for technical people to have high expectations of people. I think that is taught in Computer Science. Either the program works, or you fail and begin taking business classes.
With that said, keep in mind that your employees may have families and outside needs. They must be motivated. Motivation isn't always about the money, it can be about the work they are doing, time off, flexibility in hours, etc. Different people have different motivations, and your job as a manager is to find each employees motivations, as well as each employees strengths and weaknesses.
The last point I'll make is try to stay out of your employees work. I know it is hard to get away from the "if you want it done right, do it yourself" mentality, but if you are a manager, your role is to manage. On the other hand, keep up with technology so that you have an out if management doesn't work out!
People management is far from a science and is not right for everybody.
Do the job. I've had quite a few "normal" jobs where the manager had no idea how easy, hard, or time consuming various aspects of the job were.
I.e., in a convenience store, on a slow day it may take 15 minutes to stock the vault (big fridge). On a busy day it may take 2.5 hours.
Analogy:
I've been happily pushing my beverage cart around for
years, but I've recently been bumped up to a piloting
position. I kinda know how most of the stuff in the cockpit works,
but I want to do a really good job. Can anyone tell me what those
pedals on the floor do? Which one is the gas?
Let me just say something: WTF?? If you can't relate to people that are on other field of interest than yours, you have a big problem. Flame me, mod me down....whatever, but if that's your attitude toward other people, you shouldn't be in a management position. Management is about interacting with people, about finding what's the best motivation to get everyone to work. And it's really hard to find. Right now I'm in a small management position with normally three people that I have to look after, but sometimes it get up to seven people. And it's hard, it's fucking hard, and it's close to impossible if you feel you are a diffrente kind of person. No one will respect you.
please excuse my apathy
I for one welcome our Borgish, geek-pushed-into-management overlords!!
It's kind of funny, but our personalities do, generally, suck! I have finally given up fighting it, though, and realize that by becoming a decent manager I can actually improve my people skills and better my life in general.
If your company is behind you and realize you are a geek but have intelligence, they'll help you. See if they can give you a psychological profile. It sounds worse than it is, and you need to be open to it. they'll tell you what you are like (although you should already know) and what is desireable in a manager/leader. But most importantly, they'll tell you what to do to go from here to there.
I also reccommend reading the books by Geald M. Weinberg, such as "Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach" and "The Psychology of Computer Programming: Silver Anniversary Edition." Good luck, you'll appreciate the effort and so will your boss.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
You can't depend on those you are supervising to do what they ought to be doing. Especially those who are brilliant (often only in their own opinions) will not do what needs to be done.
For example, in a recent post about Ruby-Rails someone said he would ignore what he was told and just code up the application in Ruby-Rails, regardless of what the company actually needs. Unfortunately, firing people like that isn't easy.
Discovering these facts was a great disappointment to me. I had always been a self-starter doing whatever obviously needed to be done without ignoring what I had been told to do. The average person is the complete opposite.
You will find yourself requiring regular status reports from people. Not because you find them interesting to read but because it is the most expedient way of making sure your staff is at thinking about their jobs at least a little.
Go ahead and read Dilbert and "How to Win Friend and Influence People" because they are good. However, you will soon discover that a lot of the boneheaded actions of your previous managers were forced onto them by boneheaded employees.
Why are you worried about learning or doing anything? YOU'RE A MANAGER NOW.
Wow..some people need to have the whole world explained to them.
Unlike programming there is no such thing as knowing how to be a manager. There's no metric to rate you as good or bad. You are now purely a representative of other people's work. It is your subordinates performance which determines your performance and nothing else.
Like most managers you won't be able to determine who works for you and you won't have a past to be judged by. You'll be hired at the final stages of projects when all the implementation has been done to justify management. It's purely a matter of picking the right programming team to get hired by.
but what are your experiences as geeks in management? For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least.
My experiences have been extremely mixed. My best manager started out as a programmer (and still worked in the trenches from time to time). My worst geek managers have tried to control every last aspect of everything. Personally I think good management is a rare skill. Most people are very bad at it, and I think it takes a lot more work to cultivate being a good manager than most people realize.
I will say this though, even the worst geek manager understood the difficulties of technical problems. That's more than I can say for the worst non-geek manager I've had.
What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
I'm not exactly sure, but my guess is resisting the temptation to have the people you manage "do it my way". Obviously that means trusting the people you manage to do things right, which isn't always possible with all employees. I think the other difficult thing is commanding respect from the people you manage. That's probbably related to the trust/non-micro-managing issues. Many people use the tough guy fear+power manager style, using intimidation to gain control. That might work for non-computer related fields, but I've never found it works very well inside IT.
AccountKiller
There is only one management skill that matters.
The ability to have meetings about having more meetings.
Master this young padawan, and succeed in all things managerial you will.
Also:
The meetings will continue until we find out why nothing gets done around here.
(This really was the case where I worked years ago, I was found to be a very useful person to invite to meetings as my analytical nature cut to the chase quickly and resolved issues, sometimes in as little as five minutes even, though the meeting was scheduled to last hours. Problem was, I got invited to so many meetings I couldn't get done all my work and other things from other meetings.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I as well am a geek who made the leap to management. I've found that, geek or no, people are people. Treat them with respect, listen to their concerns, solicit input, encourage development and accountability, promote teamwork, and all the things we wanted when we were doing the geek work. Geeks often make good managers because of their problem solving skills, but sometimes encounter problems (I did at the beginning) with the arrogance we often feel speaking to non-geeks. Don't make that mistake, you'll be fine.
better than you. Ask them for input. People generally are interested in making themselves more productive, and almost always know better than management what is holding them back in their job, or where they can improve their efficiency. If you think you know best how they can do their job (and therefore, don't listen to their suggestions), you will most likely end up hurting the company.
Oh, and also, watch Office Space.
-=Lothsahn=-
I work for a small company, and the number one problem we have is that the owner does not define anyone's role. People hired for tech support end up being salesmen, and sales people end up leaving customers on hold to help people with tech support.
You need to clearly tell people what they are responsible for, and try not to change these responsibilities unless they are unsuited for it or are promoted. Tell them that if something bad happens with X, and X is on their turf, you are going to talk to them about it. This will enable you to streamline your business processes and allieviate retorts such as, "That's not my job!"
Think of it as channeling capitalism by giving people their own space which only they are responsible for.
"Surround yourself with the best people and you will succeed as a manager."
And here are some other principles I learned while managing and being managed:
As a manager, you cannot succeed without your employees succeeding. Any of their major accomplishments are shared with you inherently...broadcast these accomplishments and sing their praises to the masses. Recognition is a great incentive, and when your employees get credit for something, YOU get credit as a good manager.
When they do something wrong, defend them to the hilt...even if it was something stupid. Then behind closed doors let them have it and make it clear that you put your butt on the line for them. Be willing to take a personal hit on their behalf...NEVER sell them out.
Realize that to be first, you must be last. You are there to facilitate their performance as someone who works for them.
For cryin' out loud...never micromanage anything. All employees are different, but for the most part you can measure them by results and not stupid timeclock things, etc.
And I stress that all people are motivated by different things. Money, recognition, who and what they work with....learn and listen. If you reverse engineer their motivation you have very important information in your hands.
Be very careful of minority groups--and no I don't mean the legal minority groups--whoever the smallest group is in your team be they white male or indian female. The smallest subgroup tends to fight amongst themselves, or unite to destroy the rest of the group. Watch those situations carefully.
What, you assigned them numbers and treated them like interchangeable drones?
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
I didn't understand how to manage people until I had children. As a general rule, you should treat your employees just like you treat a 3 year old, with the possible exception that most of your employees are already toilet trained. Seriously, you need to repeat things many times over several weeks until it becomes habit to them, praise them for minor accomplishments, give them snacks, and most of all, be consistent in your directions.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As a former manager (ten years) I found that 19 times out of 20 it worked just fine to treat the employees like competent adults who want to do a reasonably good job. But then I inherited a problem department. That one time in 20 when the employees behave like emotionally disturbed children, that one time will really bite you in the ass. But what is even more dangerous is when the senior managers behave like emotionally disturbed children!
Other advice.
You're going to be squeezed between conflicting demands from upper management and the employees.
Everyone wants to use you for something.
Watch your back.
Trust no one. Believe nothing.
'Smiling faces . . . sometimes pretend . . . to be your friend.'
Oracle's CIO is reccomending his people read "So They Made You the Boss, Now What?" by Les Duncan. It can be found here http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1413 731821/
Probably not a bad place to start. I found it an interesting read.
The most important thing you can do is to engage a management methodology that leverages existing business practices to empower individual productivity.
Or you can flog your underlings regularly. Yeah - you heard me!
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
Just expect the normal behavior from your 'normals':
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're trying to do is get a feeling for how people spend their time at work so if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Becoming a manager just makes you able to handle larger projects than you could do with just two hands. The first engineer anyone remembers is Imhotep, who built the first pyramid. I doubt he worked alone.
What you are asking is actually a question that people who are not geeks wrestle with daily as well. I would suggest a few books to get your thoughts in place, and weed out the useless.
1) "A force for Change: How Leadership Differs from John Kotter (Kotter also writes a number of other papers I highly recommend.)
Management" by John Kotter
2) Good to Great by Jim Collins (SOLID Research!)
3) Built to last by Jim Collins
I recommend that you consider a couple personality assesments. Include those that consider your perspective, and one that also infers your social style. One you understand this better, you may see how your personality can mesh with people who have differing styles.
Finally, consider stufying for an MBA from a school that emphasises leadership.
Good luck! It is alot of work to sharpen the people skills when you have been so sharp technically. However, your intellect can carry you through if you consider how you best interface.
Maintain a point-of-view of 'what's in it for me'. Know that the people who report to you are ultimately doing the same.
Best regards.
1) be secure enough in yourself that you aren't threatened by your underlings. It is perfectly fine that people under you are right or know more than you. Accept it and treat them with respect.
I was a teacher at a University and I was also a student in the 4th year. I taught first year students. They never challenged me and I was a great teacher (or so I like to think). I also taught 3rd year students. These students challenged me in every way they could. They tried to ask me questions to show that they knew more than me. In this scenario I was a terrible teacher (until I realised what I was doing) because I would either, if I knew the answer, react by putting them down or if I didn't know the answer, I reacted defensively.
2) Don't base your self esteem on knowing more than everyone else about technology. You have to accept that you now are expected to be good on something else.
I am a geek and was promoted to a manager. And I really love the technical side. I was secure in myself but after a while there were inevitably situations where people knew more about the parts of the system that we were building, and the technology we used. I started loosing the platform from where I had previously gotten my self esteem. This can be a bit painful.
3) Don't be a detail fascist, unless you really have to. You'll have people under you which are good. Don't lean over their shoulder and tell them how to do things. You should however oversee that interfaces between people work well (unless you have a guy that is responsible for that).
If you are a fascist about details, then you will have to be one forever. Noone else will step up and take responsibility for good designs.
4) Management by walking around.
There are different ways of managing people. I don't know which one is best, but I know what I prefer, both to use as a manager, and for my manager to use. Make a habit of walking around and have little informal talks with people. Talk about the NY Yankees or some interesting problem, or an actual management issue that you need to discuss with this person. The upshot with this is that you'll always stay very aware what is going on and if someone is brooding over something they will let you know before it becomes a big issue.
Well, that's what I can think of straight off the bat. Good luck. And if I had to summarize all of the above and give you one advice, then don't let your insecurity lead you to react defensively.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
When I got "promoted" from network administrator to project manager. A Network Administrator's Guide to Project Management
Be aware and be fair.
Make sure you know what they are doing, and the decisions they are making.
Ensure they aren't being unneccessarily held up by problems, use your management power to make things easier for them to get their work done.
Watch for favouritism. Don't let opinions, personal preferences and such have a negative impact.
Here's my take on what comprises a good manager:
1. Reduce distractions!
2. Good engineers can get an extrememly large amount of work done in short periods of time when properly engaged. Do whatever is necessary to keep them properly engaged most of the time. Finding test equipment, dealing with expense reports and other important, yet mundane details are best left to a manager or a delegate.
3. Impress upon your reports the value of timely status reports. The value is that they won't be bothered as much if management is properly apprised of each project's status.
4. Make sure that projects are matched to appropriate engineers. You need to have a repoire with your reports to be sure that this is occuring or they may not feel comfortable telling you that they, "hate working on Project X." An engineer that is interested in the project that he's working on will accomplish a lot more than one who doesn't. You need to maximize the potential of your team. Everybody has to do some of the broing jobs but insure your team's star's time is most effectively spent. However, don't underestimate the value of having a junior member of the team work on difficult products. That's how we all learn.
I think the last one is the most difficult part of management of a team of moderate size. Small teams probably won't have as many projects or members so assigning tasks will be a little easier.
You'd better beef up on your TPS report reading skills.
This a good books The Peon Book: How to Manage Us
You must be a super star. Probably graduated from the same school as your boss or his boss. But at least you are smart enough to ask...
This whole thread reminds me of the super star baggage handler for an airline. He was the best bag thrower the airline had ever seen. (He was also a nephew of...) One day the boss calls him in and tells him he's been promoted to pilot.
"Pilot?" he asks. "Yeah." "But I don't know how to fly that thing." "That's okay, we'll get you some training in 6 months."
You might want to subscribe to Bob Lewis' IT advice line newsletter. He covers this kind of topic regularly. You can also check out his weblog.
I'm sure that his first bit of advice would be to walk around and visit everyone who reports to you and listen to them. Lather-rinse-repeat for a bit before pushing your own ideas and initiatives.
You may also want to express your concerns to your boss and ask what resources are available to help you succeed. Many companies will pay for training and even if not, you are showing your desire to succeed in your new position and will hopefully get some good input.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Peopleware (out of print last time I looked, but you may be lucky) is a superb book, and very readable. I particularly like the story about the Bell-o-phone, which sums up my attitude to telephones perfectly. It's not just about management, it's about working productively. If more managers read this book, I would consider going back to the real world (until I remembered the whole thing about mornings).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Back before I decided I couldn't stand it anymore I worked for a multinational corporation at the lowest and next lowest management tier.
The most important part of my job IMO was deciding what did not need to be "passed down" or heaped onto the front line employees. There was always stuff I considered to be stupid, trivial, a waste of time for those who really only get paid when they are doing their primary job description (yeah "other duties as assigned" means you work against your commission if there is commission to be made, and if there isn't there are too many people working/not enough business and you are working for "free")
When there are support personnel who only get paid hourly, they should take care of non-revenue jobs, not the revenue generating employees. And support personnel includes you as the manager if you don't get paid to directly generate revenue.
The best line I have ever heard about managers came from someone whose only purpose in quoting it was to try to get managment to just through hoops for her, "managers work for the employees". (She was/is a poor manager and tried to push her own shortcomings up the chain the way needy people do)
And if I have to ask, does that mean I am one?
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
The best teachers don't always make the best principles and vice-versa.
Same goes with managers and workers.
Surround yourself with people who are better/smarter than you,
and let them do their thing.
Rule with an iron fist and a velvet glove. but hey I just work I don't really do work politics
The hardest part of tech managing is letting your staff do things their way, even though you would do it another way.
Yes, I know you could do it better/faster/more elegantly, but that's NOT YOUR JOB anymore.
This is by far the toughest thing. You MUST delegate and you must NOT micro-manage.
You are owed excellent info about projects, people, rumors, and concerns. In return, you must explain why your team is doing certain things. Giving your staff a view of the big picture is critical.
Respect your staff, never chastise or demean someone in public, fire the slackers, and insist on deadlines & plans. Let me repeat that, deadlines & plans.
Lastly, understand who your customer is and give them what they want. Your job is to help them get their work done, not work on your pet projects (unless you are at Google).
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
"...position is pretty boring (I manage normals)..."
Ask to manage tangentials...much less boring than normals.
Sorry, I just cant't take this seriously. You must have done something to deserve this "promotion". I have managed only one thing: I have managed to have "no leadership potential" echo subliminally in the minds of every employer I ever had. Thirty years of just being an engineer and tackling more INTERESTING problems [to me, that is] than "incentivizing" and "coordinating" a herd of coders. Sorry man, I just can't get my head around this question. My attitude may be connected to my experiences in some way but I have not been able to flow chart it yet.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
fire half your staff. tell the one(s) who remains they will be forced to work extra hours and take a pay cut. double their work load. take away fringe benefits such as free coffee. make up some stupid go team corporate bullshit and force it down their throats at least once a week. and learn how to be a dick to everyone since you're probably an intelligent nice guy. oh yeah and you will also need to learn to refuse to listen to all reason, and promise the impossible to your boss, and then turn around and expect your team to deliver no matter how much unpaid overtime they put in. then maybe you too can be a successful(?) manager...
naeem
You can start by stopping referring to non-geeks as 'normals'. I understand that it's a defensive reaction against being called a 'dork', but as a manager, you can't afford the luxury of name-calling anymore.
The best boss I ever had focused on results. I was the project manager for a team of 5 smart young developers. I did the project management stuff to keep my developers working on what they want to do -> programming not meetings. We showed up for work at 2pm and worked till 12am. It was pretty crazy but we were all night owls. Somebody approched my boss about our weird schedules. My boss went to the CIO about it. The CIO basically said, "What he is doing is working. I'm not going to ask him to change a thing." During my 2+ years there my team finished several large enterprise-wide web apps (using Java & DB2). /.ing too much. Tell them that you completely trust them. If you can't, why not? Address that problem on a person-by-person basis (don't revoke everybody's freedom because of one lazy bum). Have clear goals that you expect them to accomplish.
The CIO was praised. Why? Because he and I focused on the important stuff. Don't worry about your guys coming in a little late. Don't pester them for
You get paid to produce results and so do your "normals". Focus on getting those results and not all the other crap that makes employment such a game. Your employees will love your flexibility and will know that you appreciate them when they meet their development schedules. Your bosses will love you because you make them look good (by getting stuff done).
my travels thru the corporate world went from 6 year technician, up to manager and finally back down to tech. During my stint as a manager, these are some important things I learned. 1 - guard words and actions. Damn, this is a lawsuit happy world, and it's pretty amazing how the goofing around w/ fellow employees you used to do cannot be done when you're a manager. All the gossip, jokes, etc can always be used against you when some formerly cool employee sues your ass for sexual misconduct. I've seen it happen. Tread lightly. 2 - Get help! Whenever something crazy came my way as a manager, I usually escalated it. This is just what managers do. it's part of CYA--covering your ass. 3 - be professional. obviously, but there's bound to be resentment be former "equals" who are now "under" you on the corporate ladder. dealing with this straight forward and honestly will go a long way towards earning the respect of your new Underlings. 4 - Give the dog a bone. When possible give your new Underlings a bone every now and then. Pizza lunch, free Mountain Dew, buy a round of beer (but don't forget item #1). Remember when you were an Underling and what you thought was cool in a manager. Anyways, to complete my path, my company restructured again, and I was moved back into production, so I got to experience it from the other side of the fence---again. All in all, I get fewer ass-chewings being an Underling, than being a Middle-Manager. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Your milage may vary.
By this I mean take care of the people on your team.
Represent them well to your superiors. Put your people in for raises. Make sure your management knows that you have the best team in the company.
Take responsibility for your team. If someone screws up, don't tell your boss that is so and so's fault. Say, "I am the manager, its my responsibility."
Give credit to team members when they do good things.
Fight for the resources your team needs to accomplish their tasks.
Let your team know you apprciate their efforts.
If you do these simple (though difficult) tasks you will very quickly have the best team in your company. If you do them well, you will also have the best paid team (deservidly, is that a word?) in the company. Your team will be in the role of what everyone else aspires to.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Find a great manager you respect, and have her/him become your mentor. Best think I ever did.
Read "Quality Software Management" by Gerald Weinberg - he has a wealth of information on how to listen, the various personality types, motivation, etc.
This is actually a 4 volume series, but the first and second volumes have the most useful information for a first-level manager.
Being a manager takes a certian style. There are a couple of ver different work personalities and what some like others do not. Being a manager is more about being able to read ppl. You have to understand your grunts and know how to motivate them, what to expect of them, and how much you can drive them. Its more of a life skill then a book skill, IMHO.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Read "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Really. It's a great book written back in the 30's. EVERY personality type can be a good manager. The trick of being a good manager is recognizing the personalities of those who work for you, and learning how to get the best from those personalities. In other words, we aren't talking about what works for you, we're talking about what works, period.
I was promoted to an operations manager from lowly developer about two years ago. I don't have any real problems with people since I tend to go with the flow. Anyone violates the rules I simply follow the management handbook and do the "warning > write up > your ass is gone" chain. That and a good sense of humor about the workplace has made me pretty sucessful geek manager. My first task for new people is to borrow my copy of 'Office Space' and watch it. After that they tend to understand where I am coming from. Nobody has stolen my red stapler yet. The only problem I have run into is that my skills are getting rusty. By spending the day doing management tasks, I am missing out on actual project work and coding. I don't have as much time to brush up on my coding and some of my underlings are surpassing me in skills.
You do not need to explain yourself or tell them why (It doesn't hurt, but in the end you are the boss). But you must tell them what is going on. People need that.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I always liked the one minute manager book series and some advice I get from my father in law. Personally, I am not in management yet but here is what I would consider the guidelines.
1) Pavlov and Las Vegas showed us you get good results with positive reinforcement over negative reinforcement. Just don't over do the positive reinforcement. Praise should be commensurate with the action.
2) Everyone should know exactly what they are to be doing. As long as the end result is satisfactory and they break no company rules, let the employee do the job. Don't micromanage.
3) Always allow time and budget for potential problems. Always have a backup plan in case it fails.
4) Always groom/train employees to leave you. Stagnant employees usually end up as trouble in the long run. This does not mean to push them out the door, but give them training in the direction they want to go. The managers I've seen who have done this may have lost an employee or two but for every employee they lost, they got another 3 good employees wanting to be transferred in or hired. Don't take transfers and employees leaving personally.
5) Maintain employee reviews and do them properly. It's important that your employee know how they are doing as accurately as possible and know when they are making progress.
6) Never play mind games on your employees. This breeds distrust. Be up front.
I hate to say it but "managing" is usually something most people do poorly without some serious background in techniques and training to be effective. You'll never be a great manager if you're pushed into it. And worse, you could end up hating the situation that you're in.
MBAs are for people with no management background and the coursework most programs provide is a good foundation. Sure, a lot of it is crap. But without it your odds of success are less good. That's not to say MBA grads can't be bad bosses, but if you have the personality it takes to be a manager, the MBA coursework will get you down the home stretch. I know everybody thinks they just product pointy hairs, but that's not the case.
...of being kicked up the ladder from junior programmer to director:
1. Learn to delegate and trust your co-geeks, don't try to quietly solve every technical issue yourself.
2. Give at least a 10 question pop quiz to any job candidate you interview for hire especially in technical positions. Some people interview great then start working and you discover they don't know the first thing about what you hired them for. You'll wish you gave them a pop quiz.
3. Provide answers, not complaints. Have a plan and present your plan. Solicit your team to contribute their own ideas to the plan and give them credit for their contributions. Otherwise other managers will not have confidence in you if you always complain and do not have solutions or any sense of department direction. Leaders have answers, followers have complaints.
4. Just know that you will deal with all the tedious HR issues of your department: vacations, promotions, coworker disputes, salary reviews, hirings and firings...
5. Hang out with and talk to other managers of other departments, get to know what they want from your department and work with them.
6. Your job is not your life. Don't work crazy hours, stress over deadlines, and neglect the world outside the office.
From now on, lets call them "mundanes".
That way, we can still be arrogant assholes, but ALSO stick in a Babylon 5 reference at the same time.
I'm guessing that, as a geek, you already have a pretty good start with the mechanics of management.
Take documentation, for example. Most geeks have learned to document just about every step they take when writing code, applying patches, and developing software and web sites. As a manager, you have to learn to do the same thing, only on a more granular scale. Should you set Bob up as a project lead, document not only why you chose him, but how you intend for him to proceed and what you expect him to produce.
Beyond that, fostering the right personal relations between your staff is key. Keep everyone as involved as possible without overwhelming them with minutiae - nobody likes a boss watching their every move, but they like one that keeps them out of the loop even less. Do it right, and your employees will perform more like a team, with each one supporting the other's efforts, and they'll all respect you more as a supervisor.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Read Niccolo Machievelli's "The Prince" for details.
Short version, your underlings must have faith in your integrity (even if it's a sham) and they should both love and fear you (even if you deserve neither).
Oh, and also, commit all your atrocities immediately. You are more likely to get away with them that way, especially if you can blame them on the former regime or on a "house cleaning" pogrom.
If your staff love, fear, and trust you, they will tell you everything you need to know.
Don't "over" manage people - aka micromanage. I agree with earlier posts about being treated if roles reversed. Simple common sense and courtesy goes a long way.
All that other "performance enhancing, project management principles, HR guidelines stuff is ok but really only applies to yourself on how you handle the administrative load.
(And congratulations on having an interesting job. I'm looking for something right now...)
If you remember that you are simply there to help guide your staff in the right direction and then sit back and let them do what they've been hired to do, I think things will work out okay.
:-)
If you think of yourself as a lord and dictate everything and make your own decisions while ignoring their input (on subjects they are experts in which is why they were hired) it's not going to be a lot of fun.
You're also there to be a Sh*T Shield -- protecting your staff from all the crap that gets flung from above
The WORST thing you can do is NOT WRITE THINGS DOWN! (You'll find out how well you comminucate when you have to actually read it again. Then write it over again and read it again, until it makes sense.)
I had a boss who came up the ranks and she didn't write anything down. You were expected to hang onto her every word and then do them.
Unfortunately she did not shut up long enough for YOU to write then down and was always saying "Well I told you..."
I quit that job when it was them or me.
I'd rather choose unemployment than working under those conditions.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They tried to make me a manager years ago -I resisted. You should also. No one makes a worse manager than an old techie. The worst, absolute worst manager, Ive worked for was a ex-techie. So, fight the good fight - stay outta management!
From nearly 20 years in some level of retail management I have learned that the most important thing to do is treat your employees/co-workers with respect. This is especially true when it comes to diciplimary actions -KEEP THEM PRIVATE- nothing I have seen destroys moral faster than berating or diciplining an employee in front of others.
Also when dealing with a problem focus on the undesirable behavior and actively involve the employee in the problem solving process, get their take on why the problem exists and what steps they believe can be taken to over come the problem.
And when in doubt it never hurts to seek advice from your superiors and other more experienced managers. After all none of us are omniscient.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup."
They've "pushed you into management?"
Bummer. Maybe you should have tried sucking more consistently at your job.
Capisca?
The problem with new "managers" is that they think they have to manage every last little thing, and they become pointy-haired bosses so fast you wouldn't think it thermodynamically possible.
You wanna stop by and shoot the breeze, fine, but DON'T FUCK WITH THE PROCESS!
--- Ban humanity.
One of my previous managers was a geek. His degree was in English, but he was pretty incredible when he got in front of the terminal.
He used to balance many projects for many different departments and he was very helpful to everyone. He told me that his method was MBWAT "managing by walking around and talking". Of course he got real work done, and he never came off as someone who wanted to micro-manage everybody. I think he genuinely made people feel comfortable with their projects, but was also great at laying out guidelines when they were needed.
He used everyone's name and they all loved working with/for him.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
I started as a self-taught programmer (probably ended as a bad one), but I have always wanted to move to management. Here is a story my Dad related to me about being a camp counselor at a summer camp:
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land far, far away there lived a King. He was a benevolent King. His subjects were well cared for, and for his time, he was extremely flexible in administrating the laws of his Kingdom.
The King noticed something however: what had at first started as a few simply "exceptions" placed upon his magnimity had become a torrent of complaints. The court was nearly overwhelmed. One discourse went something like this:
"Oh majesty, because you deeded, in your infinite wisdom to allow Serf Brown to allow his cow to pasture on Sunday mid-morn (in contrary to your previous rulings), his cow has eaten all the new shoots and will definitely fetch a better price than my scrawny heifer!"
On and on it went. Until finally the King decided to do some research. He had his most trusted aids "go forth unto the kingdom to determine the mood of realm". After sometime the aids reported back. The findings were not good. They reported that the king is jested in every ale-house and out-house. The subjects barely fulfill their duties to his farms and their taxes are woefully past due. Furthermore, one sherrif has become so arrogant as to simply ignore your edicts all together as simply too tiring.
The king was enraged. He called in his knights and scribes and began. He wrote new laws, he demanded the back taxes, he demanded the serfs work one hour longer. He revoked all his flexibility: things would change. He would get his respect.
History would show it was the quickest and most decisive battle ever. The peasants enraged at the curtailment of their freedoms had stormed the castle, pitchforks in had, and had beheaded the king.
The realm was governorless for sometime and it fell into disrepair. The people asked for a new King. The King was ascended to the throne was a long distant cousin of the newly deposed King. The King quickly restored order, took back lands, got the back taxes, got serfs to work. Further, he ruled that anyone who didn't pull his weight would feel the consequences and quickly. The people rejoiced, they had a strong King and the land was quickly restored to bounty.
The moral of the story is if you are strict at first and become flexible where approrpriate people will love you. If you are a push-over at first and become strict, people will revolt.
Lesser minds will say be an arse-hole to start and ease up. This, of course, is not the answer. People are bizzare. You can take all the management books, (I have a degree in Management), your Franklin planner, and your otherworthless Management ideas and forget them.
The only thing you can never get back is your direction. It is set on day one.
Good luck and welcome to the club.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I'm managed by a geek. Being a geek myself, you'd think this would be a match made in heaven. It's not, nor is it for anyone else on my team. His main flaw is micro-management. He needs to know about absolutely everything at all times. This comes across as not trusting us to do the jobs we were hired for. Give your reports some slack and trust in them to get the job done. Let them come to you if they have an issue instead of you fishing for them. This will go a long way towards having them like you as a boss.
:)
I don't know if this is a characteristic of a geek manager but if I can spare anyone having to put up with this crap, my job is done.
Take a look at this blog: http://millahtime.blogspot.com
The guy is a twenty-five year-old(or so) electrical engineer, yet you couldn't expect him to spell "G.E.D." with his command of english. Would you expect him to know the difference between 'irony' and 'coincidence?'
Slashdotters: You are all a bunch of faggots.
Do you hear me, you repulsive faggots? NO DIGG.
Management is like playing an RTS game, but without the pretty interface.
It's all about resource generation, allocation, deployment, etc.
If you're not already good at thinking about a situation from multiple points of view, develop this skill. Make sure you take into account not just what you know and what you're good at, but what you might not know and what others might need, both internal and external to your team/organization.
Good communication is essential, both listening and talking.
Respecting your team members is critical.
You should have a political awareness of your group and the others around it, learn who's dependent on what, etc.
Figure out what your mission is, what your objectives are, what problem is your group there to solve, and concentrate on identifying and reaching goals.
Document your practices and procedures and policies and use the information to generate performance metrics which you can use to justify your teams worth to the organization.
All of this is more than one person can reasonably accomplish, so be sure to delegate intelligently. You're going to do much less doing and much more delegating if you want to be successful as a manager. Your job isn't to do, it's to make sure it gets done. Coordinate and make decisions. Leave it to your team members to tackle the implementation.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The present "Informative" moderation to this post put a smile on my face. Anyone managing a team in the style of David Brent is asking for the sack.
I have been "blessed", a few years back, with such a position: Fortune 500 company - ubergeek & final decision maker (managing a budget of over 4 mil). Road to success? - to the overall knowledge (already there, probably), add the followings:
... and as far as talking to the higher echelons: if they trusted you with this, you probably already have an idea how to manage the executive level above you. /.!!!
- finance + budgeting skills (I am talking learning the ins and outs of asset management, accounting, depreciation, etc.)
- sharpen the presentation and reporting skills (CEOs and CFOs want to see nice colors on 3D pie-charts or 3D bars, on high level reports/memorandums/etc.)
- learn how to measure/quantify your group's work; come up with metrics fundamental to their responsibilities, related to them being able to carry out their jobs, and good enough for you to believe in those (otherwise how could you sell them to your ex-peers?!?) - and learn how to draw key performance measures out of those, for ongoing reports/adjustments, and future end-of-year appraisals
- related to the above: assign doable goals, right from the beginning - set expectations, and document progress
- lead by example, not as a dictator (people trust those who - even if more rarely than before - get their hands "dirty", once in a while)
- come up with some programs for training and cross-training your people
- reward, where reward is due, and be fair, but firm, when things go wrong
- last (but not least): set aside for yourself one or two projects, all the time, to keep yourself "on your toes", in "sync" with the technology
Good luck - and do NOT stop reading
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
I'm studying to get my MBA...just a few months away. I know my biggest problem is the fact that I like to play hooky more than anyone I could ever manage. I goof off a lot and tend to sit at my desk and Slashdot all day.
...sigh
I just got this visual of our Geek Manager here ordering his minions to decapitate everyone in marketing. ;-P
Was that the formidable force you thinking of?
I'm also not sure how this would work. According to Douglas Adams, Mongolian imperial tendencies are hereditary. I didn't see any mention of a fondness for furry hats in the writeup.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
The mind wobbles at the thought.
--- Ban humanity.
read the book 5minute manager. Its really a good book gives some nice founding behavour to be an effective leader
For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least.
For god's sake, not everyone WANTS an ocular implant dammit!
Managing is. You have hired people to handle the tech, so don't assume you know more than they do, and let them do it, even if it's wrong. You're not a geek anymore, but a manager who happens to be geeky.
You couldn't be more completely wrong. The best manager I ever had, had no idea how to do my job. He didn't need to know that, there were senior engineers who did know how to do the job that he turned me to when I needed technical leadership. However he did an excellent job of running interference for me so that I could work. I didn't have to worry about went on over my head because he did all the political fighting, and reported back to me what happened. He was smart enough to find out what would be an issue in the future, and start the political process to solve them now, before they became a big deal.
While working under him I was under some of the worst upper management I've ever seen, but my day to day job was a pleasure because I was only vaguely aware of how bad things were.
Management's job is not to get things done, it is to get others to get the job done. Sometimes management must jump in and hands on get things done, but even then the manager must never forget that the first duty is to get the others to do the work.
"Stand tall on the quarterdeck son, always."
In a different way, I'm sure I am going to repeat some of what has been said here.
Every relationship I have is a customer-supplier relationship and that applies to my relationships with my employees. They are my customer, and I theirs. Pull on that string a little, and I think you'll find some worthwhile ideas.
I view one of my most important job functions as shielding my employees from management vagaries. Put another way, attempting to reduce uncertainty. Very hard thing to do, but it helps us adapt to change.
Finally, I have found Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister very enlightening and would recommend that anyone doing software (or, actually, any technical) projects read it.
My $0.02.
apostrophes do not make plurals!!
Tech note - I've run into a LOT of people who constantly blame their computers for "problems" which cause them to miss deadlines and such. No matter which computer they're given.Hardly. If that was the case, no one would ever be able to switch careers.
If your manager can only hold one skill set in memory, you need another manager.Two different areas:
#1. Auto assembly line (10 workers)
#2. Software company (10 programmers)
The skills needed to manage these two are completely different.But if they don't know what the job requires, how will they encourage that? How will they be able to evaluate that?
If you don't know the jobs of your workers, you'll have to base your assessments upon something other than their skills.
And that's the first step to becoming a bad manager.
Believe it or not, the Neverwinter Nights game was useful for me! Well just a *tiny* bit of it, but very important.
There was this part where you had to investigate a crime, interrogate the suspects and witnesses, and show your case to the jury.
As a freedom-of-information fan, i always thought everyone needed to know most of the information, but in the game i realized that hiding some information (to present the "best image") was more important than sharing the whole truth. This made me realize that I needed to analyze people more carefully:
* Try to talk about things they like. If you don't know about them, ask so they'll share what they enjoy and what they know.
* Don't be too pushy and confrontational. A friendly smile can be much more powerful than a whip. However, be firm when someone disobeys.
* Make your "employees" appreciate you and have you in a high esteem.
* Find out what they like doing most, so they'll be more efficient at what they do.
* Don't fall for the "more hours = more product". Instead follow the "a happy employee is a productive employee".
As a geek, you can find your "natural inclination" to optimize stuff useful. Just don't expect it to work flawlessly. Employees are humans, and we make mistakes, too!
1) Your two best traits.
2) Your two worst traits.
3) The two best traits of a manager.
4) The two worst traits of a manager.
5) Fire anyone where 2==4, and promote those where 1==3. ;^)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Another thing that has been very important to me...a great manager (IMHO) is someone who doesn't forget about their employee's career development. Many times I have been involved with projects where if I could work 24 hours my manager would want me to work 24 hours. But no matter the project, everyone has to have time to continue their career development (most projects add experience but rarely address what you need for The Next Big Thing). A great manager will insist his employees take time for education, etc., even when they are super dedicated to the current effort (i.e. workaholics). I think geeky people are especially prone to being workaholics, so sometimes a manager has to make them stop working on the project and take time off for education (at least, that's been my experience).
Another thing, you will usually find one person who does a certain task better than anyone else and teams naturally tend to orient themselves so that that the person most talented always does that one job. However, a good manager will make sure everyone learns every aspect of the team's tasks, even if it means sacrificing some efficiency for a time.
My two cents...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
A similar question was asked a while back..Here is the answer I gave them. Listen.. Organize.. Decide.. and most importantly lead. Listen to the members of your team as well as your customers (even if the cutomer is just your boss). Organize the work. Make sure the team knows what has to be done, who is doing it, what and when the milestones are. Make decisions. You are not in a democracy. Listen to your team, then make decisions, don't have votes. Once you make a decision, stick to it. There is nothing worse than a wishy washy leader who changes thier mind evrey day. Finally, lead. By action and by example. You are the person everyone should be going to. If you do not lead, your project will fail, or someone else will become the defacto leader. And, as a last thought..Share the credit, take the blame. The only thing I can add..You asked what the hardest thing is. The hardest is sticking to a decision..Anybody can make a decision..But good leaders stick with thier decisions.
I've found it's key to know the abilities of those that work for you, and to set them up with projects that they can succeed at. If you have the ability of choosing those you work with, get the right people on your team, and the wrong people off of it. Keep your best people on your biggest opportunities, and not your biggest problems. If they are constantly wading thru the crap, they will become frustrated and perform at lower levels while looking for other opportunities.
its obvious as poop in punchbowl that /. is the very worst place you could go looking for answers about transforming yourself into a mangager.
[ok some comments are insightful but by and large, it /.ers are typical of the kind of crew you would have to manage...well, I'd say you are mad or soon will be.]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
1. Get a banner that reads "Is this good for the Company" 2. Get a big coffee mug and walk around with it... 3. Wear a binary tie... Seriously, management is about teamwork. Project to your team that you trust them to do a good job. Give them random perks (i.e. Pizza, sodas, etc.) Take time to understand the people you manage; some people want a lot of recognition, some want to be left alone. Understand that as long as they know you care, you probably won't have to do much managing at all. People respect management that understands the tasks their subordinates perform. If your "normals" want to talk to you about the latest news and you have no clue, "respect -1" There will be a learning curve for you and them. They are probably as nervous about you being the new boss as you are. People tend to assume the worst when new management arrives. In my personal experience, new management is truly a bane to all that is good and happy. Your new team is probably quite nervous that you are about to go in and start customizing the office a way they don't approve of. I would say just lay back and learn about the position and try not to be super manager of the dacade.
A good manager works for his team -- he provides the resources that they need (within reason), acts like a shit umbrella, to protect them from upper management, and lets them know the things going on in the company that they need to know.
The two biggest hurdles I experienced when I got into management were:
... and he mentioned you totally kicked ass." The former is a much more integrated, consistent emotional experience; the latter drives the employee nuts. This took me a while as someone who was fairly introverted -- I remember calling one of my guys because I was going to offer him a promotion. I asked him if I could call him (he was remote) at about 4:30pm on Friday because the schedule worked better, but obviously the end of a workweek can be a little ... scary for conversations with your boss :). I started off with "so ... you've been working here for about three months. How would you say you've done?" and then he went on for about 30 minutes about all the things he'd not done very well. He was expecting me to fire him. Ooops.
... unrewarded.
A) The need to communicate your message in more than just the content of your actual face-to-face presentation, but also in the less tangible body language. In other words, there's a huge difference between coming over to someone's cube and, with a smile, saying "hey, I was talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend [and he mentioned you totally kicked ass!]" and calling someone into your cube/office/meeting room and, without smiling, saying "thanks for coming. I just finished talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend
B)The absolute need to understand where your control ends and their autonomy begins. I had to deal with an incredibly difficult employee who made the most hair-brained, stupid, illogical decisions I could ever imagine. I was incredibly frustrated by this. At one point it got so bad that I was -- ironically -- in a management class for a week and he did something truly horrendous that had a bunch of people calling for his canning. I told him to not go into work until I came back, not respond to work emails, not do any work, not talk to anyone at work about any work things. The morning after, he dialed into a conference call. ARGH! I ended up having a conversation with another attendee that night over drinks and he told me the most important thing anyone's ever told me about relationships with people:
You don't control anyone other than yourself. You can't make anyone do good work, and you can't stop anyone from doing bad work. You can't make your managers make the right decisions and spend the money you think needs to be spent, and you can't make them NOT decide to standardize on IIS as a web platform. All you can do is clearly communicate -- and then enforce -- consequences. Do good work (and this is what good work is) and you will be rewarded. Do bad work (and this is what bad work is) and you will be
These people who work for you will do exactly whatever the hell it is they want to do. You can't make them do what you want them to do. All you can do is lay out the consequences of pleasing -- or upsetting -- you, and then enforce them. But you've *GOT* to enforce the positive consequences also. You must Must MUST reward good behavior both in recognition (like going over to that employee's cubicle after you've heard from a customer that they went above and beyond last weekend) and in actual benefits. Partially, I was lucky -- the IT group I worked in at the time was pretty good at giving me the resources to say "Hey, that project you worked on over the last two months has sure made you sacrifice a lot. Here's $2000," but I also spent my own money. And here, maybe, comes the other minor point: It doesn't take a lot. Seriously. At some point, after we did really well, I gave every person in my group a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. $25!! What the hell can you get for $25, anyway ?! But they knew it was my money, and they knew it was because _I_ appreciated them and was grateful to them, and it was effective (because it was sincere).
And never, ever, ever forget that management is a service-oriented job. You're there to serve, and when you've got a good group of people working for you, you're there to serve them too.
1) Know your peoples capabilities and never ask them to do anything they are incapable of.
Its OK to challenge them a little, but never give them more than they can chew. You will be confronted with this when senior management gives you tasks that your team are incapable of meeting. The easy thing to do is simply delegate the tasks and put your head in the sand, but this will lead to unhappy workers, the job won't get done, you'll discipline your workers for their failure and kill morale, and you'll look like a failure to your superiors. The harder thing to do is tell your senior management upfront that you can't do it. But that's what gets you respect. If your senior management won't listen to reason, tell your team frankly what the situation is, tell them you don't expect them to be able to achieve the impossible, but that you've got to do your job, so can they do the best they can and let you make the excuses later.
2) Know what is going on.
Your manager is going to ask you things like "How long will this take" and you're going to go and ask your people the same question to enable yourself to answer. Don't make the mistake of giving people questions that they cannot answer and expecting them to do so. I don't know how many times in the past I've had a dumb manager ask me how long this task will take, and refuse to accept "I don't have enough information to answer that and here is why" as an answer. Work with your people to get the real facts, and instead of presenting a number pulled out of your teams respective asses, present a break down of knowns, unknowns, mitigating factors, etc so that you're not promising something you don't know if you can deliver.
3) Manage your planning.
You don't want to micromanage, but you do need to juggle a whole bunch of different peoples estimates and manage to coordinate peoples working together. Typically managers will either make the initial plan then let things go and remain in the dark, or they will have way too many meetings to ensure that they are up to speed. If you have too many meetings, only the few will have something to add, and it will be irrelevant to most present, with the result that everyones time is wasted and people percieve meetings as a waste of time. Not a good perception to engender in them. Instead, help each person involved understand what the red flags are that you need to be notified of and make them feel safe and welcome bringing them to you. That way you don't need to micromanage but you will always know what is going on and will know where to reallocate resources before its too late.
I'm sure I can think of more things than this, but I'd say these are the most important points.
Oh, and I don't have any formal management training whatsoever, so I don't know how this holds up with conventional wisdom. I just know it seems to have worked for me.
BTW: Don't read those books on Making Friends and Influencing People. You're not there to make friends, you're there to make shit happen. Try looking for How To Make Enemies And Infuriate People instead. Much more useful.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I had a boss who was scary smart but was rotten at getting good work out of people. He was definitely a geek in an environment where tech smarts counted, but couldn't motivate his directs. We spent a lot of time (we were managers ourselves) griping about his unapproachability, unclear strategy, and last-minute instructions. We were definitely motivated to not manage our directs the same way, and in that sense learned a lot, but...a good boss is a rarity.
For your situation, let's assume some environmental parameters:
One, that you are probably smarter than much of your staff.
Two, that you've already made some mistakes and annoyed or to some degree alienated some of your staff.
Three, that you have enough humility to recognize that your intelligence can be trumped by another's experience. (Why else would you ask the question?)
So, the advice:
Treat your staff as though they are as smart as you are, even if you both know otherwise. You want your staff to respect you for your intelligence, not resent you as a know-it-all. Instead of ruling by decree, go for a more participatory style, while reserving the final decision to your judgment. State the problem, listen to what your staff tell you, choose the direction and if you disagree with their point of view, tell them why and see if they get your reasoning. You can learn a lot by doing this, especially in new positions or environments. Moreover, I've defused dozens of potential conflicts that way. Doing this lets your staff see you as open to feedback. ("He doesn't always agree with me, but he always listens to us.")
It's possible to overcompensate in this, but listening is an art most managers never acquire - which in many cases keeps them from advancing.
Give feedback right away, whether good or bad. My current boss says "bad news doesn't get better with age," and he's right. Good news doesn't either. If one of your staff receives praise and it's sent to you, send it on to them and cc your boss. All you have to do is add "Great work, Joe!" People really appreciate this and get the sense that you genuinely appreciate them and respect them enough to share it. In an environment without bonuses or other performance incentives, this can sometimes be the only extra "compensation" people receive.
Don't hide in your office. "Hide," you say? That's what your staff will call it if you always make them come to you. Go to them with questions. Visit their desk. Ask about the pictures on the wall (unless it's someone who will bend your ear forever). Walk around and listen to what's going on. Take your directs out for coffee one afternoon a month and don't necessarily talk just about work.
Lastly, provide your staff with a context in which to view their work efforts. What are you working on for the next year? Show them a slide with a calendar (bar format, not a month view). Explain how what they're doing helps the company. This is a huge motivator, and, not incidentally, a useful tool for you if your boss wants to know what you're doing.
This ain't all there is, but it's more than enough to get started with. There are plenty of books which will tell you about business, HR rules, etc., but people aren't a set of rules, except for the Golden one. As a manager, you need respect to be effective. Your staff won't give it unless they think they get it from you.
A sig is a waste of bits.
You are new to their game. They have 10 or 20 years experience in IT management and they will crush you because you are so new to their game and they know all the tricks, and will not hesitate to use them on you. You are a threat to them because you are smarter than they are and you have fresh ideas. You'll last maybe 3 or 4 years after they've coerced one of your borderline nutso staff into spying on you for them, and after they've FUDded all other senior managers about you. You will do great work, but they will take all the accolades for the good and shove all the blame on you for the bad. You will bravely defend yourself but will actually be dying a death of a thousand small cuts before someone above completely undermines you and destroys all your great work. ...but I'm not bitter...
Cheers!
"I naturally started to use Borgish management methods."
What about Klingon management methods?- "They misunderestimated me."
I've seen posts that indicate that you shouldn't label yourself or limit yourself to a clique. I've also seen posts indicating that you should go for it because of the increased money.
My perspective, is that if you're really good technically, you have no chance as a manager. Managers have to distance themselves from the nuts and bolts and look at people resources and budgets. Geeks are only happy elbows-deep into a problem, living for the version 1.0 implementations. Once the really interesting bits have been worked out maintenance is a chore. As a manager, you don't even get to write maintenance code.
I've seen many people try it a fail. My previous employer and current client both fell into the trap of thinking: "Hey, this person is exceeding expectations in a hands-on role, let's move them away from what they're good at and give them a job requiring a completely different skill-set."
The end-results are predictable. In the end, none of the advice that I'm writing will make a difference. You have to decide if YOU want to manage and if you will do it well.
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
I went through a similar process only slightly more gradual as I acted as a project leader between the geek (engineer role) and management. The project leader role taught me early on that I needed to improve my interpersonal skills (which of course could still uses some improvement). The easiest thing to do is find a role model in management you like and try to get them as a mentor or at minimum try to learn from them through observation and occasional questioning. If you can't find an example of a manager that you look up to or feel you can learn from, then do what I did...go get an MBA. That doesn't imply that getting one will make you a great manager (e.g. a CS degree doesn't make a great programmer) but it certainly opens you up to a large amount of imformation so that you can make some educated decisions about what approaches and systems are viable in your situation. Just like and engineering degree can help someone see things from and "engineers" perspective, the MBA can help you see it from a business mans/managers perspective. If you are managing technical people, I would suggest you start reading Druker. I would stay away from the quick fix Blanchard type material.
ManagementStyle - by Linus Torvaldss ource/Docu mentation/ManagementStyle
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~vikas/lxr/http/
I believe that people are inherently manager material, or not. It's not that people can't do it (I believe they can try, and many can and will do both ok), but there is simply no compromise to a person who is PASSIONATE about what they do.
Further, I have learned in my experience as both a manager and a non-manager (techie), that crossing over is painful and sometimes non-reversible. I have seen many a technical expert become dumbed down and hopelessly manage-a-fied by the unending streams of meetings, documentation and political rig-a-ma-role that ends up being 95% of what you do.
Sure, you'll be managing technical people, but it's not the technology you manage anymore. It's the people you manage. And that pulls upon a completely differently skillset and think/speak combination.
I have found that I will be, and shall always strive to be - technical. Even when I'm 50, 60 or 70. My preferred i/o involves a keyboard and a screen, not a mouth and an ear. I just work better with logic systems rather than emotion systems.
Don't forget to review Slashdot advise on Geek management:
Tech Team Traditions?
Tips For A Budding Project Manager?
- Be willing / seek out / be grateful to hire people that can do a better job (than you) at the work you did/need them to do.
- I don't know if this qualifies as "borgish", but you want to avoid situations that require you to give "take it or leave it" style ultimatums. They'll almost always "leave it." (unless that is what you intend....).
- Eventually, you will have an employee attempt to extort you. By extortion, I mean an unjust extraction of compensation.
They may not understand this at the time, but in light of the company economics, the fulfillment of such requests is not fair and it does not achieve positive results except short term retention of the employee in question.
It becomes unjust in the other employees minds. No, you won't tell the other employees. Yes, the other employees will find out.
The best means I've found to deal with this is having a reasonable and flexible retention and compensation plan (keep it simple!). That way there is a equitable (hopefully meritocratic) solution for recognition and compensation for all the employees.
If this is done well, then it can be public which can provide excellent incentive to improve those that lack some motivation and provide better retention of the good people.
- See how those that work for you can have a vested stake in positive results of your group. This may be ownership in shares of the company, compensation, recognition, promotion...
- With the former in mind, don't set expectations too high. Think of your employees as one group of "customers" to you. As with all customers, you wish to exceed expectations to the extent possible. If you promise too much, you may be forgiven the first time with only a mild loss of credibility. The second time, you'll lose respect, influence, etc.
It is not easy, you may fail at some things and succeed at others. Keep at it and try not to let it get to you too personally, while still learning the leasons you can.
Good Luck!
As a geek-turned-manager, your first order of business is to force all of your subordinates to run Linux on their desktop and laptop computers. It's time to turn the tables!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Another good book is A Business Tale: A Story of Ethics, Choices, Success and a Very Large Rabbit.
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I once heard a sysadmin compare his job to management. I asked him when the last time his Solaris box filed a sexual harrasment compaint was.
Take stock of your surroundings, and decide if you want to be a "Successful" manager or a "Good" manager. "Successful" managers are dynamic, demanding, decisive, and action-oriented. These are all good qualities, as long as they don't lead to disaster. "Good" managers have these qualities too, but they are also dependable, respectful, thoughtful, and solution-oriented.
Unfortunately, being "good" often doesn't lead to advancement as quickly as being "successful". We all admire the person that can step in and take control of a crisis. It's too bad we don't usually notice the person that prevents the crisis from ever occurring.
So, first you need to decide what kind of manager you're going to be. Then go out and [wreak havoc | do good].
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
...I always prefer to call them "underlings" or "slackers".
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I'm in IT management training with a very large and successful company. Here's some of my companies tactics, with my own advice.
1. People are your most important resource. You can't invest in people expecting to get something out of them. If you have 5 free minutes spend them with one of your employees. Don't ask him how the project's going, ask about girlfriends, parents, pets, and hobbies. Treat your people well and they will not only do what you ask, but they will cover your ass when you make your inevitable screw ups.
2. Be decisive. You should always listen to your people, but the final decision rests with you. Trust your people to make small choices and use initiative, but if there's a tough call to be made you make it. People criticize George W. Bush, but he may be the best example of this in the world. He encourages debate and even argument in his cabinet (which he recruited very smart people for), then he weighs the arguments and makes the decision. Finally, the entire cabinet (regardless of personal feelings) backs it.
3. Manage resources. Don't manage people (see 1 above), but manage resources. Make sure your people have what they need to do their job. People's time is also a resource. Make sure you assign your teams efforts effectively.
4. Make sure expectations are understood. Make sure you know what your boss wants from your team. Then make sure members of your team understand what is expected of them individually, and how they fit into the team.
5. Be Proactive, this is stolen from the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". Don't wait for problems and then fix them. Seek out solutions before the problems present themselves. This should be familiar from software design. Don't wait for people to find and report bugs, think your product through at the beginning and eliminate bugs in the design phases.
6. Ask for help and provide help.
A few reading tips:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness by Stephen R. Covey
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins
Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins
Who gave Catbert moderator privileges?!!!!
I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training.
I think you should hang motivational posters everywhere and put a big sign above your desk that reads "The floggings will continue unitl morale improves!"
Also talk behind peoples backs. Say one thing and do another. Promote paranoia and backstabbing. Fire people who make you look bad. And start asking people "Did you get the memo? It's just that we've started using these new cover sheets for our TPS reports."
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
A manager actually asking for input on how to manage...
Can I come work for you?
...to a beautiful woman:
You let her know who's in control, make her really work for it, then fuck her in the arse!
#include <sig.h>
There are 3 management styles.
1) Parenting
2) Team Captain
3) Locutus-style (which you've tried.)
The easiest is probably parenting, since there are cognitive hooks that we all have that you can take advantage of. There are upsides and downsides to each. If you don't have the age and experience necessary to create the meme-dynamic in your group that you are the dad/mom, or if your crew is a bunch of head cases with parent issues that make this style of management impractical, the best over-all style is team captain.
All the florid books about being truthful, honest, having integrity and confidence enough in oneself to manage people are true but also 99% fecal matter because you can break every rule in all those books and still be a great manager.
Good Team Captains have charisma. Hopefully you rolled high enough at the beginning of your game that you are now a good match for management.
At the master level of management you realize that each of these styles have applications in one way or another with the broad variety of persons you may work with. Some people need Locutus, some people need Ward Cleaver, and some people need Mike Eruzione.
The primary job of a manager is to make sure communication happens. Communicating the needs that the company has to the people you're managing, communicating the problems that the people you're managing to the powers that be, and communicating the information among your employees they need to get the job done. You don't actually have to DO the commmunication, just make sure that it's happening and nothing's getting in the way of it...
Outsource their jobs and fire their asses :P
"and can our personality..."
There is no "our personality". If you think you're part of a hive mind, you need to not think that anymore.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1591 391822/qid=1106683213/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-513630 2-8945455?v=glance&s=books
- ur l/ref=pd_kk_sr_2/103-5136302-8945455?index=books&f ield-keywords=gerald%20weinberg
Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master
the Challenges of Leadership
by Linda A. Hill
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle
Books by Gerald M. Weinberg including:
Quality Software Managment Vol I-IV
Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach
I'm not sure that a true geek would be a "good" manager. A geek (at least this geek) likes to DO things, tinker, and explore. Managers need to be in meetings (and stay awake, tell people to do things and tinker (the fun part of working with computers), and tell their geek underlings to stop posting on /. all day and get back to work - Yes sir.
hack a day
Instead of asking for advice on Slashdot, perhaps you should let your manager/boss know that you'd like to attend management school. Just my 2 cents...
Regards,
Cecil
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
I'd have to disagree with this. Granted I do so firstoff as a geek trying to transition to management, but mostly with the cynicism that I really don't believe the geek has the power that he/she had 6 years ago.
More and more I see the decision of the engineer questioned or worst ignored entirely by the P.M. who is convinced that he alone as P.M. has enough technical knowledge to decide dates, make code estimates, and decide what is and isn't technologically deliverable. I see the geek job being transformed into the code monkey job. Who can we pay the least to work the longests simply implementing the most basic APIs to do a job.
Personally, it's my hope that if more Geeks could weave their way into management that eventually smarter decisions might come down the food chain.
This however may be where the last shreds of my optimism haven't been completely been destroyted by my jaded pessimism. Granted, of course, I'm the kind of person who stopped reading Dilbert 4 years ago because it's just not funny anymore. I don't need to see the reality of work when I read the comics.
Screw that. I want cash.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Some advice...
1. You will loose some of your technical skills over time. You're spending less of your day on that sort of skill. Knowing this, identify what you cherish the most and what will make you a valued staff member at another company and keep those up-to-date.
2. Recognize that when you take manager as your title, you've walked away from some mobility opportunities. Managers aren't keen to hire former managers to staff positions and there are less manager jobs around.
3. Recognize that not everyone is as productive, smart, or responsive as you are. You'll have to set a standard of performance for the positions you manage and judge your staff by that standard and not you. Keep it in perspective, if they were as good as you; you'd be doing their job.
4. Make the workplace fun. Carnation used to put on their milk "Content Cows Give More Milk". In other words, happy people are more productive.
5. Learn to let the little things go. Just because someone brings an issue to your attention doesn't mean you have to follow through on every one. Learn to establish a split between when people see you to vent and when people see you for action.
STFU & GBTW
If you insist on the Star Treck management analogies don't go borg or klingon.
Try a more Jordie or even Riker.
Although a Klingon Office would be cool! "Bring my TPS report you filthy pahtk!"
I know this sounds like flamebait, but please hear me out.
/. for advice seems to indicate that part of you wants to succeed in your new role rather than quit. If so, then you need to approach this situation like a geek: the system you are trying to hack is called management, the tools you need are called people skills, and the methods to develop these are the same ones you used to develop your technical prowess. Long hours of study and research. Trial and error. Finesse. Maybe even a little social engineering.
Other Side, I know where you're coming from. I spent years as a tech (training to do sysadmin work) and somehow wound up in sales. To my surprise, I discovered that I'm really good at sales, and now I manage a small sales force for a very well-known computer company. Even some of my friends say I have turned from "hacker" to "suit", but no matter, I'm happy and my bills are paid. You don't sound so happy.
In your post, you say you were pushed into management, a job you describe as "pretty boring" and uninteresting. You describe your coworkers and teammates as "normals", implying that you don't feel that you can relate to them as people, an assumption made evident by their bad reactions to your "Borgish" way of barking out orders. This does not look like a recipe for business success... so why are you making yourself (and your staff) miserable by going to work each day and proving you are the wrong person for this job? Tell your superiors that they made a mistake, return to the interesting geeky work that you enjoyed, and let someone actually wants to manage take a crack at it.
Of course, there's always plan B, where you change your attitude and decide to become a good manager... the fact that you're asking
Since everyone is plugging management books, I'll recommend a few cheap short ones. "The Dilbert Principle" is good - none of your geeky friends will suspect it's actually a management training manual, but it is. Someone else suggested "The One Minute Manager", and I agree... I'd also suggest "13 Fatal Errors" by W. Steven Brown (ISBN 0425096440), as it taught me the right way to lead my former colleagues after I was promoted.
Books won't do it alone, however. You need to decide if this is really what you want to do for a living, if only for a short while. Right now, from where I'm sitting, that appears to be the only hurdle you need to overcome.
OK, guys, you can mod me down now.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
Great managers are rare... people will ALWAYS remember a real leader.
love is just extroverted narcissism
First Break all of the Rules: You, only you paying attention. Drucker's Principle of management: Your parents management book is still relevant.
See if the local college with an ROTC detachment will sell you copies of the textbooks, or if it's possible to order them with a FOIA request. Talk to the Wing/Battalion Commander and ask him which ones would make good management guides. That's what you can read to learn how to manage "normals".
... and so on. You should be able to do this for a group of up to 20 people in less than 10 minutes.
Now, a few quick things you can do (based on behaviors of my first boss, an awesome leader):
- Make sure your office door is open and gives you a good view of the traffic through your work area. Say "hello" to the folks as they come in, and two or three times a week after lunch, make the rounds. Poke your head into the cubicles, ask how the projects are going, how the wife and kids are, if their hardware is good enough. Find something they enjoy talking about and ask questions. Don't overstay your welcome in anyone's cube unless you're there to actively manage them.
- Be the first one in and the last one out of the office at least once a week, preferably on the same day. You are there to shield your people from upper management's bullshit, but you're also their supervisor. You should be available for them to talk to whenever they need you.
- Get an idea of who works which hours, and if you think someone's working extra hard -- and assuming you have the latitude to do so -- pick a Friday after lunch, go by their cube, and just poke your head in: "Sanders, you've been working hard on the Morgan account, and it looks good. We're in good shape, and we've got you to thank for it. Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off, and get an early start on the weekend?" If you have the latitude to reward people like this it's an amazing motivator.
- Balance "directive" leadership with "supportive" leadership. Tell people what to do, but not how, and let them impress you with their ingenuity; if that doesn't work, give them more specific instructions. When someone is a strong worker and appears to have the respect of the others, place them in charge of a small team with a big goal, and empower him to accomplish it: "Tom, you've really impressed me recently -- I know you'll knock this one out of the park. If you need any more resources, or if you need me to throw my weight around with The Boss, just say the word."
- Don't have meetings just to have meetings. If management decrees that each office will have a weekly staff meeting, do it standing up, and don't use PowerPoint slides. Stand in a circle around the conference table and point to each person in turn, getting short status notes: "Jim?" "pass." "Steve?" "The Marmalade Dossier is giving me trouble." "Okay, can Jeannette help you on that?" "I think so." "Anything else?" "Nope." "Alright. Ted?" "pass."
"We call you... normies"
What are borgish management techniques?
I started out as your basic Tech Support grunt, running around fixing this and installing that. After a few years (and graduating from college) I got a position at my University where I manage all the computers for the Comp. Sci. Department (including servers). While normally this is a pretty 'geeky' job, I do have to manage student workers and facilitate requests from different faculty members. Luckily for me, I got a dual degree in College (Business and Comp. Sci) so I already had some managerial training. I am also currently going back to school for my MBA (school has an MBA program so free education).
Here are a few things I have learned. Managing effectivily is hard, but it gets better with experience. Everyone you manage requires different methods of managing. You can't manage everyone the same way, we all have different motivating factors. A good manager can find those factors for each individual and 'exploit' them. It never hurts to get more training in how to manage. Be it a formal degree such as an MBA or just some work shops, whatever it is, the company likely will help pay for all or part of it. Nice thing about getting an MBA is that it will help with moving up the corporate ladder as most if not all upper management jobs require an MBA. A lot of managing is trial and error. Don't beat yourself up over bad decisions, we all make them. It's the good managers that learn from their bad decisions and make better decisions in the future.
Sig? No thanks, I don't smoke.
"Geek" is a way of being. Sere here for a description of what makes you a geek (or hacker, in the language of this lexicon). People don't become geeks because they want to be part of the geek crowd. They become geeks because certain things appeal to them.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
With 30 years of managing programmers under my belt I have a few thoughts:
1. Having a programming background is really valuable
2. Liking people and appreciating different strengths in different team members is critical.
3. Understanding that the manager's first responsibility is to make sure the team has what it needs to get the job done and to clear the minefields for them (instead of creating minefields).
4. The second responsibility (or maybe the first) is to protect the team from totally unreasonable demands
5. The next responsibility is to help each individual working for you to improve and build his or her professional capability.
6. And finally, to eventually learn to subdue your ego, listen to the people that work for you and simply help guide/facilitate them in their own management. Teach them good principles, have some standards, and they will pretty much manage themselves. You only have to handle the outlyers and run interference for them as you handle the corporate stuff.
It's not easy but working with your own staff should be the the most enjoyable part of the job.
I was working for a video game company as a beta tester a few summers ago when the company I was working for decided to make a drastic change in how things were done. Part of that change included taking a game producer that wasn't currently working on his own project and making him the manager of the game testers.
h em-what-you-think jobs, either... On the contrary, I often worked 9 or more hours every day, usually on the the same broken game, doing very mundane and repetitive tasks.
What a NIGHTMARE. Every day he was constantly breathing down our neck. I was used to simply reporting to the team who was responsible for the game I was testing, but he decided to force himself into the middle-man position, circumventing my ability to communicate with my friends and co-workers. I couldn't walk to their offices without walking passed my new manager's desk; he would always follow me and stand-in on our conversations if I tried to talk to them in person and then he would always comment on the conversation as I was walking back to my desk. He was always pointing out what we were doing wrong and yet he never seemed to notice what we did right. He really liked to micromanage the hell out of us.
This wasn't one of those sit-there-and-play-video-games-all-day-and-tell-t
I started having anxiety attacks. The other game-testers and I plotted against him. It was pretty awful.
Eventually they highered somebody else to the position. Someone who had years of game-testing experience that spent his time doing exactly what we did, instead of playing guitar or surfing the internet like the previous manager, and helping us out with our job or letting us help him with his. My job went from nightmare to pretty awesome over night.
I understand it can be a little strange. About 4 months ago I was a ditch digger (sometimes called a helper). I had filled this role for 2 years. Then all of a sudden they pulled me in the office to setup a new computer. I am now running jobs, dealing w/ customers and have about 12 people under me who used to be my supervisors. Its all kind of wierdgoing fromdealing with a shovel to negotiating contracts that are 50x my income. Just a little to weird.
I no longer question my sanity.
Business degrees have much more versatility than any science degree (which tend to only be worth something if your specifically in that field).
I went with Business Management Information Systems because:
1. Ability to move into management, since I have proper training.
2. Allows me to "geek it up" as much as I want, since I do need to know the IT industry.
3. Versatility. The management and business part of that apply in non-IT environments.
A CS degree is great for programming, but little else. Same with any "science" degree.
That's why today, most guidance counselors encourage you to consider a double if you choose a science, in particular CS, which highly interacts with management (unlike an astrophysicist who interacts more with politicans). Or at a minimum, a minor.
That said:
There's no reason why you can't go back and take a couple of courses.
With real world experience, and geek knowledge, a few course will take you far. Even if you don't persue a degree.. something like:
Management
Management Intl. Business
Ops. Management
Legal Env.
and to really push ahead:
Accounting I,II
Finance
(in that order obviously)
lots of companies would even cover most if not all of the costs (except legal env, which apparantly nothing on earth covers except your own wallet).
They would likely prove useful.
I have owned and read How to Win Friends... for years but was never able to practically implement the suggestions until I took the course.
There are exercises you go through that really snap you awake and force you to confront what what has been holding you back.
Yes, you will get up in front of those 40+ other people and tell them how you will be a calm, confident IT Manager in 12 weeks.
And you will fucking believe it.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
"What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
First, there are computer geeks, band geeks, stamp geeks, model railroad geeks and yu-gi-oh geeks. There are technical aspects to management that can be approached as "geeky". And there are, I'm certain, technical aspects of 'normal' jobs that can be so approached.
Secondly, you should ask yourself why your boss put a geek in charge of 'normals'. Perhaps he/she would like you to make them more 'geeky'? Don't assume that the boss automatically made a mistake in this placement. Perhaps there is some underlying systemic issues that only a geek could manage... ? Perhaps they need be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age?
Thirdly, any management position, geeky or not, is about seeing to their careers. Let them know that you're position is to see that they are on track to having a good career... yes, even the problem ones. With the problem ones you can mutually agree to part ways as a way of growing their career. There's less ill will and hard feeling that way. And they often land on their feet in a better -for them- situation... and are often thankful. Those who stay will work for you all the harder and as you move up in management you'll be able to take some of them with you, should you find they deserve it.
Just do what you do best
Arnold "Red" Auerbach.
I say make sure you leave tech's to do the work. Take advice from them on how long things take. Don't try and make work fit into a dead line.
Manage in the way that others could have managed to get the best from you.
The best managers I've worked with are enablers. They clear the path for progress and wrap themselves around the project as its flak jacket and as a result have a project team that tries hard in return. And even winges to you rather than about you.
IMHO (as a geek manager) the biggest mistakes that new managers make are:
1) Doing, when they should be managing
2) Thinking FOR their employees, not ABOUT them
3) Making every decision, not enabling
4) Not thinking ahead
If there's too much work to be done in a crisis, don't pick up all the slack yourself and stop managing, look into hiring a temp.
If every time an employee comes to you with a question you answer it, they won't learn to think for themselves and you'll be constantly bogged down. Ask them what they think, point them in the right direction if they're wrong. It will get them thinking in advance before coming to you and let the more important issues rise to the surface. (do they need more training?)
A big mistake made by new managers is thinking that their job is to approve every decision in the department. Enable your people, so that they know where the limits are. Teach them the basis for decisions and let them make some on their own.
Think in advance about budgets, staff vacation, staff training, staff evaluations & bonuses, etc. This is stuff that you weren't responsible for before and can sneak up on you. If you're caught unprepared by your boss on any of these issues it will make you look bad. "Why is 50% of your staff on vacation when there's a deadline coming up?", "Are you ready to do your mid-year evals?", "Are there any areas your staff is deficient in that require training?".
Finally, clean your desk up at the end of the day. File papers, empty inbox, etc. This might sound stupid, but you at least need to give staff the impression that you're organized.
Just a few tips to get you started..
Cheers
This is my post. See sig above ^
I've seen three management types in my time:
1. Micro-manager:
wants to know everything you do, to the degree where you have to send weekly emails explaining what you've done this week, and what you plan to do next week. This goes on top of project plans and meetings.
Very bad for morale, shows lack of trust, wastes time. Generally is a "company man", not at all technical. Always going on about teamwork.
2. Hands-off:
just lets you get on with it, which is generally OK if there's plenty to do, but when there is not much to do, it's boring and eventually the boss will come to think of you as surplus, as he sees no evidence of you doing any work (yeah those products just magically write themselves!)
3. Geek-now-manager:
has no clue how to manage people, ends up being a strange mixture of the above two due to trying to fit in with the geeks, whilst mixing with management. Generally will lose all geek skills due to being out of touch. Forgets even the syntax of the 'route' command.
Higher management blame geeks for the lack of progress, when in reality it's the geek-now-manager's fault for not managing. Geeks resent geek-now-manager for being no help to them (and earning more) and not sticking up for them to management.
#include <sig.h>
not sure what Borgian management techinques are, but the best piece of hard-learned advice is to go slow. Take time to listen to everyone you manage... get their picture of what your group's mission really is. Meet with them one on one, perhaps over coffee away from the office, and get to know them as individuals. Form a realtionship with each one of them.
Remember, they have been interacting in their respective roles for some time. YOU are the one who has to fit in, not them.
For example, one chapter is dedicated to smiling. You should smile often, because it makes you seem happier, more approachable, and a nicer person in general.
Okay, we know the "why", but what about the "how"? I never was good at faking smiles for photo sessions. How does one learn how to fake a smile over long stretches? It is really tough to be happy around people who you would zoom away from at warp speed given a choice.
Table-ized A.I.
If they moved you up and your unsure what to do, it obviously because your unqualified to do anything of real value anyway. Just keep your mouth shut and nod agreeingly in meetings and you'll enjoy the slow pointless climb up the corporate ladder. Just remember to stay out of the working people's way.
'We need to talk about your TPS reports.'
There is such a thing as managment training..
I suggest you take a few classes before you have a revolt and are out back swinging from a tree..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You plainly state, "I do still have time for all the geeky stuff I used to do before. My problem is: I have no formal (or any other, for that matter) management training."
Promotion without qualifications or training and time to goof off. Do you work for the Federal Government?
I was a head cashier in a retail store where I worked for a year and a half. I was a cashier for 8 months before I was promoted. There were about a dozen cashiers, usually with 3 on nights, 4-8 on weekends. It was my responsibility to make sure that everyone had something to do, and that they worked within the "LP" (Loss Prevention) standards. The first few weeks as a head cashier, I made it clear that the front end would be clean every night, and that there would almost always be something to do.
I would do all the jobs they had to do for cleaning, did anything they did. I did everything I expected them to do. If someone did something especially well, I cut them some slack the next night. I thanked them at the end of each night. I only checked how they did their jobs once in a while to make sure they weren't slacking off. Every night I made sure that the front end was the first cleaned so when closing time came, we were ready to leave. If other departments needed help, I or another cashier would help.
Now that they had gotten used to me and what I like, I didn't need to tell them anymore. It was "Mike, I'm gonna go get the vacuum and clean the vestibule," "Mike, I'll do the hangars tonight since XXXXX did them last night." Then one day, I said, "Ryan, could you clean the end caps?" He had already done them.
One night we had a call out, and we were particularly busy. We didn't have a chance to clean: the other departments helped us.
All you have to do is treat the people who you are entrusted with managing with respect and show them what you would like done. Once they know what needs to get done, they'll get it done. Like another poster said, most people want to do their job well. All you need to do is let them know that you expect them to do their jobs, and that them doing their jobs directly results in a reward for them and the company.
--<Mike>--
this takes cooperation from the employees, too. I've known many people who would happily take on other peoples' work, especially if they were trying to get in their pants or had some other ulterior motive.
comes Geek Responsibility.
There is only one Management expert in the Halls of Mount Olympus, from which all others drink from his cup..... Peter Drucker.... Start with the "Effective Executive" and don't stop until you have read all his books. You might find out that "good" management is a thing of beauty...
... is the name of a talk that was given at a small London geek conference (NotCon 2004) by Tom Dolan.
I thought it was excellent - short and to the point, with lots of good tips.
You can find his notes and PowerPoint (alas) slides here.
From the following comments "I've been doing a relatively interesting job until now, but they've pushed me into management recently. Although the new position is pretty boring..." I would say that you are going to need to learn more to be a good manager. A good manager has to be a good cognitive psychologist. Understand what motivates and demotivates people. Understand how people miscommunicate with each other. Understand how people are competent/incompetent at individual tasks or task types, not competent/incompetent in general. Understand different personality traits. As well, you need to understand logistics, dependencies, triage, planning and constant refactoring of plans, consolidating at milestones to get a sense of achievement, team building through responsibility assignment and credit sharing and recognition of specific contributions. And lots of other things. If you are of the Aspergers-Geek persuasion, think long and hard before getting into management. If you can't see the challenge of it, you will be bowled over by it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I, for one, welcome our new geek overlords.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Is that like Pigs in Space?
Read BOFH, it is the only way.
Dont tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will suprise you with their ingenuity.
- General George S. Patton Jr., US ARMY
Dear Slashdot,
One of our coworkers just got promoted to management. Now, he uses this crazy borgish management style and calls us "normals." He acts like he wants to be a good manager, but we just want to get him fired. What should we do?
4) Management by walking around.
This is not to be confused with one guy I heard of who practiced what employees called "Management by walking around yelling at people."
Three Squirrels
For instance, I have a web site that tracks my team progress against deadlines, lists what they are working on, major risks, etc. Set it up according to the suggestions in the Software Project Survival Guide but it applies to any kind of management.
Read, and follow the suggestions of, the One Minute Manager. Be sincere, I ignore a lot of the touch feely stuff, but the delegation, goal setting etc. is key and easy with this method. Use advanced management techniques later.
I've been doing a relatively interesting job until now, but they've pushed me into management recently.
Simple solution: fuck up and they will then "demote" you back to tech. So what if you get less money, it is better than spending 2/3 your waking day doing something that you don't really want. Better to play poor than sleep rich (hmmm, did that make sense? oh well).
Table-ized A.I.
1. Don't criticize your people. My secretary went home crying for a whole weekend. It doesn't help.
2. Accept that delegation will result in results different from those you'd produce yourself.
lobotomy
1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke.
2. The act of removing the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap clone systems are sold in "lobotomised" form - everything but the brain.
[Jargon File]
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Just ask. Solicit input from the people under you about what you can do to help them thrive. You have to go to them, especially with geeks.
Also, I've found doing little things can boost morale. Take them out to lunch once a month. Always provide take-out when someone has to work past dinner time. Hand out free movie tickets on Friday. Stuff like that.
Geeks thrive on compliments about their technical expertise. When one of them does something clever, make sure you notice and let loose with the attaboys (or attagirls.)
Anyone can manage resources and generate a project schedule. Comparatively fewer managers generate feelings of respect in their employees.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
we have nearly a small book on managment in very short chapters...I guess the better comments take longer to type. My favorites are warnings that the new role requires new relationship to the team members, that communication is now as important an asset as your technical mastery used to be.
Still, I would not want to herd nerds for a living.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I naturally started to use Borgish management methods
Ha... I know exactly what you mean. I left a MIS degree to get involved with an early dot-com startup. After that venture, I've been put into quasi-tech management roles in company after company where I'm expected to be the ruthless SOB that saves all the disaster projects from the mid-level Bellheads that blow their money on the wrong vendors, empire build by hiring useless employees, and focus on everything except getting the project done.
I'm assuming the poster is in that category of competence and not some high-self esteem low competence poseur. You'd better understand a few basic facts rather quickly - if you are not only technically exceptional, but get results for management and have moved up into this world, you need to understand you are one serious threat to the 'order' of ineffective suits with degrees. Your lack of credentials will very quickly be used to take you down unless you take heed of some necessary actions:
1. find a powerful higher-up you respect (hopefully your boss; if your boss isn't of this caliber, arrange to get under one of this nature quickly or plan on a new job soon. You won't survive with a no-backbone boss.). Make him/her look awesome, and most importantly, establish a mentoring relationship. Not only will this probably save your ass af few times if you're damn good and make enemies being efficient and effective, but you will learn something about how the game works at the upper levels. They need credentials too, if you can manage - Harvard, Wharten MBAs are awesome at deflecting this crap in a political environment. Read about mentoring relationships - it works on two levels. Not only are you learning pretty important stuff, but there is an overt channel of communication your boss knows exists that is critical when you don't play things right politically. Think of it as out-of-band management on a circuit - when you blow the circuit down through well-intentioned but stupid political moves, this channel will be there for the boss to explain your errors (rather than just getting pissed and firing you). You've become an understudy, and in the bosses eyes, it would be his/her failure too if they had to fire you.
2. Learn how to be nonconfrontational publically and use your boss as a screen for unpopular decisions, like getting departments of ineffective people fired. Again, you make the boss look great and he/she will use their clout to protect you. You absolutely must use this mode until you get the credentials to take on the upper level yourself. Really, this approach can be fun. It took awhile for me to get used to it, but it really can be pleasurable letting some programmer shit mouth off to you, only to participate in the decision to lay him off when the bosses decide on the annual fat trimming.
3. GET CREDENTIALS! Don't let people keep that held over your head. Certifications are quick and dirty solutions. Keep in mind, however, that they are not equal with degrees in the political management world. Start taking 6-9 hours a semester somewhere to get a business degree. If you really want to piss them off, kick it in gear and get a finance degree. Most upper level suits automatically assume geeks don't understand numbers (hey, we do it to ourselves). I'm finishing a finance/banking double major and taking the LSAT for a JD (intellectual property law track). I just *love* it when some suit assumes since I understand tech more than they ever will, I must not understand finance. Imagine the horror this management or marketing graduate has when he tries to talk finance with me and discovers his three semesters of intro finance can't match up either.
4. Treat confidential information absolutely. Never, ever leak, share, etc. information from your boss - ever. You will find you'll actually be tested - my mentor boss slipped layoff info to me and had someone else ask me that he set up. Keeping my silence earned me considerable knowledge and trust. You will be tested!
solve it, solve it well, and give them two more.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Some of the key lessons they drove home when I took the seminar some years back was this:
1) The more you advance in management, the less you need technical skills, the more you need administrative and people skills. This "Peter-Principle's" many technical people right out of what they were good at.
2) A technical lead focuses on planning, leading, originating ideas, and controlling a project. A good manager needs to envision rather than plan, empower rather than lead, create a positive environment rather than originate ideas, and coach rather than control.
3) Technical people rely more on skills to accomplish their objectives. Managerial people rely more on relationships (people skills) to accomplish their objectives.
You might not agree with some of the underlying philosophy, but the points are still worth considering. Some of the fundamental aspects of what makes you a good geek may have to be tossed in order to make you a better manager.
Sweeping statements should never be made.
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
1. be friendly, but don't try to be our friend. stress to employees that you actually work for /them/ as well and not just the other way around. you are our agent to upper management as much as you are our immediate boss.
2. pass the credit, take the blame. employees notice this behavior most when it happens the other way, when managers pass the blame and take the credit. when upper management lauds you for your groups results, speak highly of the team "behind you" which got it done. when upper management berates your team's work, acknowledge that you were the orchestrator of that work. remember, you are our agent to upper management as much as you are our immediate boss.
3. reward good work. you likely aren't in control of massive raises, bonuses, or promotions, but that doesn't mean that simple things like an e-mail or letter praising good work is useless or wasted time.
4. do not surprise us if at all possible. do not publicly single out employees for behavior, good or bad, without first speaking with the employee. the employee may not want to be embarassed with praise or have attention drawn to their promotion or raise.
that's a good start, at least.
MORTAR COMBAT!
What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?
Your number one problem is going to be getting over the belief that all geeks have the same personality type.
First book you should buy and read RIGHT FSCKING now is called "The first 90 days" by Michael Watkins. This one didn't just save my career, it launched it.
The second book is called "Sun Tzu was a sissy" by Stanley Bing. Hysterical, and has the attitude you NEED if your going to protect your people, yourself and your company from any number of threats. Mostly internal.
*Disclaimer, I'm also a former Marine (Sgt... obviously) so I had a great deal of leadership training. Leadership and management are NOT the same thing, but they should compliment each other... Figure out which one you're weaker on and start working on it!
And if your not committed to the managers path, get out now. It's not worth it. If you are committed (and for the right reasons), it'll pay in spades.
You're a lieutenant in the Army now!
Re "management books": Unless you've been "pushed" into becoming an Accounting Manager, after re-reading "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, you may substitute them with anything from the "Self-Help", "New Age" or equivalent sections of your local Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com. These type of reading material should prove to be more entertaining while providing an equivalent amount of substance.
Works on human-manipulation techniques -to be applied to the management of your "normals"- tend to be quite popular among managers even when the results of its application to intelligent human beings tend to be risible. If contact with clients is mandated you might want to pick up a book or two on the subject of Illusionism.
If your topmost priority in life -besides food and shelter- is the acquisition of better-than- normal-quantities of money, you will feel very confortable in your new position. Anything else (including technical excellence of your supervised normal's work) must be second-to-profit unless you work for Google or plan to be a considered a mediocre manager. Referring to other humans you work with as "normals" -dare I not ask "As opposed to what?"- reflects an excellent disposition for management work.
HAD
n this scenario I was a terrible teacher (until I realised what I was doing) because I would either, if I knew the answer, react by putting them down or if I didn't know the answer, I reacted defensively.
Interesting - In this sense, I see an effective teacher's role (or that of a manager) more as a facilitator than some omnicient force. It's hard for people to accept that they can't know everything, and even harder when students (or employees) make this apparent. My own approach might entail taking this information and simply building on it, if possible, through the contributions of others that may be able to provide even more information. That way, we all learn.
In my experience, management is education. But it's not like being a teacher, it's an Education Optimization Problem.
A: Management. Use what it takes - text, slides, pictures, cajoling, screaming fits, etc. Empathy is key. Now is a good time to remember all the good teachers/bosses you ever had or saw, and how they managed. Remember that your minions are not you. They may learn much differently than you do, so you have to tailor your efforts.
P.S. - Technocrats/Meritocrats are not always good at communication or teaching. We tend to be elitist and condescending. You may have some hurdles here.
--- Corporations Are A Fad.
1) Give credit where credit is due. Don't tell your boss you did things you didn't. Tell your boss who did the work and when someone does a good job make sure your boss knows it. You'll look good because the people you manage look good and your employees will be glad to be acknowledged.
2) Manage expectations. Make sure people know what the should be working on and when it will be due. Don't spring things on people and demand they be done immediately unless you really have to. Don't be the manager that cries wolf.
3) When there is work to be done and everyone else is working, do the work. Assuming you can. If you can't, help do the stuff you can so you free up someone to do it. Don't just complain, lead.
4) Listen. It is likely you employees have some skills and will have something valuable to say. Get their input when something is in their skill set. Don't disregard their input when you get it. If it isn't incorporated, explain why.
5) Stand up for your employees. When they are unnecessarily attacked, defend them. Don't jump on the bandwagon and don't throw them to the wolves. Employees will respect you if they feel you have their back and their interests in mind.
6) Be respectable. If your team doesn't respect you, they won't work for you and they won't stand up for you when you need them to. Be someone you'd respect.
You'll also have to manage up as well as down the ladder, but I'll admit I'm not as good at that. Maybe someone else can help with that.
I knew my (relatively) new boss read /.
warnings, the 'normals' are restless and reviews/raises are coming up. also: we could use some help dealing with other depts.
You know a lot, then you might be OK so long as you are not arrogent about your intelligence, otherwise folks wil bey dying to knock you down
If you consider yourself a geek because you lack social skills, LEARN THEM FAST.
Here is a tip to keep you afloat until then.
Learn what your people are best at, and PAY A SINCERE COMPLIMENT to each of them. (Oh yea can those whe aren't good at anything)
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Give your staff...
1. Clear and obtainable goals and expectations
2. The authority necessary to obtain those goals and expectations
3. Respect
Be...
1. Clear in your communications
2. Fair and reasonable
Don't...
1. Tell them how to do their job (micromanage)
2. Get in their way
3. Pester them for constant status reports
4. Bog them down in unecessary meetings
You can manage things, but you need to lead people. Any knucklehead can count beans and make sure there are enough desks and computers in the shop. But to get people to work together toward a common goal -- that takes a talent called leadership. Contrary to popular belief, it is most often a learned skill. I spent some time as a leadership instructor in the Marine Corps, and in over a decade of active duty, I met many good and a few great leaders. But I only met one person who was a natural leader. The rest learned the skill.
That said, here are the basics:
I would also recommend checking out the Marines' 11 principles and 14 traits of leadership here -- they apply to the office just as much as the battlefield.
Best of luck to you.
"...can our personality be used as an advantage in management?"
No.
Remember - we don't HAVE personalities.
Now where's my dang pocket protector?
STOP. You're being farmed.
I wish I could convince more people that what matters at work is WORK. The project they work on is more important than they are.
That's my approach anyway. The project is more important than my petty needs. Should be the same for them. Heh.
Mind you this leads to lots of hurt feelings and other cry-baby stuff that I feel has no place at work! Why, it's not even on the project schedule! We can't afford to schedule in time for praise and diplomacy!! We have a project to complete!
My quick analysis is,
If you lack a sense of purpose, you probably don't have one.
Maybe you were just being deliberately generic, but from the quick anecdotes you shared, it sounds like you don't know what you're doing, nor what you are supposed to be doing. "I manage normals." What does that mean?
Ah, I see you subscribe to the wisdom of the Sphinx! Other useful Sphinx maxims to live and die by:
Before moving forwards, you must first go backwards
The best way to sit down is to first stand up
To master Vi, you must first study Emacs
In order to sound knowledgeable you must practice talking out of your arse
I started loosing the platform from where I had previously gotten my self esteem.
Where is he when we once again need him? Please come back!No way. First thing, stop calling them "normals." It brings their hopes up and offends management. Call them peons, grunts, minions, or human resources, all of which are suitably devaluing. In addition, you should refrain from calling your minions by names. Make them all get numbers tatooed to their foreheads and refer to them by those.
/.)
Almost perfect. Really though, are meaningful unique identifiers needed? When you want to know if something is done, you ask the nearest one. If they don't know you fire them and get another.
You also have to think about these things long term. Eventually peons with low numbers may achieve some unearned level of respect based on simply having a smaller number of digits representing them. (hmmm, kinda like
Instead generate your standard GUID for each of them and have it barcoded on their forheads. This also make things nice when you eventually replace the lunch room with feed stalls. You can scan them as they go to the bathroom, or put their head into the feed cage and automatically deduct the lost time and drone chow from their paycheck.
You could go with subcutaneous RFID, but it just takes longer for their spirits to break when their tags are invisible. Obviously visible machine readable body mods are really the only way to go.
Borg management is possible, but until significant andvances in nano-tech are made we're going to have to do most of the work to assimilate the drones ourselves.
Best of Luck
Actually, I think the best technique isn't found in a book. There are two concepts I turn to.
1. Coach - think of yourself as a basketball coach - sometimes you have to let them play and sometimes you call the play. You don't scream and holler, you teach and push and encourage.
2. Leadership as service. This is the idea that you as leader are there to serve the people below you. You are to bring out their best - get them focused and encourage their own ideas. Fight off the wolves above and keep them moving.
Most books are basically built off these two themes. And they aren;t mutally exclusive. I'm not a nut job catholic but the guy who wallked on water may have aid it best: treat others as you want to be treated.
Best way to get thge best.
BTW...calling them "normals" isn't way to start. It creates class and division right from the get go.
And anyone who follows a sci-fi take on communism depicted by robots/human constructs is already off to a really bad start.
I find the best managers are people who like geting things done. Most problems have several solutions but people who look at problems as things to be provented go from fighting fires to increasing productivity vary quickly. People who like being productive tend to want to manage things when there faced with poor management and they tend to be happy when there part of a coheasive whole.
A clasic example is the software interfaces between billing systems. Some people just want to hack there way though each and every interface which might seem productive but they tend to create huge problems over time. Good managers look to balance the present with future needs so they will start to transform such a clugy solution into a eficent working system over time. This tends to promote productivity as people start to see there jobs becomeing easer over time as well as reducing stress as people move from 24/7 crunch time to anticipating future needs.
Bad management is often sacrificing the future to meet todays needs. They want to higher cheep labor and avoid investing in infrastructure ect. But, things can be as simple as providing donuts at break time on a shitty job. If your working a help desk the company may think of everyone as instantly replacable but a good manager will try and reduce stress cheeply thus saving on the bottom line by reducing turnover slightly. Something as small as a smile or a thank you can go a long way to increasing morale in bad situations but it is people who want to be productive that tend to think of such things as "cheep" productivty aids vs. a waste of time.
My dad was a CIO and he was always brutally blunt on this one point. He told his people that if he knew of a problem he could rearrange schedules, allocate resources and they could work to resolve the problem. And he would defend your efforts to the best of his abilities. Lie to him and he swore he'd hang you out to dry.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." --Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
I'm guessing that your bosses saw in you some Leadership skills. You're probably the one who makes sure something gets done, helps out someone who's not going in the right direction and tends to speak up for the group. I'd suggest keeping up the leadership with regards your team (goal setting, plain ol' listening, communication up the chain, meeting needs) and learning what YOUR managers expect the results of your "managing" to be (reports, deadlines met, etc.) I've been reading a few books on Leadership as opposed to management. The better ones include a lot of "Do this: " type of statments with some examples and explanations.
My favorite quote that relates to your situtation, "Lead people, manage events."
Also: be rigorously consistent.
Ultimately one of the most important and common part of being a manager is politics. Politics affects everyone in the company including the rank and file engineers, but for managers it is often a full time job. One of the best things you can do to put yourself in a good position is to establish your presence through confidence and using your technical skills and jargon. This is the one true advantage that technical people will have in management; the ability to know the right answer and expose others through factual evidence.
You also have to be able to stand up for yourself (i.e. confidence) and stand up to upper management as well. This means you can't fear losing your job. You need to be in a position where you are not afraid of not getting a promotion or not kissing up to someone. So hold off on buying that big screen Plasma TV and BMW 745i sedan. If you are more financial stable, you will be less likely to becoming a "yes man" just to keep your job and consequently losing more of your political power.
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Every organization is different, and each person in that organization is unique. A management technique that works in one place might not work at the other, but if you understand the theories and priciples underlying all management techniques, you'll be able to form your own management style that will fit with your organization and your employees.
P.S. - As far as books go, I recommend Managing Human Resources, by Susan Jackson & Randall Schuler. It's a textbook, but it's not too bad for reading and it's a good start for learning the principles to make you a successful manager.
Follwing up on the "protect your people" admonition, never, ever, sell out your staff for your own benefit. Never give that impression.
If your staff thinks you've offered them up as sacrificial lambs, your are dead meat. If you've actually done that, your deserve to be dead meat.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Military leadership and overstucturing is COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE for the vast majority of jobs. Consider it. Military leadership techniques are designed to allow people to perform a finite range of tasks with zero chance of screw up, redundancy when necesary, and replacability. If you treat an employee like a soldier, you get minimal efficiency because you're discouraging creative thinking and self-direction. Perhaps more importantly, soldiers have something that employees lack: absolute dedication. If a solider hates the job he toughts it out, that's why they call it "service." You can shoot him if he flips and decides to leave. If an employee hates it, she will quit, or at least do the absolute minimum excepted and bitch about it. And you sure as hell can't cap her for it. "Normals" aren't really that different from geeks, they like to be treated with respect too, and work harder for bosses who "get it" and respect them (or at least seem to).
The parent does make one good point: ask why you were selected. Because if you're such a far-gone geek that you belive that all "normals" need "a firm structure," then clearly your bosses just f*cked up in a big way promoting you. You're a geek, that means you have great technical skills and perhaps a unusual point of view. That menas you have some skills to apply to management, but it doesn't mean you're some sort of Neitzchian ubermenche entitled to treat everyone like idiots.
Sorry to pounce all over that post, but my god did I have a bad experince with a manager who may as well have taken that exact same advice.
You have the advantage. Geekanese is not easily translated as it propagates on so many undetectable levels. We think in complex patterns not easily communicated to the simple minded. How fortunate you have the tools of manipulation at your fingertips. I am seeing degradation on UDP sessions coming into the RADIUS server. What did he say? We need bigger coffee cups in the break room. You quietly handle the issue, and your popularity grows among the "gifted". Soon you become an icon. Your people hail you as their king and build small coffee-cup shaped temples to honor your loving-kindness.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
how in the USA is management is considered more important (i.e. a promotion) than an engineer.
Engineering and management are two totally different skillsets. Its like taking a good carpenter and 'promoting' him into bricklaying.
I'm a good engineer, got promoted into management then moved myself back to being an engineer, and am more happy than ever. I suggest you should do the same.
If you decide to stay in management, here's what you need to do. Change the way you think about being a boss: start to think of yourself as a facilitator, not a controller. Be there to provide the resources to the engineers that they can't get for themselves. Stuff like involving them with (or at least informing them of) management decisions is a good.
Stop micromanaging. Give them deadlines then trust them to deliver on time. You can ask for progress updates every now and again to check there's not a problem coming up, but don't tell them how to do their job unless they ask you for help.
Most of all, remember when you were an engineer and what you wished your boss would be more like.
As someone who went through a rigorous leadership program (army officer training) and then went out into the business world, I can say that most companies don't devote nearly enough energy to training leaders. The primary difference that I've seen between leadership training and management training is that people trained in leadership programs tend to have a better understanding of the importance of the actual human beings doing the work, while many management programs tend to focus on inputs and outputs.
This is a generalization, and I know (from personal experience) that many people who have gone through leadership programs still don't get it, and that many people who have gone through management training programs are very capable leaders.
But I chalk most of that up to individual personalities. Some people have more basic leadership aptitude, while no matter how much training some people receive, they'll always be incompetent in positions of leadership.
Many people have offered excellent advise on how to become a better manager, but I would go a step further and say that you should think of yourself as a leader, not a manager. That may ultimately make it easier to figure out how to function best in your new role.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You don't sound like a guy who was "pushed" into management. You sound like a guy who wanted for his management to "push" him into management. There's a subtle difference.
In a previous job I had a manager who could code. He was actually pretty good at SQL and would hand down a near-finished but not optimized script. It bypassed a lot of highly annoying "code what I'm thinking", "that's not right" iterations.
That being said, he was an exception. The company was assimilated by a pack of PHBs and the job went downhill fast.
Managementia - The loss of technical cognitive function caused by moving into the management chain. The condition generally worsens proportionally to the level of management attained. The only known treatments are leaving management and large amounts of beer.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
i am a big beliver in smiling. it sounds stupid but it really does work. next time you are at a bar and see someone walk in ask yourself if they were smiling, and compare what your impression of them was.
the downside to smiling a lot is people thing you're dumb.
Always lubricate the cattle prod before use. The normals like that.
The things that drive us crazy about managers are precisely the things that mundanes NEED from a manager.
For us it tends to be "Give me my duties and stay out of my way." For others, it doesn't seem to work that way.
When I was a retail manager at a computer store, the geeks would only come to me when they NEEDED help. The mundanes would come to me when they wanted to make sure that there was someone else to share the blame for their fuck-ups.
I'm not sure what to suggest, but good luck.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
36 of D?
"can our personality be used as an advantage in management"
No.
Never ask yourself the question whether you can do a job better than somebody else. The question is whether the _other_ one can do the job better than he does it.
And, probably more important, whether your team can do the job better than it does it. Your experience needs to tell you what of that which happens actually does long-term damage, and what is part of learning.
You can't protect your people and teams from dead ends. If you do it too often, they'll not trust their own judgment. And they won't trust yours, either.
When your opinions differ, give them a chance to convince you. A second-class approach done with conviction will beat a commanded approach most of the time. Your job only sets in when you are sure that it absolutely can't. And even then you should give your team a chance to prove you wrong.
Every time they prove you wrong, your team wins. And a single person can't be right all the time.
You HAVE to watch Office Space as much as possible. Also read Dilbet daily.
;-)
Learn to be loud mouthed, arrogant and always follow the latest fad you read in your manager magazines (subscribe to at least three of these). Also you must never forget to half realistic deadlines to pressure people.
Hit your head on a wall a few hundred times until your IQ drops by, oh, say 50 points. Forget everything you know about anything and adopt a "You don't have to know anything about the subject matter to manage people dealing with the subjct matter" policy. Make every good thing your subbordinates achieve your personal doing, and blame their (and your own shortcomings) on them fully.
Doing the above should make you a "good" manager, and if you're lucky you will be one of the fine few that gets featured in the manager magazines. Oh yeay, and don't forget to steal someoned red stapler and send out TPS report guidlines.
BTW As you can read above I don't have a high opinion of managers. There are few good managers out there that actually "manage", but a lot of them think they're gods gift to business. They forget that often it's not them, but the people that are under them that make the profit.
Advice I would give, just respect the people you manage, and treat them like you would like to be treated. Don't bitch about peculiarities (listening to music while coding etc.) and make sure you have a full stock of fizzy drinks. Actually listen to advice they give and have them think along with important descisions. Also tell them what's going on and give them praise when they've done good. Just pretty much do the oposite of what I noted above
This is the price you pay for English being spoken by many as a second language.
You can choose. Either you can learn Swedish if you want to talk with me, or you can accept that my English isn't as good as yours.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
"Seven Habits" has to be one of the most overrated books on the planet. I found it to be so banal that couldn't even bring myself to finish the book. I'm glad I'm not the only one that has that opinion.
By the way, it looks like Covey's (the author) wife has nagged him into buying another private jet -- he's just come out with "The Eight Habit".
Here's an example. I'm feeling frustrated because my manager is giving me too much work and not enough time to do it. First, the non-skillful way:
This doesn't work because cursing raises the emotional content of the message. Accusing my manager of not doing anything puts him on the defensive. What I intended to communicate was that I can't do everything. What he hears is that he's the source of my problems. I want a solution and he feels the need to justify himself. Not good.Here's the same thing said better:
As soon as I take the emotion out of it and explain my problem in such a way that he can hear it in exactly the same way I intended it to be spoken, then we can BOTH work on trying to solve it. In this case, I'm asking my manager to help me figure out how to solve the problem. In the previous case, I was making him the source of the problem.I have tried very hard to exhibit this style for the people I manage. And, of course, it goes both ways. I need to practice what I preach. I need to have the freedom to say to them anything, and I need to exercise skill in saying it.
The other thing that I did when I first became a manager was I told the people who I hired and who I inherited the same thing: I'm going to make mistakes. The only way that I can fix those mistakes is if you can work with me to make improvements. I may not always agree with your suggestions, but I'd like you to give them to me. And then this is the point that I would go into the "say anything as long as you say it skillfully" speech.
And the final thing I would recommend is that you set expectations in writing. Don't go overboard on formality. But write down what you expect from every project, and casually discuss them. At the end of that discussion ask, "Is this a reasonable set of expectations?" When they agree, you have something in your back pocket if they don't meet those expectations. Oh, and make sure that the expectations are reasonable for the person's job description. Set forth a clear definition of what success is.
Finally, religiously stick to quarterly semi-formal reviews (semi-formal means written and discussed, but not signed). That way no one is surprised at annual review time.
Or... if none of this works for you, don't do any of it.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Some people like to be left alone with little supervision as possible (like me) and others need there hands to be held sometimes to get along.
So I would think the trick is to get to know your employees well, and know which buttons to push at the right time to get them to be as productive as possible.
People in technical jobs tend to be motivated by one of three things--the technology, people, or power. Geeks are in the first category, and unless they've had management training, they will tend to blow it with the people and power people. Even with the technology people, they need to remember to delegate the interesting work to the full-time technology specialists.
I've always tried to facilitate the work of those reporting to me. It seems to be appreciated.
I posted this in a sub-thread but thought I would call it out to a larger group.
A must read, especially for this group, is "Make it So, Leadership Principals of Jean Luc Picard" by Wess Roberts and Bill Ross.
Number One rule for the managing programmers : Interpreting Time Estimates.
Multiply your newbie developer time quotes by somewhere in the 8x to 24x range. If he says three hours, it will take somewhere between 3 days and two weeks. If he says he can do it in a week, don't expect it to be done (working, through analysis, development, test, client acceptance, documented, and working in production) for two months.
Junior Developers : multiply time estimates 5x.
Senior Developers : multiply time estimates 2x-3x.
The computer gods : multiple time estimates 0.75x - 2x.
The reason why?
Newbies don't know to account for anything. They quote you exactly how long it will take to bang out enough lines of code to do what you are describing. They forget that professional code gets designed, documented, tested, and deployed - and that each of those aspects take time. They also forget that for every two hours of coding they spend an hour farking off doing email, talking with others, finding out where the standard libaries are, and helping some end user fix his printer. Finally, they are under the horrible misconception that when they need someone else to do part of it, that other person will give it their #1 priority and do it right away.
Junior developers know they have to account for all of the above, but they haven't figured out how long each one is going to take so they wayyy underestimate each one.
Senior developers have a pretty good grasp of how long each one takes (minimum, maximum, average) but tend to assume best case scenarios for each aspect.
The computer gods account for all of the above and when something isn't going according to plan they know how to work the system and make it happen, or do it themselves if they are in a serious bind.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
The army leadership FM. Sure, there are alot of unusable sections in the civilian world (e.g. combat stress). However, its probably the best book Ive found on different management styles, when to use them, how to use them, and with whom.
i ew /reference/FM+22-100
http://atiam.train.army.mil/portal/atia/adlsc/v
I work for a really small company, and my manager only has one person to manage -- me. You'd think that this would make things easier, but I am so frustrated with my manager that I'm desperately trying to find another job. The only reason I haven't out and outright quit is that I need a paycheck. So here's what I've learned from my manager's mistakes:
1) Don't make the client your only priority. Tight deadlines and multiple tasks may look great on paper, but there's only so much that employees can do in their eight (or whatever) hours a day.
2) If, for whatever reason, a deadline is approaching and a project has fallen behind, hire or assign more people to that job. This must be done without affecting the other projects you're managing, though.
3) When your underlings complain that their computer/printer/whatever is down and hence they cannot complete their assigned tasks until it is fixed, do not dismiss this out of hand and/or assume that this is just the employee angling for a prettier machine. Check and see if the machine is actually in need of repair. Important note: No matter how much of a geek you are, don't fix the problem yourself! It's not your job and takes time away from the stuff you're supposed to be doing. That's what tech support and warranties are for.
4) When planning how long a task will take to be completed, take into account that employees may be working on more than one project at a time. What would take three days if an employee was otherwise unoccupied will take much longer if the employee has six other tasks with deadlines looming.
5) Unless it is entirely unavoidable, do not have multiple deadlines on the same day! Your employees only have so many hands, and deadlines always seem to mean a whack of paperwork on top of the final product delivery.
6) Unless you suspect something against company rules (i.e. leaking confidential information, prohibited substances in the office, etc.), do NOT go through an employee's filing system or desk drawers without their permission. It doesn't matter that the company nominally owns everything in the office, it's just freaking rude, OK?
I know that these guidelines all probably seem pretty self-evident, but my boss ignores them and it drives me up the wall.
to save yourself!
Just screw up the first task you're given really badly and they'll demote you to where you belong. Don't get nailed by the Peter Principle (people rise to their lowest level of incompetence -- if you're a true geek, you just hit it).
It's your only hope, really. Of course, if you're company is too Dilbert-esce, you'll get promoted instead. In that case get Dogbert's New Management Handbook and get settled in. Either way, you can't really loose by making a really big screwup about now.
May as well.
I've got no management experience, but I've worked for enough people, good (rarely) and bad (mostly) that i've identified what i like.
The superhero of middle management is my former boss, Ron, at a now-utterly-defunct embedded linux vendor.
Ron was Not A Programmer. He wasn't even technically speaking a geek, except in the strict jargon file definition. He was an old HAM operator and a former QA manager for various semiconductor fabrication facilities. He was managing a bunch of software QA people, me among them.
So, this was the basis of his attitude:
"As your manager, I am a man who is not competent to do your job, someone who, in fact, has only a cursory understanding of how you do your job.
What i need from you is for you to get your work done. How i intend to make that happen is by making sure:
a: You know what your job is
b: You know what your priorities are
c: You have everything you need to get the job done
d: Nobody will get in the way of your doing it, even if i have to jump in front of the bullet for you."
It was great. If people from other departments interfered with my work, Ron got on their case for it and hasseled their supervisor about it - so people from other departments rarely hassled me.
I knew exactly what my #1, #2, and #3 projects were, when they were due, and what was expected from them.
This rocked. If you've ever caught flack for not delivering something that you were never given any sense of urgency about, you can appreciate this.
If i needed anything - a particular cable, a memory module of a certain type, more clarification from marketing or engineering exactly what they wanted from me, an OK to take the rest of the day off if i was getting nowhere fast, heck, a sandwitch, Ron was on it.
I probably could have asked to take his daughter out to dinner and he wouldn't have said no right away.
Ron wouldn't make me work late unless he was working late too. Often this meant that he was in the office doing nothing important, so he'd fetch dinner and send flowers to the significant others. I'm serious.
If Ron was cutting out early before a holiday, he'd send me home first.
So, it was like this. I was certain - absolutely certain - that Ron would do whatever it took to make sure i could do a good job at what he'd asked me to do.
And, lets face it, that's what job satisfaction is all about.
I was entirely sure that Ron wouldn't ask me to do something unless it honestly needed to be done. That he would never bullshit me or sell me out.
I had no doubts about the fact that if upper management asked him to have us do something that he felt was unreasonable, he'd do whatever he could to talk them out of it.
So, whatever Ron wanted, Ron got. He treated us like princes and in return we exaulted him as our king. I'd work for him again in a heartbeat.
I'm not sure I'd even ask what the job was.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I, for one, welcome our new Management overlords.
I wish this was as easy as the equation suggests. I've gotten in the practice of submitting 3 estimates for each task.
Optimistic: Assuming the APIs and algorithms play nice
Realistic: What my experience suggests may be the time hit
Pessimistic: What my experience suggests the hit could be if everything goes wrong. This often includes political issues such as a tech writer with a god-complex.
Unfortunately, in the last cycle I went thru, the PM simply took the pessimistic estimates and used them as is. All this inevitably does for the engineer is teach a better way to 'Scotty' your estimates for the purposes of either looking good or sneaking in more features that PM won't approve.
Granted, I'm not sure (as a tech) how much I want a PM to take my numbers and then modify them because he is assessing my level of number accuracy.
...of hiring a geek for a position in which he's supposed to take over a bit of management - and he's already demonstrated his inability and general lack of social skills. Or, at least I thought he was a geek, but obviously not enough to get an understanding about the system he's supposed to take over. :(
...C64, Mac, IBM PC, take your pick...
I noticed you left out the Apple II. Which was designed by two kids in a garage.
A recent Slashdot thread mentioned Linus's citationin as a top manager in 2004. His right blend of management discipline and independence has kept the Linux project successfully evolving for 13 years. And still be a Geek and make some money.
Plus Linus is on the cover again this week.
1. Give your people the tools they need to do their jobs and then stand out of the way and let them work!
2. Don't sweat the small stuff. A guy who just spent his entire weekend (uncompensated) nursing a project "go-live" doesn't deserve to be called on the carpet for taking an extra 15 minutes on his lunch break.
3. And above all else, never *ever* hang your people out to dry. You take the heat for them and then deal with them appropriately later, but never make them feel like you are not backing them up 100%.
Treat people as outlined above and they'll be willing to walk through fire for you when the time comes. It's a karma thing.
Excessive drinking is fine...in moderation.
The managers that employees have the least respect for are the ones who are weak. So there are 2 rules: 1. Don't let your employees run roughshod over you. Know when it's time to lay down the law. Expect and reward high quality work. 2. Don't let clients or other managers bully your people. Go to bat for your team. Employees will be loyal to you if you are loyal to them.
I am with you for most of what you say, having gone the way from coder to manager, too, +5 Insightful. But I'd like to add something *very* important about "Management by walking around": Know when *not* to walk to certain people, because if they have something to do that is more complex than "change those HTML templates to make them XHTML compliant" or something as trivial. The interruption will stop their flow. I first read about it in Peopleware, but found not interrupting people at the wrong time essential even before reading the few books on management I read.
Of course, this implies that you have to know your staff and be able to judge whom you can interrupt when. Some people need to be interrupted from time to time, e.g. when they're stuck. Others, I tend to be one of them, work best uninterrupted and will report back when they have questions or are finished.
Bottom line: Know your people, have common sense, be yourself. People work best with managers who are genuine.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
I, like everyone else, have known many managers, but I am always surprised that my fellow cow-orkers never seem to get the fact that the managers are out for themselves. The one person I know who knows this has a saying whenever a manager does something piggish:
"That's how they got to be managers, dumbsh*t!"
Enjoy the position, you PHB you.
The best sound-bite description I've heard of the responsibility of a manager is: "Eliminate uncertainty." A lot of the advice given here falls into this (clear goals, "run interference", "select good people" etc). It runs both ways: make things clear and unambiguous for your staff and ensure you provide consistent results for the company.
Don't "manage" -- "accomplish." I believe John Walker said that managers do just that: they manage a problem in perpetuity rather than make it go away which is what an engineer would. Don't fulfil his stereotype.Don't try to be the friend of the people reporting to you. Respect them, of course. Be friendly, by all means. But you are not their friend, and if they have a problem you can't cut them slack you wouldn't cut anyone else (and likewise when they're awesome, don't take them for granted but let them know you know).
Keep your perspective. I once worked for a CFO who referred to all the developers as the "direct contributors." Her biz-school point was they were the ones whose work our customers wanted. The rest of us (except for the sales guys) were overhead.
I've been told in the past I was a great manager and I also know that at times I was a dreadful manager. It's a skill like any other and has its own disciplines, problems and rewards. As long as you don't crash the plane along the way you can get better at it. Good luck.
"Borgish" management methods? You assimilated them? Fut the wuck?
Personally, I've managed to keep myself out of management since I'd be terrible at it!
"I've been doing a relatively interesting job until now, but they've pushed me into management recently. Although the new position is pretty boring (I manage normals)" By looking down on those you manage, you might find it harder to see them as useful for any tasks. Instead of taking the attitude "Oh crap, I manage normals", you might consider saying "Hmm, given the tasks I need to get done and resources I have been given, how can I best get this done in a) in the least time b) at the lowest cost c) with the coolest outcome and/or d) with the best opportunity for an even higher paid management job that I can still be a geek in. Think of resources as everything from code base, to your budget, to your office supplies, to every single skill of every person under your charge, even if they don't do it as well as you. "For example, I naturally started to use Borgish management methods, and this wasn't received well by people, to say the least. What are the most difficult hurdles for a manager geek to jump, and can our personality be used as an advantage in management?" It helps to remember any time in your life, no matter how brief, that you felt like you were managed well. This could have been on the Olympics of the Mind team, at church, at school, on a sports team or on the job. How were you treated? How were you motivated? How did the other person make you feel? Did they talk down to you or say they knew you could do it? Take those pieces and always keep them around on which to hang the stuff you learn in the books.
Being a good manager is not something that comes naturally for most people - whether they have a technical background or an MBA.
Obviously you need to find a balance between getting the work done, and keeping your employees happy to be a good manager. You need to find that sweet spot between mentor and tyrant.
Since you probably have a lot of technical know-how, it is important to keep in mind that your employees might not. Communication will always be important - don't assume that they will always understand what you are talking about, since you may be speaking in different dialects (geek versus non-geek).
Treat them fair, develop their skills and knowledge and keep the job challenging and you will be doing much better than most. Also take the time to listen to them.
Feel free to tap into your inner geek to discover ways to improve processes, or implement creative solutions.
Basically, you have the same experience as any new manager, with the benefit of superior technical abilities. Other managers will learn to pfear your awesome powers.
1. Listening to complains
People will bitch about almost everything, when they do please put 100% attention to them, I typed while listening which made them feel bad.
2. 80% of the people "feel" and 20% "think".
We geeks tend to believe we think where we actually feel more, it was my mistake to assume that geeks think and make the logical choices--killed me at least twice when I believed that way.
3. Keeping your cool when you yourself could do someting in 20 min. but you get an estimate of 2 weeks.
Not Kidding ! please practice this--I finally had do things like lying about stomach ache (which I never get) before I can put up the face which shows interest and respect for the geek--this is 100% true. I fucked up once very bad when I could not take the BS from a senior programmer about something taking 2 Months and did the coding 15 mins right there while the one account manager watching this whole thing. Did not go well at all after that I rubbed her programming ego so bad that I got fucked later many times by her in totally unexpected ways. It took me 2 yrs to make up with her--after all she was a senior programmer and had some say about projects etc.
I guess this is what I did not do and paid for it so I can share this with the group.
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
I cannot recommend this course higher. It made it blatantly obvious to me what I was doing wrong when interacting with others at work.
Honestly, this course turned my career around, and removed a glass ceiling that I had previously hit.
Jason Pollock
first, get a million dollars.
then... do whatever you want.
surround yourself with the best people.
ok, how do you do that?
-pyrrho
Completely to the point! The combination of:
1) Know your position. "A man has to do what a man has to do". When it is a 'serving' position, serve as you should. When it is a 'dictating' position, dictate as you should, which is not 'randomly'. Praise what is good, reject what is bad.
2) the "golden rule": treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself. Keeping in mind that 'normals' like other stuff than you, although I cannot imagine it being that different.
I naturally started to use Borgish management methods
Are you just being condescending and insulting about the people you manage because you're insecure, or are you really this clueless? Why in God's name did they "push" you into management with an attitude like this? Wasn't there anyone else at all that could take the job?
I think you should get out now, and find a job you like, and that you want to do. This one is obviously a horror story for both you and your hapless employees.
I'm sorry if I'm repeating sentiments expressed earlier, but this is pretty much a parody of "bad geek manager" talk.
Drucker. Go read, think and then think again. Then go read about the Stevenson family (hint: click here) Oh - and by the way, the geeky stuff will soon be what you do after hours. Hacking people is much more fun, and the best challenge you'll ever get.
Not too technical, but in 3D computer graphics a "normal" is defined as a vector that is perpendicular to the face of a polygon. They are used for texture mapping and determining which side of a polygon needs to be rendered. Referring to people as "normals" just sounds really weird, imo. This is a very commonly used term in 3D graphics.
As far as moving into management goes, never turn down a promotion, even if you don't want it. You are dead at the company if you turn it down. Some people here say to "stick with being a techie". That's fine, but if you are offered a management job (more $) and decline, you will not be offered it again, at least with the same company. That's my experience, anyway. If you are nervous about a promotion like that, just take it when it's offered and forget about trying to preserve an existing positive work situation that is guaranteed to change regardless of your efforts to keep it the same. I've put this into practice and I'm much better off (professionally and financially) going with the flow instead of staying with what's comfortable.
I was for a long time an uber-geek, and decided that the only way to get things working right was to get into the management side. So I moved to a job managing lots of geeks.
I proved very quickly that geek != manager.
So I got training. Courses and an MBA.
Result: management trained geek != manager.
So now I do consulting/contracting and manage nobody.
Some of us are never going to have the right personality, no matter what the training.
re, your sig line.
If computer science is applied philosophy why can't I work as a software engineer with my philosophy degree... oh wait, I do... for 15 years.
It's just that as a trained philosopher I'm forced to wonder, "hmmm, is that really me?"
seriously, logicians had a hell of a time getting work for hundreds of years but now there are not enough of us to fill the jobs. Sometimes someone may think, "I wish he had more formal education in computer science" but that's fair as I often think, "I wish he had more formal training in logic"...
and logic has remained the same for thousands of years... computer science... the computer scientists with 15 years of experience also didn't learn C++/Java/etc. in school.
-pyrrho
I've been a geek managing people for about a decade now, and it's not as hard as it seems. Non-geeks don't understand how we can be fascinated with technological tidbits. Once you understand that, and then figure out what motivates them, you can appeal to them from their perspective. For example, you might call a friend to let him know that the latest release of X linux just came out, and the kernel tweaks are insane. They might call a friend to tell them they just got a certificate for being the best customer support rep. Be the guy/gal that knows what motivates that person, and who gives them the certificate. The bottom line is, if you take the time to know what motivates people, you'll be able to motivate them. Listen. A lot. Care about your people. Back them up. Demand the most of them, and reward it (little things matter here). Give them credit for their work, publically. Help them to feel good about themselves and they'll help make you a success.
The world of achievement has always belonged to the optimist. -- J. Harold Wilkins
Look, kids right out of undergraduate engineering don't have the experience to ship products beyond small little apps (which may be worth a lot financially, but technically impressive stuff requires experience). Managers straight out of MBA programs don't have the ability to be senior managers. Newsflash: school is phenominal and teaches you concepts, experience seasons you.
Look, I know plenty of brilliant self taught programmers. They slam out code fast as hell. However, they often make basic mistakes that create maintenance problems that they would have learned with a basic CompSci education (note: dropping out of school having finished most of a CS degree isn't self taught, neither is reading through CompSci text books, if you picked up the theory in a formal matter, you got the knowledge).
I have a S.B. in Comp Sci from a decent school. Without experience, I couldn't program, and as I manage more than program, I don't have the experience. Yet with that basic grasp of the theory, I can often catch basic mistakes in the design phase. So the education was worthwhile, but experience is important.
I am in an MBA program right now. Its a survey program, I study a little economics, a little management theory, a little accounting, a little finance, etc., etc., basically the basics of the theory of business. Without years of business experience, the coursework would make no sense, and learning how to apply it professionally is ALSO a challenge.
But guess what, having studied the basics of managerial techniques, I stopped making the BASIC mistakes that the literature catches. I also understand numbers that come out of a ledger now.
Could I audit a Fortune 500? Absolutely not. Can I read their financials and understand where the numbers come from? Decently. However, if I wanted to be a stock analyst that was good, I'd need a LOT more EXPERIENCE than the education gives me.
Knocking MBAs for not being business geniuses is like knocking 22 year old CS graduates for not being able to knock out an office suite. Knowledge is the building block.
Guess what, I'd take a guy with 10 years experience over a recent MBA any day of the week. However, want to bet that in 3 years the MBA w/ 3 years post-MBA experience has gained more than the guy with 13 years and no MBA?
Alex
>If you are a fascist about details, then you will have to be one forever. Noone else will step up and take responsibility for good designs. +1, right, really!! In my lenguage, we've got an expression which says "the best is the enemy of the better" (I don't know if I explain myself)...
Arrant and defiant drones need to be re-assimilated into the collective and reset.
There have been a lot of posts about "do this" or "do that" and there are a lot of them that apply universally.
I find though that one of them most overlooked items is the communication style that's used. To be a successful manager, you need to learn how to adapt your communication style to each of the individuals. Some people need to be pumped up, some need to be challenged, and some just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Most of all though, you need to make sure that they know when they've done a good (or great) job because when they know when they did well, they can (usually) repeat it in the future.
replace all keyboards from QWERTY to DVORAK
i sig thus i am
really. All you need to do is use the phrase "moving forward" a lot. Variations are ok too. e.g. "going forward" or "forward thinking". Those seem to work pretty well for those in management at my job. :)
If you're the kind of geek that I am, then you like to open up the box to figure out how things work. Then, knowing what you've learned, hack it to make it work better. Doing this with a work group of human beings is not as easy, but the metaphore applies. I suggest you look into the discipline of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. These scientists have been studying workers and work behavior for over a hundred years and they have a firm grasp of how to be a successful manager depending on your organization's culture and the personal characterisics of your direct reports. As for what you can do with your direct reports in the immediate future: 1. Support them where they need help and when they are under attack. 2. Do not get in their way.
Hopefully this gets read. I am a geek. I am also an oustanding manager. I did it the same way I became a super geek. RTFM. There are many books on management. Pick up all the books you can, glean from those around you who are top managers, and you will too become a top manager. Same things applies to geekdom, RTFM.. Learn to hack people (figure out what makes them tick) and you can manager them. You may have to start out with a simple "hello world" but eventually you will be doing some hard core stuff. But start out small. Write down what your goals are for your team and yourself, and follow through.. Read, read, and then when you are done read more on management and people skills.
Just clears up the obstacles, politics and beauracracy that could slow down his employees and then gets the hell out of the way...
(Assuming good workers ofcourse)
Don't be an asshole. Make yourself open and available to people's concerns. Know your team and make time to 'hang out' with them if possible. Be positive while maintaining a realistic focus. Be committed. Be forgiving. And most of all, just be yourself instead of trying to be some sort of stereotypical manager you have in your head. That pretty much covers it.
Like you, I started with the Borgish tactics, which didn't work at all.
As soon as I realised what it was I was doing, I found some time, and contemplated what my options were. More speciffically, I reflected back on all the managers and supervisors I'd worked for. I was looking for the very best one supervisor or manager.
What I found was a man named Bob, that had the ability to motivate people, without being borgish, Bob also gave employees enough information to allow them to set their own priorities, additionally, when there were problems, he was quick to analize the facts, and either educate employees as to the causes of their trouble (letting them draw their own conclusions and solve the problem) or if need be (rarely) solve the problem and motivate employees toward implementing goals and objectives which would effect a fix of the problem. But most of the time, Bob just walked around - he called this MBWA (Management By Walking Around)
My reason for searching for a single best boss was to emulate as close as possible the things I admired about his management style.
From that day on, whenever there was a problem, or issue that needed my attention, I asked myself "What would Bob do in this situation?"
If I came up with a blank, the overriding ideas was to empower employees to make their best decision as to what to do, or empower them to effect the fix I knew was needed. I asw a tee shirt once that summed it up well - "Tell me what to do, Or how to do it, but not both (both is called micro-management, and that is worse than Borg tactics. Then ALWAYS follow up, to see how things are working.
Bob also had a lot of personal integrity - If he said "I'm going to do this, at that time" it was done at the time promised. Bob also solved his problems without snitching. He would never mention a wayward employee to senior management, with the exception being a time for action against an employee that was truely un-trainable, about 10 minuites before escorting him to ER, and he did this personally, and was honest and forthcomming about the issues, to the point that a terminated employee knew what was wrong with their behavior, and how badly they'd failed at fixing it. Oh, you might say that Bob might have been a hardass, but not so. To get fired,. an employee had to be unable or unwilling to learn and/or modify necessary skills and behaviors. And he NEVER discussed an employees performance, except with that employee alone, away from other employees. I asked him about this once, and his reply - " The only people that need to know about an employee's performance is that employee, and me. peroid"
But mostly, Bob was a resource that anyone could ask help from, that would spend time teaching you the necessary things so that you could succeed. And he never NEVER worked on product.
Hope this helps
toosmart
Take management lessons from Captain Picard. Seriously!
-Picard understood the strengths and weaknesses of all of his team members, and delegated tasks appropriately.
Engineering difficulties? Have Geordi take care of it. Ship morale low? Get counselor Troi on it. Unknown problem affecting ships computers? Have Data try to figure it out.
-Picard knew enough about everything on his ship (science, engineering, etc) to understand reports and make solid decisions, but he didn't try to do everything himself.
-Picard does his homework.
When the Enterprise is scheduled to cross through alien space, he reads up on their laws, customs, and politics so that he has a basis for making good command decisions and getting the most out of negotiations.
-Picard asks for suggestions and input from his team members, but isn't afraid stick to his guns when necessary (even if most of the crew disagrees with him).
-Picard stands up for his team members.
Paranoid starfleet admirals interrogating crewmembers without cause? Aliens trying to execute Wesley? Starfleet scientist trying to disassemble Data? Hell no! Picard won't stand for it.
If only more managers took lessons from Captain Picard...
If you decide to move to the world of pie charts and performance evaluations, take the change seriously: you're learning a whole new job, and it will take study and attention.
Having been mid-management before (shift supervisor, then later shop supervisor) I can offer some tips.
1) Trust no one. Lest of all "your" employees or your boss.
2) Remember the immortal words of Scottie to LeForge, "How do you expect to be known as a miracle worker, when you tell them how long it will actually take?" Best advice, double the time, double the money required, and triple the downtime required to implement.
3) While not trusting anyone, ASK people to do things for you. Not the "If you could do that it would be great, mmmkay?" sort of asking, give someone a task, tell em to do you a favor and get it done quick.
4) Remember to REWARD those who DO what you ask them to when they hurry for you... (early off work, recognition as your best help on the particular job)
5) Those who don't perform for you, punish with menial tasks for a day or two. Make them see its in their best interest to do what you "ask" them too.
6) Never ever be afraid to get rid of someone who doesn't work well with you. Personality clashes are a bitch, and hard to deal with, so why deal with it. Transfer them and make tham an SEP (Someone Elses Problem)
I am. A Digital Monk.
If you want to be a leader, as opposed to being a 'manager', then you should:
1) Know what is going on. If one of your people is annoying everyone in the entire company, it shouldn't be a surprise. Another is a slacker? You should know that. Another a SuperStar? You'd better know that for sure, or he/she will soon be gone.
2) Back up the people that deserve to be backed up. There are a lot of corp-uscles who will try to order around your people, slag them, knife them in the back, etc. If you don't back up your people, you are truly useless, and deserve every bad thing that happens to you.
3) READ Peter Drucker! The single greatest human asset this country has on the process of management. One of his many books is worth a shelf of 'One Minute Manager' schwa.
Unfortunately we just left a time, the dot bomb boom, where thousands upon thousands of incompetents were thrown into the IT world. They were all chasing $, and do not naturally like the work. They prefer to chit-chat, socialize and talk on the phone any day then script or code. Typically these are women, who should have gotten English Lit. degrees or the like.
Still, thanks to political correctness and affirmative action, they retain their jobs. It will be your job as their manager to take the blame for their incompetence. They can not be fired. But you can. Good luck. There is no way in hell I'd want to be in management these days.
Whenever talk about management gets a little out-of-hand, I find it helpful to recount Peter Drucker's famous line: Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. Helps to put things in perspective when you're in a rut. Good luck.
-Q
"normals" - you won't connect with people with that kind of distance. Find out who they are - what their passions/hopes/ideals are. Care more for your people than for yourself or any tribe you thought you came from. You are them now, because you can only achieve through them. Respect your people. p.s. don't let your empathy prevent you from demanding performance.
Let your people be smarter and bigger/better geeks than you. You're the manager and need to be "above" competing with your folks.
The only problem with your approach is that the manager (or whoever is asking you to quote an estimate) doesn't have three columns in which to put numbers.
: ... but it is going to take you four days to accomplish.
Ways for your estimates to get more accurate
1. Keep track of projects or even parts of projects that you gave estimates for - and keep accurate records on how long it actually took. If you spent an hour on it Monday, two hours on it Tuesday and an hour on Wednesday, delivering it at noon on Thursday (the rest of the time you were waiting on someone else's SLA) how long did it really take you? Four hours? No. Four days.
There is strong reason to believe that a similar project in the future will take you four days. Explain that it won't be 40 hours worth of work, only four hours worth of real work
2. You can probably give a good estimate of roughly how much code it will take to do a given task (plus or minus, order of magnitute.) Take a pretty big project and figure how long it really took (start to finish, concept to final delivery) and then look at the project - count function points and count lines of code. You will be amazed at how low the lines of code per hour actually is (4LOC sustained over the course of the project is pretty average. 6LOC sustained is pretty good. 10LOC per hour for every hour between the first concept meeting and final delivery is heavy hitter. Nobody I have ever met can do 15 LOC / hour sustained for the entire length of the project. That's not per hour you spend actually programming, but average total over the course of as many months as it took to actually do the entire thing.
Cut and paste doesn't count, nor comments or blank lines.
Ditto function points.
You figure out how many function points or LOC / hour you can do sustained over the course of a big project - all you gotta do is guess how many lines of code or function points the project will be (often easier to guess than actual hours because you will generally be re-writing an existing application and can count the LOC or function points in the old app.)
3. Never quote time in less than half-day increments. Most developers can't get their caffeine up to operating levels in under two hours, much less get 'in the zone'.
4. Want your productivity to double? Put your IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, WSAD, whatever you are using) in your startup group in Windows so it is already open with some code in the editor when you turn your computer on. No joke. The sooner you can get a developer dialed in and thinking in 'code' the sooner he starts banging out the good stuff. If he opens even a single email before starting his editor - there goes an hour.
I have no idea how to auto-start apps in Xwindows on Linux (KDE or Gnome) but if you can figure it out more power to you.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You will get crap from all sides. You will be asked to compromise your personal views in the interest of teamwork. You will be ridiculed, screamed at, and a general target for anything that goes wrong. You will be asked to deal with the most difficult engineers, and the most difficult customers. If you are lucky, your own boss will watch out for you and only 50% of this crap will come your way. Push back push back push back. Protect yourself and your integrity or you won't get through it. Having said all that, give yourself 18 months before deciding if you are cut out for management. Hopefully you will get a chance to manage 2 projects or 2 teams in that time. I just stepped down from 4 years managing a data communications team that varied from 3 to 24 people. It started with 24 (bad start), a total disaster, and gradually got better and better. Personal counseling helped a lot, a professional outside the work environment. Last year my 4 best people were taken away, my schedule shortened and I was made responsible for worldwide product support - in the name of giving me a "chance to grow". I quit when it was clear that my bosses would not budge on anything, and didn't really care. I was tired of pushing for what I mistakenly assumed were basic principles. Know your limits. Be open to new ideas. Be humble but don't compromise your own principles. You do know what your own priniciples are, right? What you would compromise on, what you wouldn't? Good luck out there.
Relax dude, learn to play golf and remember what it says from my one foray into management at the money store where after blue level management training I got this lovely walnut plaque that says:
What Is It That All Good Managers Do The Same?
1) Give performance feedback regularly
2) Involve others in the business operation
3) Listen to employees
4) Communicate clearly performance standards and expectations
5) Interview and select the right people
----------
Most of all learn to let go, delegate and start thinking of programming as recreation.
Get personal with your employees and think of crazy, personalized incentives to keep them going. Do work with them, and ask them for input and feedback as you give the same to them. Solicit suggestions for and hold discussions about process improvements. Don't forget the tiny things that need your attention as much as the big things--keeping on top of those helps you be prepared when the big things come along. Teach your employees how to do something new rather than just do it yourself--it'll strengthen your team and reduce the burden on you.
Good luck!
Read jack phelps dot net
I waded through some of the post but with 500+ replies I couldn't read them all. So I'll preface this by saying some of this has probably already been said.
;-)
So here's some thoughts:
1. As previously stated serve your people. Authority and responsability are tied to each other. When something goes wrong with one of your team, stand behind them, and try to help fix it. Being in charge means being responsible for what happens.
2. Management is simply making the best use of the available resources. The people under you are your most valuable resources. Make sure they are being used to the extent of their capability.
3. If you stand behind your people they will stand behind you.
Not too deep, or profound or anything just a few thoughts to add to the pile
Man oh man... where are those mod points when I need them?
I *really* wanted to mod you up for your statement! It seems like these replies are a sea of suggestions on how to take on that new management role - yet, the best suggestion of all may well be yours.
I faced a similar problem a few years ago. I had been working in corp. I.T. for nearly 6 years at the same place, and it became apparent that management's view of me was quickly turning negative. (Basically, it went from earning respect for being a rather "senior" PC support person with lots of experience, to someone who must lack motivation because I didn't make a strong effort to "move up" into some type of leadership/management role.)
For a while there, I really had to ask myself if I was "screwing up" or "slacking" or what? But I came to my senses and realized *NO*! The real problem was/is, corporate culture tends to "promote" people to management because they don't really have any other feasible way to reward you in a tech. position once you achieve a certain level of skill/experience. It's often a really bad idea, because it takes people away from what they're truly good at... throws them into a role they're typicaly NOT good at, and hampers the ability of the people they manage to be productive workers. All this because of such things as "salary scales/ranges" which place artifical ceilings on how much they can pay someone in a given role. (In my case, they all but flat out told me they simply didn't know what to do come yearly raises next time around, because they were already paying me the most they were allowed to, according to their salary limitations.)
The only mistake *I* made was sticking around when the writing was on the wall... I guess I thought my experience would see me through, but I was wrong. When management realized they weren't going to be able to cram me into a functional management role, they eventually gave me the boot.
Know what though? Despite some initial bitterness and stress about finding another job, I'm SO much happier now. I no longer bother with coporate I.T. at all. Instead, I work for a *small* business focused on on-site PC service and support, and I get to do what I love every day for different people - with no management breathing down my neck at all. It's just me, out there each day, making or breaking it because of my own skills (or lack thereof). The pay's not quite as good, but I'm not stuck watching my life get sucked away by paperwork, meetings, telling a bunch of intelligent people how to do their job, or whatnot.
and that is why you will always be a dweeb. Join th e army and get a free boonie hat.
As a former geek who has grown to love being a manager, all I can say is most of these postings are clichés and gibberish. Give management a try. If you love it and other people say you are good at it. Do it. If either of the above is not true, go back to what you ARE good at. The Peter Principle can apply to geeks turned managers as well as it applies to anyone else. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PETERPR.html
I'd start with learning some decent grammar.
If your were "forced" into the position of "boss" (wahh, here's the world's largest fiddle playing out your lament, cry me a river.), do your best or stand aside.
Never forget your roots in geekdom. The moment you do, you become a PHB and subsequently, one of "them".
Earn the respect of the geeks you used to work with in the proverbial trenches. Earning the respect of your peers goes a lot further than whining on Slashdot.
My two bits.
-Scott
Not all NCOs are incompetent blockheads, though a good few are.
Not all soldiers are dedicated. Trust me. I work around plenty of them. The contract they signed only means so much to them. There's ways of saying screw you Army if they really want to. I've seen it happen.
The good NCOs are the ones who do a lot of the things mentioned above. Take care of their soldiers needs. My CSM is always telling us "if your NCOs aren't taking care of you, make them take care of you." They are a buffer between the angry officer with a jacked up phone because he decided he is smart enough to mess with it, and teh soldier who has to go out there and fix it.
If you want to know how an NCO should be, look up something called the Creed of the Noncommissioned Officer. One thing that was stated earlier really stuck out as being familiar. The earlier poster said that the manager's job is to make sure the job gets done, and that his people get taken care of. "My two greatest responsibilities will be uppermost in my mind: the accomplishment of my mission and the welfare of my soldiers."
Some people just get to the higher ranks because all the smarter people got out of the military, and they had to promote *somebody*. You do the math.
What if you are an employee under a manager/supervisor who commands no respect, won't discuss things with the staff, sets no example and talks about you behind your back? Senior administration doesn't seem to notice (or likes it) but the entire IT dept suffers because of lack of foresight, no respect etc. What's the employee supposed to do? Stop caring and do only exactly what you are told to do?
Put simply Geeks expect to be good at what they do, and they strive to improve if they are not. The fact that you've asked how to be a good manager already puts you ahead of the 80% of the managers that I've met that have never stopped to ask themselves that question.
So, expect that there will be much to learn, and do your best to learn it. Cross check what folks tell you and experiment when necessary. Remember that well over 90% of management theory is nonsense, and you'll have to work to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Oh, and you won't succeed at first, and will have to debug your management systems.
I managed a group of fellow engineers, and I can equate it to hurding chickens............ Secondly, if everyone was made to manage people just once, it would ever so much better for all.
On the other hand this depends in part on what you call "great". The following link was mentioned on Slashdot a few weeks ago:b 2000_page3.htm
http://www.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2000/sw_jan-fe
Your apparent failure to recognize this subtlety shows why it can be challenging for geeks to make the switch to management.
I'll try to keep that in mind, you arrogent mealy-mouthed snot.
To be a successful leader, you don't need to make people like you. Don't need to be their friend. What you have to do is lead them to victory.
You need to know your team well enough to ask of everyone involved quite specifically for their very best, so when that's the best they can do, they really feel like its their victory.
You're the leader, you set the goals, you make sure this happens. They're not just your co-workers anymore, they're the tools you use to do your job. Might sound distasteful, but its true. You should know their strengths and weaknesses as well as you can and plan all this carefully so it comes off.
You succeed, your team grows in skill and confidence and camaraderie, they become more productive than they were when you took responsibility of them. Everyone looks good, things happen, you're all in demand, you've all got something to show for yourself, you all win. Yay team.
Sounds a hell of a lot better than that guy everyone liked who stayed with the company for a long time but no one can remember the name of as they go on to bigger and better things, doesn't it?
Oh, and strangely enough, most of the people I've worked with seemed to have liked me for some reason. Can't fucking imagine why...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The key difference is a manager will tell you to do something. You will only do the action if it is in your best interest. A leader will convince you to do something that isn't necessarily in your best interest and you will do it.
You're kidding, right? A "manager" only provides advice, not instructions? Try again:
Leaders have followers. Managers have subordinates. Leadership and Management are both important skill sets and roles, but they are of necessity applied in different contexts.
I've been thinking about IT management. I hear there's this program from Norwich University that's specifically on info security. Cool thing is that there are scholarships too. Might want to check out other universities too.
Don't worry my friend, most managers don't have any formal training either, they just smoke hookas all day in college. ;-)
Seriously, I don't have any management experience either & I'm the president now.
Just follow your heart you know what is right from your time "in the trenches" so to speak. Most geeks instinctively know more about management than regular management types.
Sincerly,
Daniel Lott,
Service Computers