Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers

https://getlighthouse.com/blog/silicon-valley-bad-managers/

by ohjeez • 6 years ago

69 74 6 years ago

1123581321• 6 years ago

Lighthouse looks like an interesting product, particularly the skip-level insights and 1:1 scheduling.

There is a new type of bad manager taking over, that does all the little things from contemporary management wisdom right, but is adrift as a leader and a bit delusional about the aura of thoughtfulness they project, personal wisdom and ability to mentor. To put it too glibly, it is what happens when one understands the material from Rands and Ask a Manager better than what their company and industry is actually doing.

I would like to see manager assistance software tackle this by guiding the manager by periodically guiding the user through some tough personal questions.

In case it must be said, I am not afflicted with this kind of bad manager; I’m just observing it in other organizations and trying to prevent myself from committing the same overreaction.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

Knowing what to do is a hugely uphill battle on its own, but then actually being brave and making the time to have the necessary discussions with your team is another level. Many managers are afraid of doing so or fear the time commitment.

The counter intuitive lesson many leaders have to learn is that when you proactively have these discussions that align interests between employee and company, while also showing some empathy for your team, you fix many problems when they're super easy, instead of massive fires to fight.

With all that in mind, that is exactly why I started Lighthouse; knowing what to do and then actually doing it are two separate things. Keeping it all in Google docs and making your own system from scratch rarely holds together as well as someone automating things and reminding you of the right things to do.

xchip3• 6 years ago

It is a hidden ad. It turns out the solution is to hire the author of the blog post.

the-dude• 6 years ago

A submarine.

908B64B1972• 6 years ago

I met a lot of Jobs copycats.

Most of them failed at one or most of these:

- They could never get a technical co-founder to work with them

- They were wrong about the market

- They were wrong about design

- They didn't have the means to self-finance their businesses (think Pixar and Next)

- They didn't have the connections

What they had was the college drop-out part and some ideas.

Consultant32452• 6 years ago

I also have a turtleneck.

person8645• 6 years ago

Do they also copy the volatile temperament? I've always wondered how important that is to managing creative or groundbreaking teams. I work in architecture, where that temperament is way more common than vision and talent.

mgkimsal• 6 years ago

Not the GP, but I've been in a few situations like that, where yeah, they copy the volatility too. I think it was deliberate. Worked with someone who morphed in to that, and I think he thought it was either expected or somehow a requirement for 'success'. Being volatile and yelling and copying other aspects of Jobs (and that behavior in general) is ... not great, but it's doubly so when you're pulling that on people who you're not even paying.

Getting berated or public raked over the coals from a jackass 'founder', but you've got decent $ coming in - some people can justify that to themselves, at least for a while. Expecting people to take that shit when they're working for 'equity'? Have seen that and it's insane. Good thing was/is that I've not seen it much, and haven't seen those situations play out successfully. But... the Apple/Jobs myth was powerful on that part for a long time (probably still is?).

908B64B1972• 6 years ago

Definitely!

But I didn't get close enough with most of them to know if they too had kids whose paternity they denied. I only have so much time after all.

robocat• 6 years ago

And media regularly depicts successful management as anger e.g. Gordon Ramsay, The Apprentice.

How many managers model their behaviour upon these fake depictions of success?

ci5er2• 6 years ago

I bet they got the black turtleneck right, though - amirite? :-)

uberman• 6 years ago

Does it really have comparatively bad managers? Are a lack of diversity and prevalence of harassment more common in Silicon Valley than say big pharma, big banking, big investing, or big entertainment?

I am speculating the answer is "no".

jevanish10• 6 years ago

Certainly finance has its own terrible reputation and problems, but that does not absolve Silicon Valley / Tech companies from doing better. They absolutely have the knowledge, funding, resources to do better.

quanticle3• 6 years ago

But that's not the question. The question isn't whether Silicon Valley can do better. The answer to that is trivially yes. We can all do better.

The question is, is the quality of management in Silicon Valley worse than it is in other industries and other locations. I would argue no. I would argue that the quality of management in Silicon Valley is at worst average, and is likely above average. In Silicon Valley, workers have far more bargaining power than they have in other areas of the country, and, as a result, if the management is truly awful, they'll simply leave.

That's not true elsewhere. If you're working for say, Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin, and you have a bad manager, what are your options? Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent.

This isn't a theoretical consideration, either. I've moved from the West Coast to the Midwest, for family and cost of living reasons, and one of the things I've noticed is that the management here just really isn't as good, especially with regards to software projects, as it is on the West Coast. Partially that's down to the companies here being less software oriented than they are on the West Coast. But I would also argue that a significant part of it is that the management here is simply less competent.

nickpinkston• 6 years ago

There's a lot of great points in the article, though I'm unsure how Silicon Valley's early/mature companies stack against average ones.

Take for instance:

- Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup?

- Are managers at IBM / GE / JPM better than ones at Facebook / Apple / Google?

At first blush, I'd think that we're actually better correcting for firm age, but I'd love to see the data/research.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business.

In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.

quanticle3• 6 years ago

The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business

Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.

quanticle3• 6 years ago

If anything, I would argue that management in Silicon Valley is better than average. A Silicon Valley manager knows that if they mistreat their underlings too much, those underlings will quit and go somewhere else. A manager, at say, a manufacturing plant in a Rust Belt city faces no such restrictions. If they fire a worker, that worker has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the line workers in those locations and industries put up and shut up.

sigsergv• 6 years ago

Unless those underlings are H-1B visa holders and cannot leave.

vanusa• 6 years ago

Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup?

We can safely leave out "design studio" as these are much closer conceptually to programming shops.

But going by my own experience working jobs closer the former two categories - I would say "yes, and by a wide margin". The reasons for this are very straightforward:

(1) Both the customer needs, and the performance metrics in business in the "pizza-drywall" camp are generally much more "pure" (dare we say 10x as pure) as those in SD.

As in: "Can you make a pizza so good that not only you would would want to eat it as often as you could - but your friends would brag to their friends and neighbors about it as well? Or at least be good enough for the market / price range we're after? And can you make X per day, every day? And like not be a dick or show up hungover and stuff."

Versus: Are you a "culture fit"? Can you stay on top of the latest buzzwords? Can you spend all your available time for several weeks or months cramming for our ridiculous interview process - and put up with all the whiteboarding, ghosting and other gratuitous humiliations that we expect you to eat, eat, eat, and eat some more of in return for the exquisite pleasure of working with us? And once we deign to let you in - will you go along with our various brainwashing rituals (standups, agile, "DevOps culture", etc)? Or at least pretend to? BTW if you're kind of a dick that's actually okay being as many of us are, as you'll find out eventually.

(2) Infinitely less emphasis on what might loosely be called "theoretical" management techniques (see above) versus, again, nuts-and-bolts: "Can you do the work? Will you be happy doing it? Can we get along?"

Hands-down - while it would never be sustainable economically - I was infinitely happier at many of the food service / delivery / random construction jobs than at at least 50 percent of the tech industry jobs I've had.

bwanab• 6 years ago

In my experience everywhere has bad managers. I’ll volunteer that until I got wise to my own failings and quit being one that I was one of them. It’s a hard job. What we need is for our educational system to incorporate management training from the earliest grades. I’m not talking about books on business or BS like that, but teaching the soft skills that people need to manage other people. Irrespective of the field one goes into, those soft skills can help.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

Totally agree. Trying to lead clubs and student groups in college taught me more about leading than anything I did in a classroom.

xchip3• 6 years ago

What a subtle way to brag about your, allegedly, "leading skills" XD

fungiblecog• 6 years ago

Managers are terrible everywhere

swframe23• 6 years ago

My friend's wife texted me recently to talk to her very unhappy husband. During my conversation, he mentioned that he has a really good relationship with his skip level manager. Based on what he told me, I advised him to work to replace his bad manager.

If you want to be successful (however you want to define success) and anyone or anything stands in your way then make it your job to overcome it.

majormajor• 6 years ago

I don't know if tech companies have worse managers than other companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't... but that seems to be missing a rather big point.

If your company can have better managers than its competitors you can gain an advantage. So if you say "eh, we don't have it that bad, other industries suck too," you're leaving that opening for others...

jevanish10• 6 years ago

This^. Well said.

swframe23• 6 years ago

Can you share your experience getting a good outcome when there is a bad manager in your way?

waylandsmithers• 6 years ago

With a manager only a few years older than you, you have a tough experience.

So I'm pretty early in my career but have already had multiple experiences having managers who are a little younger than me. I want it to be fine, but it's just hard to see them as any kind of authority. How do other folks make this work?

justin_oaks• 6 years ago

If management is about authority then then the managing is already going poorly.

ip26• 6 years ago

"Authority" can refer to wisdom & experience, e.g. "They are an authority on the subject". People like having leaders who are knowledgeable about the task at hand.

swframe23• 6 years ago

I mentioned my problems, with my manager, to very senior coworkers and they strongly recommended that I quit. As a result of their advice, I mentally quit my job. My old job was to make successful products for customers. My new job is to overcome the limitations of my manager.

I've tried very obvious things. I have worked out a path to be successful despite the efforts of my manager to prevent it. I included my skip level manager in the conversation. I very carefully review my manager's actions and tell them constructively in our 1on1 when they are managing badly. I spend a lot of time reviewing my progress to make sure my path is the best. I built relationships with other coworkers without my manager involvement so they can support my efforts when performance reviews are due.

If I kept the notion that was doing my old job I would be unhappy; changing my point of view has helped a lot.

iamthepieman• 6 years ago

I mean I don't expect much out of managers so whether they are younger or older doesn't really matter to me. I see leadership of any sort as service. Truth and service should be the motto of every leader. They seek the truth out methodically, thoughtfully and doggedly.

Truth seeking is ultimately about accepting reality and calling things like they are which is, of course, harder than it sounds. We have all sort of motivations to lie to others and, more importantly, ourselves. As a manager this is compounded because you don't have control over what you are responsible for, you're relying on other people to do the work you are held accountable for so you start lying to yourself about how your team is doing, how communications is happening or not happening and a host of other things. The good managers learn to not do this.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

If you're doing it right as a manager, it's not about authority. Instead, you should be working to align interests and support your team.

Having someone younger than you as a manager can feel awkward, but if they actually invest in you and listen to you, it can be a great relationship...especially if you know you don't want to be a manager. Then, it's like this person is doing you a favor, so you can stick to the IC work you like.

aeternum• 6 years ago

As a manager, I feel that whenever I have to use authority I've failed.

If a manager is unable to convince a team member and forces them to take some path by pulling rank, isn't it a recipe for disaster regardless of age? In my experience, begrudging compliance is not a recipe for quality code.

angryasian• 6 years ago

In engineering Hiring good managers is not what they optimize for. Yes Engineering management should still have a high level of understanding of engineering principals within that domain, but management also because a people skill. Out of all my interviews, people skills and EQ are very often overlooked.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

EQ has already been co-opted as a term and rendered essentially meaningless. One job, there was a craze for it, starting at the top, so naturally we all eventually had to go to this wretched little one day course on it. I kid you not, everything was about either "fear" or "love." If that sounds familiar, if it sounds like Donnie Darko, you would be right ... almost everything we were "taught" in this emotional intelligence course was almost directly out of that mindset, done straight and not as a parody.

Fear and love are the only real motivators, apparently, and we don't want to be afraid of things, blah blah, it was such a wretched simplification and so absurd in its manipulative outlook ("do it, you wouldn't want to be ... afraid ... now would you?") that I began to wonder if this was some kind of larger test on who could keep from laughing.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR.

Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...

_y5hn2• 6 years ago

That sounds like mental abuse.

EQ would be more about using empathy to connect to others, try to understand other's points etc. Of course, if you "teach" such stuff to manipulative people, you get wretched results.

marsdepinski• 6 years ago

When the cheap money dries up, we'll find out what the real definition of bad management is.

tehlike• 6 years ago

it won't dry up.

glaucon• 6 years ago

Really ?, not ever ?

lcuff2• 6 years ago

I'm not so impressed with this article, and partly it's because of the rather bad news: There's not much to be done about bad management. Peter Drucker, well worth reading if you haven't, said that the thing that makes a manager is character. My definition of character is someone who takes action that may have serious negative personal consequences (extreme version: high-profile whistle blowing). Character can't be built by buying an app or taking a weekend workshop. It's formed early in life. It's an extremely rare commodity. Hence, good managers are scarce on the ground and likely to remain so.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

I appreciate the skepticism, but that's a very fixed mindset. People can absolutely change and I've seen it hundreds of times.

It certainly can take a "come to Jesus" moment like you find out your team hates you, you get fired, a wave of employees quit on you, etc, but people can absolutely change when they decide to.

Character is absolutely important, and it does predispose one to being a better manager, but you can become a good manager later in life.

Unfortunately, as we discuss in the article (I wrote it), the incentives aren't always there, nor are the positive examples of what to do.

diegoholiveira• 6 years ago

I do believe in change too, but what I've seeing in many places are temporary changes to save your job or get a promotion, not a real change, a profound change.

lcuff2• 6 years ago

I agree that people can and do change, at many levels and in many ways. When we unknowingly treat people badly, and get the wake up call, we can (perhaps) shift to treating them better.

My personal journey has included discovering how amazingly angry I was, without even knowing it. It precluded having reasonable (engineering) discussions when people disagreed with me, being able to take and give direction, etc. Therapy helped a lot. Learning to be truthful, disagree reasonably, keep promises, think through problems, treat people kindly are all 'learnable'. But some core elements of our beings are pretty intractable, and I believe having the solid core of 'self' that can stand (again in the face of negative personal consequences) against the often outrageous conduct that's around us in the world is only very occasionally developed in adulthood.

question0004• 6 years ago

I'm a developer and I admit the truth is that managers are bad only because developers are worse.

Turnover in tech is extremely high and it's not because devs are constantly being mismanaged, it's because they are egotistical and capable of working independently and often just do without any real penalty. "Oh you fired me, well 9 times out of 10 I'll just be earning more money across the street, good luck recruiting anyone with a bad Glassdoor review!" What incentives does the manager have to get invested with the devs in this situation when employees good and bad can just leave easily.

Anyone who's worked in tach a while has seen cases where a dev has just flat out refused to do something a manager has asked them to do. Why? Ego is the only reason when you get paid either way.

Look at all the egotistical devs on this forum alone saying "all managers are bad" without considering they could be part of the problem.

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

flat out refused to do something

that will cause a cascade of other problems because it can't be tested properly because no time has been spent automating regression because the managers agreed to unrealistic timelines because they're not the ones who have to deal with the fallout.

jevanish10• 6 years ago

It's certainly a two way street between a manager and team member to work well together, but in my experience the best managers in Silicon Valley/tech retain great people for a long time. In fact, many bring former team members with them from company to company, being a talent magnet.

throwaway9870• 6 years ago

It is my experience good managers know how to filter through employees to find ones that are manageable. Perhaps not at the time of hiring, but they know how to move people off their teams that they know are not good members. I consider myself a decent manager and built strong teams of people that would still work for me or act as references, but even then, I probably failed with half the people I hired.

dx87• 6 years ago

I work at a tech company on the east coast, and the managers I've talked to don't like managing west coast dev teams for all the reasons you mentioned. They said they'll refuse to show up to meetings, won't answer phone calls/emails/slack, don't document anything, etc., because they think they're code artisans and won't do anything that they think is below them.

question0004• 6 years ago

Yeah, there's really a lot going on cultural in this phenomenon of the egotistical coder.

I'd break it down into these following factors:

1) youth, young people don't really care about burning bridges their life has pretty much always been on an upswing and they feel "set for life." There peers are bartenders, but they are making more money then their parents year one.

2) male dominated, I don't want to engage in stereotypes here but it just seems this is a factor.

3) education system, typically it has pushed people towards research and novelty. When I told my professor I wanted to get into web development he said "pfft that's just plumbing" definitely plays into factor two, the typical egotistical dev feels emasculated writing and email template. Not a good vibe for a manager.

outworlder• 6 years ago

The other points are valid but...

They said they'll refuse to show up to meetings

There's usually FAR TOO MANY MEETINGS. This is even more prevalent the more bad managers and engineers exist. Talking and assigning 'action items' is a good way to deflect attention from the fact that you have no clue what the heck you are doing. And bad engineers get shielded by the collective (as long as they can show some work done on their "action item", or indicate that they are blocked because of someone else).

If you actually have good engineers, they will see the meetings for what they are and start pushing back.

TP4Cornholio2• 6 years ago

The west coast sounds like a paradise for developers. Makes me wish I had moved...

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Why is that bad?

ci5er2• 6 years ago

A first level response would be that you were hired at a salary to do a job.

If you can't or won't do a coding job I hire you for, I would back-fill for myself and you would be on the street. (Cost of capital for startups isn't cheap!)

TuringNYC2• 6 years ago

> Turnover in tech is extremely high and it's not because devs are constantly being mismanaged, it's because they are egotistical and capable of working independently and often just do without any real penalty. "Oh you fired me, well 9 times out of 10 I'll just be earning more money across the street, good luck recruiting anyone with a bad Glassdoor review!" What incentives does the manager have to get invested with the devs in this situation when employees good and bad can just leave easily.

Let me provide a flip side to this from the dev's perspective: Salaries stagnate for developers in the same company as valuable options in il-liquid private stock serve as golden handcuffs. Companies abuse this position by further underpaying developers as compared to the market. If they can "make more money across the street" that is proof of the situation. Dont you expect developers to have some resentment to this situation?

question0004• 6 years ago

Yeah, it seems so insane to me how little companies will give raises or promote from within, this is definitely driving turnover and building animosity against managers. I think that's a big factor here. I most upper management doesn't want to have commit to having few veteran devs when they can increase/decrease the labor pool quickly.

lkbm• 6 years ago

Anyone who's worked in tach a while has seen cases where a dev has just flat out refused to do something a manager has asked them to do. Why? Ego is the only reason when you get paid either way.

I don't think I've seen that yet, but if it came up with any of my coworkers, it would be because of ethical concerns. "Hide the cancel button", "Remove the unsubscribe link", etc.

Are you talking about people saying things like "I'm a senior engineer. Get the newbie to do that task"? I can't imagine that flying for a second where I work. You can try making the case that it's a poor use of your time, but flat-out refusing to do something out of ego would be the reddest of red flags.

(fwiw, I'm in Austin, not SV.)

question0004• 6 years ago

Yeah I've seen situations where basically a dev wants to take project in a direction and the manager repeatedly shoots it down until they quit or are fired. They will just argue that the manager is micro-managing and making technical decisions, but in reality it's just matter of how the business must operate and the dev is actually stepping on the managers toes.

Devs will also just argue that doing some UI related changes are pointless even though managers have requested them repeatedly and clearly prioritize them. I've seen all forms of recalcitrance.

phreack• 6 years ago

Maybe it was an unrealistic task, like 'we've agreed to have this <10 month thing> built in 2, so get to it'. If agreeing to such a thing means it becomes your fault when it inevitably fails, it's necessary to refuse and reschedule.

Or not, but I can imagine many exceptions besides ego that would be reasonable. If it's just a Rockstar tantrum, then you're better off firing that dev asap and I can't even imagine such a person getting away with it, though I've never worked in SV.

csharptwdec19• 6 years ago

Anyone who's worked in tach a while has seen cases where a dev has just flat out refused to do something a manager has asked them to do. Why? Ego is the only reason when you get paid either way.

False.

- You know it's going to cause a problem and - You know you'll be blamed for it, or - You know you'll be the one to live with the 4AM calls.

Anyone who's been in any business a while has seen cases where a control freak has to have their way, even if it means running the business into the ground. And while -that- may be their business, your sanity is yours.

petr25102018• 6 years ago

You should consider why it is easy for developers to leave a company. It is also because companies hire only people who already know everything and don't train and give chance to people that might need to learn something on the job.

Also, if companies don't provide incentives for people who stay longer, it is only their fault.

didip• 6 years ago

I think the real problem here is companies unwilling to invest in their own people, both ICs and managers.

* Managers don't get proper training.

* ICs don't get proper training.

* No one want to train juniors and interns.

* Very few companies offer yearly refreshers.

* Yearly raises are not a thing in most companies.

* Small companies tend to offer crappy insurance.

* etc.

proc0• 6 years ago

The pervasive problem I've seen is bad accountability models, where the person who knows how to do something is not the one officially responsible (but ultimately it is because they get fired of course, however they're not responding to higher management about it). This causes huge tension and also miscommunication. Knowing how to do something should at least give you more decision power on how to move forward with a problem, but what ends up happening is extra overhead explaining solutions and options just so a decision is made by someone else that might still not understand and make the wrong decision anyway. This also causes a bottleneck and compounds the problem by making the org. very slow to respond to changes in direction.

Unfortunately I don't see an easy solution, and bad managers tend to be the ones that have the least understanding of the problems, but somehow make the most decisions.

atty• 6 years ago

That VP who delivered your best quarter ever sexually harassed someone, again: Do you sweep it under the rug?

No. And the idea that this is a decision at all is frankly pretty disgusting. Some things are more important than having a good quarter, like your self respect and the physical and emotional safety of your employees. If your company can’t survive having criminals removed, then maybe it shouldn’t.

Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers

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