Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

by Michael Lopp

My definition of a great manager is someone with whom you can make a connection no matter where you sit in the organization chart.

it’s your ability to construct an insightful opinion about a person in seconds that will help make you a phenomenal manager.

Every single person with whom you work has a vastly different set of needs. They are chaotic beautiful snowflakes. Fulfilling these needs is one way to make them content and productive. It is your full-time job to listen to these people and mentally document how they are built. This is your most important job.

These drastic shifts in organizational perceptions showed me managers who were great at the pride part, but turned into jerks when the panic started.

In your head, you are king. It’s clear what you do; it’s clear what is expected of you. There is no person who rules you better than yourself because you know exactly what you’re about.

Your manager is your face to the rest of the organization.

I ask the same question in every interview I have: “Where do you need help?”

A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak.

A manager’s job is to transform his glaring deficiency into a strength by finding the best person to fill it and trusting him to do the job.

Managers who don’t have a plan to talk to everyone on their team regularly are deluded.

He was a pure delegator and he’d forgotten how to do real work. Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organizations.

Real work is visible action managers take to support their particular vision for their organization. The question you need to answer for your manager is simple: does he do what he says he’s going to do? Does he make something happen?

The difference between a manager who knows what’s going on in an organization and one who is a purely politically driven slimeball is thin. But I would take either of those over some passive manager who lets the organization happen to him. Politically active managers are informed managers.

The organization’s view of your manager is their view of you.

There is no more pure a panic than a layoff, and you want to see who your manager will become because it’s often the first time he sees the organization is bigger than the people.

Panic backs a person into a corner and their only means of getting out of that corner is relying on skills that have worked for them in the past.

A successful organization is built of layers of people that are glued together with managers.

they are intimately aware of what it cost to get here, and they want to protect it.

They hire more people and they become a moderate-size, well-run engineering team.

“Shiny. Polished. This isn’t very exciting. I mean, it’s certainly pretty, but where is the threat? Who is coming to eat us?”

They continue to believe the right thing is something risky and something new. We need to make a big bet.

Once you’re successfully past 1.0, you have a choice: coast and die , or disrupt.

A Stable’s choice of disruption is within the context of the last war. They can certainly innovate, but they will attempt to do so within the box they bled to build.

Volatiles want nothing to do with a group of people who no longer take risks, because they believe that stagnation is death.

what I really want is your high-level assessment of the week. Three things that are working, three things that aren’t, and what we’re going to do about it.

Busy feels great, but busy is usually tactical, not strategic.

In the absence of information, people make shit up. Worse, if they at all feel threatened, they make shit up that amplifies their worst fears.

It’s great forgetting there are other humans on the planet Earth; it’s blissfully productive until Richard walks in the room, and Richard wants to talk.

If they’re doing anything except listening, they aren’t listening.

The courage it takes to stop this meeting five minutes into the scheduled hour because there is no discernible way to make progress.

the definition of a successful meeting is that when the meeting is done, it need never occur again.

I’m talking about engineers here: a class of human being that derives professional joy from the building of things—specific things. Things they can sit back and stare at—look there!—I built that thing.

while I believe that folks don’t wake up intending to construct lies, I also know that for any story you’re hearing, you’re getting the version that supports their chosen version of reality.

Sniffing around pisses people off. Sniffing around is often interpreted as micromanagement, a passive-aggressive way of stating, “I don’t believe you can do your job.”

The ability to listen to random stories and quickly tease out a flaw in the logic or the absence of a critical dependency is just one of the skills you need to develop as a manager.

See all those project managers scurrying to and fro? Their job is the maintenance of the facts and the discovery of project truth.

A one-on-one is an opportunity to learn something new amidst the grind of daily business.

When the Vent begins, you might confuse this for a conversation. It’s not. It’s a mental release valve, and your job is to listen for as long as it takes. Don’t problem solve. Don’t redirect. Don’t comfort. Yet.

They don’t want a solution; they want to be heard.

I see this repetition as healthy way of chewing on the problem, but there’s a point where this Vent becomes a rant.

when I see the Disaster approaching, I carefully tuck all of my emotions in a box, lock the box, and magically transform into a Vulcan.

As you’re sitting there weathering the Disaster, remember that you are experiencing an anomaly—a bizarre emotional version of the person that only shows up when they’re on the edge.

Your primary job during the Disaster is to defuse, and you start defusing by contributing absolutely nothing.

You’re no longer experiencing the problem. You’re experiencing the employee’s emotional baggage regarding the problem.

A Disaster is the end result of poor management. When your employee believes totally losing their shit is a productive strategy, it’s because they believe it’s the only option left for making anything change.

A one-on-one is your chance to perform weekly preventive maintenance while also understanding the health of your team. A one-on-one is a place to listen for what your employee isn’t saying.

Your reward for a culture of healthy one-on-ones is a distinct lack of drama.

even under attack, your job is the same: Listen. Nod. Repeat.

The key with a question offense is to move your freak from the emotional state to the rational one.

What I hear when you walk into my office and freak out is “I’m caring about my job here, Rands, please listen.”