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

by Michael Lopp

The most experienced managers in the world make horribly bad decisions all the time.

you’re potentially one big, bad decision away from being out of a job.

And then you’re going to make a big, bad decision and you’ll remember: “With great power comes great responsibility.” As a manager, you are responsible for making great decisions and the best way to do that is to involve as much of the team as possible in every decision.

by including them in the decision process and creating a team where they feel they can say no, you’re creating trust.

A team that trusts you is going to look out for you.

screwing up often reveals more useful information than not screwing up.

“Shipping a 1.0 product isn’t going to kill you, but it will try.”

A great way to topple your fledging pyramid is to hire folks who are not getting the product done with a sense of urgency.

Process is the means by which your team communicates.

If your engineers aren’t arguing about the way they develop software all the time, they’re becoming stagnant, and that trickles down to your pitch and trickles up to your product.

The definition and hierarchy an org chart portrays is the first step in creating a culture of secrecy in your org.

Let’s call “failure” a really bad decision. It’s when you choose to change something and that change percolates up through the pyramid.

A successful 1.0 is measured by the success of the product that ships, but it is built by a seemingly endless amount of decisions, arguments, failures, and successes that you can’t plan for that will teach you everything you need to know, but are, inconveniently, trying to kill you.

the Old Guard can’t conceive of a universe where everyone doesn’t know everything, and they have difficulty explaining what they find obvious.

Process is being created not as means of control; it’s being built as documentation of culture and values.

Process should be written by those who are not only intimately experiencing the pain of a lack of process, but who are also experts in the culture.

Imagine all process as a means of capturing and documenting culture and values.

Ask in a way that illuminates and doesn’t accuse.

a healthy process that can’t defend itself is a sign that you’ve forgotten what you believe.

you’re either fretting about starting, you’re preparing to begin, or you’ve begun.

The elegant solution requires offense, and the lower the stress, the better the offense.

creativity begets creativity.

Whatever it is that you’re not starting, I know it’s hard to do, otherwise it’d already be done. Otherwise you wouldn’t have spent weeks of time considering it rather than doing it.

You can’t think because when you’re busy, you’re not thinking, you’re reacting.

Panic is the mother of the path of least resistance.

The time to kick off your deep thinking is right after your last major release.

Structured thinking kills thinking, but unstructured thinking leads to useless chaos. Your meeting driver must be able to swerve the conversation back and forth between the two extremes, but generally keep it in the middle.

You want to walk out of your first brainstorm meeting with five hot topics that folks want to address.

You want to see the results of the last brainstorm meeting in a prototype . . . paper . . . code . . . wireframe . . . bulleted list.

I’m talking about the e-mail from someone you trust . . . a peer . . . pissing you off in e-mail by commenting on a problem that needs to be solved and perhaps casting doubt on your ability to solve it.

Asking dumb questions is the best way to start figuring out what is actually going on.

any big decision, any big problem, deserves time and consideration.

In just about every company I’ve worked at, the only source of measurable truth regarding the product is the bug database

“People who talk fast are moving quickly to cover up the gaps in their knowledge.”

Progress + momentum = confidence

an individual tends to be very bad at work estimates until they’ve begun the work.

If you’re working on an impossibly hard or impossibly dull task and you find yourself mentally blocked by boredom or confusion, stop and do something else. The benefits of stopping are stunning.

when you’re facing an uphill mental battle with yourself regarding the impossible task, it’s time to choose another battle . . . that isn’t a battle.

I know there is no controlling the world, but I will fluidly surf the entropy by constantly changing myself.

this is a personal confidence you earn by constantly adapting yourself to the impossible.

The hardest part of this step is not jumping when you think you see a place where you can start moving. That! That! That! We need to fix that! It very well might be the right move to fix that, but you don’t even know how much “that” there is, yet.

Each time you take action with incomplete data, you risk stoking rather than extinguishing the disaster fire.

Vet your model with at least three qualified others.

Confidence is not a plan.

Having a solution where all the implications of the solution are not understood is not a fix. You must take the time to explore all the implications—and in my experience this takes longer than it takes to come up with your plan.

However, as the DRI, the person who is most likely to be yelled at, your job is to be accountable. Your job is not to own all of the work, which is why the last part of this step is to put a proper name next to each and every task, and, as much as possible, this name should not be yours. When you’re done with this assignment, and someone in the War Room asks, “Hey, why isn’t your name on the list?” Your answer is, “Because I’m the one making sure this whole thing is moving forward and I’m the one who gets fired if it doesn’t.”

The part that has screwed me the most is failing to understand all of the implications of my theory.

Everybody wants status an hour ago. Everybody is talking to everybody else about the state of your sky-falling situation, which means the Grapevine is actively working against you.

While all of this going on, your job is internal public relations.

There’s no glory in propping up the sky because, chances are, you and your team are partially responsible for this situation, and depending on the severity of the disaster, there’s a good chance you could get fired. Even if you fix it.