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

by Michael Lopp

The Management Quiver

1. Don't Be a Prick

• A great manager is someone with whom you can make a connection no matter where you sit in the organization chart.
• You must see the people who work with you. Constructing an insightful opinion about a person in seconds will make you a phenomenal manager.
• It is your full time job to listen to your employees, to mentally document how they are built, and to fulfill their needs.

2. Managers Are Not Evil

• The what-do-you-do disconnect between employees and managers is at the heart of why employees don't trust their managers, or find them to be evil.
• Run away from any evil manager, or someone who puts themselves before their team, who lie, and who have no ability to lead.
• Because you don't understand what someone else does at your company, you're automatically biased against them. And because you understand your job intimately, you believe it's more important.
• Tell your manager what you do and why it matters. If they aren't an engineer, find a way to speak their language.
• A manager's job is to take the skills that got him promoted, and make them scale. This means building a team to reinforce where he is weak.
• Regardless of the relationship with your manager, you'll speak differently to him than you would to a friend, because he's part of the organization.
• As a manager, you carve out time for regular one-on-ones so that you have a chance to learn.
• Delegation is a slippery slope for managers, because pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organizations.
• People who work for pure delegators don't rely on them for work because they can't depend on them for action, which pushes that manager out of the loop.
• Politically active managers may be slimy, but they are informed, and they know when change is afoot and what action to take to best represent their organization.
• The organization's view of your manager is its view of you. Judge his clout when interacting with his superiors, or with his cross-functional peers.
• Your manager is not a manager until he participated in a layoff, or participates in the constructive deconstruction of an organization.
• 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.
• A successful organization is built of layers of people glued together with managers, who translate between layers in both directions.