How Do You Find a Good Manager?

I have had some amazing managers - who do an amazing job of allocating work and managing our time to get the best out of us. But it doesn't really matter because the C-suite usually sucks.

In most large firms there is a magical barrier somewhere between lower and upper management where quality doesn't really matter. For every great servant leader, you will also have to deal with someone who has no technical experience and have never had to work a real job in their life. And the only reason your good boss has to report to them is because through proper breeding and connections or luck they have enjoyed a career unencumbered by details.

This is a great discussion. Good managers can insulate you from bad companies and bad managers can ruin your experience in a great company. I would go as far as to say the person you work for is more important in some cases than the company you work for.

Here are some thoughts. Companies aren't always clear on who you would be reporting to during the hiring process. This isn't always intentional, but org structures are sometimes in flux as teams grow. You should at least ask who you're going to report to or who you could potentially report to and ensure you have a conversation with them.

Also when looking for jobs, instead of searching by company or job openings, look for managers you have gotten along with or would like to work for and literally contact them and tell them you're looking for a new gig and would love to work on their team. Manager's who may not be hiring right now generally are open to the idea of bringing a known quantity onto their team who want to work for them specifically, so if something opens up you jump to the top of the list.

I skimmed the paper. It's pretty ambitious IMO.

They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups.

They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.

All these numbers are then correlated with some indicators, eg age, ethnicity, social skill score, and so on.

I guess the big issue here is whether the lab task is representative of a real-world project. The big one for me is that in the real world, you don't often have an objective measure of success, and whatever you do have is not going to be independent of the environment that you're operating in. Sometimes you get to grade your own effort, other times you get graded by some fool who gets it wrong. The team changes over time. Goals change over time.

Tangential.

i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it.

Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?

As an experienced dev I can tell whether a (direct) manager will work for me or not within about three weeks, with some variance depending on organizational pressure (in lean times you can tell sooner, in lush times it takes longer — a result of how much of the managerial skill needs to be brought to bear).

If a manager doesn't work for me, I don't care how good of a manager they are by any organizational measure, since I know I can get (and deserve) a better working environment. In this case if nothing changes, I am going to leave — which should rightly count as a demerit to such a manager.

There are even cases where people will work harder just before they quit, so as to leave a good impression or secure a pending promotion (despite present management) prior to their departure.

Seen in this way, what makes a manager good for an org seems to be different than what makes a manager good for an IC. TFA seems to be looking at it from an org perspective only (if one is being generous, since what they have studied is hardly an org), which can probably work in the short term, but will lead to ugly consequences in the long run.

Not sure how you screen for this in interviews but..

My WORST managers have been guys who fly off the handle on administrative minutiae like the formatting on an internal wiki, tabs-vs-spaces, or making lots of PR comments on trivial code changes at 10pm without ever clicking the approve button.

The common theme seems to be having no focus on what clients actually do with the product and their satisfaction.

The problem is the nobody is actually looking for good managers.

This paper is super interesting and seems to agree with real life anecdata - most managers are crap and management is a hard skill that people are not trained for.

How to find a good engineering manager to work for:

1. during your interview you must learn something significant - can be technical, or about managing people or something.

2. they should not grate you even 1 second. The interview is where you and they are at your respective very very best behaviors. If they grate on you even for 1 second, you probably don't want to work for them. You should always come out feeling positive.

3. they should push you during your interview without you feeling bad about it. The job of a manager is to bring the best/most out of you. When you are on the job they will push you hard. Also they need to find the boundary of your abilities during your interview.

4. they must have better communication skills than you and you should look up to them. Everyone judges their boss and can't deal with a boss that is worse than them at their job.

Find a good manager to work for is very difficult. Because of the high stakes related to a job search - finding a good one will probably only happen by accident.

Treasure those bosses.

The worst thing that can happen (as it happened with me) is that your first boss is great at their job. Then every boss after that will be such a huge letdown. :)

burn n’churn until you find one, then cry when they eventually leave or retire.

You find a good manager the same way you would find a good IC: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q

Know your working style. Identify if there is a direct report with similar style. If no, they are not a good manager for you. If yes, ask them directly if they are a good manager.

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Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity.

"

Given the amount of mediocre managers promoted from good ICs, it would be interesting to see if and how they can actually become competent at managing. Maybe playing the games presented in the paper regularly as a team exercise could actually help. There is often not that much feedback going upwards.

“ The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills.”

That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.

I wonder as well how the performance correlates with the candidate's peers prediction of how they would fare, as this is also a big component of how managers are usually picked, and might or might not be a good indicator

Be your own manager first.

The most obvious way to select a good manager for an organization is to have the workers in the organization elect their managers. Shareholders in the investment capitalist model will not like this, as they want to be the ones selecting the managers (C-suite), even though they have no day-to-day involvement in the corporation's operations, and typically are looking at quarterly returns as their metric for what is 'good'. Unexamined assumption here: define 'good'.

Workers in a corporation will instead tend to elect people who ensure decent working conditions, profit-sharing and safety, while also maintaining a positive balance sheet, e.g. in a steel mill. If they live in the local area, they're also unlikely to support dumping industrial waste in their rivers and streams. A shareholder who lives halfway around the world has no such motivation, so they'll hire managers who pollute and cut safety and health standards in the name of higher profits and dividends for shareholders. If their results are terrible they'll call on their pet politicians for a corporate welfare (bailout) to protect their holdings. Silicon Valley Bank is a recent example, but there are dozens.

Easy fixes: (1) Only allow the workers in a corporation to be shareholders in that corporation, with one vote per share, with shares based on skill and experience (2) Less radically, give worker unions the same voting rights when it comes to C-suite selection as the shareholder unions (Blackrock/Fidelity/Vanguard/StateStreet etc.). (3) End corporate welfare programs - just let collapsing corporations go into receivership and find new operators for each entity, and stop the 'fail upward' trend.

Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization

All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism.

That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of financial instrument aka “investors.”

Then there’s a third group, and this third group is “management.” Management is hired by the investors - not the employees and is generally given more equity in order to convince the manager that they are actually closer to an investor than a worker.

The true job of management is to prevent labor from having more power and more control of the financial vehicle than the investors do - find me a manager that’s empowering their employees in a way that shifts power from investors to employees and I’ll find you a manager with no job.

This is why CEOs carry the weight of all of this bullshit because investors point to them as the scapegoat person for anything that goes bad on the labor side, and employees look to this person for direction and guidance for what to do on behalf of the investors - so they pull the “I’m paid only if the company does well” smuggling in this concept that the company doing well benefits everyone (hint: it doesn’t and if the options are homelessness or death you don’t actually have options)

In cases where “investors” create the org (EIR, VC spinout etc…) they are intentionally creating a demand signal for labor, and a process for which you can grovel to them for them running a max-min algorithm to ensure they don’t pay anything more than they legally have to - going so far as to now make it a religion where it’s unethical to do anything other than this

Alternatively if a group of engineers gets together to create something, the second that they have success on it, the capitalist investors will direct all their existing financial instrument companies to go and try to capture that new market away from the small group - typically via ruthless competition, but sometimes acquisition becomes the mutually minimum cost outcome. This is all with the idea that if you can acquire your way to market dominance in a monopoly type scheme this is the ideal for investors. It is a very predictable line of income and that’s all they care about.

As long as you live inside of this model, there is no possible world where you will ever have a manager who cares about the people underneath them or the customers for more than a very brief period while the rest of the organization figures out that this manager is a threat to the owners.

If you wanna be successful as a “manager” in a capitalist profit driven organization, there is no option other than to align yourself with investors and do everything you can to prevent your employees from becoming more independent (typically by granting unvested “options” that have zero value outside of the organization)

Hate to be that guy but none of this really matters.

We all know managers get picked by kissing the right ass and siding with the right boss. Which of course makes (most, yes MOST, but not ALL) managers incompetent, or at best barely mediocre by happenstance.

How many PhDs and think-tanks does it take to write a paper on "good managers"? That'd be a more interesting white paper