Stats for nerds
3recommend
12mentions
3people
2020–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I do not like this article. I do not learn how to manage better. I do not understand why managing is hard. The diffusion between individuals, organization, and science/technology never got on to the table, because it never got into the restaurant. It's a glaring omission. I do not learn what management should aim for. I am not learning what successful management was like before computers: think post WWII advances in tech+manufacturing. So how can I assess if AI --- forget making things better or worse for me or the other guy --- is even registering in the universe of measurable change?
I am not per se force fed ... whence this comment ... but there's a running unchallenged theme of brittle otherness between tech and business that, if this was a movie, is like the first 45 minutes of the Breakfast club (snark, derision, insecurity, anger, immaturity etc.) before the kids grew up and learned something. The OP never gets me to a place where I want to learn, grow, or do better. Here's an example:
The article also contains pictures which drive this point more with apes, robots."What’s particularly fascinating is how these proclamations are enthusiastically amplified by two distinct groups: middle managers who’ve never written a line of code beyond an Excel formula, and that special breed of commentator who’s long resented programmers..."The thrust of the article is advanced by python code which amounts to the same, sad ``pattern match" the OP decries: a linear, finite list of things with 1D real value score. Life is far more complex than that.
The article is also replete with references to ``laws" which, I have noticed over the years, HN likes. It's the tech equivalent of an American Southerner with a catchy one-liner: it seems pithy, smart, unique, and powerful all at the same time:
Yah - well - the main users of American Southerner catchy lines in media are American Congressmen. America thinks Congress sucks.“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.” — Putt’s LawNobody who cares about management, or people, or organizations, or science, or really anything in the adult world thinks about things the way the article does minus OP.
The article --- if we assume the OP is underneath on the same page with me here --- is graphics+English+rhetoric performance art pushed around the world by Ethernet. Otherwise it's the kind of simplistic nonsense we could do without.
Wanna do better? Read a book:
The clearest, shortest, smartest read you'll run into deftly combining organization, management, and quality which, as engineers in the software world, we could do a lot better at:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/d...
A focus on dynamics between individuals, teams, and organizations:
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
As for the tech, CS, science, math parts of the equation ... HN is a wonderful resource.
- Categorizing oneself into one of a number of discrete psychological categories has merits as a start. For example, one might discover unknown proclivities in behavior. But ultimately it's counter-productive.
Ultimately behavior arises in context of disagreement whenever interesting behavior is important. And therefore behavior is a matter of dynamics not the statics of a single identified category. It's best to think of interesting behavior pair-wise say in a team, family, and so on.
Here [1] is far more useful, and far more practical. The salient analysis arises like this, say in the context, of a team:
* teams fail because individuals fail
* individuals fail because they refuse to change
* individuals refuse to change because the change the environment desires conflicts with the self-esteem of the stubborn individual. To change the stubborn individual would have to admit that their sense of things is wrong.
* Until the individual changes, the individual will often exhibit defensive behavior to delay or defray change e.g. play off the problem, criticize others, play the victim. All these behaviors have the same goal: as long as one is putting the focus elsewhere, it's not on me, and I don't have to change because I'm not wrong.
Example: the boss wants a team member to have more control, competence in sorting out a task, which he/she doesn't see. This is a conflict over control. There are any number of realities underlying this,
* the boss feels overworked and doesn't want more work. he/she feeds undervalued, under payed, disrespected. So the boss pushes harder.
* the worker feels the work is unimportant, feels micro managed, or feels they are made to suck up crappy work that previous workers never did right. The worker refuses to change.
Until and unless the feelings and contextualization of this conflict is engaged, it will not be resolved. As Human Element correctly notes, good teams have a valuable asset of adaptability. There need not for example be an alpha leader, common vision etc (more static idealogical constructs) to getting things done, if these other deeper ideas are pursued.
- One-on-ones? Let me tell you: just like couples there are a few in which the relationship is unreasonably effective and, of half those cases, they couldn't half-explain why two times in a row. The rest? The std. deviation is shocking. It's all over the place.
So there we are: it is and can be awesome. But in too many corporations games -- especially lack of openness -- prevents things from going anywhere. And that, friends, is a darn shame.
As I mention time to time on HN the best, short, spot on reads that take this to its core avoiding simplistic conclusions while arriving at doable, realistic things are two:
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Japanese/d...
In different, self reinforcing ways, there's a confluence: those with self awareness will figure it out nicely summarized by Schutz's Jung quote:
"All the greatest and most important problems in life are fundamentally insoluble ... they can never be solved but only outgrown. This 'outgrowing' proves upon further investigation to require a new level of consciousness."
This dovetails with one of the central insight's in Human Element: the biggest impediment to teamwork are rigid individuals. The how, why, and what next? Gotta hit the books. Good grief: used copies of the book can come to your front door for less than a Padron cigar or 15 year Laphroaig single. That's value.
Off subject but a particularly funny example of can't-change is the Angelica Huston part in Buffalo-66, an absolutely outstanding film.
- To get grounded in this issue I highly recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
to nail the fundamentals. There's too many HN posts on human dynamics that float above the fundamentals leaving the whole issue in a fog. It will make clear there are three interrelated issues in sharing feedback:
- behavior of openness
- self-esteem on TL and mentee's parts, which depends on self-awareness
- both of which run on concurrent with potential conflicts around control, openness, and inclusion.
As the book explains openness in the context of human organizations is one of the last things to be well-resolved. Why that's the case is very important to understand. Seen in the context of the book, the OP's write-up makes some good points, however, without the deep principles advanced in the book the solution space will remain in a fog. And to the extent it's foggy, no real progress can take place.
- I continue to be unimpressed by articles on teams, team building in Hackernews. This article is another one. It seems more like sales and marketing article, and as a sales and marketing writeup, it is a very thin veneer with foggy bits of truth that doesn't move the bar at all.
If you want to quit messing around with fog and "hit it" right, directly, and fundamentally, then buy two books:
- Human Element: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
- Total Quality Management the Japanese Way: https://www.amazon.com/What-Total-Quality-Control-Management...
That's what? Not even $10 total for used copies. Can't beat that! Here's why these are good books:
The Human Element book cuts through all the crap on teams, on why they work, why they don't. The central thesis: Teams are broken by individuals. Individuals are broken when they engage in defensive, fixed, unchanging behavior. And that modality happens when the context in which the individual works hits their self esteem negatively. If the individual lacks self-awareness their coping behaviors and ability to learn, change is significantly reduced. Then what behavior you'll see will make things worse. This ought to strike you as real: a manager's worse assignee is a person with whom they've had "the talk" but things don't change. Human Element is also extremely operational in nature: it provides a toolset to do, to engage, to measure, to check, and to move on beyond stuck. Once you get this, you'll be far better able to place the OP's piece in context to greater effect.
On the Ishikawa book (TQM the Japanese way) don't get too focused on "Japan", although during the 80s/90s Japan was kicking butt. In Japan the highest award for organizational and quality excellence is the Deming Award. Deming was an American who was well received in Japan. So what's at work here really are universal truths for all human organizations. It deals with teams in the larger context of human organizations. In software company culture is all the more important. TQM's focus is what quality means. Quality like "international relations" or "global economy" immediately comes with notions on what it means. But when you drill in to it, the certainty turns into its own kind of fog. This book helps you press your understanding to getting down to fundamentals that companies will never outgrow.
Both books are short reads. And very information packed. The TQM book was extremely well translated from Japanese; I applaud the translator. Ishikawa would be considered an industry leader, and an excellent example of a manager with Drucker know-how but real, on the job experience in manufacturing.
- See ... what I do not like or agree with is the essentially paranoid, mistrustful nature of your statement. No, not everybody will "will just ask for the moon and over-sell whatever their team in particular is focussing". A couple of points here that go way, way back to pre-1985:
* one of the major problems at corporations is lack of openness. People BS all the time. Worse, and I've seen several of these in my job, people believe that if you do not manage-up and BS then you're a chump. Part of the management is to cut this BS out. The difference between you and me at this point in time is that it's an unchecked assumption for you, but not for me.
* Cross functional coordination is essential to proper corporate governance. In particular, manager's damn well drill into internal service suppliers they'd better be customer driven and not make whatever they want - see also Conway's law. A lot BS at companies is half-assesd internal suppliers who underperform because they get management cover 'cause we have to use them ... and they cannot be essentially fired without extraordinary cause. Cross functional coordination is essential to getting and keeping people on the same sheet of music.
I'd read "Human Element" (Dr. Schutz) and "Total Quality Management the Japanese Way" (K. Ishikawa [might be sp there but title is good]).
In my experience manufacturing knows this is true, even they don't always practice it. But most service companies are clueless.
Yes, if you don't have a management approach (TQM the Japanese way), you don't have a solid framework to human organizations and teams (Human Element), you don't have cross functional coordination, you don't have customer driven teams, and management tolerates the BS ... then you don't in fact have management and you do have politics whence I refer you to my original statement.
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