Very entertaining to read a thread of managers telling themselves they shouldn't do any work, and then simultaneously describing not doing any work as "many times the return of you as an IC" (presumably counting themselves not interfering with the people doing the actual work as equivalent to doing the sum of that work).

If you think "hands on keyboard coding" is the primary/only form of work that matters, then you've missed out on a lot.

Of the best managers I've worked for, one of the most obviously important things they did was keep other teams off our backs. Constant interruptions, shifting priorities, "just a quick question", and the like do more to destroy a team and its progress than anything else. Their name doesn't get attached to lines of code or completed items but a lot more things get completed as a result.

If you want that then hire someone to stand outside your office with a stick and reply rudely to emails. We don't need to give them hiring/firing/promotion/rewards authority.

As an IC you can't tell other teams managers or higher ups or PMs to fuck off if they call you directly and tell you they think what you are doing isn't good. Or if they ask for unreasonable stuff. At least without fear of getting fired. A manager needs to prevent this from happening

So the problem managers solve is the problem of there being other managers?

Don't forget sales/marketing overpromisers and nosy executives who get in the developers' hair.

Completely alarming this comment is being down voted. It's 100% true.

I guess it depends on what the person is doing. A guy with a stick won't be negotiating timelines and requirements, explaining why things can't / won't / weren't done, dealing with fallout or shifting the requirements / timelines of others based on teams productivity.

Do they need to be the one with hiring/firing/promotion/rewards authority? I don't know.

I don’t especially care what people think of the job I did, or how I did it. I made enough to be where I am, today, and I like it.

It was what it was, and it is what it is.

I just wrote about my own experience, and my own feelings about that experience, as opposed to rendering judgment (look through my posting history, here, and you’ll find very little judgment of others. I am too old and tired to fight. I have better things to do with my time, other than TCP/IP posturing).

Your imagination is very far from the reality of what managers do. I’ll give you a run-down of my day:

1) reading emails. These emails generally consist of a few categories of things — stuff I need to be informed about, questions, asks for permission (a special form of question), documents (generally decision and decision docs, or stuff from Product), and meeting requests.

2) meetings. These meetings generally consist of stuff that couldn’t be handled over email, but is a lot of the same stuff. It’s also status updates, not from my staff, but with my peers. 1:1s and staff meeting (mine and my manager’s) are the balance.

3) There is no 3. Really, it’s a full time job to do 1 and 2. Every now and then I will carve out some time to write a document myself, but in general that gets delegated because I will do it more slowly than someone who doesn’t have a pile of time-sensitive email and meetings to deal with.

You are mistaken, this is literally - word for word - my imagination of what managers do.

Well then you are mistaken in your characterization of this not being work.

Replying to emails and sitting in meetings thinking of the best way to tell other people how to do the actual work isn't work, no.

Oh I forgot - we give the people who do this control over the employment of the people who do the actual work. Very weird system.

I'm not sure what's more unsettling to me: That we have managers here who believe that reading emails and sitting in meetings is considered contributing and making an actual difference... Or that HN has this many managers on it who apparently really cannot code or directly contribute alongside their team; yet are posting on a more technical forum, on a regular basis. Strange. Guess it's like a hockey fan who watches every game but has never laced up skates themselves.

Former manager here - you'd be very surprised at how much effort it takes to act as a human shield for your developers to keep the interruptions to a minimum and keep their roadmap stable. It's work, and it can be delicate. Try running interference with a company president who wants to bother your developers when they're trying to get something out the door, or trying to make sure stupid ideas die before they become your team's problem.

Why do people keep saying that managers solve the problem of existing in the same company as other managers as though that’s a compelling point?

And yet one that billions of people participate in. You are either a genius of epic proportions or just wrong in your thinking here. As long as people in coordinated groups get more done than individuals, I believe you are wrong.

People in coordinated groups do not necessarily require someone to sit around in meetings and send emails telling the rest of them what to do.

Btw, I never said “telling the rest of them what to do.” That is a complete misconception of management, at least the way I believe the best managers practice it. I only get involved in decisions that my team has been unable to make themselves. Even then, I rarely find myself having to be the decider. My role is to facilitate a good decision, not to tell people what to do. The team looks to me for prioritization and providing context, not to top-down manage them.

How is coordination achieved otherwise?

The other guy is definitely a bit jumpy and as a programmer I can't agree with him (fully) but that part of your comments stood out to me:

> And yet one that billions of people participate in.

Most of humanity participated in slavery for a long time as well. A lot of Europe's city dwellers enjoyed watching the hanging of criminals at dawn or sun-down, too. People also developed the mass habit of accusing a neighbor they don't like for being a witch and were hoping to have them burned (because the neighbor's chicken pecked your watermelon seeds or whatever; yeah, people are that petty).

Appealing to statistics and what the majority does is missing the point of the big power imbalances that are sadly one of the constants in every human society or system.

It doesn't help that many programmers are rather introverted and prefer passive resistance as opposed to having a good and informative one-on-one meeting, of course. And many managers are stuck in the unenviable position of having to develop skills to extract valuable actionable info from introverted people who prefer to sabotage them behind their backs. I recognize that and I sympathize.

But the inconvenient truth is, and one many managers forget about all the time, is that most of us have zero decision power -- which is quite the shame because we need it in no small amount of situations.

Formulas like Scrum (or anything "agile" really) are a complete and pathetic joke. The process must adapt to the task at hand. The best performing teams I've been in had zero process -- they only had some 10-15 ground rules like "if you are stuck for more than a day please raise the issue with the rest of the team; nobody will think you're stupid, we'll only try to unblock you". Whatever needed to be done, we used our own breed of process that best served it. On the rare occasions Scrum was actually useful btw. Most of the time the schema was more or less "enable your ICs, actively seek to unblock them, then leave them the hell alone, they know what they're doing".

You alluded to (in another comment) that you don't make the decisions; that you facilitate the people to arrive at the right decision. Kudos to you but you should still recognize that you're the minority, sadly.

Most programmers are forced to work with managers whose ego is easily bruised. That's a fact of life, one that can't be fixed by going to another job because the odds are at least 90% that it will be the same there as well.

So yeah, there are problems on both sides, that's unquestionable. I mostly went on to rant about how appealing to statistics is a poor strategy to evaluate if a given system is good (which doesn't at all explain how many companies started getting more bang for their buck after they moved to a 4-day working week btw; among other examples).

I undoubtedly compressed too much into too few sentences. My allusion to genius||wrong is raising exactly this concern. How do you decide which? For me in this argument it comes down to results. Why do people organize in this way? As I stated,I believe groups get more done than individuals and that coordinating those groups becomes the central feature of management. It can be done poorly or well, but if it facilitates the group being more productive than an individual it is superior from a pragmatic perspective.

Managers do work. They decide you what need to be done, when it’s due, they coordinate processes inside and outside the team, they (hopefully) review what gets implemented, make sure the team has the physical things it needs, build budgets and roadmaps, isolate the team from organizational bullshit, work on hiring and more.

It’s quite simple - you as a manager can only do the work of one IC but your are responsible for multiple ICs. If they sit idle, make the wrong decisions, are demoralized or leave the company, you hurt the org much more than help by technical contributions yourself.

I’d put the cutoff at about a team of 6. Below 6 you can do technical work yourself, above 6 you’re better off taking care of your team.

No kidding... We got managers here saying they don't know a lick of Python their "IC's" [1] work on, or they can only contribute by ordering pizza when their team is working hard. Seriously...talk about textbook Dunning-Kruger. It use to be people got promoted to manager from becoming experts in the task they would now manage... Now they are spawned from business school, I guess. It's fine to be a manager and manage a team, set goals, deliverables etc etc... yes, it's a real job. But damn you for not being able to roll up your own sleeves and put pen to paper with the rest of your team to achieve those goals.

[1] This business jargon term has seriously got to go. It's bullshit and oddly demeaning.