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Hm, not sure. My first boss 'managed' by assigning tasks to people and recording start/finish date in an Excel sheet. Multiple week projects were the same as one-day fixes of they made it on to the sheet. I was 'managed' by having my task completion times compared to 15yr developers, and given no feedback other than to work faster.

We also had a lot of slowdown because we were stuck on a shitty off-the-shelf program he bought. He went for this one instead of the more usable competitor because it was cheaper. If he could get developers to build a working tool in the cheap product by holding them 'accountable' in his Excel sheet, he could push for the product to replace the more expensive competitor and gain some reputation in the corporation.

In the end, most of the project was a horrific failure. His best employees left, and control of the project was transferred to another manager inside of a year or two.

I think a lot of this could have been avoided if my boss had any idea about what he was managing.




If you read back you will see that I also stated a bad boss who doesn't know how to do your job is worse than a boss who does.

Do not allow your experience with a bad boss to clutter your thinking about how a good boss would handle things.




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