> All I see is an ode to the 10x'er and how sucking up to them might keep them around long enough to be successful.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy Dan Luu's writings and I'm thankful that he shares his thoughts.
That said, a lot of his recent writings present extremely rare, specialized situations like small teams of carefully-selected 10X-er type programmers who are hand-picked from their sterling reputations and naturally extremely motivated. If you find yourself in a top 1% unicorn team like that, a lot of his writings ring true. Trying to apply arbitrary big-company management to highly-optimized, high-performing teams like that is a mistake.
However, statistically most of us won't be working on or managing those unicorn teams. Trying to apply top-1% advice to the median team is going to result in a lot of mismatches.
Generally speaking, HN isn't a great place to get any sort of management advice. The userbase is mostly IC engineers, and as a result the upvotes tend to follow what IC engineers want to hear. Writing an article about making the difficult management choices that come with managing real-world (not top-1%) teams is hard to do without upsetting a lot of readers, so instead we get a lot of "engineers good, managers bad" type articles even if the authors start out with best intentions.
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy Dan Luu's writings and I'm thankful that he shares his thoughts.
That said, a lot of his recent writings present extremely rare, specialized situations like small teams of carefully-selected 10X-er type programmers who are hand-picked from their sterling reputations and naturally extremely motivated. If you find yourself in a top 1% unicorn team like that, a lot of his writings ring true. Trying to apply arbitrary big-company management to highly-optimized, high-performing teams like that is a mistake.
However, statistically most of us won't be working on or managing those unicorn teams. Trying to apply top-1% advice to the median team is going to result in a lot of mismatches.
Generally speaking, HN isn't a great place to get any sort of management advice. The userbase is mostly IC engineers, and as a result the upvotes tend to follow what IC engineers want to hear. Writing an article about making the difficult management choices that come with managing real-world (not top-1%) teams is hard to do without upsetting a lot of readers, so instead we get a lot of "engineers good, managers bad" type articles even if the authors start out with best intentions.