Management Bits and Tips

Past performance, success and achievement record doesn’t mean that the same would hold in the future (bit). Look for environment and hidden factors that explain the lucky side of success and evaluate it for new environment (tip).

This bit and tip was influenced by the following book I vehemently recommend:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Although the book focuses on trading and material success the ideas can be applied to hiring decisions and team building. Especially, contrary to the popular opinion that the past poor performance stays poor in the future, I’ve seen examples when poor past performance changed to more than average if not exceptional after environmental changes. These changes doesn’t mean changing the company to work for or pursuing entrepreneurial career but could be changes inside the same company. When hiring or promoting I would also recommend to look for the number of people in the team. It is one case when there was a small team with 2 members and one star performer and a completely different case when a team had 10 members with one star (clearly Team Lead position). However, if a candidate was a star in 5 companies but teams were 2-3 people in size we clearly have the star performer against 10 - 15 people.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Recently started reading this interesting non-mechanical book on people management written by Michael Lopp. I borrowed from him the term “mechanical” manager to describe his book as non-mechanical. The second chapter “Managers are no Evil” is worth alone as it provides a simple answer to venerable question asked by engineers: “What does my manager do?”… The stories in this book come from software engineering companies ranging from startups to big ones. Highly recommended for software and technical support engineers and team leaders promoted to management positions to get insight into their new role, avoid mistakes and blow-ups. 

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

Day-to-day hands-on experience only is limiting (bit). Read books, articles and blogs to deepen your understanding and broaden your knowledge and then apply to your day-to-day work (tip).

Sounds obvious but so far I have seen that engineers and managers en masse don’t read or only read on per-problem or per-task basis. It is a known fact that in order to really understand our subject matter we need to read about other experiences as well, be it science, engineering or management. Even reading one book or article about a particular topic is not enough, it is better to read several of them to avoid biases and see different viewpoints. From my personal experience, I got much deeper understanding of C++ merely by reading the vast amount of books. Although I applied hands-on C++ knowledge to the variety of projects, the real life experience was very limiting even when I happened to write and maintain parts of C++ compiler. For management roles it is even more important to read because managers cannot afford to learn from day-to-day feedback only. It might be too costly. In the future I’ll put some links and reviews for management books I found worth reading.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -