One thing that I learned from going to IC to manager:
there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
Case in point: trying to retain good people.
Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc).
Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention.
However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people".
The point of this story is twofold:
- managers do a lot of "unseen" work
- it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.
I agree about the hidden work, but you describe it in a reactionary manner.
A huge amount of management effort goes into being proactive so you don't even need to get to the point in the conversation where they voice wanting to leave. Or when they do, you've seen it coming, have plans in place and they move on with your blessing.
* Creating a culture where employees (and managers) feel valued and have autonomy.
* Ensuring employees are clear about where they are headed, giving them something to work towards.
* Proactively identifying and unblocking issues before they become crises, often across functions.
* Identifying areas of frustrations for teams and individuals.
That's just a small number of the things you'll be doing, and whilst scope varies massively by company size (though until you get to the large corp environment most of this is still covered up to the VP / CTO level), you'll be juggling it all alongside technical input, cross functional leadership responsibilities (VP may well be in the SLT if the company isn't huge), horizon scanning, constant process refinement.. The pillars of people, process and technology all need to be constantly considered..
Having done this repeatedly from IC all the way through Head, Director and VP level (and up to CTO), I can say that being a proactive problem solver is always required of a good manager / Director / VP.
Edit: Having read the actual article ;)
IC paths map this quite well too..
Tech Lead maps to manager, Staff maps to Director, Principal to VP
You can only be so proactive. At a ginormous company, the pace of change is glacial. You can push really hard and get buy-in from leaders with hundreds of people under them and still get blocked trying to improve things about the office/culture that are simply beyond one's control - even with VP buy-in. Big companies need to federate out more if they want this type of proactive management - or just accept it and maybe that makes sense too.
Indeed, don't ignore obvious issues like team morale, career paths for ICs, but there's a certain zen to the balance between proactive and reactive. Don't do too much proactive work if there isn't incremental return on it. Don't burn yourself out or set yourself up for deep disappointment.
Mid-pandemic I saw another manager go from enthusiastic to despondent overnight when his upcoming hiring headcount was cut to zero and his lovingly cultivated recruiting pipeline was basically worthless. He left shortly after, unsurprisingly. It was painful to watch and taught me a lesson in contingent value in management. I don't mean to say I know better though, he was definitely a better manager than me lol.
If you are a manager, would you accept that from a subordinate who failed to do their job successfully?
The nature of work is that it's not a cleanroom lab or a business school case study; lots of difficult and unfair obstacles exist, and your job is to overcome them. To me, that defines 'job' like the sea defines 'sailor'. You're very lucky when that isn't the case.
Realistically, there is some judgment involved and matters of degree, and there are limitations, but the best people find a way using the resources they have.
I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about.
Retention is definitely one, but there's the flip side of dealing with poor performance. You can't announce to everyone that one of the team is on a PIP or struggling with personal issues. But a poor performer means that I'm doing a _ton_ of work to figure out how to fix the issue (whether that's spending hours every week coaching them, building all the long-term documentation that HR requires before we can fire someone, picking up some of their slack myself in the meantime...)
Coordination of people also takes way more time than I realized as an IC. If you meet with your manager once per week, that's an hour out of your week. But your manager is meeting with everyone on the team and a good manager is going to spend at _least_ as much time thinking and planning for each of those meetings as they spend in the meetings themselves even if everything is going well. They have to make sure nobody is accidentally working on the same thing or impacting someone else, talking to other teams, that sort of thing. That one hour out of your week is 1-2 days for your manager. Not to mention that they then have to go do the same sort of coordination with other teams.
You have something that blows up your week that you need to escalate once per quarter? Multiply that by the number of reports your manager has and that's how much time they've spent fighting fires this quarter. And they need to explain to their leadership what happened and why it won't happen again.
Etc. etc. It's not harder work, but it is very different work from being an IC. (On the other hand, being a manager has made me a better IC too. Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster :) )
One anecdote I have is that when I first moved to a management role, I told a colleague how happy I was that I'd finally have real control over my calendar. After he finished laughing (literally) he said "your calendar belongs to your team and you'll never be in control of that again". He was absolutely right: if something goes wrong or someone is unhappy, everything else moves aside so I can fix my team's problem.
I moved from IC to manager to director. Meetings in general are a huge time suck, and by the end of my tenure, I was basically triple-booked for the entire day every day. Every evening was an exercise in deciding who to piss off. And the emails! <Marvin/Android Voice>Don't get me started on the emails! :-) Finishing the twilight of my career as an IC consulting, and it's much better for me.
Bezos used to (supposedly, didn't work for him) have the habit to forward emails to reports (direct and further down), with just an added comment of "!" or "?"
"!" was "Do something about this"
"?" was "Can you please explain WTH?"
> Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster
Could you provide some examples of what managers need to know?
It's less about what I need to know and more about how I need to organize it. I get the same information from all of my reports, but the ones who were managers hand it to me ready to go where the others I get it from a conversation.
When I'm talking to my team, I need to know things like:
* Anything that is blocking them (and what they think will solve that)
* Any unexpected events, fires that are about to start/have started
* Progress on their tasks and any timeline updates
* Things they've heard from meetings with other teams that might impact what they're working on or other people on the team
The ICs who were managers previously tend to come to 1:1s with this already sitting in our shared document outlined roughly like I have above when we start our meeting. E.g.
* I'm waiting for Joe Bloggs to finish his API work before I can build the user workflow for X. He was supposed to be done last week but I'm still waiting. He's being very vague about the timeline and I need to know when this will be done so I can start work. Can you talk to him for me?
* Mary was out sick last week so didn't finish the design for Y. We're working on it now and she'll be done by Tuesday. I've put my work on Y on hold until then and am focusing on Z instead. It should still be done by the deadline.
* Status of Project Foo is...
* I had a sync with the database team yesterday. Did you know that they're planning to move everything to paper tape next quarter?
All of that would come out in a conversation anyway, but having it like this focuses it and puts it in context already (which is normally what I would need to do with that info).
The real difference is that folks who have been managers before tend to have a better understanding of what will impact the larger team or project, not just their part of it. I care about the individual too, but some of my brain is always on the bigger picture.
To add on to this I like things organized as:
- things you need my action on
- things you need my input on
- things you think I need to be aware of that may need my input/action later
Given that there are plenty of people on the spectrum working in IT a promotion can be a devastating blow to some.
The thing you've mentioned about poor performance resonates a lot with an unfinished text I have about generation lost to covid.
For me shaping a new team is all about forming bonds between teammates. Living in eastern europe it usually involves a lot of drinking together. :)
The end result is that you have a team that cares about each other, and if someone has a bad day for whatever reason (sick cat, kid misbehaving at school, hangover or divorce) the rest of the team will be happy to fill out and carry on as a unit. If something bad will happen the team will indicate the bad apple and you'll know when to step in.
Even though my first daily job in 2006 was an online first company I was very sceptical when covid started. It takes a lot of thought and preperation to have your org ready for an online work, and setting up zoom calls is simply not enough. I took hiatus as I felt I was not able to form a functional team based on skype calls. I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
I'm not going to lie, this is what I feel work from home and distributed teams has made hardest.
It's not that it can't be overcome, but it has to be done intentionally rather than organically. And that's a whole task a manager needs to add to their list of responsibilities.
> I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
Maybe, but I will say that having the norm be "unless you hang out in person your team can't bond" is an out for some people to excuse not being friendly or empathetic. Friendly people are friendly no matter the medium.
I've had managers hand-wring over getting people to hang out, and it's like: okay, I've drank beer with this difficult person that you hired, can they stop being an asshole in chat now?
My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
People will join the stand up call saying routine like "hello yesterday no blockers", proceed to grab a random task from the backlog and call it a day.
Meanwhile in the office people will have a casual chat over a coffee, go for a smoke, grab a lunch together and maybe even hang out after work on their own accord. When someone shows up late for office saying "crap my kid is really sick" it's more likely that someone else steps in and say "hey, it's fine, I'll do the deploy for you today".
When someone asks for that in a group chat people may miss it, and honestly, who cares about random set of pixels on your screen.
Not to mention that in the office, if you're not an asshole, people will stay with you after work and be willing to teach you how to work with that new library or system. I'm not seeing that organically happening in full remote structure where you can't really put a face behind a name.
Like I've said, I worked for fully remote companies long before covid happened, but everytime those companies invested a lot of time and money to get people together and do random meaningless stuff. Heck, when I joined Wikia in 2006 they flew us all from all around the world for basically two weeks vacation so we just could spend the time together and to get to know each other.
> My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
This is very true and I learned this quickly when moving to a management role. As an IC, when someone is out for some life event, it might mean more work for you to pick up the slack. As a manager, everyone on your team's problems become your problems.
Cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc all weigh heavily on my mind when something happens to one of my direct reports.
Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.
> Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.
I've been a manager, and I've also been a volunteer firefighter for many years. I've seen a lot of things no person should see.
My relatively brief stint in management kept me awake at night more than the shotgun vs face suicide, or fatal motor vehicle accidents that I attended in the same period. I think it was because the fate of those people was well out of my hands, but the livelihood of my direct reports was not.
you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.
People use those as magic words to absolve people of responsibility, humanity, and guilt. Nothing about 'business' mitigates those, IMO. Why would it?
I think it's laziness and irresponsibility to just elminiate essential requirements and responsibilities because you don't want to put in the effort.
At the same time, the risks of 'business' are affordable to some people: They can get another job, can afford the layoff, etc. But for many people, especially in the US with a poor workers comp situation for very many people and where health care, housing, education, and nutrition (for many) depend on income, it's not affordable.
I wouldn't call them magic words to absolve people of responsibility, but rather a cliche name for situations like that. Of course you can have ethical business, I mean business ethics were first class we had in economy. But in real world you WILL get bulldozed sooner or later by "it's just business". Read the geravis principle. It's not condoning, it's observing.
Another cliche or magic word is 'reality' - as in, 'my point is reality' and therefore anything that disagrees must be fantastical. It's also the old rhetorical tactic of claiming inevitability.
The reality is that everyone acts with ethics; it's a matter of degree: businesses don't murder people, for example. Another reality is that we make reality the way we want it; to say we can't make it otherwise is simply to fold.
I don't quite understand your point. It's not about bending spoons, but about the arrogance of certainty.
And why not be your own boss? It might take some work to get there, but I think the most important requirement for being your own boss is the drive and adaptability to overcome all the challenges.
I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you'll find new, better work soon. Where I work, we do not have any open positions I'm aware of at the moment. But if you like we can connect. I'm trying to start my own start-up rn. But can't promise anything.
In addition to me being terrible at not taking my reports personal problems home with me, what did me in was pouring large amounts of time and effort in getting people to improve (e.g. if they were on a PIP, but just in general as well), and that effort not being reciprocated.
It was a great learning experience and fun track to be on, but I'm a happy IC again.
I'm not trying to make light of your experience, and I do appreciate that you care about people you have to look after deeply.
However, I also don't think what you described is professional with respect to being a manager. A manager's job is to balance the interest between stakeholders and their reports, make sure things happen as promised (and adjust scope when promise can't be met), and make sure everyone in their team grows (skill, remuneration, etc.).
> Cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc all weigh heavily on my mind when something happens to one of my direct reports.
These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems. It's unhelpful, or even narcissistic, to think that you're actually quietly taking on more burden for everyone without being appreciated.
You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
> Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.
I disagree. That's just an excuse of not doing what you should be doing as a manager: manage things. See above.
If you are an empathetic person, if you work in a team where people have/had "cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc.", then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager. In fact, if you can't manage your emotions and get what needs to be done done (damage control, repriortization, etc. to get things shipped), then you're not doing your job as a manager.
Edit: feel free to downvote if you don't agree but much appreciated if you also leave a response to say why you disagree. Otherwise, I hope you feel good "punishing" people just because you feel differently but don't actually have a concrete argument against.
> You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.
That sounds... very peculiar, un-empathetic a point of view, like you are blaming someone for facing a difficult moment.
Case in point, if you were to manage managers, and you had to tell that to one of your report facing such a situation... that would be, in that case, a fail in management on your part.
You don't tell people in a tough spot to "toughen up", "not good for that role", not even in corporate environments.
That's plain toxic. And inefficient (whereas you should be looking for a way to improve the situation/morale in some way, short term, and long term).
So you give them the space to explore the situation, their feelings, and you support them to find their solutions. That's how you lead by example. Not by jumping to conclusion "oh... looks like someone's not fit for the role".
You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep your team's individual challenges in mind. The same way that a developer might need to manage server resources, or consider the impact of a new feature on future maintenance, a manager needs to solve the problem, except the resources available to solve the problem happen to be human.
If a teammate has a sick parent, everyone on the team may choose to empathize. For the manager, every challenge that comes up, the parent sickness is one of your constraints to be dealt with. You need to compartmentalize sufficiently that you can think about this without stopping your work to solve the problem, but not so much that you treat the worker as a non-human resource. It can get a little tough.
> then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager
Speaking from experience, at least for me that's not true. For me the largest emotional toll is knowing that I'm responsible for dealing with whatever is happening. Sure, I might wind up taking the exact same actions as an IC. But as an IC I don't *have* to. And that helps, even if just enough.
I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with. Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though. ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs. As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
> I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with.
I agree but that's not what I said. What I said was it's "unhelpful, or even narcissistic", for a manager to think that being empathetic as a manager is more emotionally taxing than an IC.
> Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though.
It does. That's just being professional though. Being a good coworker in general requires emotional stability and self control. I'm not sure if you're trying to argue that a manager has to have much greater ability to do those than an IC since you seem to avoid saying that directly.
> ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs.
Uh, the reverse sounds just about as true? I'm honestly not sure what the argument there is.
> As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.
It's unclear from what you said why it's more important as a manager -- that's just what every professional should do at a workplace. Can you please elaborate?
As a manager, you are always implicitly communicating from a position of power. That changes what you can and cannot say. It's not very hard to understand once you experience it from a manager's perspective, but I don't think that I would have truly understood this exclusively from an IC's perspective, though.
It's truly frightening for people who don't understand that well to be given the opportunity to mange people.
As yobbo said it much better than me, "the part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you."
It's impossible to have a conversation with people who only make reasonable-sounding statements that are irrelevant to the actual conversation. I'm out.
Maybe you mean something else? Narcissism is the condition of a very vulnerable ego, and insisting that nothing around you can threaten your ego - everyone has to be 'perfect'.
> These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems.
The crux of the issue is here I think. You, as a manager, a report, anything, have no say as to what anyone feels and how, and how it affects them. That’s purely on them. You may only be there for them.
You may think for yourself, that these are not heavier problems than other ones. Others may think differently, and feel differently. That’s not more, or less professional (whatever that word has ever meant).
Being a good manager is how one does manage their team, in the end and what the outcomes are. Not how one feels/struggles to do it internally or within the confidentiality that you have with your own manager. Manager to whom you should be able to openly share how you struggle yourself internally. Which requires trust.
If, ever, your manager did retort « you’re showing you’re not fit for this » or came to moral judgement for just expressing your thoughts to them, this becomes a Whiplash situation you better get out of, because that manager will not have your back, ever.
(of course, if the personal issues of the manager/report turn into problematic actions or omissions, that’s another topic)
In my experience the inverse is also true. Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
Well run engineering organizations are like a well running engine. They need to have solid parts but they also need constant attention and fine tuning. The best managers do this well.
> Dealing with performance and behavioral issues can take a huge amount of time, and it something that is never discussed with parties who are not involved.
This is true. I feel like there needs to be a better solution to it which isn't wearing your heart on your sleeve or airing dirty laundry in public.
Recently, I saw some emails from the manager two levels up form me that shouldn't have been in our CRM where he was standing up for my manager and his paycheck not going through properly. It seems like it was just an oversight because this one paycheck is run differently than others, but the director was clearly triggered because he said to payroll, "if we need to withhold anyone's paycheck, don't just do it. I need to know first because I need to know how to figure it out."
I just quietly deleted the email and made sure similar ones wouldn't get logged. But I was also impressed at how quickly this director just stood up for someone under him. And if not for this chance stumble upon I never would have known of this side of his work.
Maybe the recognition of managers is something that has to be done publically by those above them to get their teams to hear it?
This is a perfect example of the silent work managers do.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind someone on the people/finance side that their systems work for the employees and not the other way around is astounding. “No we cant ask them to wait another month to get paid, no I don’t care our system doesn’t support it, fine pull out your check book and write them a physical check…”
In my (big tech) company, managers have little leverage to retain people. Salary/bonus aren't in their control. Even evaluation aren't decided by them.
They can try to make people happy so they stay in the team, but I find that they aren't very good at that either. When the team has issues, I don't find them effective to solve any problem.
They do administrative work, communicate with leadership, hire, 1:1 which are more or less useful, help with roadmapping and alignement, attend calibration meetings for evaluation.
I'm not saying they're not useful or that they don't work, but I find they leave the hard parts to the team to figure out. The hard part would be things like pushing backs on leadership demands, helping prioritizing tasks in the team.
Concrete example: right now, everybody is overworked in my team, oncall is hard because we're pushed to ship new features, not work on reliability. Manager pretends to be empathetic, "always happy to help". But practically does nothing.
My criteria for a good manager is that they're not harmful and don't add friction and stress (and those ones aren't appreciated by higher management). More than that, I've never seen it. But maybe i wasn't lucky.
- Listen to their team. Issues arise, complexity may be higher than appears. Being receptive to reality and not being obstinate.
- Manage priorities, when there is too much to do everything, so progress can continue instead of gridlock by stakeholder updates, changes, and context switches leaving you feeling like a husk
- Not an expectation, but I find the good ones almost play the role of team therapist. I had a very kind manager stay up until midnight with me being supportive when it got really bad. The opposite of this is the not-my-problem people
- Really really good managers understand the pressures you are under, and give suggestions on how you can work smarter.
I do think sometimes there is pressure and they get in the way of work to produce visible artifacts to have something to point to that they did. I’m empathetic, a lot of their work is invisible.
Oh, that explains a thing.
A decade or so ago, I was a well regarded engineer at a FAANG who got an offer from a startup. I told my manager I was probably going to take it, as it sounded fun.
He and his lead tried to talk me into staying, showed me other departments I might find more fun.
Really, they could've offered me a trivial raise and I probably would've stayed, but I was too meek to ask for money, and they didn't bring up money at all.
That always struck me as very strange; I assumed it was either a mistake, or a "if they're going somewhere that is a pay cut, clearly it isn't money, and if you offer them money they'll leave in 6mo anyway". But, if they don't have that level to pull, that's a much simpler answer.
Do you mind sharing what big tech company? I've worked at both small companies and big tech. Managers do not have full control, but they can influence very significantly comp and evaluations. If your manager isn't doing it then it is a performance problem.
If you are a very senior IC, managers may consult you in these situations as well. Fishing for interesting projects or possibly even trying to have you talk to the person leaving as well. You generally would have context and an ability to connect with the other IC in a way a manager may not. I've never been in management but have on many occasions been roped into these scenarios.
Part of being a manager is to be proactive in trying to retain the good people. Increasing their visibility within the leadership and across the organization, paying keen attention to their career goals, selling these goals in advance to your manager and others within the organization, clearing hurdles that may be affecting their work etc.
And most importantly, plan for their departure. Do you have any internal candidates to take their position? What would it take to hire somebody and bring them to the IC's level?
When they finally decide they want to move on, you have hopefully laid the groundwork to keep them at the company (they move to a different group with an opportunity that matches their ambitions), or you don't have the arduous task of replacing them all of a sudden.
Its a good example to call out but it should be obvious to anyone genuinely considering the transition. Managers are there to manage people, the job is easy when the teams awesome and the jobs hard when the team isn't awesome. This includes poor performance, attrition, and people drama. All things that come with the territory of managing humans.
There's also a huge part of "managing moods" to prevent people from thinking about leaving in the first place.
And all of that within the constraints of the department budget and company policies.
Crisis management is a big part of the job, and the more people you have the higher the chance there is a crisis at any given point in time. Around 100 devs there's usually at least 1-2 things going on at any given time.
Does anyone tell their manager they are leaving and still expecting anything nowadays? I thought dive-and-save is very rare since the flattening trend happened (esp. in big tech)
Never experienced the dive-and-save myself. Usually a wince and a sigh, followed by "oh... when's your last day?" Your first line supervisor is upset, but resigned that he's powerless to do anything substantive that might retain you. The MBAs at corporate HQ couldn't care less, and it'll take them weeks/months to get around to approving a new job req.
Word. IMO, one of the most important, yet underrated duties, of a good manager.
As a leader, you want people to crawl over broken glass to want to be by your side. If not, you end up like North Korea, where you have to sell why people should stay, sometimes eve being dishonest and intimidating in the process. Seeing the latter happen is always a sad sight.
One thing I discovered: almost everything a manager does has a big lag between input and observed impact. Retention is one of the slowest, it's like steering a cruise ship!
I can't say I agree with this bc I have felt the immediate impact of a key employee leaving, usually in the form of me taking up their responsibilities. Even with a two-week, sometimes even four-week, hand off, this turns into real pain the moment that employee is gone.
People leaving is definitely a step-function of negatives as the responsibilities get shared between the (now smaller!) team.
I think GP was more saying that improving retention, at a % level, is a slow ship to steer. (At least what is available at the manager level.) Decreasing retention across the org in the long term doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take a while to observe whether the effect is trending downwards or upwards. (And also depends on what signal you use - people actually leaving, or people talking about leaving!)
Personally I think spending huge amounts of time on retention _after_ someone resigns indicates huge, possibly org-wide, problems with communication and career development.
There are lots of reasons people resign, but a lot of the time it comes back to feeling bored, under appreciated, or that their career has stalled. If you’re actively managing a team, you should be balancing these things, _and it should be obvious_ at least to people who are paying attention. Both developing someone’s career and signaling that you want to help are fundamental in a manager building good relationships with their reports.
Or as Rands in Repose points out in his post on “Diving Save” [1]:
> Diving Saves are usually a sign of poor leadership. People rarely just up and leave. There are a slew of obvious warning signs I’ve documented elsewhere, but the real first question you have to ask yourself once you get over the shock of an unexpected resignation is: “Did you really not see it coming? Really?”
If you routinely don’t see it coming, maybe your reports have a legit gripe about what you’re spending your time on.
If the majority of your retention work is escalations and meetings at the time they want to leave, you're really holding this management thing wrong.
I've done this 3 times in 20+ years as a manager. It's not exactly super-common.
When it happened, it took maybe a day total. (Seriously, one of your jobs is to have good relations with your execs. If somebody wants to leave due to a better offer, you need to be able to go to your exec and say "hey, we need to counter this offer, make it so please", and they trust you - you can't have endless runarounds at that point)
Yes, there's a lot of unseen work, but active retention measures is so tiny a blip, it doesn't even matter.
Are you saying you, as a manager, are running a group so poorly that you have enough churn to where retention makes up a large percentage what you work on day to day?
Or are you saying your company treats/pays employees so poorly that there is significant turnover throughout the organization? And instead of generally treating/paying employees better they rather have middle management spend a significant amount of their time discussing retention?
And you are choosing to highlight this as something IC's should appreciate that management has to deal with?
You’re getting downvoted, it seems, but you raise a very real point: you need to have a high turnover, or rough span of control ratios, in order for this to be a common interrupt.
Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers… it’s a bit telling.
Anecdotally: I spent 6-7 years managing at various levels (manger/sr mgr/director) before going back to an IC role, and I had a single regrettable attrition (+2 non-regrettable) in that time.
> Especially given it’s well known that people don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers…
I know this is an old saw because it’s usually true, but I’ve left companies where I had a good relationship with my manager because I lost confidence in leadership at some level above them.
Sometimes you can see the train wreck coming and it’s time to go.
I recently went through the retention process, and before resigning the first thing I did was ask around to figure out exactly how the process worked (I wanted to stretch my end date for various reasons). The knowledge was definitely there among the longer tenured ICs, and I've shared notes on my case.
FYI, there is a concept of a reportable event that some employees (managers and officers) are required to report, resignation usually being one of them. I.e. don't ask your manager.
Sounds like pretty bad point to intervene though? If I decided to leave, and even announced it I'm probably pretty pissed off already. I probably raised my concerns before - or if I haven't, it is an indication of dysfunction of its own, I just had no space for that. In the best case you give me something that convinces me not to leave - and my takeaway will be that things are only going to change if I threaten with leaving.
Alot of leadership in general is keeping drama away from the troops. A sure sign of a toxic workplace is when stuff like this and other high level drama at the management level is well known.
In this case, if it becomes known, you’ll find that there’s a big todo about retaining some people but not others? Why? The lack of understanding there leads to rumors, and that perception becomes reality… and it’s always bad.
I've been gathering anonymous feedback from teams I've worked with as a lead or eng mgr. I usually ask the scrum master or someone neutral to talk to the team and gather a few bullet points. I always talk to the team first and ask them for willingness and permission.
The one single thing that keeps repeating is something along the line of "we don't know what your doing".
Not as in we don't believe in you, or we haven't seen you in the office for past few weeks, but they don't understand where my focus goes.
And that's on purpose. I've been battling with myself for very long time about it. I'm past "I identify with the company" credo, but I always wanted to shield my teams from distractions and bullshit. I don't feel comfortable coming back to my team saying that I just had the conversation with CTO and he's so toxic that I have to wash myself, or that I've fighting for the last two weeks to not get the team fired, or any other usual corporate machiavellian schemes that happens on a daily basis.
I think smaller companies do think this way of retaining good people. Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable. Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention. This proves your point though.
> Large corporations believe anyone is replaceable.
This is definitely true. By design, large corporations are structured so that there is no single point of failure.
> Again I am an IC & don’t see/hear any extra work done for retention.
Even in large corporations, extra work definitely happens for retention (I have experienced it myself as an IC). Even though everyone is by design replaceable, the organization has some incentive to work on retention:
a) Bad retention hurts the organization's reputation and future hiring (horror stories spread very fast)
b) Within the team, losing a great teammate hurts morale and output and managers know it will result in a hit on their metrics at least for the next half.
c) Managers may not always be able to backfill, and losing an employee can reduce the size of their "empire" that they are often trying so hard to establish at whatever cost.
There's also a constant tension between using fear as a motivator to squeeze more work out of employees, but not squeeze so hard that they quit. Different companies find their own spot on this continuum. For example, Amazon is famously in the sweatshop part of the scale and they could care less about their reputation. They seem to be doing OK though.
1. Keep everyone on the same page
2. Keep things humming along
3. Keep shit from rolling downhill
It can be very easy as a manager to get caught up in putting out fires related to the second two and let the thrid happen or not happen on its own. But that's where ICs see them or notice their absence the most.
The thing I run into more is I often see managers as part of the machine, someone who I need to protect myself from rather than someone there to support me. This is likely as much a me problem as anything else, but its also something I've see good managers overcome.
It looks like the conclusion on that page supports my claim.
> Conclusions
The notion, at least, behind the expression "there is honor among thieves" is ancient, and it is expressed (inexactly) by English writers as far back as Daniel Defoe in 1723. A pamphlet published in 1782 describes "there is honour among thieves" as an "adage," so the familiar wording must be considerably older than that date.
The counter-proverb, "there is no honour among thieves" is somewhat younger—at least in Google Books search results, with an exact occurrence in 1828 after earlier instances in which writers denied the assertion that honor did exist among thieves.
I read you as claiming that the idiom used the word "amongst". That wasn't true when the word existed and it still isn't true now.
The concept of honor among thieves has been used in many ways. Whether you emphasize that it's present in certain contexts or that it's absent in other contexts doesn't change the way you refer to it.
Not always true. I've coached people to stay before and they are still at the company. Sometimes they have concerns that actually could be fixed from management. People are complex and have many different reasons for wanting to leave, some fixable some not.
If someone puts in a resignation then sure, let them go. But if they come to you, their manager, and say "I'm thinking about leaving" it's a different situation. They may have a legitimate reason that you can solve to their satisfaction.
> there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
That's what most bad managers I have worked tend to overestimate -- they think they are doing real work tanking the team from "bad" things when they are actually the one not communicating with the team and just cave to upper management every time when protecting your team really counts.
Most people I have worked with are aware that their average-to-good managers have to deal with things that they don't see, and when that understanding is mutual and respectful, then great work happens. When the manager always thinks that they are shielding bad things (when they are not) and the team isn't getting the communication they need, that's when bad things happen (and the manger ends up getting promoted and the rest of the team gets laid-off anyway).
> Case in point: trying to retain good people.
It's actually not that difficult: just be honest to people, treat them fairly, and be considerate.
If you spend more time arguing/reasoning why they don't deserve to be promoted/get a raise than thinking about/making planning for ways to get them promoted or fight for their salary, you're just a bad manager. Sorry (assuming they even have the awareness) is not good enough when you have screwed up someone's career progression by half a year, let alone more. It happens too often.
It baffles me that people think there is some sort of art or science in retaining good people. If good people want to try something completely and they can only do so by leaving, then let them. Otherwise, if good people want to leave it's always the company's fault (bad managers, insane colleagues who hurts culture, and many other bad things).
> Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc).
Good people usually want to leave because the company is not treating them well enough, it's as simple as that. If they leave for reasons that you can't comprehend that doesn't make them "ludicrous", you're just not good enough to understand what's really pushing them to leave.
Bad people, on the other hand, would leave for a variety of reasons, including ludicrous ones.
Assuming we are on the same page, good people are also often professional. So of course they will announce they are leaving to their direct manager, that's just the right, professional thing to do. Not sure what you point is there.
> Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention.
Successful retention in this case is very rare (unless they're they are not as good as you think they are). By the time good people want to leave, they have already made up their mind and it would take some pretty drastic changes or life-changing kind of money to keep them. It's rare that companies can make drastic changes like that when they have already screwed up for so long so that good people are pushed out. It's also rare that, by the time someone has made up their mind on leaving, that they genuinely want to stay even if the (new) price is right -- most management doesn't realize that the implication is that they have treated people unfairly for too long, and people are not just going to forget about it when you offer them more money now (what about all the time they have been underpaid?).
> However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people".
That's just bad company policy and most likely management is silencing people for some downright stupid reasons. If good people are leaving, their leaving usually already says it all, and silence actually makes other good people even more suspicious of the management.
In most cases, other employees who have good working relationship with good people actually have a better idea than management. If you're talking about people who don't know/haven't worked with those good people then... they wouldn't have cared either way.
So yes, the only reason people don't know is because it's now common practice to get people leaving to agree to NDAs -- especially when they aren't just leaving on normal terms/compensation -- even when there is absolutely no reason for them to sign any NDAs. It's not because nobody wants to tell, it's because people have been scared into not talking/literally gagged.
In the end, if you're not a narcissist, why do you want anyone you're not close to care about you leaving anyway? As long as you get well-compensated where necessary, chances are the people who really care about you already know what's happening anyway.
> The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.
"Unseen" is overrated in my opinion. In the context of moving from IC to manger, the word "unexpected" is more apt then "unseen".
Alternatively, if there is a lot of "unseen" work, then the manager is basically work that they aren't communicating to the reports AND their reports can't hold them accountable to those "unseen" work, which is clearly a sign of broken communication and cultural problem. You can argue about most managers don't actually see the work that good reports do equally well.
You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times. Many people lack the ability to be self critical and want to avoid confrontation. That often leads to surprises, a managers worst friend.
Not op. But to refute 'You make it sound like employees are perfect and communicate transparently at all times' and 'surprises, a managers worst friend'.
Modern workplaces forced quarterly reviews, thus there should be no surprises.
In practise reviews actively prohibit employees from communicating transparently.
Your last sentence makes me think we agree. In my experience employees perceive they have much more to lose from transparency. If they are low agency, not actively bad and defer when asked what they want, you may be surprised when they finally quit.
The issues with any of these things is bad companies/managers burn lots more people than good companies, hence creating large numbers of people with zero trust in things like reviews.
This is, if you've been burned by a company getting rid of you after being transparent, you are never going to be transparent again even if it would be in your favor. Then when you look at most companies thinking the most important thing is how much profit they are going to make next quarter that quarterly meeting stops looking like an event to see how you are doing, into one where the company determines how much blood they can extract from your withered corpse.
there is a LOT of activity at the manager level that you never see and therefore don't often think about when you are an IC.
Case in point: trying to retain good people.
Good people often times end up wanting to leave for a variety of reasons ranging from ludicrous to 100% legitimate. They often announce they are leaving to their direct manager and maybe one other person (E.g. head of another team they work with etc).
Given that they are good and worth keeping, this triggers escalations, meetings with the employee and between managers, senior managers and HR. In the best case, this leads to a successful retention.
However, the only people that know any of this happened are the employee and the manager tier. The other employees have zero idea any of this occurred unless someone shares/mentions it. I point this out b/c multiple times as an IC, I thought "no one will care if I leave b/c I never see managers actively trying to keep people".
The point of this story is twofold: - managers do a lot of "unseen" work - it's worth researching this kind of thing if you are about to move from IC to manager.