<story><title>Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)</title><url>https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baz00</author><text>A finding I had when I took a management role was that it&amp;#x27;s really hard actually getting anyone  to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don&amp;#x27;t give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it&amp;#x27;s perceived they are working for the hours required. I&amp;#x27;ve found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I&amp;#x27;m dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve spoken to managers in other sectors and it&amp;#x27;s the same for them too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scottLobster</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s an issue of incentives, and sadly my experience is it&amp;#x27;s often not the immediate management that&amp;#x27;s the problem, it&amp;#x27;s structural issues with the company that low-level managers have little if any say in.&lt;p&gt;Speaking for my own experience, program-level and above management often doesn&amp;#x27;t put their money where their mouth is.  Maintenance is chronically under-funded, well-articulated and respectful feedback is ignored with a thank-you.  Hell more than once I&amp;#x27;ve been forced to spend an entire  day in a conference room with all the other relevant devs to do a &amp;quot;Root Cause Analysis&amp;quot; of a given recent crisis, and we took it seriously each time and came up with genuine solutions.  But said solutions required more hardware, more maintenance, more stuff that no one wanted to budget for.&lt;p&gt;You work in that environment long enough, you learn to clock in and clock out.  If you allow yourself to give a shit you&amp;#x27;ll just be constantly tearing your hair out.  Those of us with some objective sense of professionalism usually evolve into the functional elites you mention, but I completely understand those who go the other way.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)</title><url>https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baz00</author><text>A finding I had when I took a management role was that it&amp;#x27;s really hard actually getting anyone  to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don&amp;#x27;t give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it&amp;#x27;s perceived they are working for the hours required. I&amp;#x27;ve found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I&amp;#x27;m dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve spoken to managers in other sectors and it&amp;#x27;s the same for them too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rndmwlk</author><text>&amp;gt;So many people actually don&amp;#x27;t give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it&amp;#x27;s perceived they are working for the hours required.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve found that&amp;#x27;s due to completely backwards incentives. Most people don&amp;#x27;t give a fuck because they aren&amp;#x27;t rewarded properly. If I do an excellent job and complete whatever task I&amp;#x27;m given well ahead of schedule the only reward I get is more work. Even if I sandbag a bit and do an excellent job and complete on time, often the reward for being &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; is more responsibility or more difficult tasks (without compensation). Some folks want that, many do not. Dollars to doughnuts if your team members know that quality work on schedule will be actually rewarded then you&amp;#x27;ll find more of those members capable of producing that quality of work.</text></comment>