The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").

The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical arguments, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."

One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.

   "Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be 
    prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
    time they perform that action, and expect it to be 
    performed in that way until otherwise instructed."

Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.

PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D

I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.

After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.

Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.

Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.

put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.

"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.

The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.

The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.

Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.

The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.

If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.

A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.

Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.

I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.

Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.

Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.

And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.

Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.

Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.

Delegation: (usually the first failure I see) http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html

And the rest: http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html

Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.

Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.

So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.

At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.

A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.

I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.

Cheers!

From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:

Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.

Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.

Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.

I'm facing this argument right now, and it's unclear to me on what my manager's opinion on this is. I'd rather not trade quality. While I agree with the quoted answer, I can't think of a good argument to back it up, and the answer doesn't provide one. Can someone give something more concrete here, especially something more concrete than, "well, a weak hire will cost you more in training / patience / bringing them up to speed / constant mentoring"? (or is that really the argument?)

There's a lot to write here.. but above seem important to me dealing with problematic manager.

This attitude could potentially backfire. It can lead to a closed-loop that eventually results in dishonesty to meet unattainable numbers. Better to plan growth empirically and adjusting for things like regression to the mean at the team and company level.

It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes.

When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your team. They are worth it.

You have to hire good people that you can trust to do the job, up front. Then you have to trust them to do the job. It's as simple as that.

It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.

One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.

It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.

Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.

Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.

Your title doesn't impact your role on the team. You can easily make a big impact as a leader, without the people management aspect.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and better for morale to hire a couple of temps to do the data entry?

It is clear from what you have said that your people were overworked, deadlines were not reasonable and there were not enough proper employees. Yet management persisted with their existing paradigm and you got to be the one that bore the bad news to everyone so they all resented you.

The best you can do in that situation is exit. Which it sounds like you and others figured out.

Sleep well knowing you cared about the people and the results, it was upper managment that did not. They cared only about the money.

As a side note, I hear this excuse a lot, about how money will be lost if we don't do this bad thing or that. Money is brief, setting up the proper business practices is long term. Sure, there are temporary situations that require extra effort... but they are obvious and temporary.

I'm still stuck at 'training'.

I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:

"What is good general management advice?"

But the question that was asked is:

"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"

A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,

"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."

For example,

"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."

[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]

Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?

Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.

As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.

Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.

If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.

I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.

Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.

The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.