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Ask HN: How to deal with managers who don't/don't want to understand the system?
4 points by websap on Dec 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
Hi HN,

I'm a senior level contributor at a late-stage private company. I've previously worked at a FAANG company for a decade and my take was that most software managers, especially software managers that directly managed engineering teams understood how the system worked and how services interacted with each other.

At my new gig, it seems like managers (and leadership, whatever that word means to you) seem to care about the metrics and availability numbers, but from my experience there seems to be a lack of want to understand how the system works. A lot of managers are from FAANG companies, but were building software probably in the 90s. Things have moved on. We now use declarative APIs, large distributed services, etc.

How do you deal with this type of management? A lot of questions they ask simply boil down to this isn't important because XYZ... It seems as soon as you start explaining the reasons they just stop listening.

Have you'll dealt with this? How have you helped educate managers to increase their understanding of the underlying software services that they manage?



Look for the positive in the situation - you have been given enough trust that they don't have to care how it work. No second-guessing your decisions, no micromanaging solutions...

So enjoy your autonomy, figure out what they do care about, make sure you hit their goals, and you may end up with a great role.


You need to learn how to manage up. My VP could care less about API-driven design, etc.. I tell him that our system is designed with latest enterprise standard that meet user requirements, met the budget, delivered on time and as long as I hit his metric. He doesn't care. He leaves me alone and praise my work.

Now, this only applies to VP and above, if your EM is L1 or L2 and doesn't know the system, time to switch team.


The police service used to have a rule;

Sergeants have to spend at least 80% of their time working the regular beats with street-officers. As you go up the ranks you spend more time at a desk, disconnected from reality, but even when you reach the rank of Captain, you still must spend 10% of your time out in a patrol car or walking the neighbourhood.

This stops the kind of disconnected management that you speak of, where they think they are "above" the work and will justify this with all sorts of "management talk" about abstraction, metrics and overview to justify the fact that they've simply forgotten how things actually work and lost the edge.

One trick that occasionally works is to drag them back down to reality by their ego. Ask for help.

  "I'm having a little difficulty understanding problem X, and *as my
   superior* I wondered if you could explain to me...."
However, in general you cannot up-manage and educate people who refuse to engage. They lack the humility. They went into management as a refuge from the demands of understanding and you're reminding them of that.


> How do you deal with this type of management? A lot of questions they ask simply boil down to this isn't important because XYZ... It seems as soon as you start explaining the reasons they just stop listening.

What's there to deal with? Don't go into detail that they don't care about. Instead talk about requirements, outcomes, and consequences. If they don't care about the "why", given them only the "what". I don't understand why you're posing this like it's a problem.


> How have you helped educate managers to increase their understanding of the underlying software services that they manage?

There are many ways a manager can be incompetent. Lacking fundamental knowledge about what they manage is one of them. Some managers will be willing to learn, some even enthusiastic about it. Others will not. In the latter case, the projects are (in my experience) likely to fail, and it's better to fail fast and just quit.




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