The manager I hated and the lesson he taught me
The manager I hated and the lesson he taught me
How a tough manager changed my approach to leadership (and why I’m grateful now)
There are maybe three sentences worth of content.
Wrapped.
In stutters.
That make.
It.
Super hard.
To read.
It drives me nuts on LinkedIn; it’s sad to see it’s made the jump to “longform” on substack.
I stopped coding for myself and started coding for the next person who’d touch my codebase.
Yeah. The worst code is the code only one person can work with. Sucks if that person is no longer working at the company.
What's with the image thumbnail that doesn't appear in the article? It also looks like AI slop.
The content is good, but c'mon.
This AI gen illustrations are painful.
Yeah I mean obviously the technical points here are correct (and I wish my colleagues would write more robust code with less Bash and regex all over the place), but I don't know why he thinks you need an asshole manager to deliver that message.
Over-engineered. Too many moving parts. Refactor.”
That was it. No “nice work.” No “good attempt”. Just a hard stop.
Uhm yeah, would writing "good attempt" have hurt? Obviously not. He could easily have been nice and still deliver the technical information.
Good attempt, but I think this is too over-engineered with too many moving parts. For instance x y z would be simpler to maintain, and a b c isn't robust to 1 2 3 for example.
It doesn't take much. Don't be a dick.
The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, "good attempt" could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn't good at all, it's bad. If you'd asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it's impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it's completely inappropriate as it'd stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it's incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it's sensitive to moisture.
The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.
Did anyone run this through a few AI content scanners? This article was boring and pointless. I thought this was the programing feed and not butt sucking.
Not everything that's poorly written is ai, you should give humans more credit
Over-engineered. Too many moving parts. Refactor
Why would a manager give his opinion on code?
Maybe the person is more of a tech lead?
A lot of companies make their most senior devs engineering managers, and expect them to stay technical. I assume this was the case here.
We have an engineering manager that's about the same, the only issue is that they let PR through because features are wanted and there's no time to get things right.
I think, I may be pleased to have to redo everything several times to make it better and simpler, but what we get is that everything is bad but we'll still merge 😞
I now feel at several times I fucked up quite a lot by making something that works but not something simpler.
I had one of these when I was loaned out to another department. He made me realize that my manager is terrible and I need a new job.
Sounds more like a tech lead than a manager.
Unrelated, but substack links seem to contain a lot of slop nowadays. Bear blog for the win.