Item — HN Reader

- Trying to "create a buzz" around the office, asking for a "sense of urgency," and other things that result in an illusion of productivity.

- Focusing on fixing problems, rather than preventing problems

- Acting as yes-men to bad upper-management strategy, thereby creating a layer of indirection between the people who think it's a good plan vs the engineers who can explain why it's not quite that easy

- Trying to use software tools (e.g. Jira's burndown charts) to quantitatively/"objectively" measure engineers

2 comments

Jira management :(

I've seen so many "managers" spend all their time staring at Jira instead of talking to their actual team or reading the code.

I'm convinced Jira is an anti-pattern for management

Jira has a lot of bad use cases around it, but I don't think it's a bad tool. I rather be looking at the board to get status updates than interrupting someone to see where things are at, and basically resorting to micromanagement. It should however not be used as a replacement to talking to the team or reading the code - but it should be one of the tools in the shed.

"Acting as yes-men to bad upper-management strategy"

Makes me think of "There are two types of managers: shit umbrellas and shit funnels".