Ranking of Managers
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
Last week still felt slow, like the last week of the Holiday season. We'll see what this new week brings us! I hope you had a restorative weekend.
Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!
Things I enjoyed in the past week
Paper: Going Solid. It's a good blog post that summarizes the paper "Going Solid" by Dr Richard Cook and Jens Rasmussen. The paper explains how systems can shift from loosely coupled to tightly coupled, making them harder to control and more prone to accidents.
Time Travelling and Fixing Bugs with Property-Based Testing. I came across this blog post while researching a bit of Property-Based testing I'm trying to include in a presentation I'm giving soon (a month or so).
I was going through LinkedIn (?) and came across this Substack on how to get promoted faster than your peers. The whole post is a good read, but the most interesting point for me was the ranking of managers into tiers. The post creates this tiers:
S-Tier: Fast Promotions, Strong Skip-Level Relationships, Fights for you in calibration.
A-Tier: Supportive, gives good projects, less political capital.
B-Tier: Nice, leaves you alone, no promo velocity.
C-Tier: Actively hurts your career through neglect or incompetence.
I think manager relationships should be less reductive, but for the purpose of their post, it makes sense to focus on promotions. Especially as the common aphorism goes: "People quit managers, not jobs". I decided to write a bit about my experience with different managers and how I see them behave based on the above tier list.
Thinking about a C-Manager is basically someone who is actively working against you. Like, has envy of you, always puts you in crappy things to do, things nobody wants to do. I haven't had that experience myself, but I have heard from peers how their managers treat them, which drives them to quit.
With a B-Manager, you need to put in a lot of effort yourself; they leave you alone in many areas. On one hand, it might be good not to have someone micromanage your tasks, but on the flip side, they leave you alone even when you need their support. You might get some vague feedback if you insist. I know a lot of people aim for this type of manager, mainly for being left alone to clock in and clock out. I've also noticed that these managers cannot drive their reports to grow; at best, they overwork them.
A-Manager's are where we get to a bit of the good stuff, they are good with feedback, timely, and direct. While feedback will help you get better in your role, they themselves might not be good at advocating for you, or they might not even know how to help with calibration. But will look for cool projects for you, or try to help and hear you out. I've seen a lot of on-call people who are pretty much 24x7 solving incidents, but being heard and helped by A-Managers makes a whole world of difference for them, keeping them in that job and helping them keep solving problems.
S-Manager's I haven't had the opportunity of having, maybe that speaks of my organization at large (or I'm being too harsh). I have seen other parts of the company where people move fairly quickly within their organization, so I imagine that has to do with that organization having S-Tier managers.
In general, I think understanding the relationship and "ranking" with your manager, and going at it with eyes wide open, is the best you can do for your role and career. Sometimes I brought hard questions to managers, and they didn't have the experience to answer or didn't know where to look for the answers.
Your turn!
Have you ever looked back at your managers and understood how they rank, and how they've helped or undermined you? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
