It's pretty refreshing to read posts that admit 'management is difficult' on HN. We can get a bit lost in our bubble of tech work, and forget how important management is to actually accomplishing things.
Unfortunately unlike software development there's no simple way to check if the 'output' of management is working correctly or not. This combination of 'hard to do' and 'hard to verify' means that there are many projects humming away with incredibly poor management.
The really terrible part is the de-correlation of management quality with rewards for management. Supposedly management is better compensated than individuals due to their impact upon organizations being greater than individual contributors, but this flies in the face of the modern trend of the "subservient manager" philosophy of management as well as management sometimes just carrying out orders from above that don't require skill (the most common one that we all recognize requiring little insight or talent is "reduce costs"). Managers are sometimes given truly terrible situations that nobody can manage their way out (no budget, bad morale, bad organizational reputation of the group, and no authority to create change to reverse the situation)
If you have a poor individual contributor, they are almost always fired. If you have a poor manager, oftentimes they have worked a relationship with someone that has power that makes it very difficult to fire them, so they're oftentimes "promoted." This kind of nepotism and cronyism exists to some extent among individual contributors but ICs usually disperse more across business verticals throughout their careers while managers and others in primarily soft skill roles tend to be extremely connected (whether through intrinsic personality or due to the nature of their jobs is another question) and seem to act more as cohorts rather than as individuals.
I think that really is the rub. Manager performance is hard to measure, and most organizations don't really want to measure management performance because it's costly and easier to cycle through ICs, especially where there is an abundance of IC supply. I worked for a bad manager that caused over 60% of the team to leave (including me), and finally a year later they were "demoted" by being put in charge of a smaller, less-significant team. An IC that dropped 60% of their deliverables would have been on the chopping block in weeks, if not months.
I would argue bad management is pretty easy spot if you have any reference point for good management; you don’t even have to be a manager. Sit down with a few employees and ask them a few questions. The effects of bad management are everywhere in an organization. Employees are frustrated, resentful, unheard, and happy to talk.
Programming is hard, too, and good code is a much subtler thing that requires an expert to give you any sense of.
there's no simple way to check if the 'output' of management is working correctly or not.
What an odd thing to say - ask any accountant or banker and they’ll say they’ve had methods for this for literally hundreds of years. Ever since “share price” was a thing, and even before that.
The problem is doing something with the information. Look at IBM for example (one of many). You can see simultaneously that managers are doing a terrible job - zero revenue growth for years - but also see that they are lavishly rewarding themselves for it.
