alt Hacker NewsThis is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow. Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.
Why is forced introspection good for managers but not for ICs?
I’m not saying that the extreme “I do nothing except act as a sounding board and tell my team to solve their own problems” is a good approach. But pushing people to solve their own problems does help them grow. It needs to be a balance.
A good manager should be able to see what someone is capable of solving with zero, a little, or a lot of help and engage accordingly. And sometimes they can’t solve it at all and the manager has to take it in directly or pull in someone else who can.