{"id":1604,"date":"2013-11-24T23:51:36","date_gmt":"2013-11-25T05:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2017-04-25T21:10:42","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T03:10:42","slug":"explaining-my-non-hierarchical-management-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/archives\/1604","title":{"rendered":"On being a not-boss"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>This whole tech world thing is totally crazy. I look forward to telling grandchildren about how I was part of the second dotcom wave. My job has been morphing into management (except NOT, except kind of). I do hiring stuff (we&#8217;re trying to find technical people right now, so having the qualities of a librarian, plus the computer knowledge of a developer, plus the writing skills of a &#8230; writer), I videochat with my teammates to see how they&#8217;re doing and encourage them to take on more of the things they&#8217;re interested in (the hope is that if each person does some management stuff they&#8217;re good at, we&#8217;ll cover it all and won&#8217;t need one person doing shit management work), and I take care of some of the shit management work. Except it&#8217;s not shit. Actually, someone once said &#8220;a good manager is the person who holds the shit umbrella, so that their team can get work done&#8221;. It&#8217;s not quite like that, since we don&#8217;t have a bureaucracy for me to be slashing red tape. It&#8217;s more like being a single point of contact with other teams, if someone doesn&#8217;t know who to go to. I have historical knowledge (not specifics, but in general of how to do things better next time. So, like a historian.) I&#8217;m also getting better at pointing out when people are fucking up. It&#8217;s really hard for me, because I am conflict-adverse, and I&#8217;m totally chicken about giving negative feedback. I&#8217;m learning that with good, smart people giving negative feedback means they think &#8220;Thanks! I wouldn&#8217;t have figured that out so fast. I&#8217;m going to work on that.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>I wrote this today, verbatim, in a catch-up email to a group of friends from library grad school. I realized it&#8217;s worth sharing, as it sums up a lot of hard-to-express thoughts I&#8217;ve had as the GitHub ship heads farther into space.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This whole tech world thing is totally crazy. I look forward to telling grandchildren about how I was part of the second dotcom wave. My job has been morphing into management (except NOT, except kind of). I do hiring stuff (we&#8217;re trying to find technical people right now, so having the qualities of a librarian, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bucket-of-sunshine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1661,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}