Being Not-So-Bad at Giving Bad Reviews

A reluctant manager’s advice on the hard parts of managing.

There is an old post from 1995 by science fiction author Orson Scott Card that compares the job of managing software engineers to that of bee-keeper. I am not sure I’m 100% in line with his version of the analogy, but I do like the general idea of software managers as beekeepers.

When you keep bees, you cannot really direct each bee to do things specifically, and attempting to do so is pretty counter-productive. What you can do though is to provide an environment that bees like. Protect them from danger. Provide access to materials they need. If you do that, and you are gentle in your overall management of them, you can harvest the honey. It was the general approach I preferred as a manager, and still prefer as someone who is managed.

This works great for managing people who are doing well, and I think it made me a pretty likable manager that people wanted to work for. As a result, I found it was a lot easier to get tough projects done, like quality pushes to fix bugs where no one really was enthusiastic about it. I could carry my gentle beekeper capital into these projects and get people motivated to make the honey.

But of course this is the easy part of the picture. In my tenure as manager, I was…