I am too young and stupid to be giving career advice, but in the spirit of career conversations week, I figured I’d pass on advice I’ve received which I ignored at the time, and now think was good advice: you might be underrating the value of good management!
I think lots of young EAish people underrate the importance of good management/learning opportunities, and overrate direct impact. In fact, I claim that if you’re looking for your first/second job, you should consider optimising for having a great manager, rather than for direct impact.
Why?
Having a great manager dramatically increases your rate of learning, assuming you’re in a job with scope for taking on new responsibilities or picking up new skills (which covers most jobs).
It also makes working much more fun!
Mostly, you just don’t know what you don’t know. It’s been very revealing to me how much I’ve learnt in the last year, I think it’s increased my expected impact, and I wouldn’t have predicted this beforehand.
In particular, if you’re just leaving university, you probably haven’t really had a manager-type person before, and you’ve only experienced a narrow slice of all possible work tasks. So you’re probably underrating both how useful a very good manager can be, and how much you could learn.
How can you tell if someone will be a great manager?
This part seems harder. I’ve thought about it a bit, but hopefully other people have better ideas.
Ask the org who would manage you and request a conversation with them. Ask about their management style: how do they approach management? How often will you meet, and for how long? Do they plan to give minimal oversight and just check you’re on track, or will they be more actively involved? (For new grads, active management is usually better.) You might also want to ask for examples of people they’ve managed and how those people grew.
Once you’re partway through the application process or have an offer, reach out to current employees for casual conversations about their experiences with management at the org.
You could ask how the organization handles performance reviews and promotions. This is probably an okay-not-great proxy, since smaller, fast-growing orgs might have informal processes but still excellent management, but I thin k it would give you some signal on how much they think about management/personal development.
(This maybe only really works if you are socially very confident or know lots of EA-ish people, sorry about that) You could consider asking a bunch of your friends and acquaintances about managers they’ve had that they thought were very good, and then trying to work with those people.
Some random heuristics: All else equal, high turnover rate without seemingly big jumps in career progression seems bad. Orgs that regularly hire and retain/promote early career people are probably pretty good at management; same for orgs whose alumni go on to do cool stuff.
Agreed, but I’d be careful not to confuse good mentorship with good management. These usually go hand-in-hand. But sometimes a manager is good because they sacrifice some of your career growth for the sake of the company.
I like the archetypes of ruthless versus empathetic managers described here. It’s an arbitrary division and many managers do fulfill both archetypes. But I think it also captures an important dynamic, where managers have to tradeoff between their own career, your career, and the organization as a whole. Mentorship and career development falls into that
Edit: Another distinction I’d add is good manager versus good management. Sometimes it’s the organizational structure that determines whether you’ll get good training. In my experience, larger and stable organizations are better at mentorship for a ton of reasons, such as being able to make multi-year investments in training programs. A scrappy startup, on the other hand, may be a few weeks away from shutting down.
I definitely feel a few of my past managers would have been much better at mentorship if other aspects of the situation were different (more capacity, less short-term deadlines, better higher-up managers, etc.).
I am too young and stupid to be giving career advice, but in the spirit of career conversations week, I figured I’d pass on advice I’ve received which I ignored at the time, and now think was good advice: you might be underrating the value of good management!
I think lots of young EAish people underrate the importance of good management/learning opportunities, and overrate direct impact. In fact, I claim that if you’re looking for your first/second job, you should consider optimising for having a great manager, rather than for direct impact.
Why?
Having a great manager dramatically increases your rate of learning, assuming you’re in a job with scope for taking on new responsibilities or picking up new skills (which covers most jobs).
It also makes working much more fun!
Mostly, you just don’t know what you don’t know. It’s been very revealing to me how much I’ve learnt in the last year, I think it’s increased my expected impact, and I wouldn’t have predicted this beforehand.
In particular, if you’re just leaving university, you probably haven’t really had a manager-type person before, and you’ve only experienced a narrow slice of all possible work tasks. So you’re probably underrating both how useful a very good manager can be, and how much you could learn.
How can you tell if someone will be a great manager?
This part seems harder. I’ve thought about it a bit, but hopefully other people have better ideas.
Ask the org who would manage you and request a conversation with them. Ask about their management style: how do they approach management? How often will you meet, and for how long? Do they plan to give minimal oversight and just check you’re on track, or will they be more actively involved? (For new grads, active management is usually better.) You might also want to ask for examples of people they’ve managed and how those people grew.
Once you’re partway through the application process or have an offer, reach out to current employees for casual conversations about their experiences with management at the org.
You could ask how the organization handles performance reviews and promotions. This is probably an okay-not-great proxy, since smaller, fast-growing orgs might have informal processes but still excellent management, but I thin k it would give you some signal on how much they think about management/personal development.
(This maybe only really works if you are socially very confident or know lots of EA-ish people, sorry about that) You could consider asking a bunch of your friends and acquaintances about managers they’ve had that they thought were very good, and then trying to work with those people.
Some random heuristics: All else equal, high turnover rate without seemingly big jumps in career progression seems bad. Orgs that regularly hire and retain/promote early career people are probably pretty good at management; same for orgs whose alumni go on to do cool stuff.
(My manager did not make me post this)
Agreed, but I’d be careful not to confuse good mentorship with good management. These usually go hand-in-hand. But sometimes a manager is good because they sacrifice some of your career growth for the sake of the company.
I like the archetypes of ruthless versus empathetic managers described here. It’s an arbitrary division and many managers do fulfill both archetypes. But I think it also captures an important dynamic, where managers have to tradeoff between their own career, your career, and the organization as a whole. Mentorship and career development falls into that
Edit: Another distinction I’d add is good manager versus good management. Sometimes it’s the organizational structure that determines whether you’ll get good training. In my experience, larger and stable organizations are better at mentorship for a ton of reasons, such as being able to make multi-year investments in training programs. A scrappy startup, on the other hand, may be a few weeks away from shutting down.
I definitely feel a few of my past managers would have been much better at mentorship if other aspects of the situation were different (more capacity, less short-term deadlines, better higher-up managers, etc.).