A number of people have recommended good books. So i'll maybe drop a few pieces of advice that I've learned while managing a diverse group of ~35 people.

* Listen to the people who report to you. They aren't always right, but they often are, and if they are pushing back then there is a good chance that they might be seeing something you don't.

* Much of leadership is about communication. And much of communication is about planning. And much of planning is about knowing and understanding all the components of the problem you're trying to solve. So cultivate a deep understanding of your people, their talents, your business, your boss, and spend time thinking about how to best optimize all those things.

* Its hard to lead in an area where you don't some expertise. You don't have to be the best, but you shouldn't be a slouch in the subject matter either. In order to earn respect you'll need to be able to understand what you're being told by your team, and you'll need to be able to articulate why you are making certain decisions, and that is seriously difficult if you don't have a good understanding of the domain.

* Good task management and organization is remarkably similar to good distributed systems architecture. Teams should be organized so that communication and integration dependencies are minimized, because communication overhead grows logarithmically as the number of people who need to be informed increases.

not nearly a complete list... but a start maybe. good luck! good leaders/managers are a scarce resource.

I hear this kind of response some times, but I don't agree with it. If you're being tongue in cheek, then I'm missing it, but if you're serious, then this is precisely why many managers are bad.

It also runs counter to my experience. I don't think people deliberately promote people who are incompetent in order to "get them out of the way". People are smarter than that, as it only pushes bad people into management.

If we want better managers, then we should move heaven and earth to get the best people who understand the needs of both technical and organizational constraints and who can communicate and coordinate effectively.

Thanks dang! It can be a difficult job, and you do it well. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I think you're right, in that open displays of emotion are rarer in men. I'm not sure you're correct in the assertion that men can't appeal to people for help based on being sad. At least, that hasn't been my experience. I think men don't display/communicate their emotions in the same way, but I think its somewhat normal (at least it is today) for men to seek out help for something because they are experiencing conflict and it bothers them.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDHBFRBN - for the exact number.

The vast majority of our defense spending is Salaries for US Service Men and Women. And they are under paid in many cases. Just bumping the salary of the bottom ranks would likely shift the spending ratio.

(you can verify this by digging into the monthly treasury statements: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/monthly-treasury-st...)

Can you elaborate? What you wrote seems to contradict this source:

"Roughly one-quarter of the Department of Defense’s budget is for military personnel."

https://www.cbo.gov/topics/defense-and-national-security/mil...

I looked closer, and it seems my memory is either bad or the levels have changed since I last dug into those numbers. In either case, thanks for checking those numbers!

Turnover is a business issue, and if you want to show it is a problem, then you need to demonstrate the negative affect it is having on business objectives. If you could show that it was costing the business more to rehire/train new people than it would cost to give higher wages or make org changes so that there was higher retention, then those arguments tend to be effective in my experience.

Try to build a virtual hallway/watercooler. We use slack for this, and worked very intentionally to encourage people to post what they were working on in their respective channels, and to reflect conversations in slack threads.

This led to the team being able to observe what other people were working on, to occasionally "overhear" something that was relevant to them and hop in.

We also encouraged people who jumped into video conferences to drop the meet in the slack thread so that other people, if it mattered, could hop in. Though not always appropriate (we have plenty of private ish meetings) that makes it easier for remote people to engage in the random happy accidents you get from a physical office.

Thanks, good idea!

Director of Software Development.

I run a team of ~30 (down from ~45). I'm one level down from the CEO.

"The fetus is utterly reliant on the mother to provide a hospitable environment, it seems self-evident that a body that is not autonomous doesn't have the same right to self-autonomy."

So you're saying that if a life is reliant on something external for its life, then it isn't autonomous and doesn't have the right to self autonomy?

Wouldn't that mean that we don't have to respect the living will of someone on life support? They are entirely reliant on other people to provide a hospitable environment.

The same would hold true for new born babies, who can't feed or shelter themselves. And, for that matter, that would hold for small children. At what point does a child become self reliant enough that they don't have the right to decide if they want to be alive?

"Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment it relies upon, aka the mother."

You're being somewhat hyperbolic here. But this isn't much different that what the government does now. Government limits our rights in order to provide everyone with a set of equitable rights. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is what the goal is. And to do that, you have to limit what some people can and can't do in order for everyone else to have those rights.

We have already granted the government authority to act on behalf of those who are too young to make decisions on their own. Children who find themselves abandoned, or in homes that are dangerous, can be removed by the state and placed in a safer (hopefully) environment. This system doesn't always work, but its acknowledged that its better than doing nothing at all.

"Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?"

You've pushed the idea to the extreme to prove a point. But what you've shown here is only that an extreme interpretation of this is a bad idea. The other end of this extreme is equally bad. When a mother has total autonomy to decide the fate of her children until they are old enough to live on their own without the support of their parent, then a mother could kill their child right up until they were what, 5 or 6? maybe 10? Or force the child to live under extreme physical or sexual abuse?

A better answer here is somewhere in the middle. At some point after conception a child becomes a person. When that happens, the child should have all the same rights as any other person. They should have the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" the same as any other. And those who chose to bring that life into the world must accept the responsibility to care for that life until it no longer needs that care. To do otherwise is to invite cruelty and societal degradation.