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Some mistakes I made as a new manager | benkuhn.net

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the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking

This post was adapted from a "management roundtable" I gave at Anthropic . I had an unusually hard time becoming a manager: I went back and forth three times before it stuck, mostly because I made lots of mistakes each time. Since then, as I had to grow my team and grow other folks into managing part of it, I've seen a lot of other people have varying degrees of a rough time as well-often in similar ways. Here's a small, lovingly hand-curated selection of my prodigious oeuvre of mistakes, and strategies that helped me mitigate them. Contents The trough of zero dopamine The first thing I notice

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