[HN Gopher] How to be a leader when the vibes are off
___________________________________________________________________
How to be a leader when the vibes are off
Author : mooreds
Score : 177 points
Date : 2025-09-24 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chaoticgood.management)
(TXT) w3m dump (chaoticgood.management)
| shredprez wrote:
| Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in
| tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech
| workplaces.
|
| That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit"
| leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible
| for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out
| and onto something better is important too, even if it can be
| tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
| dogleash wrote:
| [flagged]
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| haha yeah "Chaotic Good" is not a great choice of title for
| this blog...
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| > Lie through your teeth, but not so much people quit?
|
| I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me
| summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you
| don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your
| opinions so your team knows you are on their side and
| understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the
| bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences
| by not being zealous about the new order.
| watwut wrote:
| > In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be
| fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team
| knows you are on their side and understand their plight
|
| This person is not on the side of the team. This person is
| simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the
| team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new
| other, just in a sane way.
|
| Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are
| on the "side of the team".
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| > Well, ok, it is that persons job
|
| This is the key. If they don't do it, it's not their job
| anymore. The team won't just revolt in unison, but the lead
| will be replaced with someone more complacent. The only
| option is to comply, but let the team know in private that
| you don't like the new vibes.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job
| and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I
| and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking
| to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off";
| explanations on how best to _not_ fight the ways everything is
| going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it.
| For example, buying into the company message while privately
| criticizing it---good job advice, but morally, that 's cowardice;
| it's pathetic; that's the behavior of a person who is trying to
| have their cake and eat it too, who's just there for the money;
| whose friendship is a lie. That's the spineless substitute for
| leadership we've come to expect in our disappointing world. "Yeah
| it sucks, it affects me negatively" in private only counts if you
| are also taking a non-infinitesimal stand against it in public;
| if your actual moral position comes out in favor of the right
| thing. Otherwise it is a lie, manipulating your employees to make
| them feel like they have a friend while not actually sticking up
| for them.
|
| If everyone felt and acted morally then the place would be forced
| to improve. Or at minimum, to fire all of you, but they should be
| forced to actually do that, morally, and suffer the political and
| economic consequences of doing so. But for that to happen people
| have to be systematically standing up to them in the first place,
| saying "do better, or else".
| woah wrote:
| What are you going to do after the revolution? I'm going to
| lead poetry readings and design upcycled fashion
| ajkjk wrote:
| well since the revolution in question is one where the
| company you're working for becomes attendant to its
| employees' dignity, I imagine you would keep working the same
| job under a new CEO and board (the old ones being forced out
| by the revolution), but you would enjoy it a lot more and
| feel much more inspired to keep doing good work....
| jonahx wrote:
| That's not the kind of revolution the author was implying.
| ajkjk wrote:
| In fact I remember now that I have had a manager who followed
| this exact advice: they'd agree with you about what was right
| and wrong in private, but do nothing, or very little, in
| public. It was infuriating. I didn't quit over it, although I
| wish I had in hindsight; instead I stayed uninspired and
| frustrated and burnt out until the manager eventually cycled
| out for another. But my guess is the team was half as
| productive or less than it would have been if the manager had
| stuck up for them in public. There is really nothing as
| demoralizing as when none of the people with power stick up for
| you. Of course, they will say that they don't have power either
| ---but that's the trick. Everyone up the chain says they have
| no power, they're just following orders; the decision making is
| abstracted from on high. It is always a lie: everyone has
| power; just, the power is proportional to the risk you take to
| use it. I should have threatened to quit over being treated
| better, and meant it, and the manager should have threatened to
| quit to their bosses over the same things, and everyone else up
| the stack.
|
| (Of course, an organization where your only way of getting
| listened to is threatening to quit is already unimaginably
| toxic. A healthy organization has a moral code of its own: you
| should be listened to because you were mistreated, not because
| you had to threaten something to be heard. But this seems to be
| increasingly untrue in modern tech companies where everyone
| seems amoral and just does their job and tries not to rock the
| boat so they can get to their next stock grant.)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When the higher-ups make a bad decision, sure, push back on it.
| Push back on it with reckless disregard for your job, even. But
| when pushing back fails, your people either have to accept it
| or leave, and not all of them want to (or can) leave. Your job
| then is to help them accept the decision. If you can't or won't
| do that, your only moral option left is to leave yourself.
| dasil003 wrote:
| This is an easy reaction to have in an internet forum, and of
| course it will get a lot of support because it resonates with
| the rank and file, so you'll naturally get a lot of internet
| points at places like HN and LinkedIn.
|
| But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and
| complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can
| stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and
| in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it
| comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.
|
| Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something
| that a whole generation of software developers have been
| sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not
| purely a result of greedy management. I started working in
| 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming
| CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new
| grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.
|
| I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small
| company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person
| understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At
| scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business
| understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job
| is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still
| recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a
| large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and
| corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the
| leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move
| on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out
| and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.
| ninininino wrote:
| "I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt
| leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup
| before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today
| fresh out of school."
|
| The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year
| between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase
| of 87.60%.
|
| In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need
| 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note
| that income tax increases as you increase in income in
| absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less
| net of taxes).
|
| If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and
| again, tax makes it worse).
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yes thank you for inflation lesson, I spent part of my
| childhood in Brazil in the late 80s and early 90s, so I
| understand inflation better than most Americans.
|
| For reference, I earned $26k at my first full time
| programming job.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| I don't think this is an easy reaction at all, I read it as
| someone who sees through the BS and has experienced it first-
| hand.
|
| You call it grandstanding, I call it just being a good person
| and supporting your coworkers. Maybe a little 'grandstanding'
| is all that is needed to break a handful of beaten-down
| people out of their rut to stand up a little more and demand
| some attention. Shining light on these entrenched issues is
| the only way to get them to change. Shame works wonders. I
| agree with the parent post that more and more standing up is
| the only way to change. Someone just has to have the courage
| to do it first, job be damned. That grandstanding can go so
| much further if someone with the CTO title were to push
| things.
|
| Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get
| easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and
| the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words
| have meaning, and you have the entire body of experience and
| knowledge held by your people at your disposal upon which to
| draw. But that goes against the line of the C-suite knowing
| best and having some hidden knowledge.
|
| > leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding
| inevitably break down
|
| Because "leadership" are being cowards. Because they kept
| their teams at arm's length, not wanting anyone to get an up-
| close glimpse of how bad they're fumbling.
|
| I don't know what ZIRP has to do with anything. If anything,
| we're in this mess because managers fell asleep at the wheel
| because they knew they didn't need to do jack diddly, the
| investments will always keep coming, no worries, no need to
| actually do their jobs, valuations will always rise, don't ya
| know!
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _Things don 't get more complicated the higher you go,
| they get easier, precisely because you're in the position
| of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually
| have your words have meaning_
|
| Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of
| leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there
| are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and
| influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing
| and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a
| fantasy world.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Wrong. I have lead people and lead them the way I would
| want to be lead. Just like that. You don't know the first
| thing about me bub.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The rusted wheel that won't
| spin when the cart moves gets replaced. If every manager
| refused to act like a good little toady, maybe this strategy
| would work, but that's not how the prisoners dilemma pans out
| in the real world.
| recursive wrote:
| Some of us have bills to pay.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Mouths to feed...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you
| 're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes
| are off"_
|
| The fish rots from the head. You _don 't_ start a revolution
| within a corporate structure, because you effectively have zero
| power in any sufficiently large organization with sufficiently
| bad leadership.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yeah. Be the fearless revolution leader in a corporation during
| a tricky job market era and not only you'll be fired, your
| subordinates, by association, will be tagged as radioactive
| material.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| "How be a good C-suite sycophant and not trigger a revolt from
| your team"
| boston_clone wrote:
| > part of your job is representing and facilitating those
| decisions with full alignment
|
| this is not chaotic good, this is lawful neutral. and really bad
| leadership.
| rglynn wrote:
| Out of genuine curiosity, what about this do you think is bad
| leadership? And, if I may, what would good look like?
| boston_clone wrote:
| because we must, above all else, keep an ethical backbone in
| our decision-making that respects both the welfare of the
| people we lead and the task at hand.
|
| if c suite is demanding people RTO to a toxic work
| environment, I'm not going to require my team to meet the
| exact requirements - wanna use your lunch break to drive to
| the office, tap your badge, then drive back home? sounds good
| to me. I'd also be asking for data to substantiate claims
| made regarding productivity gains or morale improvements.
|
| or if newly appointed partisan hacks start programs for
| employees to snitch on LGBTQ+ people, you _should_ channel
| chaotic good and not fulfill their request, and actively work
| against others fulfilling it, too. I know of at least one
| government organization in which this has taken place.
|
| good leadership is about doing the right thing, and getting
| the job done. the right thing means leading by example with a
| high degree of proficiency, teaching others to be competent
| and confident, and growing yourself as an individual and as
| part of a larger community.
|
| committing yourself to always carrying out the orders of
| leadership is a hella slipppery slope dude - _especially_
| when the "vibes are off".
|
| maybe my examples are a bit pessimistic, but I just feel the
| author really missed the mark and left me (and others)
| scratching my head. maybe I'll give it another read later and
| try to steel man some of the positions. good and fair
| questions, by the way :)
| miltonlost wrote:
| "How to suck up in public but bad mouth in private" is I suppose
| some good advice if one doesn't mind hypocrisy or lying or having
| integrity. But if you're middle-management in a company being
| described here, you've long since lost any revulsion to
| hypocrisy. If my manager was saying one thing to one person/group
| and another to me, I don't think that's good leadership at all,
| mainly shitty humanity.
| apercu wrote:
| The capital class didn't like the power employees had during
| covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health
| or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to
| everyone. This phase, too, will pass.
|
| AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to
| incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your
| business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
|
| AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be
| like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your
| training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than
| you were.
|
| The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the
| racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as
| "ok" to be shitty now.
|
| Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of
| it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.
| motorest wrote:
| > AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to
| incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later
| your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT
| costed.
|
| There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your
| comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you
| why.
|
| The value proposition of cloud providers for business
| perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront
| costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to
| use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able
| to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.
|
| The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful
| improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain
| scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated
| infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute
| infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are
| in the six or even seven figure range.
|
| How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume
| of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?
|
| I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on
| why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of
| going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud
| engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to
| square one and try again.
| Retric wrote:
| Cloud didn't suddenly invent renting servers in a data
| center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor
| of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen
| always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus
| transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those
| companies.
|
| > The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in
| meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows
| beyond a certain scale
|
| What nonsense, I've seen many small projects with ~500/month
| in hosting costs including manpower lose _tons_ of money by
| trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down
| ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy
| can do other things when they don't need to mess with servers
| for months on end.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an
| instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment
| meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being
| used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to
| scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down
| just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target
| with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until
| the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10
| months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's
| what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.
| Retric wrote:
| Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well
| below half just to break even. But you always need a
| server or you can't handle new requests. So at small
| scale there's zero benefit from dynamic loads.
| serial_dev wrote:
| > you always need a server or you can't handle new
| requests
|
| You don't always need a server, you could also just go
| serverless, get charged 10x while you make your
| architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.
| Retric wrote:
| Yea, just don't ask what's listening for those requests.
| darkwater wrote:
| The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to
| spend less for smart people/companies that have the right
| workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients
| that are not so smart or don't actually need that
| elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but
| in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used
| or not.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| The last couple of companies I worked for were only still in
| business because they avoided the cloud completely, and their
| competitors didn't. Paying 4x the cost for something isn't a
| competitive advantage unless the capabilities the cloud
| provides are significant. While they are nice, unless you are
| a very specific type of business, they aren't going to make
| up for the increased costs.
|
| In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a
| disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...
| mc32 wrote:
| What sector of the Econ were those failures in?
| moffkalast wrote:
| There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the
| actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not),
| it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure
| or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire
| business model is built on top of making it impossible to
| migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and
| Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get
| locked into their API, it's how it works.
|
| The more practical day to day reason for the top management
| to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount
| of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a
| more general skillset which they can hire from at any point
| and fire any of their team without a second thought if they
| idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.
|
| It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power,
| as always. The cost doesn't even matter.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It makes workers easier to replace, but it also makes
| switching between companies easier.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed
| apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.
|
| It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few
| times before.
|
| If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the
| webserver and one for SQL.
|
| When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated
| servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.
|
| For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the
| entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server.
| Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were
| the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do
| exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.
|
| It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud
| than do the boring job of setting up your own server.
|
| Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad
| thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself.
| But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And
| firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install
| your dB engine.
|
| It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a
| couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.
|
| What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.
| vanviegen wrote:
| > But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And
| firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install
| your dB engine
|
| These are things you still need to think about and setup in
| the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's _less_ work
| compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers.
| Except for the backups, that 's the only solid convenience
| win for the cloud in my experience.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like
| the racism on the right of politics
|
| So, a bogeyman?
| vkou wrote:
| Racism didn't end in 1964, but people sure have gotten better
| at dog whistling about it.
|
| (Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of
| the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to...
| Question the credentials of its black pilot. Because no
| matter how much a black person will ever achieve in this
| country, some mouth breather who hasn't done a day of honest
| work in their lives will insist that those achievements were
| all a sham, they don't deserve any of them, they can't do the
| job, their out-of-work cousin with a meth habbit can do it
| better, etc.)
|
| And if you call the pricks and nepobabies who are doing that
| out on it, they start hand waving it as 'we're just asking
| questions' and 'well, he _could_ have been unqualified ', or
| raise some other nonsense deflection of their vulgar,
| unacceptably racist behavior.
|
| ---
|
| All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides
| the pilot's skin color were out. If your first reaction to
| 'aircraft flown by <race of> pilot crashes' is 'clearly,
| that's because they were an unqualified AA hire', you are,
| unfortunately, a racist. Own it, or stop it.
|
| And, sadly, quite a number of people were very happy to out
| themselves as such. What is sadder is that others are happy
| to play cover for them.
| gitremote wrote:
| > Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth
| of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was
| to... Question the credentials of its black pilot.
|
| > All that judgement was made before any of the facts
| besides the pilot's skin color were out.
|
| It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white.
|
| Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because
| they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI caused the
| crash, he said, "Because I have common sense." He claimed
| without any source that the Obama administration "actually
| came out with a directive, too white" on aviation agency
| standards.
| vkou wrote:
| Incredible. I wasn't aware of that detail.
|
| > Trump thought the pilot must have been black just
| because they crashed.
|
| This, my friends, is the behavior of the supreme leader
| of the right-wing political party of the US.
|
| 'Racism from the political right is a boogeyman' indeed.
| dabockster wrote:
| If not racism, then a real life Mean Girls at a very least.
| But in this case, Regina George is your boss.
| gtowey wrote:
| > The capital class didn't like the power employees had during
| covid.
|
| So true.
|
| Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the
| companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but
| then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.
|
| It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for
| living wages and better work conditions.
| smcg wrote:
| You must be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, because that's
| what I got called for saying this since then. /s
| Herring wrote:
| Trump won the popular vote. I don't trust the billionaires,
| but I'm not sure my coworkers are much better tbh.
| doodaddy wrote:
| Even as a jaded person I'm surprised how many people read this
| and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no
| integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn't
| always let you be a crusader. It's called choosing your battles
| and it's something that most of us have to do almost every day.
|
| Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests
| lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do
| the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances,
| most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file's control.
|
| Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an
| unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet
| is an option and probably the most sensible one.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| > Even when you don't agree with decisions the company leadership
| is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating
| those decisions with full alignment.
|
| Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert,
| disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions,
| loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the
| C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders'
| blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all
| that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your
| form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them
| why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you
| have to be prepared to leave as well.
|
| People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate
| life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power
| in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor
| until you get on the list of "major holders".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That will put you ahead in some contexts or completely destroy
| your life on different contexts. And even make you ineffective
| for fighting against the problem.
|
| Apply it smartly, and evaluate if forcibly changing your
| context isn't the right move for you. Blindly sticking to the
| anti-jingoist approach is as bad as blindly applying it.
| watwut wrote:
| > And even make you ineffective for fighting against the
| problem.
|
| We are not discussing someone who has any potential or
| interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The
| proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is
| complete support of that thing.
|
| And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really
| love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders
| take.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that
| you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately,
| within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new
| policy sucks, I get it. It's going to affect me in negative ways
| too." It's really important that you validate the emotions that
| all of these aspects are bringing up in people.
|
| This I wish more leaders did. It can be really demoralizing to
| the point of leaving a role when you hear company stuff that's
| blatantly false, in bad faith, or whatever - and your leader, who
| you know damn well is smart enough to see it as well, looks you
| dead in the eye and repeats the company line.
|
| In other words, "don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's
| raining." I'd rather be told you're screwing me than being
| screwed and gaslit about it. No matter what, in the end I'm going
| to remember I was screwed and how you approached that.
| serial_dev wrote:
| On the other hand, I do not expect middle managers to talk
| negatively about a policy that they do not have influence over
| and they did not initiate because in the end they cannot change
| it and I don't want them to get into trouble for validating my
| feelings.
|
| Middle managers will say that it is only raining and I will nod
| along even if we both know that they are pissing on my shoes.
|
| I might start looking for another job, but as long as I'm
| there, I will smile and play along if I know that my resistance
| will not change the decision. Even in my exit interview, I'll
| say everything was great.
|
| This is probably not what I would have done at the beginning of
| my career but now I have a family so I don't mind pretending.
| nsedlet wrote:
| Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US):
| mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have
| to be a multinational company with global entities and offices.
| Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside
| the country.
|
| When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better
| work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless
| global labor market.
|
| That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the
| American worker in some ways.
| dingnuts wrote:
| "remote" can just mean "far enough from the financial district
| that I can afford a little space" as it turns out. You're not
| WRONG but just being in the same time zone as your coworkers
| gets you 90% of the in person benefits and, realistically, it's
| too hard to work with a team that is on a vastly different tz.
|
| Local can still be better than global while still allowing
| people to work from home and convene in meat space as needed
| throw725725168 wrote:
| > Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people
| outside the country.
|
| You can be even if a multinational company moves their
| employees back to the office.
|
| If you chop off your limbs, not everyone can compete at that
| game, but why play it in the first place?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Small scale offshore outsourcing existed way before the
| pandemic and the big shift to remote. They used to call it
| software factories.
| nextworddev wrote:
| You - the "leader" - is responsible for the off vibes
| foxfired wrote:
| I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been
| reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I
| rather have direct communication with my team to understand
| issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is
| struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full
| story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points,
| number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.
|
| I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is
| going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I
| remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've
| addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are
| aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying
| this is the way forward, deal with it.
|
| Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page
| right now and addresses similar issues ->
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604
| physicsguy wrote:
| A lot of this I think is interest rate driven rather than AI
| driven.
| staplers wrote:
| Definitely plays a huge part in expectations and burnout when
| the roadmap flips halfway through a quarter because suddenly we
| need to court VCs or trim staff or whatever the fed/gov
| decides.
|
| The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it
| everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled
| code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
|
| Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams
| expect it more so they buy-in less.
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling
| the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of
| employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames
| if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high
| performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having
| automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line
| manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by
| tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter
| "law".
|
| A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office
| job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone
| above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work.
| She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has
| experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager
| didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR
| for a disability leave.
|
| Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and
| doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could
| have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a
| valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey
| of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got
| less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to
| take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Her manager probably did her a huge favor
|
| Yeah, navigating disability leave can be a little rough
|
| Not as rough as being PIPed out though, which was probably the
| other most likely path in front of your friend
| dvcoolarun wrote:
| In their mind, I guess everyone is a strong leader, as they say
| everyone judges themselves by effort and others by results.
|
| From a employee's perspective. I think you get a good idea, when
| working for a company, if your leader's vibes are off.
|
| If they have a ego or can have a adult conversation or like to
| avoid it. Since life is not a 'silver lining'
|
| You will meet some behaviours (which you can call toxic or not )
| But times are changing, and people are less patient.
| catigula wrote:
| >I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to
| ultimately have a robot do their entire job
|
| Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to
| this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you
| look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific,
| though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue
| their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is
| someone who has cut 10 roles.
|
| >Let them know you're still on their side
|
| You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your
| company.
|
| >This too shall pass
|
| That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and
| possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such
| as privacy, enabled by AI.
|
| The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms,
| we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine
| because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life
| and nobody is stopping them.
|
| Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your
| role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and
| very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather
| than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's
| good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and
| parcel of this mentality.
| neilv wrote:
| > _The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that
| you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately,
| within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new
| policy sucks, [...]_
|
| If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does
| (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing
| your manager job there?
|
| I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and
| I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on
| something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
|
| Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions
| about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved,
| and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
|
| Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and
| I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything
| comes up before then, let me know."
| jdefr89 wrote:
| Your employees won't rat you out... Just don't say "sucky" to
| those above you. If I have a cool ass manager who looks out for
| me and is real (I'm lucky enough to be at a MIT lab where
| everyone is cool as hell), I will always have their back...
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I think this is true 90% of the time, but that 10% of the
| time is really risky. The high stakes of the bad case make it
| wise (imo) to avoid saying your company's policy "sucks"
| neilv wrote:
| If you're a manager, consider _not_ saying that up the org
| chart is "sucky". Almost certainly no one on your team will
| go tattle, but it can leak out accidentally, such as when
| someone is flustered over a problem.
|
| More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your
| team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group
| that has to stick together against hostile outsiders _within
| the company, either up the chain or sideways_. People outside
| the team will pick up on that 's the tone you're promoting to
| the team.
|
| But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come
| back to you...
|
| For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work
| with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a
| sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably
| hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed
| promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
|
| A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a
| hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team
| from a lot of noise _including some of what they 're being
| shielded from_, as a team and individually. Just like
| personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all
| the things you do for them.
|
| (I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when
| to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions)
| lower their voice and tell me something that a drone
| wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring.
| Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded
| personality, and I can always just ask myself what would
| Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and
| most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and
| later managers/mentors.)
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can
| backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar
| to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but
| intended to deflect.
| neilv wrote:
| You have to mean it, and you have to follow through on your
| words with actions.
|
| Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make
| people think you are being sincere, people will eventually
| realize you aren't being straight with them.
| goles wrote:
| Your balancing the relationship you have leadership to do what
| you are asked to do, just as you ask IC to do things they may
| not like, with doing the best you can to maintain or improve
| the QoL for your team.
|
| The author is right, the correct stance is... > "Yeah, <s>this
| new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions,
| I get it. It's going to affect me in negative ways too."
|
| Then critically thirdly, > "Lets work together to demonstrate
| why the new policy is a risk _to the customer_. "
|
| Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has
| to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
|
| To get what you want the compelling argument is to the
| customer.
|
| Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but
| this is the level of support we can provide customers. This
| customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do
| this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order to in
| order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be
| accommodated to provide the same function, I've done an
| estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
|
| It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your
| team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO
| by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely
| outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where
| there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by
| saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst
| ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space,
| and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have
| everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the
| lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the
| office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully
| remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is
| split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our
| contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in
| Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in
| order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than
| sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually
| figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage
| adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a
| $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because
| someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see
| if there's money inside."
| ori_b wrote:
| Alternative title: "I'm just here for a paycheck. Maybe you
| should be too."
| Poomba wrote:
| I feel like OP has either never worked outside of tech
| startups/Silicon Valley or never worked pre-2012 (dont wanna
| assume tho and this is not meant in a disparaging manner)
|
| A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like
| lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St
| firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the
| financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say
| they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the
| exception
| tschellenbach wrote:
| There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of
| remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I
| think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue
| multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these
| issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything,
| including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower
| valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency.
| Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation
| collapse or go under.
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| well, and let's be honest - most CEOs and boards get the same
| advice from the same advisors and peers. and the advice since
| Elon took over Twitter (not that I can say he "started it" but
| it was around that time I started hearing C-suites say he was
| right to let everyone go) has been to implement more draconic
| policies at your software companies.
|
| that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general
| has been tight created a perfect storm of bias that these
| policies are working or could be beneficial. in better times, a
| company with good funding and a healthy customer base would
| come through and eat everyone's lunch if their competitors were
| treating their devs like that. but because of the temporary
| complete collapse in competition as we've known it, especially
| amongst startups, this has gone on far longer than it typically
| would.
|
| it'll get better soon but we've lost an entire generation of
| technical leadership now (due to burnout and other factors) so
| it'll be a slow and turbulent recovery.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > it'll get better soon
|
| I really wish I had your optimism about that.
|
| I'm starting to worry that nothing will ever be better again
| tschellenbach wrote:
| The other part of this is the AI wave. Every SAAS company in the
| world is vulnerable to someone with higher AI driven pace, or
| better AI features to overtake them.
|
| Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible
| business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally
| at risk of losing vs openAI.
| jdlshore wrote:
| I think this is the fear, but I haven't seen any evidence that
| AI is making companies more productive. Lots of anecodotes, pro
| and con, about individual effects, and a small number of
| studies, pro and con, about company effects, but nothing
| definitive, and certainly not the kind of groundswell of new
| products and releases that I would expect.
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few
| turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret
| it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out
| there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the
| combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to
| achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning
| leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.
| airspresso wrote:
| Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of
| the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting
| pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy.
| Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me
| any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do
| what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team
| forward.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Take care of yourself. Your oxygen mask goes on first.
| data_ders wrote:
| > the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high
| expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those
| expectations
|
| wow. real!
| Prcmaker wrote:
| A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself
| as the intermediate member between those expectations and our
| technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped
| reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.
|
| It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were
| getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased.
| I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
| stevage wrote:
| I saw a definition of burnout as the accumulation of thousands
| of tiny disappointments and it stuck me. If you're always
| failing to achieve anything despite effort going in, you burn
| out.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I don't know if I'm misinterpreting the blog, but this feels
| like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management
| while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I've always
| despised managers who'd be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but
| always be "part of the system" when it mattered the most. Yes
| it's always good to not get into public arguments with the
| upper management, but this gives off a lot of "play both sides"
| kind of a vibe that's not actual good management.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused,
| financialized, and less mission-driven
|
| The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
|
| I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other
| leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to
| mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money,
| efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal
| management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a
| 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We
| were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the
| product stack.
|
| I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad
| "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away
| from. The consequences of these things extend _far_ beyond the
| person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you
| are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our
| culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of
| this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for
| other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some
| inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To
| know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt _you_ taking crazy
| pills, it was _literally them taking crazy pills_. The other
| employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under
| this kind of leadership.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| > Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the
| same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak
|
| ... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and
| customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the
| resulting longlevity of valve.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency,
| etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal
| management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.
|
| This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a
| cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow
| their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The
| VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a
| "product decision framework" and he still couldn't answer the
| question about what we were going to build.
|
| The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously
| broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that
| emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to
| support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their
| obvious problems.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Inexorable lifestyle choices like moving, having kids, or
| buying a house. Yes I feel pretty trapped.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Thank you for the negative feedback. Further validating that
| I'm not permitted to vocalize that my life choices the past 5
| years trapped me into indentured servitude for boss and
| family.
| wavemode wrote:
| It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could
| just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum
| growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase
| profitability at the expense of all else.
| manoDev wrote:
| TL;DR "yes men" middle managers keep their jobs.
| polynomial wrote:
| So basically, leadership is coping? No thanks.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| This headline reminds me of a headline a while back that was
| something like how to do founder mode when you are not the
| founder. It all goes back to some Orwellian newspeak vibes. The
| words for what we are doing sound horrible. Can we just change
| word meanings so it sounds good?
|
| If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a
| cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.
|
| If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and
| hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've
| made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive
| dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because
| of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job
| and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.
| arandr0x wrote:
| I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone
| who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah
| there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the
| efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world
| you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under
| a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and
| some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins"
| looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current
| headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like
| it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is
| anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual
| actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what
| specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this
| value context.
|
| I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.
| stevage wrote:
| > In public, you have to support the policies, but when you're in
| private with your manager and your peers, that's the time you can
| safely push for change.
|
| They are actually advocating being two-faced as a form of
| leadership.
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