[HN Gopher] Things I want to say to my boss
___________________________________________________________________
Things I want to say to my boss
Author : casca
Score : 209 points
Date : 2025-12-11 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com)
| tayo42 wrote:
| Its amazing that working is so inhumane and unnatural that people
| break down like this. There is is nothing you can do except suck
| it up and create mental barriers to protect your self while
| participating this weird game of white collar work.
| ctkhn wrote:
| People have been writing about it for years. This is why we
| have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white
| collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't
| need those things
| venturecruelty wrote:
| There are a bunch of things you can do; this industry refuses
| to do any of them. "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of
| ideas."
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Anonymous whining reads like slander and lack of
| accountability. What's amazing about that?
|
| > working is so inhumane and unnatural
|
| What is work supposed to be? You either keep yourself alive, or
| if you can't, you cooperate with others to do so.
|
| Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to
| coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard? What are you
| protecting yourself from except your own fragility.
| abroszka33 wrote:
| > Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking
| to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard?
|
| Nobody is saying that. That's super easy to do and most
| people love it.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > reads like slander
|
| Slander is spoken, libel is written.
|
| > What is work supposed to be?
|
| THe union movement (and this is from the english point of
| view, I don't know much about it in the USA) people literally
| died for companies because the value of human life from the
| "lower classes" was so low. You only work week days because
| people literally fought and died for it.
|
| We can, working together, create a better working world,
| where people are valued rather than exploited and used up for
| no real societal gain
| reallymental wrote:
| I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the
| article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're
| finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of
| leadership mindset finally reap its rewards.
|
| Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around
| 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these
| "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship",
| "leadership" and all those heavy words.
|
| It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that
| means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All
| this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why
| are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?
|
| This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's
| people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):
|
| `In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and
| come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for
| doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've
| watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen
| good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a
| dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years
| of cold war without the option.`
|
| So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own
| backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow
| rules gentlemen.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the
| rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.
|
| If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this
| quarter and have no real care about building long-term value,
| why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money
| at the expense of things like your brand and people?
|
| I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at
| public vs private companies.
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
| phantasmish wrote:
| The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management
| being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had
| basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the
| '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition
| eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a
| large merger. His description of the difference was... not
| flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time.
| Way more business trips that could have been an email (but
| how would the managers get to go party away from the family
| otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't
| understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it
| works, resulting in braindead leadership.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a
| business solves is way undervalued. Institutional
| knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been
| devalued precisely because the managerial class
| (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live
| the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as
| much as possible.
|
| This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more
| power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets
| itself in this way _" how AI can replace or minimize X
| role"_ as opposed to _" This is how you can use AI to
| empower your workforce_ in the majority of discourse I've
| seen around it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more
| power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets
| itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X
| role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to
| empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've
| seen around it.
|
| Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's
| what corporate buyers care about, the same way every
| productivity improving invention has been marketed to
| corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is
| increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages
| up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X
| role needed in the production of Y units of a good or
| service.)
|
| Its _also_ sold as a labor productivity increase to
| independent creators. And the two things are, after all,
| different sides of the same coin.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that
| 's what corporate buyers care about_
|
| Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that
| is what the "AI boom is really about", in opposition to
| something else, which I also discuss in the post you
| excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn't read the
| whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of
| the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn't
| understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the
| post it responds to.
| no_wizard wrote:
| What is it really about, in contrast to what I assert?
| I'm looking at how its being implemented, talked about,
| thought about, introduced.
|
| I'm happy to re-evaluate my stance in the light of better
| evidence, but the AI adoption has corresponded to alot of
| CEOs announcing layoffs with a simultaneous doubling down
| on AI tools to replace those now displaced workers or
| those LinkedIn stories from people saying how they will
| never have to hire X or Y because AI will do it / does
| it.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Professional Managerial Class (college -> management
| being the norm)
|
| This isn't the norm in most STEM industries anymore.
|
| Most of us started off as IC-level engineers before either
| beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being
| sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like
| Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.
|
| Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking
| domain experience would limit how high you could climb.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and
| recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Tell me more
| alephnerd wrote:
| When I was in the policymaking world and was considering
| grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research
| was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of
| misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to
| become a Nash Equilibrium.
|
| Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding
| how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto
| players helps build coalitions that you need to get
| initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives
| also need to be executed successfully, becuase
| organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games.
|
| Essentially, I made sure to understand _how_ to speak
| (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple
| stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers,
| PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and
| also _how_ to execute successfully on initiatives (ie.
| How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land
| customers, or manage an M &A event).
|
| This meant both building domain knowledge about each of
| the stakeholders fields as well as building domain
| knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could
| specialize in.
|
| Basically, understanding incentive structures and being
| able to show how your interests and goals align with
| those incentives is critical.
|
| For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I
| wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to:
|
| 1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers
| _that matter_ - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who
| spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year
| in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and
| PMs
|
| 2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery:
| it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a
| conversation around adding new capabilities that are
| assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and
| Leadership
|
| A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't
| care to understand how organizations work or how to make
| a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a
| technical problem it should actually matter to the top
| line of a business. In most cases, it does not _if you
| cannot make a case for it_. A number of them also don 't
| care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I
| have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave).
|
| I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a
| secondary in Government). Even though my current day job
| doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught
| myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience
| research, and other functions. If you want to survive and
| thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to
| build industry specific domain experience, technology
| specific domain experience, and basic product management,
| sales, and user experience chops.
| exasperaited wrote:
| Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of
| the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and
| fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA
| culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a
| career farming a quasi-commodity.
|
| The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine
| payment with stock options, etc. etc.
|
| Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I
| noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock
| options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease.
| Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people
| leave with vested options that the company refused to either
| honour or buy back.
|
| Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is
| short-term-ist, naive, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk
| about some of the problems.
| slashdave wrote:
| I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture
| of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board
| cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society
| as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary
| times.
| amarant wrote:
| Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the
| brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions
| talking?
| slashdave wrote:
| The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle.
| More celebrities really.
| exasperaited wrote:
| I struggle to find things in the modern business world that
| cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are
| talking about -- boards not caring about the welfare of
| employees -- is a fundamental result of the culture of the
| MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a
| way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.
|
| I used to work for a small business and I decided I would
| have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a
| client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".
|
| There were four of us.
| coldpie wrote:
| > when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've
| got a resource for that".
|
| Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a
| small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a
| resource", not someone from my company, but good lord
| what a way that is to talk about human beings.
| quesera wrote:
| This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word
| "resource"?
|
| Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative
| connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious.
| They are protected and important.
|
| Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What
| isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.
|
| Every project requires resources. Some of them are human.
| It's just a category.
|
| Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human
| for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to
| handle that need is available"?
|
| I don't use the word, and the _first_ time I heard it, I
| thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought
| about it more, and I just don 't understand the strength
| of reaction.
|
| It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen
| as a living human being with real human complexity and
| needs and desires, at work.
| dogleash wrote:
| >Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?
|
| It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or
| anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the
| sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy
| to notice.
|
| For a business to need resources it means a category of
| stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials,
| etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing
| inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is
| concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer"
| instead of "cow shit."
|
| The better question is why we started concealing it. Why
| are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or
| personnel?
| exasperaited wrote:
| > Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human
| for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to
| handle that need is available"?
|
| "I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising.
|
| "Yes we have someone here that can work on this with you"
| is so obviously less dehumanising.
|
| I find it surprising that people would ever be confused
| about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that
| sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or
| perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real
| problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of
| myself and people I care about that reduce them to
| allocatable units.
|
| But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of
| us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because
| there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So
| why ever lurch towards the language of
| interchangeability, in earshot!
| ambicapter wrote:
| What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s",
| roughly?
| exasperaited wrote:
| OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad
| contention is that much of the modern way business works
| traces back to:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissi
| o...
|
| The equivalent in the UK -- the Big Bang -- was very much
| fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990
| :-)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)
|
| On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE
| reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks
| to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary
| people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in
| the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.
|
| This did two things: first it means that there's so much
| more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them.
| But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with
| quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised
| trading that went before it.
|
| That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and
| London so much that it fuels the market for business
| schools, MBAs, economics degrees.
|
| Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-
| competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you
| start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty
| years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of
| private equity.
|
| But before these reforms, people on the streets in either
| country did not really have access to the stock market, and
| stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were
| absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was
| ending.
|
| Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien
| concept now.
|
| The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK
| simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang.
| The entire culture of venture capital changed.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of
| leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up,"
| because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when
| you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
| eric_h wrote:
| Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing
| only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional
| graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even
| though in the long term those complex, multidimensional
| things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make
| line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
| hinkley wrote:
| The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of
| beanie babies in his office.
|
| I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG
| that kidnaps people to make their ships "go".
|
| But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows
| exactly what he is. He's a useful idiot with a knack of
| getting something for nothing out of people. That's his
| skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and
| the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching
| about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us
| into doing free work.
|
| Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate
| that beautiful moron. I've paid for one expensive repair that
| I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for
| two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All
| told I've paid pretty much what a fair universe should have
| charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.
|
| The thing is if they know you're in IT they will engage in a
| coherent argument with you that explains why they are
| entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, "it won't
| connect to the internet" then they do the mental math on what
| an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him
| too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just
| less work.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just
| literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put
| in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely
| ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how
| many group policies we can implement and just disregarding
| the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and
| ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making
| everyone's life more difficult. Systems password
| management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's
| the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing:
| this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays
| each year, each one written by a different anonymous
| contributor.
| marcinzm wrote:
| As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on
| money and their career growth versus the product or whatever
| their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock
| go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a
| lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion
| that they should do likewise.
| arevno wrote:
| That's because many of us older developers got into the
| profession when it didn't pay well, and had _negative_ status
| associated with it, because we loved doing it.
|
| So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those
| who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love
| of it.
| ian-g wrote:
| It isn't entirely that.
|
| Somewhat, sure.
|
| It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but
| good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if
| you leave early no severance.
|
| And why are you being laid off?
|
| Your duties are being offshored.
|
| _You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people
| to replace you, but your duties are.
|
| Ostensibly this saves money.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS
| communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle
| where people like that have a chance to hang up together
| and keep the warm feeling of being human.
| hinkley wrote:
| FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to
| be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once
| already.
|
| I'm a maintainer on one library in small part because of
| an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library
| years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I
| voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or
| performance because I can't pull down a wrongheaded
| project but I can pull up a better one.
|
| (Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and
| it's 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one
| I'm helping out on. Ha!)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Never put it this way before, but it's exactly why I
| started blogging. I was fed up with how bad Python
| content was online.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| I've never thought about it this way but now that you
| mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of
| substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.
|
| Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?
| dominotw wrote:
| what do we do now?
| gdulli wrote:
| Why does having different values imply intolerance?
| flatline wrote:
| I do think there can be element of snobbishness around
| it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of
| corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish
| (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things
| Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly
| tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you
| want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through
| the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient
| "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is
| measured by hiring and expansion more than product
| delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing
| are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still
| need technical skills, but they are somewhat less
| important, there are many more competing incentives than
| there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has
| been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs,
| written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech
| has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of
| corporate existence that the two have more or less
| completely merged.
| dakiol wrote:
| I feel divided. I do love my career (computer
| science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time
| to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.).
| But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company.
| I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them,
| and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech
| company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride
| of my skills when working on open source and the like.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with
| consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which
| are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of
| us to escape the grind of working under ownership that
| doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was
| never negative it was just a job.
|
| Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell
| anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just
| shrug.
|
| I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I
| was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a
| computer, what else was I going to do?
|
| But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta,
| there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn't
| involve computers when I got off of work.
|
| I'll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have
| changed but part of my job has always been creating
| production code.
|
| I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I
| haven't gotten paid for. It's always been a means to
| exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor
| for a degree so I could make money
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that
| way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of
| modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code"
| movement and promises of a good paying job. These people
| aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead
| because it was seen as easy money
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Hard not to be motivated by money when simply being alive
| requires so much of it. It's easy to be principled when
| your bills are paid.
| kermatt wrote:
| They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral.
| Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.
|
| If the individual's focus is on short term income or career
| growth, then they align with the company's goals.
|
| Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter
| anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as
| antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure
| what is considered success.
|
| Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since
| 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned
| into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em,
| join 'em.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't
| let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's
| going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health
| insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded
| anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who
| wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the
| Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things
| are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with
| hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software
| we deserve. Selah.
| ajkjk wrote:
| imo younger engineers are doing this _because_ the culture
| has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about
| anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you
| fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness
| is rewarded with nothing. There 's a strong pressure, from
| every direction, not to care about anything other than just
| completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your
| RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything
| out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious
| threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money
| hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.
| burningChrome wrote:
| You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer -
| mostly on the front-end side.
|
| I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of
| work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time
| and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more
| than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.
|
| All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing
| beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a
| great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.
|
| Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it
| why.
| getpokedagain wrote:
| If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't
| fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the
| wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses
| off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad
| reputation.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks
| probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s
| loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not
| go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions,
| not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs -
| it's not if there's another, it's when.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more
| on money and their career growth versus the product or
| whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".
|
| I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken
| to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.
|
| "Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe
| it: People who don't care if their choices are actively
| hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as
| long as they think it will look good on their resume.
|
| This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and
| kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then
| leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess
| behind.
|
| It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project
| managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy",
| his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's
| push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on
| time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking
| next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their
| work because that would reduce his personal "planning
| accuracy" stat that he tracked.
|
| We even had a customer support person start gaming their
| metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and
| fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off
| short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10
| e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked
| good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer
| satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter
| because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)
| css_apologist wrote:
| > last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35
|
| ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my
| manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking
| about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own
| experience and two or more generalized out. You can know
| about things that you don't directly experience.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory"
| even if the experience wasn't first hand.
| didibus wrote:
| > Profit at any cost
|
| Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor
| in all this...
|
| You boss is just some average manager that very often could
| even be below average.
|
| Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of
| them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
|
| Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And
| the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role,
| and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck
| becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend
| even more towards being average at their job.
|
| Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading
| a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as
| they go.
|
| What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than
| having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to
| sell a narrative.
|
| What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits,
| that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee
| you should also be focused on that as your goal.
|
| But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well
| being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to
| innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good
| both for the employed engineers and profit.
|
| Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of
| maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
|
| Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing
| but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this
| isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at
| leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
|
| It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to
| properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the
| resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to
| mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and
| velocity go up. Etc.
| dominotw wrote:
| luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.
| stuffn wrote:
| > and as an employee you should also be focused on that as
| your goal.
|
| Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate
| substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't
| honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing.
| An employee should run themselves as a business. A company
| who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises
| gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if
| you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make
| code that looks reasonable.
|
| To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra
| hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime".
| Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship
| $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers
| game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are
| amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped
| rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as
| close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the
| drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales,
| executives) but they do because droolers display traits
| commensurate to the dark triad.
|
| > Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of
| maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
|
| You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly
| describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a
| selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a
| "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits
| intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact,
| tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in
| history and their leaders to realize this.
|
| > It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest,
| to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus
| the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers,
| to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up
| and velocity go up. Etc.
|
| Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on
| hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship
| between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of
| unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you
| should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this
| way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to
| produce non-linear gain.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing
| but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this
| isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad
| at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
|
| I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply
| because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem
| in leadership.
|
| I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade
| now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years,
| there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the
| role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude
| to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that
| affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've
| contributed a great deal to engineering strategy,
| particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am
| embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate
| sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming
| work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.
|
| The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that
| engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain)
| don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't
| like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that
| other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP
| rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of
| a director.
|
| [0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this
| excellent website: https://staffeng.com
|
| [1]: As in _having the power to put plans and /or actions
| into effect_
| eleveriven wrote:
| But I don't think the people in the article "took things too
| literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics
| or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working
| under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make
| it obvious they don't
| Aurornis wrote:
| > these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of
| "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
|
| I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had
| management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was
| hard to get any work done.
|
| These were people who had read 20 different management books
| and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled
| hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your
| family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for
| a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work.
| They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the
| business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the
| company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets
| they would give us.
|
| They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they
| wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on
| programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the
| role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored"
| you about things you knew.
|
| The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and
| you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily
| in implementing all of the leadership material they could
| consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and
| online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing
| they could.
|
| The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out
| of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and
| "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business
| on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome
| environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing
| important got done and the VC money bled out in between team
| lunches and off-site bonding experiences.
|
| So any extreme is bad.
| repeekad wrote:
| "Burnout isn't a sign of commitment, it's a sign of
| organizational failure."
|
| Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise
| you're burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for
| it
| elicash wrote:
| I think it's a bit more complicated. More people can sometimes
| slow things down. You may need to simplify processes, instead.
|
| I agree with the original quote, though.
| bob1029 wrote:
| More people is a really difficult problem to solve in the
| current job market. You might think it's a buyer's market,
| but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars. A
| lot of your honest participants have found alternative ways
| forward. I stopped applying to "normal" jobs a year ago. 1099
| via networking and luck is my life now.
| pdimitar wrote:
| What is 1099?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| 1099 is a US tax form. They meant contracting probably.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I moved to a new position recently and was involved with
| hiring my replacement. We got a good hire, but one of the
| people my bosses initially wanted to shortlist had an
| impressive resume, but then you go on LinkedIn and there
| are two profiles. Same exact headshot. Similar names, as if
| one of them could be a nickname and one a full name. Career
| timelines are totally different though.
|
| So just by doing a little pre-interview prep, I found out
| that this person (if it was a real person and not a persona
| of some kind) had a resume with one career timeline and two
| LI profiles with two separate and different career
| timelines.
|
| Fed this to my bosses who proceeded to have an extremely
| awkward and brief interview with the person (or the person
| posing as the person) about "so, in 2022, were you at
| $FIRST_COMPANY, $SECOND_COMPANY, or $THIRD_COMPANY?" I
| mean, you have to pass a background check to work at my
| company even if offered; why do people do this?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> You might think it 's a buyer's market, but all you wind
| up hiring right now are the best liars._
|
| And wasting a lot of time on the not-so-good liars. We've
| recently taken on someone for an infrastructure management
| role and apparently things are much much worse than they
| were last time we needed that sort of resource (about five
| years ago). Padding CVs was always an issue, but completely
| making them up, or getting ChatGPT to do it for you, now
| seems to be the default behaviour.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Or simply dare to say that the deadline you're shooting for
| is impossible.
|
| There's value in knowing that too
| slashdave wrote:
| In my experience (as limited as it might be), burnout is a very
| person thing, usually driven internally by the employee with an
| out of kilter sense of balance between self-commitment and job
| performance. Common drivers are broken, centralized processes
| (e.g. stack ranking) rather than individual managers. Staffing
| doesn't really help, it just raises the bar, because this is a
| matter of competition.
|
| In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not
| helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote
| levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers
| could never hope to achieve.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Yep! It's wild how often companies treat burnout like a
| motivation problem instead of a math problem
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| There are cultural differences though.
|
| In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It
| is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up
| on your side (worst case).
|
| This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and
| work ethics) from the US.
| kakacik wrote:
| Yeah but in general French approach to work and US ones
| are... not similar, dare I say the opposite of each other.
| Often 10 weeks of paid vacation vs 2 (4 is already a big
| perk). How sick leave is treated or general health issues.
| Number of public holidays. And so on.
|
| So this view difference makes complete sense.
| glitchc wrote:
| You know, watching Mad Men, it seems to be that work culture
| hasn't changed since the 50s. The same fake smiles, the same
| small talk, the same boss's favorite getting the credit. What's
| really changed since then?
|
| Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Or more recently Train Dreams. It's a real shame we had to
| spend time to bury those three men who were hit by a falling
| tree, but the company can't afford for us to take a day off. So
| back to work.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| >What's really changed since then?
|
| Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
| ikamm wrote:
| Let's also not assume anything about the past based on
| Hollywood TV shows made 50 years later...
| agenticfish wrote:
| Mad Men isn't a documentary. Contemporary work culture
| influenced its creators, so you're likely seeing a reflection
| of that when you watch the show.
| everdrive wrote:
| A very good observation, and true of nearly any contemporary
| fiction set in the past. People just seem unable to avoid
| this flaw.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| I would consider it more of a necessary evil than a flaw.
| Both the writer and the audience need to be able to connect
| with the story, and you're just going to have a better
| connection if it feels more familiar to you.
| xnorswap wrote:
| "contemporary fiction set in the past"
|
| Nitpick, but this is a contradiction.
|
| Contemporary fiction doesn't mean "current" (or least it
| didn't used to) it means "set in the time it was written".
|
| I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point
| of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick
| it!
| everdrive wrote:
| Ah, thanks -- I was just trying to capture the weirdness
| that happens when a work is set in the past, and then
| that work itself becomes old. For instance, if you watch
| Braveheart right now you're getting two views of the
| past: you're getting a (not-very-realistic) view of
| medieval England, and then in addition you're getting a
| view into how people in the 90s felt about history and
| social issues.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| In the long run, this makes for very interesting
| rhetorical analysis of the work.
|
| Your example of Braveheart, for instance, involves two
| views of the past through the lens of the _present_. So
| even in that context, both of those views are tinted by
| the experience and environment of the observer.
| mekoka wrote:
| > I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the
| point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't
| nitpick it!
|
| According to at least a few references, it very clearly
| applies to the two meanings. I couldn't find a single
| dictionary that excludes or seems to favor one over the
| other.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| "contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a
| genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world.
| I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of
| the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the
| TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting
| is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary
| outside of... contemporary usage and definition.
|
| It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is
| about a TV show and not literature.
|
| Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18
| year old show that stopped production more than a decade
| ago contemporary?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Most so called documentaries contain a lot of fiction too.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| You do realize Mad Men is a TV show made for our modern
| sensibilities right?
| ostacke wrote:
| I'm sure you're right, at least to some extent, but let's not
| forget that Mad Men is fictional, and from the 21st century,
| and might not accurately reflect the 1950's.
| goostavos wrote:
| Fictional, but it captures something about work and life in
| that unique way that art is supposed to.
|
| One of my favorite scenes:
|
| Peggy: "You never say thank you!" Don: "That's what the money
| is for!"
|
| It captures a lot of the mismatch in perspective between
| employer/employee boss/subordinate. You're there to do
| something for someone who is paying you to do it. That's as
| far as it goes (despite the constant human pull to perceive
| it as more).
| lukashahnart wrote:
| I love the design of this website, especially having the body
| text on the right, but I find the website looks a lot better
| zoomed out to 80%.
| grimgrin wrote:
| imo it reads best if you switch to a narrow view
|
| in desktop firefox I ctrl-shift-m to compact the
| left/right'isms of the design
| ivanovm wrote:
| this has ai writing smell all over it. entire paragraphs that
| just say it's-not-this-it's-that over and over again
| grimgrin wrote:
| perhaps it is the nature of their thought process
|
| perhaps they blur their poetry
|
| did they use an LLM in 2020:
| https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
| jnovek wrote:
| Why does it matter? The information in the post still
| accurately captures a sentiment held by many people.
| macintux wrote:
| The complaint is definitely getting old. I wonder how many HN
| threads at this point _don 't_ have someone speculating about
| AI-generated content.
|
| Hopefully @dang adds something to the guidelines to
| discourage it.
| parliament32 wrote:
| AI generated content in the comments is already prohibited.
| I hope we extend the restrictions to submissions entirely.
| macintux wrote:
| I would rather people who don't currently have a voice
| due to language barriers or simply poor communications
| skills be able to use LLMs than try to gatekeep them.
|
| And I'm certainly weary of "someone used an em-dash, must
| be GPT" low-value comments.
| parliament32 wrote:
| I certainly hope we gatekeep them. "I just need my
| hallucinatory text generator to translate for me" -> "I
| just need my hallucinatory text generator to refine my
| thoughts for me" -> "I just need my hallucinatory text
| generator to generate my comment for me". This is a damn
| near antithesis of this place.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &qu...
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| I hope so. Random accusations of "this feels like AI" don't
| add anything to the conversation and are genuinely harmful
| to those accused when there is no AI involved.
|
| AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of
| jumping at ghosts these days.
| gryfft wrote:
| I had the same reaction. The disclaimer at the bottom doesn't
| mention AI, but I have a feeling this was generated from a
| prompt to consolidate the 24 human submissions into a single
| essay.
|
| Tangentially, I really look forward to the day "Not X but Y"
| stops being so overused by LLMs. It's a valid and useful
| construction in a vacuum, one which we should be able to use,
| but its overuse has gone past semantic satiety into something
| like semantic emesis.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such
| intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this
| _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat
| things quite so often.
| parliament32 wrote:
| I doubt a human would use it repetitively, even if it is
| common. This was most likely written paragraph-by-paragraph
| by AI, causing the repetition, if I had to guess.
|
| I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling
| for AI-generated content.
| roarcher wrote:
| > EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated
| content.
|
| No thanks. How would you find violators, with AI detectors?
| Might as well go back to throwing people into lakes to see
| if they float.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| The AI turned me into a newt!
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Most of the "this is AI" complaints demonstrate the illiteracy
| of many of those making them.
| ivanovm wrote:
| Say more, I'd love to know how this is a demonstration of
| illiteracy
| rhyperior wrote:
| Because "I haven't seen this literary tool" or "I wouldn't
| think to use it" or "It doesn't match my perception of
| human literary tools", it must be artificial.
| ivanovm wrote:
| It's far more telling that you'd imagine this is a
| literary tool so interesting or complex that other people
| haven't seen it or thought of it
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+not+x+its+y
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Speaking about telling it's called negative parallelism
| not " it's not x it's y". Don't be proud of ignorance
| even if you don't care for the subject.
| ivanovm wrote:
| Kinda funny how we went full circle with you calling me
| ignorant and illiterate on the basis of not using your
| preferred terminology, as opposed to the actual, obvious
| meaning of the subject
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Ignorant and illiterate don't take the whip from me if
| you are so generous with it on yourself.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Abject narcissism is rewarded time and time again. I think this
| is, at its core the problem in and of itself.
|
| I truly believe that capitalism is the best possible system of
| financial discourse for the most people. I also believe that
| anti-trust and regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure
| competition at a very core level. I don't think govt should be
| picking winners and losers and in fact, I feel we should
| expressly format any govt contracts such that there are multiple
| suppliers. This should go towards all essential infrastructure,
| bar none.
|
| I also feel that govt should act in terms of a somewhat
| protectionist front in favor of its own peoples. I think it comes
| down to real negotiation to keep it that way, but that trying to
| be fair is only a recipe for long term failure.
|
| Given the inflation of the past couple years, the push to
| stagnate wages for white-collar work is a bit repugnant at best.
| The push to stagnate blue collar work is worse still. This can
| and will only lead to more unionization. One can only hope for a
| combination of local-focus and worker-lead efforts to stabilize
| (rebalance) the economy. I say this not in support of socialist
| efforts, but to keep them at bay, lest we succumb to communism in
| the longer term, which at a global level will stagnate society as
| a whole.
| ArcHound wrote:
| As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what
| are you going to do about it?"
|
| If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then
| there's no reason to change.
|
| And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need
| to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than
| speaking up and risking homelessness.
|
| Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the
| situation could improve.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing,
| just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting".
| Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
|
| Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would
| be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad
| attitude, and communicate it to others.
|
| Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed,
| eventually, in terms of their bottom lines.
| ArcHound wrote:
| I agree. No use in breaking yourself over a "top business
| priority" that'll change next week.
|
| Maybe I'd dispute the last point - seems companies with such
| employees can do rather well.
| cons0le wrote:
| The only real answer is to unionize. But every time that gets
| mentioned here, ~90% of people are against it. I notice SWE
| try to cultivate that "rockstar" persona, the last thing
| people want to do is admit they need each other / take
| collective action.
|
| We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the
| outsourcing started
| keybored wrote:
| > What are we going to do about it? Many of us are
| withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort,
| "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get
| our best.
|
| That you are framing it for apparent familiarity with the
| nonsense term quiet-quitting says a lot.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Unionization is an approach that would work.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > You can't fake care. People feel it. In small moments, in the
| gaps between your words, in the way you prioritise your business
| over their wellbeing
|
| This resonates with me. I've seen way too much of this
| "performative" care. It's pretty grating when they start sounding
| like therapists: "tell me how you're feeling, this must be pretty
| upsetting, huh?". Or, "do you need any help?" and I'd be honest
| and say something like - "yeah, sure, someone could assist with
| x, y, z", -"oh, unfortunately, we don't have anyone available".
| They know there is nobody there to help yet they feel like
| they've ticked their check-mark of showing "care".
|
| This is one of those "you're fly is open". People can see and
| smell the fakeness a mile a way. There are certainly worse
| qualities and maybe some people enjoy this "therapeutic" approach
| but it's certainly not a universally better thing and shouldn't
| become the default. If the care is just not there I'd rather it
| be just plain and simple without the extra fake fluff.
| FatherOfCurses wrote:
| The most galling part of this is that management thinks we're
| all too stupid to notice.
| firefoxd wrote:
| I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting
| too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and
| perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
|
| I've built viable products where I poured my soul into it just
| for it to be tossed aside [0]. I've optimized processes that went
| from 12 hours job to 17 minutes, I was fired shortly after [1]. I
| even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my
| work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was
| scrutinized.
|
| So when I work with a boss that doesn't care and is mostly
| performative, unless we are building a product that makes the
| world a better place, I don't put too much heart into it. I make
| sure they pay me for my time, and I look for a better job.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806948
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903
| everdrive wrote:
| >I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more
| about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted
| and I was scrutinized.
|
| In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a
| problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement
| the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear
| that its not going to work well and there are better
| alternatives.
|
| If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection and
| then just implement the garbage your boss asked for. If you do
| care "too much," then you might just be a thorn in your boss'
| side. Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product
| works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him
| claim success, so you're a problem.
| abroszka33 wrote:
| > If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection
| and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for.
|
| This works in theory, but the problem is that some jobs are
| complex and require thinking. These jobs will attract people
| who do not like to be a slaves. They want to enjoy their
| work, do something good and feel good while doing it. The
| slave like job mentality you mention has severe limitations
| on what it can achieve.
| mordae wrote:
| Nah, you'll get yelled at if bosses solution you have
| implemented brings further trouble. Mostly for not fixing it
| for them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a
| problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to
| implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want
| to hear that its not going to work well and there are better
| alternatives.
|
| I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of
| situations that could be described like this. In many cases,
| it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens
| and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making,
| including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I
| was juggling.
|
| It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin
| slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something
| different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I
| knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best"
| alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the
| tradeoffs a decision was made.
|
| > Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works.
| He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him
| claim success, so you're a problem.
|
| HN comments are wildly cynical. People who consume a lot of
| this cynicism think they're getting a leg up on the workplace
| by seeing the world for how it really is, but in my
| experience becoming the uber-cynic who believes all bosses
| are intentionally destroying the product with bad decisions
| to claim success (how does that even work?) is the kind of
| thinking that leads people into self-sabotaging hatred of all
| bosses. You need to watch out for yourself, but adopting this
| level of cynicism doesn't lead to good outcomes. Treat it
| case by case and be open to the idea that you might not have
| all the information.
| everdrive wrote:
| >I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of
| situations that could be described like this. In many
| cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were
| dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision
| making, including a lot of invisible factors and
| relationships that I was juggling.
|
| I think this is also a really important counterpoint --
| sometimes the person who "cares too much" is simply wrong,
| and is causing problems that should be avoidable. In other
| words, without more details it's hard to know if it's the
| manager or the direct report who is really the problem
| here.
| bojan wrote:
| > It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin
| slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something
| different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time
| I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best"
| alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing
| the tradeoffs a decision was made.
|
| You're saying it's hard to communicate that, but you've
| just done it really well. If you were to tell me a bit
| about those trade offs so I can also consider them the next
| time, I'd be a perfectly happy camper even if my idea isn't
| being picked up.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'll answer for him -- even if he does a great job
| communicating it, not everyone does a great job receiving
| it. It's just like honesty: it really takes two and if
| someone is intransigent enough even the best of us cannot
| penetrate.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Let's face it. Working for other people sucks. They set the
| agenda. They make the decisions. Often those decisions and
| agendas will not be what you think is best. It maybe the case
| that you are correct. Go start your own thing and run it how
| you see fit.
|
| Now if you want to see what a really "caring boss" is like
| watch this video of former employees of Musk. The real
| interesting thing is some of them seem to like the humiliation,
| lack of boundaries and over work. Similar to what groups of
| soldiers feel after serving in a war together and returning
| with PTSD. Hope the money was worth it. Personally I would
| avoid it but to each his own.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvDt0lByxJA
| nosianu wrote:
| > _Working for other people sucks._
|
| Depends.
|
| I worked and even had a business with and/or worked for three
| people that I've known for a long time. And had loud
| substantial disagreements with - before going into business.
| Worked like a charm every single time. The personal side I
| mean, business was neutral once, a complete failure but I
| only wanted the paycheck anyway once, and a resounding
| success in a traditional business where I handle only IT
| right now.
|
| In the first venture I found out I hated selling and
| business. Sure, I can do it, but I really really don't want
| to. I am a minimalist, and I might have become a poor monk in
| a monastery a thousand years ago. I don't want to sell anyone
| anything. So in the next two businesses I left all the
| business stuff to others, and it is sooo much better.
|
| And now that I'm in a non-IT traditional business I'm a
| servant 100%. And it is nice. My main focus is non IT stuff,
| and I use computers to achieve that. Finding differences in
| thousands of EDI messages for invoices, order confirmations
| and deliveries, for example. HOW - who cares? I am not
| developing a product. If it's a one-off I may just run some
| command line tools. Or, shocking!, I actually use Excel. Or I
| ask ChatGPT for a little helper Python script to run over the
| raw data files.
|
| Doing servant work without business responsibilities is
| really nice :) My boss may have the bigger house and car, so
| what? He also has exponentially more stress (I have pretty
| much zero). In my youth I may have had a different opinion,
| but now I don't want his stress level for _any_ amount of
| compensation. And no, future early retirement by making lots
| of money now does not change the equation. I don 't want to
| retire at all anyway, keep doing business stuff on the side
| at least. Without the stress it's no problem! One of my
| direct colleagues is way past retirement age...
| lentil_soup wrote:
| I agree with you, but lately, given the state of my industry
| and my personal situation I've started to fear that my company
| is just going to burn if we don't succeed and I need to do as
| much as possible to prevent that as finding a similar role is
| going to be pretty damn hard, I also don't have the leverage I
| used to have a few years ago to just change jobs. All of that
| has lead me to break my back and confront my boss which is
| extremely uncomfortable and pushing me closer to burnout.
| Unsure what my point is other than I wish I had the space to
| not care
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's
| product. I'll deliver work and perform my best
|
| How did we get to the point where "deliver work and perform my
| best" is equivalent to not caring?
|
| Delivering work with reasonably good effort and quality is the
| baseline expectation. If your version of not caring too much is
| "perform my best" then I think this is a problem of
| miscalibrated expectations of the workplace.
|
| The majority of people in the world go into their jobs, try to
| get their work done with reasonable quality, and go home.
| keybored wrote:
| > I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped
| putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver
| work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
|
| To say (yes, with some moderation because it's hyperbole) that
| you won't kill yourself of your boss making a buck needs to be
| preempted with a "watch out, cynical-sounding opinion"
| incoming.
|
| Oh wait. I forgot what this website is behind all the
| quirky/nerdy/hacker submissions.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Wow, brilliantly written. It's been a long time since I've read
| something I identify so personally with. Bravo.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Burnout and disagreeing with leadership are something we all deal
| with. But don't quit your job folks. It's a real rookie move.
| Unless you have something rock solid lined up, you will become
| radioactive to any potential employers, and idealism doesn't pay
| the mortgage.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| There is a cost-benefit analysis that you need to make here.
|
| Its not a hard and fast rule (unless you're on a visa, or tied
| to active healthcare), but you don't owe your employer, so
| killing your sense of joy for them seems unwise. The flip side
| is that long bits of unemployment is a redflag.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| These are good solid points.
|
| For the care issue, I don't know how I would scale it.
|
| For my direct reports, I care, because I have yet to have take
| the MBA course where they remove my empathy. Its easy to know how
| they feel because I have the context.
|
| However, should I be good enough, or lucky enough to climb up the
| greasy pole and have reports with reports, I don't know how I
| would be able to scale the attention required to provide valid
| pastoral care to those reportees.
|
| Large forums only really allow the extrovert, confident, brave or
| stupid to over supply their opinions. So its not like a group
| monthly meeting will allow those grumbles to be surfaced before a
| crisis.
| mordae wrote:
| You hire caring direct reportees.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| My 'boss' was an absolute pyschopath who was a direct cause in
| my, let's just say, poor mental health over a period of years.
| I'd rather say not say anything to them ever again, but horrible
| interactions with them replay in my mind constantly. Imagine
| spending thousands of hours doing your best to make someone happy
| just to be treated like the worst piece of garbage who ever
| existed. That's what my 'boss' was like.
| macintux wrote:
| I worked indirectly with such a boss, and just a few months of
| exposure to that toxicity was enough to leave scars.
| ls-a wrote:
| Sounds like my ex
| eleveriven wrote:
| I hope you're in a place now where you can start untangling
| their behavior from your sense of self
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| I've experienced this too. Luckily, I switched roles, so I
| don't have to engage with him so much anymore, but I still get
| his aggressive attitude every once in awhile.
|
| He's made woman employees cry. He's randomly shouted at others
| for thinking they were being "smart". He's also made me and
| another coworker contemplate quitting on multiple occasions.
| Dude has two moods: 1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger.
|
| When I had to work with him full-time, my mental health was
| getting absolutely destroyed. Imagine a whole 8 hours of
| someone indirectly/directly calling you stupid, shouting
| profanity, and just being super passive aggressive. Oh, and not
| forgetting the threats of being fired. He made it seem like the
| CTO was discussing it, but I think it was him trying to get me
| fired.
|
| I felt like shouting at him the most hurtful words I could
| think of and quitting every single day.
|
| I've just been working on side projects hoping one of them
| eventually replaces my salary (trying to find a different job
| in this economy is really unlikely). I don't want to work with
| people like this.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| "1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger."
|
| That was exactly my experience. It was either extremely
| friendly and fun, or extreme anger. It was terrifying. I
| would usually stay up 24 hours in a row preparing for
| meetings because I would be too anxious not knowing what I
| was going to get.
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| >It was terrifying.
|
| I feel this. I'd get butterflies knowing I had to call him
| or hearing the phone ring. I don't know how people like
| this remain employed for so long.
|
| >I would usually stay up 24 hours
|
| This is wild. Hopefully you never have to deal with someone
| like that again. Likewise, I would just leave if it ever
| got to the point of interfering with my mental health
| again.
| squeefers wrote:
| id love to see these people lead a team whilst sticking to their
| own advice
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| We found the boss guys
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| As a side point, some people here seem to think this post
| specifically came from 24 contributors. The text at the bottom
| seems to indicate this and I initially got the same feeling.
|
| However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not
| the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's what I thought, too - turns out this link is to just one
| of the essays.
| hitekker wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. The text at the bottom is rather
| misleading.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Just more evidence that eng managers (not product managers) and
| the myriad layers of executives are a waste of time and money.
| Engineers don't need babysitting. They don't need titles and they
| don't need someone running interference if people just leave them
| the fuck alone.
|
| Give them a product goal and they will accomplish it. Tell them
| what you want to track and they'll figure out how to track it.
| Tell them what your long term vision is and they'll set you up
| for it.
|
| Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging
| engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what.
| This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a
| product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless
| people.
| cons0le wrote:
| We can't even agree to let people WFH and stop burning capital
| on useless leases / real estate
| truth_seeker wrote:
| The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly
| limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively
| debate within that spectrum
|
| All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda
| system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they
| are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify
| decisions and to consume.
|
| The whole educational and professional training system is a very
| elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too
| independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how
| to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to
| the institutions.
|
| If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we
| despise, we don't believe in it at all.
|
| -- Noam Chomsky
| 295fge wrote:
| But they don't care. And I don't care. What I care about is my
| coworkers and boss doing their jobs with talent and integrity so
| we don't go out of business and I can afford to keep my home and
| don't have to go through the disgusting job search hoops that are
| required in my profession.
| csours wrote:
| > "It's the performance of 'care' from leadership. Saying one
| thing loudly and proudly, yet doing another quietly, repeatedly."
|
| It's the employee engagement survey where you want people to say
| that the company cares about you, and first line managers get in
| trouble from the results but executive leadership does not. It's
| the cognitive dissonance that you expect us to just deal with.
|
| It's the lack of communication when people are fired. There's no
| good way to fire people, but there sure are bad ways and you've
| found them.
|
| It's the times that I've told my boss about issues I'm dealing
| with and those issues show up in my end of year review instead of
| working on them together.
| pdimitar wrote:
| To the author: You have thought about your boss likely 100x more
| than he ever thought about you.
|
| Don't do him this favor. You are giving him too much power that
| way.
|
| And be sure that he forgot about you, like COMPLETELY, maximum 72
| hours after you were let go. Do the same. Take your lessons,
| internalize them, and forget the source. Be like an LLM: have the
| right conclusion inside your brain after the source material is
| long gone and thrown out.
|
| Move on.
|
| ---
|
| I am in my 40s and _just now I am beginning_ to start
| understanding _only a part_ of the dynamics involved in
| companies. But the TL;DR is that executives want to shine and
| look better, always. They only care about an ever-increasing
| compensation _and_ bonuses. They care not about the company 's
| long-term success.
|
| If you are in the way of that -- with your pesky technical
| stability and less resource usage, being one example -- then you
| are an inconvenience and will be removed. They want people who
| help them look better to their upper echelons.
|
| That's just one example.
|
| From here on my playbook will be to attend more executive
| meetings when I start a job, and get a feel of who does what and
| what are their goals -- and make sure I at least don't stand in
| the line of the fire when sh1t hits the fan. And will always have
| something else lined up even if I love my current team to bits.
| Simply because the said said team has exactly zero say if I get
| to stay or get booted out simply because somebody two levels
| above wants a promotion and my salary is making it look like they
| spend too much.
|
| (I remember how much I regretted losing one job some three years
| ago. I loved everyone there but I had a terrible health condition
| and couldn't perform. But you know what? The guy who was
| practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got
| fired a year and half after me. Reason? Product is done and
| delivered, we don't need you anymore, nevermind that we get
| feature requests and the occasional bug reports all the time.)
|
| "Nothing personal. Just business."
|
| Well, two can play at that game. Wish me luck. I want my heart to
| harden. I want to stop caring. I want to learn to preserve my
| caring for the things that truly excite me about technology.
|
| I might fail. But I am very quickly learning the game and I will
| adapt.
|
| I wish OP does the same.
| rhyperior wrote:
| "I want my heart to harden."
|
| You're just at a different place in the curve of rationalizing
| other humans' behaviors and motivations and how they affect
| you. Your response is not invalid, but it makes me sad, because
| you think it's the best response for you. Why wouldn't you
| instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
| rkomorn wrote:
| > Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make
| it your super power?
|
| At least one reason would be because the empathetic person is
| usually the one bearing most of the cost of this "super
| power" while at best only sharing in the reward. Quite often
| entirely thankless work.
| pdimitar wrote:
| How exactly would empathy be a superpower? If I'm empathetic
| then I'm effectively making excuses for people who don't care
| that they make my work unbearable.
|
| I'm very interested in your response. I have accepted that I
| have blind spots and I want to remove them.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Not "OP", but I will say that empathy can certainly help
| you build better things (tools, processes, policies, etc)
| for the people they affect.
|
| It can also help you understand where coworkers or peers
| are coming from, and work with them better.
|
| The problem comes when it's a one way road where the
| empathetic person is doing all the work.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That's exactly what happened. I tried improving processes
| and worked so hard that I neglected my wife.
|
| I was removed because the team lead thought I'm going
| over his head... while I coordinated every move with him.
| But the moment I disagreed with him -- once, and for the
| first time -- I was removed. Zero discussion.
|
| I'm quite empathetic. My original message above comes
| from bitterness because neither extreme is good. I was in
| the positive extreme for a while. Too sympathetic, always
| finding excuses for people who only saw me as a tool to
| advance their own careers and removed me the minute they
| thought that was no longer true.
| cons0le wrote:
| > The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there,
| all the time, got fired a year and half after me
|
| Every team I've been on has had one rockstar. I've seen the
| rockstar get fired 3 different times. Maybe they were making
| too much, or rising too fast, I'm not sure. But I do know that
| being the "most productive" doesn't guarantee employment
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yes, sadly. And before somebody quickly interjects: he not
| just was not an a-hole, he was extremely kind, calm and
| always supportive. You almost never hear him say: "I am too
| busy right now, can we do this later?".
|
| Seriously. Almost never.
|
| Yep. Still got fired.
|
| And he was not rising or anything. Was a small hardcore team,
| zero politics were involved, they were tight-knit, loved
| them. But there was only so much the CTO could do; it was a
| startup that was under the boot of a bigger org he was
| actually working in. He fought for good paychecks for
| everyone, and generous severance too. But had no say if the
| higher echelons said that somebody had to be let go.
|
| There's no moral of the story except "don't sweat your job,
| they'll replace you the next day". Treat it as a transaction,
| not as a second family.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > I hope you learn that if you focus on making money instead of
| the team lining your pockets, you will end up with a broken team
| and no money.
|
| Very much this. If you don't actually care about us, don't expect
| us to care about you or your company or the work. You're going to
| be left with automatons rather than creative, energetic people
| (even if the bodies haven't changed).
|
| And the fact is that automatons don't make the line go up nearly
| as well as people who care. So the really ironic thing is, if all
| you care about is money, _then you better care about the team_.
| And not just care with lip service, but really care.
|
| My current job has problems, but I'll give them this: When I
| wound up in the ER the weekend before a business trip, nobody was
| worrying about the effect on the trip.
| kermatt wrote:
| Something I _should_ have said to my boss, and their boss the
| CEO:
|
| "Shut up for 5 minutes and _listen_ :
|
| You have been repeating the same things for a full year, yet
| nothing is different or better. This is because while the message
| has been consistent, if vacuous, your weekly changes in direction
| prevent any initiatives from being successful. We won't become a
| "Billion Dollar Company" running like squirrels on a highway.
| Pick a plan, and stick with it. Grow 10% each fiscal year instead
| of hoping to grow 10X in a single leap.
|
| In other words, grow up."
| psychoslave wrote:
| This year I started to have the background ideas popping up in my
| mind about a future where societies put care as the main goal.
|
| More precisely "la societe du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit
| different as in french the term as a very large semantic network.
| Sure care is the closest general translation.
|
| Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on
| technological side than on relevant careful social organisation,
| human inter-help, environmental and moral sides.
|
| Technology is easier to track continuously with proxy metrics
| which regularly move up some scale. In many other areas, tracking
| can be more an hindrance, an inhibitor or even a cause of total
| extinction.
| tehjoker wrote:
| This is a very good thing to want and if you are serious about
| that, I would implore you to look into socialism. That's what
| people who take that idea seriously have written voluminously
| about how to make it happen.
| orzig wrote:
| > You can't fake care. People feel it.
|
| My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I
| thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the
| situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me,
| so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but
| joined his next company.
|
| I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics
| are obvious to all involved", which is often.
| cons0le wrote:
| What's funny is you totally can fake that you care. They just
| don't want/need to
| fisherjeff wrote:
| It's insane to me that this even needs to be written - showing
| you care is just not that hard! And it absolutely doesn't have to
| come at the expense of business goals.
|
| I've had some amount of success running a startup, and honestly
| the only thing that reliably paid off was hiring great (i.e.,
| smart, thoughtful, kind) people and treating them like family.
| procaryote wrote:
| Caring and showing you care can be independent. Some people
| care and don't show it. Some people don't care but pretend to.
| If you don't care, showing you care is harder, and your acts
| might betray your true feelings
| stego-tech wrote:
| I'm just glad to see more folks realizing the same things I've
| suffered through for much of my career. If anything, I wish my
| own bosses would read these words (and many more) to understand
| why I'm so withdrawn, so angry, so _tired_.
|
| Being a leader means a constant confrontation with choosing
| political or organizational consequences to a decision. If all
| you're doing is operating politically, your reward will always be
| burned out, tired, and frustrated workers who, _for once_ , want
| you to do what's in the best interests of your own organization
| rather than your personal political advantage. At least until a
| better political player than you outmaneuvers your ass, because
| you gave them room for growth in an organization that rewarded
| such behaviors.
|
| Workers just want to do good work, make good things, get paid
| good money, and go home. If your decision-making as a boss
| regularly imperils or impairs those things, you suck as a boss.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Most workers aren't asking for miracles. Just let them do their
| jobs without turning everything into a political chess match.
| stego-tech wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where I'm quite literally re-
| evaluating my tolerance towards politicians in organizations
| in general. Obviously game theory comes into play in a lot of
| decision-making _between_ entities, but I feel like _within_
| a cooperative unit that sort of behavior should be outright
| obliterated.
|
| Letting politics (politics != policy) fester within what
| should be a cooperative unit is toxic to overall cohesion and
| success.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| OP, your boss seems so cute compared to mine.
| lcuff wrote:
| Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could
| have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and
| the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the
| right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When
| I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be
| liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't
| think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial
| roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on
| the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their
| context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear
| the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked
| for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock
| options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies
| that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to
| be straight with subordinates about things they could improve;
| Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing
| death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.
|
| I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't
| see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A
| Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
| kakacik wrote:
| > I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm
| frightened
|
| Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up
| realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in
| mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without
| ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
|
| Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown
| monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner
| peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think your definition of character is useful, and I tend to
| agree with Drucker that it's the most important thing, because
| otherwise a manager will subject to whatever political winds
| are blowing higher up without any grounding or point of view on
| what should be pushed back on. On the other hand though,
| "do[ing] the right thing regardless of negative consequences to
| oneself" is easily stated, but in practice is not effective
| without influence--if you are constantly saying no, you'll
| quickly be replaced.
|
| The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot
| on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large
| organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in
| very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large
| scale software development because ground-level expertise
| really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human
| communication inherently has limits. I would say most people,
| and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions
| about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge
| they would quickly realize that when they describe that a
| hundred person org they would get a hundred different
| interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment
| of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles
| are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational
| politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans
| each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely
| harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone
| deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described
| 30+ years ago.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If
| you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization
| (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment.
| At that point, your options are to push to change your
| environment's values, realize your values aren't actually
| what you think they are, or leave.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I
| want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm
| frightened.
|
| First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good
| character!
|
| I think you are right that good character is the core of being
| a good manager. It's the core of being a good person. Virtue
| and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to "happiness"
| (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it's
| been the heart of western philosophy.
|
| We are all works in progress.
| eleveriven wrote:
| The gap between performative care and actual leadership seems to
| be getting wider, and companies still act shocked when turnover
| spikes or teams quietly disengage. What the author describes
| isn't some dramatic abuse, it's the slow erosion of trust
| hinkley wrote:
| > In the end, good leadership is never proven by what you say
| about yourself. It's proven by what people say when you're not in
| the room.
|
| > And trust me, they're talking.
|
| Some of the people I've had to railroad into things say stuff
| like, "well this is the first I've heard about it." That's a You
| Problem.
|
| The fact that nobody is discussing this with you should tell you
| that you've been cut out of the loop for being impossible to
| negotiate with. It's absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
| procaryote wrote:
| I don't need my boss to care about me. I need them to care about
| the team succeeding, and the mission I signed up to.
|
| I need them to show some very baseline decency and honesty so
| that I can somewhat trust what they say. I need them to not drive
| their own career at the expense of the company or team.
|
| If the company needs to do layoffs, I want them to pick the right
| people to stay, to have a good shot at still doing a good job,
| not pick emotionally.
|
| You don't have to care about people to understand it's better to
| not burn them out. Staff turnover is expensive and bad for the
| team performance. Quality and innovation starts suffering long
| before people implode.
| supjeff wrote:
| If a good leader is somebody who consistently sets a good
| example, and is willing to sacrifice personally for their team, I
| don't think there are very many out there. The problem is that
| companies still need "leaders" the same way TV stations need
| programming.
|
| If an company decides to invest some money in the pursuit of an
| opportunity, some managers might get hired or promoted, and the
| company isn't going to scour the earth for genuinely good
| leaders. They'll post a job, take a few interviews then promote
| the person who was going to get it anyway, or hire somebody who
| looks the part. Generally, one shouldn't take middle-managers
| seriously.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Managers are what they are, independently from their position
| on the ladder.
|
| You can have a shitty or wonderful VP, same for the n+5 manager
| of 2 people down the pyramid. Position rarely defines
| leadership or setting or not good example.
| dwoldrich wrote:
| Attitude matters. How ambitious or timid were you? And, are we so
| helpless?
| CaptWillard wrote:
| Posts like this make me appreciate my boss.
|
| I've been very lucky to work for some great people,
| even/especially when the situation above them is borked.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| These are all true but, to phrase it in SV-speak: having good,
| sincere management does not scale. We would all be better off
| with better managers, but if we are really serious about treating
| workers with respect at scale, unions are the only proven
| solution.
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