I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.

I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.

Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!

If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.

In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).

Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.

The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.

I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.

The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).

1. In a going concern, which has found traction, a manager is often the _reason_ for people to leave the company.

2. In a company that is not finding traction, or the larger view of its direction is obfuscated, managers are the reason people _stay_ back to work.

This manager being the end-all of association comes from military knowledge that you fight because of allegiance to your battalion, cause and the country - in that order.

In an knowledge enterprise, these constructs exist, but with almost equal weightage.

The best manager cannot make an employee stay back if the company is not going anywhere, or if the cause is not evident.

The worst manager will lose employees even if the company is going bonkers.

My direct supervisor was great. He was a good manager on most levels.

I left because the company had no future, they weren't going bankrupt, but they weren't growing either. I never got a pay rise, probably never would. My benefits actually shrunk as time went on, staff social functions were cut (e.g. team lunches), use of networking funds became more restricted, and my work environment became less flexible.

In fact, the only reason I considered staying was my manager and coworkers.

People leave poor working environments, whether it's a company or a manager causing that poor environment.

I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.

Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.

I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.

So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.

Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.

I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify …

I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO.

The goal was to hopefully try and generate some more self-awareness and introspection and thus make life a little fairer, more pleasant, more growth-oriented and hopefully more successful for all concerned.

I wasn't trying to deny or downplay that people also leave their jobs for all of the other reasons highlighted by folks here.

Thanks, Rich.

That may seem disloyal to those good managers, but I never left on a whim. It was always an agonizing process. But it was also always necessary. My former managers have never held it against me, and I now have connections with a number of great managers who would hire me without question if I was ever looking again (and they know I would work for them in a heartbeat).

What always happened was that it became evident that my interests and my company's interest had diverged, whether it was a lack of opportunity for advancement, the company was going under, the product was a non-starter, or upper-management was bent on self-sabotage.

EDIT: Added missing words

Especially at a larger company, managers might be constrained wrt hiring and firing, reviews and raises, pushing back against misguided product-management decisions, etc. Even a good manager might not be able to deal with these issues quickly enough to prevent attrition. I've seen some really good managers, people I'd worked with before and who have been superstars at other companies, burn out trying. That's sort of leaving the company that hobbled the manager, but other managers and other groups within the same company were doing fine so I'd call it leaving the group.

People turn you down because of managers, not companies, too.

Last company I left went bankrupt and got bought by a VC who replaced the whole management.

The new managers were running around telling people how to do things because of the "company spirit".

A few people, including me, were in the company for over 7 years and we knew the company spirit, because well, we lived and formed it.

Now some newly hired MBAs try to tell me that I'm wrong?

The bankruptcy lead many people to leave. The rest left because of the new management. Now the company has the old name and product, but noone of the people that created or formed it remained.

- The reason people decide to resign.

- The reason people begin to consider resigning.

In my experience, bad management is what usually kicks off the whole thought process, but other factors are what cement the decision (like an offer with higher pay, better title, higher prestige company etc.)

I've also had toxic managers at other organizations, so I agree a manager CAN drive an employee away, but that's not always or even usually the case.

I could be managed by the best manager in the world, but if I'm paid 20% below market rate I'm going to leave for a better paid job.

I quit my last employer because the manager was an abusive bully with severe trust issues who would constantly threaten, abuse and demoralize people, but HR was also to blame since they did not lift a finger to address the issue even though this manager's behavior was widely known throughout the company for decades.

I've also left a great manager in the past since the business was going nowhere. I've left a good manager and good team because I was very underpaid in another company.

You'd think this would send a signal to someone that a mistake had been made. Nope!

#2. Next the mindset. Typical mindset when you move from technical (or any IC) role to MGMT and the higher you go in MGMT should completely change.... unfortunately its not so easy to give up the control. MGMT is about making others successful... giving up your control to others is very frightening and often causes identity issues... moving from do it all (as an IC) to ask_and_inspire is not easy...

#3. Assuming you overcome these two... typical problem of MGMT/leadership is they try to find, "What's the matter?" where as the focus should always be on "What matters to you (an individual/ICs in team)"

I wrote about how to use the perspective to help prepare for job searches and interviews, and to enjoy your time at work more: http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave-2

The thing that's driving me out is the company's lack of direction. They talk of innovation, but their actions demonstrate that they're more concerned with maintaining the status quo with incremental improvements to aging products.

I've spent about 70% of my few years here working on new products that never saw the light of day. That's disheartening. Fool me twice... time to go.

The Gervais Principle is a great lens with which to look at company hierarchies and all people in any large organization should know about it: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)

You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.

Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.

On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.

I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.

Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.

In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?

If you keep writing very similar implementations of very similar things (without actively damaging the code-base) you may very well be an O(n) developer. You keep working at the same pace regardless.

If you are a developer of some calibar, the work that you've already done will feed back into the work that you're doing - making you an O(log(n)) developer, until the work levels out and you slip back toward o(n).

Then there's the other end of the stick, the idiot who has no business writing code, but who management keeps around because he's cheap in the short term. Everything he touches turn to shit, each change corrupts the code base just a little more, and each change to the corrupted code takes an amount of time proportional to the level of corruption. This is the O(k^n) developer, and he needs to be stopped.

I imagine that there are probably tasks that don't allow the 10X or 100X to show through; anything basic and repetitive enough (or so heavily specified that the developer's job is essentially "typing").

However, I'm not sure that there exist 10x managers that are not manipulators / psychological exploiters.

Same goes for teaching or education in general. So many wannabe educators writing or producing programming lessons that clearly have never studied education theory. A notorious one or two out there as well. Art or professional grade creative endeavors are probably the same way for the vast majority.

Unless you're some sort of savant, no one gets away with shortcutting the learning involved with anything. It's just kind of blissful ignorance.

You don't know what you don't know and it becomes a strength since most are too unmotivated to ever do things the right way, in a well-informed, disciplined manner regardless. To those who are in those fields though, it's painfully obvious.

I'll be honest, I was surprised to read this sorry if environment still existed for programmers

Getting "work done" is fairly easy to recognize - you can tell when bugs are getting fixed and features are being delivered and when they are not.

Getting work done to a high standard and delivered at an appropriate speed is, I think, only recognizable by another developer who is as good or better than you.

>Personally, I always try to get to the bottom of this stuff during job interviews - nobody wins if the employee assumes there will be flex-time and the company doesn't allow it!

Yeah, that's one of my red flags during interviews. Companies that are strict on this type of stuff are essentially advertising the fact that management is clueless about what development does and rely upon intrinsically meaningless social cues to build trust. Like suits.

What I'm reading here is that you're perceiving it (perhaps accurately, perhaps not) as a threat to one's dominance as manager.

I think you may be using the word respect as, say, a capo would - as in, "respect the chain of command" or as cartman would say "respect mah authoritah"!

If true, then that signals a certain level of insecurity over one's position which I think may be an unfortunate signal to send. As an employee I would see that as weakness, especially if combined with technical incompetence.

>If you still think it's unreasonable, consider if your employer paid you a couple of days late - is this still ok?

It's funny, an employer actually asked me that in my first job and I shrugged my shoulders and I said I probably wouldn't notice, which was an answer that clearly infuriated him.

He later fired me (a real blessing in disguise), and the last chunk of pay actually did come in about 4 days late - something I was keeping a close eye on because I was concerned he may not pay me at all. I am absolutely convinced it was him being spiteful - he did payroll himself and there was no other reason I could see for it being late.

I had a good chuckle over that one.

>Some programmers have the attitude that they are indispensable and can behave anyway they like.

Often it's because they are and they can. I mean, nobody's indispensable of course, but the nature of what they do means that they can create (or destroy) a lot of value and don't have much of a reason to fear termination. This tension between that and managerial refusal to recognize it because it signals a threat to their dominance has, I think, been the result of a lot of self destructive behavior in this industry. A lot of people would rather feel powerful than keep a healthy bottom line. Their prerogative, I suppose. It's good to recognize this and point it out when it happens though, because, for instance, as a shareholder I wouldn't want to be bullshitted about what went down.

I think you should read this:

https://medium.com/incerto/how-to-legally-own-another-person...

By his definition, you think programmers are "too free", no?