Things I want to say to my boss(ithoughtaboutthatalot.com) |
Things I want to say to my boss(ithoughtaboutthatalot.com) |
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.
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.
We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the outsourcing started
Maybe I'd dispute the last point - seems companies with such employees can do rather well.
That you are framing it for apparent familiarity with the nonsense term quiet-quitting says a lot.
>If you hire your own prodigal child, I'm quitting effective immediately.
May we both suceed in our future untogetherness.
I've been very lucky to work for some great people, even/especially when the situation above them is borked.
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.
in desktop firefox I ctrl-shift-m to compact the left/right'isms of the design
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.
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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.
"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."
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.
I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.
Hopefully @dang adds something to the guidelines to discourage it.
perhaps they blur their poetry
did they use an LLM in 2020: https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
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.
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?
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.
I'm very interested in your response. I have accepted that I have blind spots and I want to remove them.
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
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.
Fortunately communication is usually conceptual like a metaphor.
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.
AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.
And I'm certainly weary of "someone used an em-dash, must be GPT" low-value comments.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
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.
Empathy is a super power because it helps you understand people and connect with them, and connecting and collaborating is how we succeed. You’re deciding to cut that off in response to what sounds like a shit situation, like cutting off your own fingers.
As mentioned elsewhere, being empathetic landed me in this crappy situation so sometimes I have my doubts of the strategic value of that trait.
I don't punish others for the a-holery of those who wronged me. Seems to work wonders so far and things are turning around in a very positive way. I'm just despairing how much time it all takes.
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
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.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
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.
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.
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
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.
>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.
Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).
Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).
Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).
Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise you’re burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for it
I agree with the original quote, though.
There's value in knowing that too
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.
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.
So this view difference makes complete sense.
However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
> 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.
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.
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
Many of the writers on the show have only ever worked in show businesses, which is its own mutation of work culture. Not many have actual worked in stereotypical corporate work situations.
Mike Judge (Office Space, Silicon Valley, etc) probably comes closest having started in corporate life and made a transition.
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).
More precisely "la société 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Letting politics (politics != policy) fester within what should be a cooperative unit is toxic to overall cohesion and success.
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.
> 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.
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
Nobody is saying that. That's super easy to do and most people love 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.
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.
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.
The Whatsapp corollary is if your team has a separate chat group without you in it, you should look at your leadership style.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
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.
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
True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.
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.
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...
ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
... which doesn't really matter anymore either as long as it's profitable, see Facebook, Twitter, Boeing...
They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.
If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.
A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.
What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.
> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".
I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.
And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."
Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.
Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.
It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.
It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.
> 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
That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.
But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.
Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).
And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.
But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.
Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.
And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.
I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.
For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:
The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.
They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...
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.
About this part:
> Number of public holidays.
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?
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.
The thing I liked most is that when my clients would ask me to do things - I would often propose things more reliable and less time to implement solutions. They would then opt for the less optimal thing sometimes for good reasons. If I was an exempt employee that would have meant me spending my personal time on the extra work to meet deadlines. The contractor me would bill them for the hours:)
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.
Any recommended resources?
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.
Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote
As capitalism moved towards financialization, the societal incentives moved from "profit from doing things" in the long run towards "profit from trading ownership of entities that eventually do things" in the short term.
This requires a completely different kind of management. I don't need someone who deeply knows what it takes to create and manufacture planes as a CEO anymore, I need someone who can make the most out of the numbers to make the speculators happy during this quarter.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just judging by the fact that you bashed one of my side projects on another thread saying it's 100% AI-generated when it's not.
What kind of person takes the time to post something bad about a stranger? What is the benefit on your side, what satisfaction do you get from that?
I would just have ignored it if I didn't like it, but not sh*t on someone's work like that.
What you seed usually returns to you 10fold, just keep that in mind.
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.
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.
"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.
But, for example, "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 us to interchangeable 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.
Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a 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?
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.
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.
> Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category".
Sure they can -- they are all employees, for example.
I agree that "resource" is an impersonal word when used for "staff" (largely because it can apply to non-human things). I just don't feel the need to be considered more than a resource at work.
I bring special skills and knowledge, I have no concern that I am an interchangeable cog in the wheel of industry -- and yet at the same time, I have no illusions that I cannot be replaced (on some possibly-inconvenient timescale for business operations, although certainly that has varied over time in my employment history).
Actually that raises an interesting question, I think. When I was in high school, I worked a few summer temp jobs as unskilled labor. If anyone had called me a "resource" then, it would have felt patronizingly euphemistic to the point of absurdity. I was just a body. So in that case "resource" would be a silly upgrade.
So I guess it comes down to context. I can see where a four-person company, especially if you've been there a while, has a much higher expectation of personal relationships.
You mentioned that your boss was on the phone. The other party to the conversation might have been further removed (org chart-wise) from their staff. They might think only in resource allocation and not know any names or capacities at the productive level in their own org, never mind yours. Since they are a client, your boss may have mirrored their language, even though he was speaking about a full human, and within earshot of that human.
I don't know, maybe your boss was just a jerk in general, and this word was enough to make you feel like it was a summary of how he thought about you.
But maybe it was just a word. Neither incorrect, nor intentionally offensive.
Obviously, words can be triggers. I'm in the camp that believes they should not be, for all sorts of logical reasons, but I'm not an absolutist. Some words are intended to be triggering, for example, and although I think it's a mistake to give them that power, I understand it's not that simple and that I speak from a position of privilege.
However, I don't think that "resource" has reached the point of social awareness that it is actually offensive to some people. I think that most people who use the word intend no offense, and are not thinking in a way that, if fully explained, would be offensive.
For marketing and pricing strategy, probably "Monetizing Innovation".
For UX research, CS160's content [0]
For sales strategy, "Blue Ocean Strategy".
For launching products, "The Lean Startup".
But most critically, start having sincere conversations with stakeholders and understand why they do what they do.
Ofc, if you don't work in a major tech and startup hub like in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, TLV, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Prague, Warsaw, or Bucharest, much of this is moot because the kind of organization that would allow you to grow doesn't exist outside of those hubs.
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!)
Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?
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.
Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.
On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.
Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.
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