> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven
The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.
I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.
> The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.
This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.
The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase profitability at the expense of all else.
> Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak
... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.
Thank you for the negative feedback. Further validating that I’m not permitted to vocalize that my life choices the past 5 years trapped me into indentured servitude for boss and family.
This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.
Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy. Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team forward.
A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself as the intermediate member between those expectations and our technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.
It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting the blog, but this feels like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I’ve always despised managers who’d be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but always be “part of the system” when it mattered the most. Yes it’s always good to not get into public arguments with the upper management, but this gives off a lot of “play both sides” kind of a vibe that’s not actual good management.
I saw a definition of burnout as the accumulation of thousands of tiny disappointments and it stuck me. If you're always failing to achieve anything despite effort going in, you burn out.
> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...]
If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?
I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."
Your balancing the relationship you have with leadership to do what you are asked to do, just as you ask IC to do things they may want to do, with doing the best you can to maintain or improve the QoL for your team.
The author is right, the correct stance is...
> “Yeah, <s>this new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.”
Then critically thirdly,
> "Lets work together to demonstrate why the new policy is a risk to the customer."
Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
To get what you want the compelling argument is to the customer.
Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but this is the level of support we can provide customers. This customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be accommodated to provide the same thing on time, I've done an estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
Your employees won’t rat you out… Just don’t say “sucky” to those above you. If I have a cool ass manager who looks out for me and is real (I’m lucky enough to be at a MIT lab where everyone is cool as hell), I will always have their back…
I think this is true 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time is really risky. The high stakes of the bad case make it wise (imo) to avoid saying your company's policy "sucks"
If you're a manager, consider not saying that up the org chart is "sucky". Almost certainly no one on your team will go tattle, but it can leak out accidentally, such as when someone is flustered over a problem.
More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.
But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...
For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.
(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)
If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but intended to deflect.
You have to mean it, and you have to follow through on your words with actions.
Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.
Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech workplaces.
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
Definitely plays a huge part in expectations and burnout when the roadmap flips halfway through a quarter because suddenly we need to court VCs or trim staff or whatever the fed/gov decides.
The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams expect it more so they buy-in less.
I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency. Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation collapse or go under.
Valuations are at record highs though. For instance Microsoft stock is at an all time high yet they're instituting RTO (which was clearly not needed to get the stock to the ATH) and an aggressive, anti-employee culture. You can see a lot of this coming from people like Musk who have astronomical valuations, not tied in any way to reality.
well, and let's be honest - most CEOs and boards get the same advice from the same advisors and peers. and the advice since Elon took over Twitter (not that I can say he "started it" but it was around that time I started hearing C-suites say he was right to let everyone go) has been to implement more draconic policies at your software companies.
that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general has been tight created a perfect storm of bias that these policies are working or could be beneficial. in better times, a company with good funding and a healthy customer base would come through and eat everyone's lunch if their competitors were treating their devs like that. but because of the temporary complete collapse in competition as we've known it, especially amongst startups, this has gone on far longer than it typically would.
it'll get better soon but we've lost an entire generation of technical leadership now (due to burnout and other factors) so it'll be a slow and turbulent recovery.
> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. “Yeah, this new policy sucks, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.” It’s really important that you validate the emotions that all of these aspects are bringing up in people.
This I wish more leaders did. It can be really demoralizing to the point of leaving a role when you hear company stuff that's blatantly false, in bad faith, or whatever - and your leader, who you know damn well is smart enough to see it as well, looks you dead in the eye and repeats the company line.
In other words, "don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." I'd rather be told you're screwing me than being screwed and gaslit about it. No matter what, in the end I'm going to remember I was screwed and how you approached that.
On the other hand, I do not expect middle managers to talk negatively about a policy that they do not have influence over and they did not initiate because in the end they cannot change it and I don’t want them to get into trouble for validating my feelings.
Middle managers will say that it is only raining and I will nod along even if we both know that they are pissing on my shoes.
I might start looking for another job, but as long as I’m there, I will smile and play along if I know that my resistance will not change the decision. Even in my exit interview, I’ll say everything was great.
This is probably not what I would have done at the beginning of my career but now I have a family so I don’t mind pretending.
I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I rather have direct communication with my team to understand issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points, number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.
I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.
> In public, you have to support the policies, but when you’re in private with your manager and your peers, that’s the time you can safely push for change.
They are actually advocating being two-faced as a form of leadership.
If you are actually against the policy and suspect a lot of people are too, then don't silence your employees by keeping their feedback isolated to 1:1s which you admit are ineffective.
Executives need clear feedback to avoid making major mistakes.
The other part of this is the AI wave. Every SAAS company in the world is vulnerable to someone with higher AI driven pace, or better AI features to overtake them.
Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally at risk of losing vs openAI.
I think this is the fear, but I haven’t seen any evidence that AI is making companies more productive. Lots of anecodotes, pro and con, about individual effects, and a small number of studies, pro and con, about company effects, but nothing definitive, and certainly not the kind of groundswell of new products and releases that I would expect.
I feel like OP has either never worked outside of tech startups/Silicon Valley or never worked pre-2012 (dont wanna assume tho and this is not meant in a disparaging manner)
A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the exception
As others have expressed, sycophancy is not leadership.
How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?
Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.
This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.
While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.
This headline reminds me of a headline a while back that was something like how to do founder mode when you are not the founder. It all goes back to some Orwellian newspeak vibes. The words for what we are doing sound horrible. Can we just change word meanings so it sounds good?
If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.
If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.
I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins" looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this value context.
I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.
Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message while privately criticizing it---good job advice, but morally, that's cowardice; it's pathetic; that's the behavior of a person who is trying to have their cake and eat it too, who's just there for the money; whose friendship is a lie. That's the spineless substitute for leadership we've come to expect in our disappointing world. "Yeah it sucks, it affects me negatively" in private only counts if you are also taking a non-infinitesimal stand against it in public; if your actual moral position comes out in favor of the right thing. Otherwise it is a lie, manipulating your employees to make them feel like they have a friend while not actually sticking up for them.
If everyone felt and acted morally then the place would be forced to improve. Or at minimum, to fire all of you, but they should be forced to actually do that, morally, and suffer the political and economic consequences of doing so. But for that to happen people have to be systematically standing up to them in the first place, saying "do better, or else".
This is an easy reaction to have in an internet forum, and of course it will get a lot of support because it resonates with the rank and file, so you'll naturally get a lot of internet points at places like HN and LinkedIn.
But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.
Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something that a whole generation of software developers have been sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not purely a result of greedy management. I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.
I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.
"I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school."
The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 87.60%.
In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note that income tax increases as you increase in income in absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less net of taxes).
If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and again, tax makes it worse).
Yes thank you for inflation lesson, I spent part of my childhood in Brazil in the late 80s and early 90s, so I understand inflation better than most Americans.
For reference, I earned $26k at my first full time programming job.
I don't think this is an easy reaction at all, I read it as someone who sees through the BS and has experienced it first-hand.
You call it grandstanding, I call it just being a good person and supporting your coworkers. Maybe a little 'grandstanding' is all that is needed to break a handful of beaten-down people out of their rut to stand up a little more and demand some attention. Shining light on these entrenched issues is the only way to get them to change. Shame works wonders. I agree with the parent post that more and more standing up is the only way to change. Someone just has to have the courage to do it first, job be damned. That grandstanding can go so much further if someone with the CTO title were to push things.
Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning, and you have the entire body of experience and knowledge held by your people at your disposal upon which to draw. But that goes against the line of the C-suite knowing best and having some hidden knowledge.
> leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down
Because "leadership" are being cowards. Because they kept their teams at arm's length, not wanting anyone to get an up-close glimpse of how bad they're fumbling.
I don't know what ZIRP has to do with anything. If anything, we're in this mess because managers fell asleep at the wheel because they knew they didn't need to do jack diddly, the investments will always keep coming, no worries, no need to actually do their jobs, valuations will always rise, don't ya know!
> Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning
Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a fantasy world.
well since the revolution in question is one where the company you're working for becomes attendant to its employees' dignity, I imagine you would keep working the same job under a new CEO and board (the old ones being forced out by the revolution), but you would enjoy it a lot more and feel much more inspired to keep doing good work....
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The rusted wheel that won't spin when the cart moves gets replaced. If every manager refused to act like a good little toady, maybe this strategy would work, but that's not how the prisoners dilemma pans out in the real world.
> But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"
The fish rots from the head. You don't start a revolution within a corporate structure, because you effectively have zero power in any sufficiently large organization with sufficiently bad leadership.
Yeah. Be the fearless revolution leader in a corporation during a tricky job market era and not only you'll be fired, your subordinates, by association, will be tagged as radioactive material.
In fact I remember now that I have had a manager who followed this exact advice: they'd agree with you about what was right and wrong in private, but do nothing, or very little, in public. It was infuriating. I didn't quit over it, although I wish I had in hindsight; instead I stayed uninspired and frustrated and burnt out until the manager eventually cycled out for another. But my guess is the team was half as productive or less than it would have been if the manager had stuck up for them in public. There is really nothing as demoralizing as when none of the people with power stick up for you. Of course, they will say that they don't have power either---but that's the trick. Everyone up the chain says they have no power, they're just following orders; the decision making is abstracted from on high. It is always a lie: everyone has power; just, the power is proportional to the risk you take to use it. I should have threatened to quit over being treated better, and meant it, and the manager should have threatened to quit to their bosses over the same things, and everyone else up the stack.
(Of course, an organization where your only way of getting listened to is threatening to quit is already unimaginably toxic. A healthy organization has a moral code of its own: you should be listened to because you were mistreated, not because you had to threaten something to be heard. But this seems to be increasingly untrue in modern tech companies where everyone seems amoral and just does their job and tries not to rock the boat so they can get to their next stock grant.)
When the higher-ups make a bad decision, sure, push back on it. Push back on it with reckless disregard for your job, even. But when pushing back fails, your people either have to accept it or leave, and not all of them want to (or can) leave. Your job then is to help them accept the decision. If you can't or won't do that, your only moral option left is to leave yourself.
checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see if there's money inside."
Even as a jaded person I’m surprised how many people read this and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn’t always let you be a crusader. It’s called choosing your battles and it’s something that most of us have to do almost every day.
Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.
Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.
>I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to ultimately have a robot do their entire job
Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific, though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is someone who has cut 10 roles.
>Let them know you’re still on their side
You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your company.
>This too shall pass
That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such as privacy, enabled by AI.
The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms, we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life and nobody is stopping them.
Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and parcel of this mentality.
Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.
When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.
That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.
"remote" can just mean "far enough from the financial district that I can afford a little space" as it turns out. You're not WRONG but just being in the same time zone as your coworkers gets you 90% of the in person benefits and, realistically, it's too hard to work with a team that is on a vastly different tz.
Local can still be better than global while still allowing people to work from home and convene in meat space as needed
"How to suck up in public but bad mouth in private" is I suppose some good advice if one doesn't mind hypocrisy or lying or having integrity. But if you're middle-management in a company being described here, you've long since lost any revulsion to hypocrisy. If my manager was saying one thing to one person/group and another to me, I don't think that's good leadership at all, mainly shitty humanity.
because we must, above all else, keep an ethical backbone in our decision-making that respects both the welfare of the people we lead and the task at hand.
if c suite is demanding people RTO to a toxic work environment, I'm not going to require my team to meet the exact requirements - wanna use your lunch break to drive to the office, tap your badge, then drive back home? sounds good to me. I'd also be asking for data to substantiate claims made regarding productivity gains or morale improvements.
or if newly appointed partisan hacks start programs for employees to snitch on LGBTQ+ people, you should channel chaotic good and not fulfill their request, and actively work against others fulfilling it, too. I know of at least one government organization in which this has taken place.
good leadership is about doing the right thing, and getting the job done. the right thing means leading by example with a high degree of proficiency, teaching others to be competent and confident, and growing yourself as an individual and as part of a larger community.
committing yourself to always carrying out the orders of leadership is a hella slipppery slope dude - especially when the "vibes are off".
maybe my examples are a bit pessimistic, but I just feel the author really missed the mark and left me (and others) scratching my head. maybe I'll give it another read later and try to steel man some of the positions. good and fair questions, by the way :)
The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass.
AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.
The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.
Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.
> The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid.
So true.
Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.
It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.
Racism didn't end in 1964, but people sure have gotten better at dog whistling about it.
(Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot. Because no matter how much a black person will ever achieve in this country, some mouth breather who hasn't done a day of honest work in their lives will insist that those achievements were all a sham, they don't deserve any of them, they can't do the job, their out-of-work cousin with a meth habbit can do it better, etc.)
And if you call the pricks and nepobabies who are doing that out on it, they start hand waving it as 'we're just asking questions' and 'well, he could have been unqualified', or raise some other nonsense deflection of their vulgar, unacceptably racist behavior.
---
All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out. If your first reaction to 'aircraft flown by <race of> pilot crashes' is 'clearly, that's because they were an unqualified AA hire', you are, unfortunately, a racist. Own it, or stop it.
And, sadly, quite a number of people were very happy to out themselves as such. What is sadder is that others are happy to play cover for them.
> Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot.
> All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out.
It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white.
Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI caused the crash, he said, "Because I have common sense." He claimed without any source that the Obama administration "actually came out with a directive, too white" on aviation agency standards.
> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.
The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.
The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.
How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?
I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.
The last couple of companies I worked for were only still in business because they avoided the cloud completely, and their competitors didn't. Paying 4x the cost for something isn't a competitive advantage unless the capabilities the cloud provides are significant. While they are nice, unless you are a very specific type of business, they aren't going to make up for the increased costs.
In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...
Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies.
> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale
What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.
Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.
The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to spend less for smart people/companies that have the right workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients that are not so smart or don't actually need that elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used or not.
Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.
> you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests
You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.
Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.
It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.
If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.
When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.
For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.
It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.
Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.
It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.
What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.
> But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine
These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.
There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not), it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire business model is built on top of making it impossible to migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get locked into their API, it's how it works.
The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.
It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.
> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.
Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you have to be prepared to leave as well.
People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor until you get on the list of "major holders".
That will put you ahead in some contexts or completely destroy your life on different contexts. And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.
Apply it smartly, and evaluate if forcibly changing your context isn't the right move for you. Blindly sticking to the anti-jingoist approach is as bad as blindly applying it.
> And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.
We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.
And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.
> Lie through your teeth, but not so much people quit?
I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences by not being zealous about the new order.
> In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight
This person is not on the side of the team. This person is simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new other, just in a sane way.
Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are on the "side of the team".
This is the key. If they don't do it, it's not their job anymore. The team won't just revolt in unison, but the lead will be replaced with someone more complacent. The only option is to comply, but let the team know in private that you don't like the new vibes.
> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven
The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.
I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.
> The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.
This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.
The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase profitability at the expense of all else.
> Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak
... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.
Inexorable lifestyle choices like moving, having kids, or buying a house. Yes I feel pretty trapped.
Thank you for the negative feedback. Further validating that I’m not permitted to vocalize that my life choices the past 5 years trapped me into indentured servitude for boss and family.
This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.
Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy. Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team forward.
Take care of yourself. Your oxygen mask goes on first.
A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself as the intermediate member between those expectations and our technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.
It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting the blog, but this feels like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I’ve always despised managers who’d be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but always be “part of the system” when it mattered the most. Yes it’s always good to not get into public arguments with the upper management, but this gives off a lot of “play both sides” kind of a vibe that’s not actual good management.
> the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations
wow. real!
I saw a definition of burnout as the accumulation of thousands of tiny disappointments and it stuck me. If you're always failing to achieve anything despite effort going in, you burn out.
> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...]
If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?
I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."
Your balancing the relationship you have with leadership to do what you are asked to do, just as you ask IC to do things they may want to do, with doing the best you can to maintain or improve the QoL for your team.
The author is right, the correct stance is... > “Yeah, <s>this new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.”
Then critically thirdly,
> "Lets work together to demonstrate why the new policy is a risk to the customer."
Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
To get what you want the compelling argument is to the customer.
Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but this is the level of support we can provide customers. This customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be accommodated to provide the same thing on time, I've done an estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
Your employees won’t rat you out… Just don’t say “sucky” to those above you. If I have a cool ass manager who looks out for me and is real (I’m lucky enough to be at a MIT lab where everyone is cool as hell), I will always have their back…
I think this is true 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time is really risky. The high stakes of the bad case make it wise (imo) to avoid saying your company's policy "sucks"
If you're a manager, consider not saying that up the org chart is "sucky". Almost certainly no one on your team will go tattle, but it can leak out accidentally, such as when someone is flustered over a problem.
More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.
But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...
For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.
(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)
Sucks this is being downvoted. Maturity is hard.
If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but intended to deflect.
You have to mean it, and you have to follow through on your words with actions.
Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.
Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech workplaces.
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
A lot of this I think is interest rate driven rather than AI driven.
Definitely plays a huge part in expectations and burnout when the roadmap flips halfway through a quarter because suddenly we need to court VCs or trim staff or whatever the fed/gov decides.
The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams expect it more so they buy-in less.
I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
Her manager probably did her a huge favor
Yeah, navigating disability leave can be a little rough
Not as rough as being PIPed out though, which was probably the other most likely path in front of your friend
There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency. Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation collapse or go under.
Valuations are at record highs though. For instance Microsoft stock is at an all time high yet they're instituting RTO (which was clearly not needed to get the stock to the ATH) and an aggressive, anti-employee culture. You can see a lot of this coming from people like Musk who have astronomical valuations, not tied in any way to reality.
well, and let's be honest - most CEOs and boards get the same advice from the same advisors and peers. and the advice since Elon took over Twitter (not that I can say he "started it" but it was around that time I started hearing C-suites say he was right to let everyone go) has been to implement more draconic policies at your software companies.
that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general has been tight created a perfect storm of bias that these policies are working or could be beneficial. in better times, a company with good funding and a healthy customer base would come through and eat everyone's lunch if their competitors were treating their devs like that. but because of the temporary complete collapse in competition as we've known it, especially amongst startups, this has gone on far longer than it typically would.
it'll get better soon but we've lost an entire generation of technical leadership now (due to burnout and other factors) so it'll be a slow and turbulent recovery.
> it'll get better soon
I really wish I had your optimism about that.
I'm starting to worry that nothing will ever be better again
> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. “Yeah, this new policy sucks, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.” It’s really important that you validate the emotions that all of these aspects are bringing up in people.
This I wish more leaders did. It can be really demoralizing to the point of leaving a role when you hear company stuff that's blatantly false, in bad faith, or whatever - and your leader, who you know damn well is smart enough to see it as well, looks you dead in the eye and repeats the company line.
In other words, "don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." I'd rather be told you're screwing me than being screwed and gaslit about it. No matter what, in the end I'm going to remember I was screwed and how you approached that.
On the other hand, I do not expect middle managers to talk negatively about a policy that they do not have influence over and they did not initiate because in the end they cannot change it and I don’t want them to get into trouble for validating my feelings.
Middle managers will say that it is only raining and I will nod along even if we both know that they are pissing on my shoes.
I might start looking for another job, but as long as I’m there, I will smile and play along if I know that my resistance will not change the decision. Even in my exit interview, I’ll say everything was great.
This is probably not what I would have done at the beginning of my career but now I have a family so I don’t mind pretending.
I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I rather have direct communication with my team to understand issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points, number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.
I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.
Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page right now and addresses similar issues -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604
> In public, you have to support the policies, but when you’re in private with your manager and your peers, that’s the time you can safely push for change.
They are actually advocating being two-faced as a form of leadership.
I know, right? It's sycophancy.
If you are actually against the policy and suspect a lot of people are too, then don't silence your employees by keeping their feedback isolated to 1:1s which you admit are ineffective.
Executives need clear feedback to avoid making major mistakes.
In their mind, I guess everyone is a strong leader, as they say everyone judges themselves by effort and others by results.
From a employee's perspective. I think you get a good idea, when working for a company, if your leader's vibes are off.
If they have a ego or can have a adult conversation or like to avoid it. Since life is not a 'silver lining'
You will meet some behaviours (which you can call toxic or not ) But times are changing, and people are less patient.
The other part of this is the AI wave. Every SAAS company in the world is vulnerable to someone with higher AI driven pace, or better AI features to overtake them.
Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally at risk of losing vs openAI.
I think this is the fear, but I haven’t seen any evidence that AI is making companies more productive. Lots of anecodotes, pro and con, about individual effects, and a small number of studies, pro and con, about company effects, but nothing definitive, and certainly not the kind of groundswell of new products and releases that I would expect.
I feel like OP has either never worked outside of tech startups/Silicon Valley or never worked pre-2012 (dont wanna assume tho and this is not meant in a disparaging manner)
A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the exception
As others have expressed, sycophancy is not leadership.
How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?
Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...
This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.
We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/
While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.
This headline reminds me of a headline a while back that was something like how to do founder mode when you are not the founder. It all goes back to some Orwellian newspeak vibes. The words for what we are doing sound horrible. Can we just change word meanings so it sounds good?
If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.
If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.
I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins" looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this value context.
I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.
Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message while privately criticizing it---good job advice, but morally, that's cowardice; it's pathetic; that's the behavior of a person who is trying to have their cake and eat it too, who's just there for the money; whose friendship is a lie. That's the spineless substitute for leadership we've come to expect in our disappointing world. "Yeah it sucks, it affects me negatively" in private only counts if you are also taking a non-infinitesimal stand against it in public; if your actual moral position comes out in favor of the right thing. Otherwise it is a lie, manipulating your employees to make them feel like they have a friend while not actually sticking up for them.
If everyone felt and acted morally then the place would be forced to improve. Or at minimum, to fire all of you, but they should be forced to actually do that, morally, and suffer the political and economic consequences of doing so. But for that to happen people have to be systematically standing up to them in the first place, saying "do better, or else".
This is an easy reaction to have in an internet forum, and of course it will get a lot of support because it resonates with the rank and file, so you'll naturally get a lot of internet points at places like HN and LinkedIn.
But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.
Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something that a whole generation of software developers have been sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not purely a result of greedy management. I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.
I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.
"I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school."
The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 87.60%.
In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note that income tax increases as you increase in income in absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less net of taxes).
If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and again, tax makes it worse).
Yes thank you for inflation lesson, I spent part of my childhood in Brazil in the late 80s and early 90s, so I understand inflation better than most Americans.
For reference, I earned $26k at my first full time programming job.
I don't think this is an easy reaction at all, I read it as someone who sees through the BS and has experienced it first-hand.
You call it grandstanding, I call it just being a good person and supporting your coworkers. Maybe a little 'grandstanding' is all that is needed to break a handful of beaten-down people out of their rut to stand up a little more and demand some attention. Shining light on these entrenched issues is the only way to get them to change. Shame works wonders. I agree with the parent post that more and more standing up is the only way to change. Someone just has to have the courage to do it first, job be damned. That grandstanding can go so much further if someone with the CTO title were to push things.
Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning, and you have the entire body of experience and knowledge held by your people at your disposal upon which to draw. But that goes against the line of the C-suite knowing best and having some hidden knowledge.
> leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down
Because "leadership" are being cowards. Because they kept their teams at arm's length, not wanting anyone to get an up-close glimpse of how bad they're fumbling.
I don't know what ZIRP has to do with anything. If anything, we're in this mess because managers fell asleep at the wheel because they knew they didn't need to do jack diddly, the investments will always keep coming, no worries, no need to actually do their jobs, valuations will always rise, don't ya know!
> Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning
Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a fantasy world.
Wrong. I have lead people and lead them the way I would want to be lead. Just like that. You don't know the first thing about me bub.
What are you going to do after the revolution? I'm going to lead poetry readings and design upcycled fashion
well since the revolution in question is one where the company you're working for becomes attendant to its employees' dignity, I imagine you would keep working the same job under a new CEO and board (the old ones being forced out by the revolution), but you would enjoy it a lot more and feel much more inspired to keep doing good work....
That's not the kind of revolution the author was implying.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The rusted wheel that won't spin when the cart moves gets replaced. If every manager refused to act like a good little toady, maybe this strategy would work, but that's not how the prisoners dilemma pans out in the real world.
> But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"
The fish rots from the head. You don't start a revolution within a corporate structure, because you effectively have zero power in any sufficiently large organization with sufficiently bad leadership.
Yeah. Be the fearless revolution leader in a corporation during a tricky job market era and not only you'll be fired, your subordinates, by association, will be tagged as radioactive material.
In fact I remember now that I have had a manager who followed this exact advice: they'd agree with you about what was right and wrong in private, but do nothing, or very little, in public. It was infuriating. I didn't quit over it, although I wish I had in hindsight; instead I stayed uninspired and frustrated and burnt out until the manager eventually cycled out for another. But my guess is the team was half as productive or less than it would have been if the manager had stuck up for them in public. There is really nothing as demoralizing as when none of the people with power stick up for you. Of course, they will say that they don't have power either---but that's the trick. Everyone up the chain says they have no power, they're just following orders; the decision making is abstracted from on high. It is always a lie: everyone has power; just, the power is proportional to the risk you take to use it. I should have threatened to quit over being treated better, and meant it, and the manager should have threatened to quit to their bosses over the same things, and everyone else up the stack.
(Of course, an organization where your only way of getting listened to is threatening to quit is already unimaginably toxic. A healthy organization has a moral code of its own: you should be listened to because you were mistreated, not because you had to threaten something to be heard. But this seems to be increasingly untrue in modern tech companies where everyone seems amoral and just does their job and tries not to rock the boat so they can get to their next stock grant.)
When the higher-ups make a bad decision, sure, push back on it. Push back on it with reckless disregard for your job, even. But when pushing back fails, your people either have to accept it or leave, and not all of them want to (or can) leave. Your job then is to help them accept the decision. If you can't or won't do that, your only moral option left is to leave yourself.
Some of us have bills to pay.
Mouths to feed...
checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see if there's money inside."
So basically, leadership is coping? No thanks.
Even as a jaded person I’m surprised how many people read this and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn’t always let you be a crusader. It’s called choosing your battles and it’s something that most of us have to do almost every day.
Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.
Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.
>I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to ultimately have a robot do their entire job
Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific, though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is someone who has cut 10 roles.
>Let them know you’re still on their side
You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your company.
>This too shall pass
That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such as privacy, enabled by AI.
The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms, we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life and nobody is stopping them.
Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and parcel of this mentality.
Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.
When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.
That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.
Small scale offshore outsourcing existed way before the pandemic and the big shift to remote. They used to call it software factories.
> Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.
You can be even if a multinational company moves their employees back to the office.
If you chop off your limbs, not everyone can compete at that game, but why play it in the first place?
"remote" can just mean "far enough from the financial district that I can afford a little space" as it turns out. You're not WRONG but just being in the same time zone as your coworkers gets you 90% of the in person benefits and, realistically, it's too hard to work with a team that is on a vastly different tz.
Local can still be better than global while still allowing people to work from home and convene in meat space as needed
"How be a good C-suite sycophant and not trigger a revolt from your team"
"How to suck up in public but bad mouth in private" is I suppose some good advice if one doesn't mind hypocrisy or lying or having integrity. But if you're middle-management in a company being described here, you've long since lost any revulsion to hypocrisy. If my manager was saying one thing to one person/group and another to me, I don't think that's good leadership at all, mainly shitty humanity.
> part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment
this is not chaotic good, this is lawful neutral. and really bad leadership.
Out of genuine curiosity, what about this do you think is bad leadership? And, if I may, what would good look like?
because we must, above all else, keep an ethical backbone in our decision-making that respects both the welfare of the people we lead and the task at hand.
if c suite is demanding people RTO to a toxic work environment, I'm not going to require my team to meet the exact requirements - wanna use your lunch break to drive to the office, tap your badge, then drive back home? sounds good to me. I'd also be asking for data to substantiate claims made regarding productivity gains or morale improvements.
or if newly appointed partisan hacks start programs for employees to snitch on LGBTQ+ people, you should channel chaotic good and not fulfill their request, and actively work against others fulfilling it, too. I know of at least one government organization in which this has taken place.
good leadership is about doing the right thing, and getting the job done. the right thing means leading by example with a high degree of proficiency, teaching others to be competent and confident, and growing yourself as an individual and as part of a larger community.
committing yourself to always carrying out the orders of leadership is a hella slipppery slope dude - especially when the "vibes are off".
maybe my examples are a bit pessimistic, but I just feel the author really missed the mark and left me (and others) scratching my head. maybe I'll give it another read later and try to steel man some of the positions. good and fair questions, by the way :)
Alternative title: "I'm just here for a paycheck. Maybe you should be too."
The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass.
AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.
The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.
Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.
> The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid.
So true.
Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.
It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.
Trump won the popular vote. I don't trust the billionaires, but I'm not sure my coworkers are much better on average tbh.
You must be a paranoid conspiracy theorist, because that's what I got called for saying this since then. /s
> The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics
So, a bogeyman?
If not racism, then a real life Mean Girls at a very least. But in this case, Regina George is your boss.
Racism didn't end in 1964, but people sure have gotten better at dog whistling about it.
(Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot. Because no matter how much a black person will ever achieve in this country, some mouth breather who hasn't done a day of honest work in their lives will insist that those achievements were all a sham, they don't deserve any of them, they can't do the job, their out-of-work cousin with a meth habbit can do it better, etc.)
And if you call the pricks and nepobabies who are doing that out on it, they start hand waving it as 'we're just asking questions' and 'well, he could have been unqualified', or raise some other nonsense deflection of their vulgar, unacceptably racist behavior.
---
All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out. If your first reaction to 'aircraft flown by <race of> pilot crashes' is 'clearly, that's because they were an unqualified AA hire', you are, unfortunately, a racist. Own it, or stop it.
And, sadly, quite a number of people were very happy to out themselves as such. What is sadder is that others are happy to play cover for them.
> Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot.
> All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out.
It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white.
Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI caused the crash, he said, "Because I have common sense." He claimed without any source that the Obama administration "actually came out with a directive, too white" on aviation agency standards.
Incredible. I wasn't aware of that detail.
> Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed.
This, my friends, is the behavior of the supreme leader of the right-wing political party of the US.
'Racism from the political right is a boogeyman' indeed.
> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.
The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.
The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.
How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?
I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.
The last couple of companies I worked for were only still in business because they avoided the cloud completely, and their competitors didn't. Paying 4x the cost for something isn't a competitive advantage unless the capabilities the cloud provides are significant. While they are nice, unless you are a very specific type of business, they aren't going to make up for the increased costs.
In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...
What sector of the Econ were those failures in?
Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies.
> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale
What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.
Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.
The only thing that cloud brought is the possibility to spend less for smart people/companies that have the right workload. At the (hidden) expenses of the other clients that are not so smart or don't actually need that elasticity. Yes, there are economies of scale at AWS but in the end there is fixed capacity that either gets used or not.
Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.
> you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests
You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.
Yea, just don’t ask what’s listening for those requests.
Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.
It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.
If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.
When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.
For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.
It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.
Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.
It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.
What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.
> But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine
These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.
There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not), it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire business model is built on top of making it impossible to migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get locked into their API, it's how it works.
The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.
It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.
It makes workers easier to replace, but it also makes switching between companies easier.
> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.
Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you have to be prepared to leave as well.
People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor until you get on the list of "major holders".
That will put you ahead in some contexts or completely destroy your life on different contexts. And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.
Apply it smartly, and evaluate if forcibly changing your context isn't the right move for you. Blindly sticking to the anti-jingoist approach is as bad as blindly applying it.
> And even make you ineffective for fighting against the problem.
We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.
And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.
TL;DR "yes men" middle managers keep their jobs.
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> Lie through your teeth, but not so much people quit?
I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences by not being zealous about the new order.
> In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight
This person is not on the side of the team. This person is simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new other, just in a sane way.
Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are on the "side of the team".
> Well, ok, it is that persons job
This is the key. If they don't do it, it's not their job anymore. The team won't just revolt in unison, but the lead will be replaced with someone more complacent. The only option is to comply, but let the team know in private that you don't like the new vibes.
haha yeah "Chaotic Good" is not a great choice of title for this blog...
You - the “leader” - is responsible for the off vibes