Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
> When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened.
First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good character!
I think you are right that good character is the core of being a good manager. It’s the core of being a good person. Virtue and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to “happiness” (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it’s been the heart of western philosophy.
I feel like the solution is ultimately going to be some kind of trust-less or low-trust system that ultimately incentivizes every individual to do the right thing, no matter where they might be in the hierarchy. We can't rely on top-down leadership spontaneously getting it right, let alone bottom-up leadership. This is why we need an external system that can incentivize people effectively, while being fully observable, trustable, reproducible, etc.
Thanks for the vulnerability and full marks for self awareness.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
I think your definition of character is useful, and I tend to agree with Drucker that it's the most important thing, because otherwise a manager will subject to whatever political winds are blowing higher up without any grounding or point of view on what should be pushed back on. On the other hand though, "do[ing] the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself" is easily stated, but in practice is not effective without influence—if you are constantly saying no, you'll quickly be replaced.
The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large scale software development because ground-level expertise really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human communication inherently has limits. I would say most people, and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge they would quickly realize that when they describe that a hundred person org they would get a hundred different interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described 30+ years ago.
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.
I agree that "the right thing" depends on point of view and narrative at hand (the context). And when I quote Drucker and point to character, I see it as the bedrock on which a good manager will stand. But people of good character still need a whole array of other tools to turn them into good managers: Being skillful politicians to navigate the organizational polity, being people who can see the big picture. Having _lots_ of people skills. Having a good grasp of the field of endeavor. An ability to laugh at themselves ...
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened
Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
> "It’s the performance of ‘care’ from leadership. Saying one thing loudly and proudly, yet doing another quietly, repeatedly."
It's the employee engagement survey where you want people to say that the company cares about you, and first line managers get in trouble from the results but executive leadership does not. It's the cognitive dissonance that you expect us to just deal with.
It's the lack of communication when people are fired. There's no good way to fire people, but there sure are bad ways and you've found them.
It's the times that I've told my boss about issues I'm dealing with and those issues show up in my end of year review instead of working on them together.
I used to work in a fairly secure government data center. I was a facility electrician, but also sat on lower-level hire boards (i.e. blue collars). My RFID would grant me access anywhere across multiple facilities.
>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.
Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).
Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).
Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).
Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
More people is a really difficult problem to solve in the current job market. You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars. A lot of your honest participants have found alternative ways forward. I stopped applying to "normal" jobs a year ago. 1099 via networking and luck is my life now.
I moved to a new position recently and was involved with hiring my replacement. We got a good hire, but one of the people my bosses initially wanted to shortlist had an impressive resume, but then you go on LinkedIn and there are two profiles. Same exact headshot. Similar names, as if one of them could be a nickname and one a full name. Career timelines are totally different though.
So just by doing a little pre-interview prep, I found out that this person (if it was a real person and not a persona of some kind) had a resume with one career timeline and two LI profiles with two separate and different career timelines.
Fed this to my bosses who proceeded to have an extremely awkward and brief interview with the person (or the person posing as the person) about "so, in 2022, were you at $FIRST_COMPANY, $SECOND_COMPANY, or $THIRD_COMPANY?" I mean, you have to pass a background check to work at my company even if offered; why do people do this?
> You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars.
And wasting a lot of time on the not-so-good liars. We've recently taken on someone for an infrastructure management role and apparently things are much much worse than they were last time we needed that sort of resource (about five years ago). Padding CVs was always an issue, but completely making them up, or getting ChatGPT to do it for you, now seems to be the default behaviour.
In my experience (as limited as it might be), burnout is a very person thing, usually driven internally by the employee with an out of kilter sense of balance between self-commitment and job performance. Common drivers are broken, centralized processes (e.g. stack ranking) rather than individual managers. Staffing doesn't really help, it just raises the bar, because this is a matter of competition.
In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers could never hope to achieve.
In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up on your side (worst case).
This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and work ethics) from the US.
Yeah but in general French approach to work and US ones are... not similar, dare I say the opposite of each other. Often 10 weeks of paid vacation vs 2 (4 is already a big perk). How sick leave is treated or general health issues. Number of public holidays. And so on.
I agree with your sentiment. Work in France sounds like hell -- not for the work-life balance, but for the compensation model. Sorry to all of the French readers here. (You may feel similar to the United States or other places.) In these countries were the labour laws are extremely in favour of the worker (France, Germany, Italy, etc.), the pay for technologists is generally awful and there is very little upside. If you work really hard, you barely get paid more. That would so demotivating to me.
About this part:
> Number of public holidays.
I Googled USA vs France. Both have 11 national holidays per year. Did you mean to write something else?
Ha today I learned something, you are correct its 11 in US too. But it seems (according to gemini) that in US folks do not get automatically a fully paid day off on every one, which is the default in Europe. We often have 'labor day' wich are other types (acknowledged but no day off)
As a side point, some people here seem to think this post specifically came from 24 contributors. The text at the bottom seems to indicate this and I initially got the same feeling.
However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
> In the end, good leadership is never proven by what you say about yourself. It’s proven by what people say when you’re not in the room.
> And trust me, they’re talking.
Some of the people I’ve had to railroad into things say stuff like, “well this is the first I’ve heard about it.” That’s a You Problem.
The fact that nobody is discussing this with you should tell you that you’ve been cut out of the loop for being impossible to negotiate with. It’s absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
You know, watching Mad Men, it seems to be that work culture hasn't changed since the 50s. The same fake smiles, the same small talk, the same boss's favorite getting the credit. What's really changed since then?
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
> I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick it!
According to at least a few references, it very clearly applies to the two meanings. I couldn't find a single dictionary that excludes or seems to favor one over the other.
Ah, thanks -- I was just trying to capture the weirdness that happens when a work is set in the past, and then that work itself becomes old. For instance, if you watch Braveheart right now you're getting two views of the past: you're getting a (not-very-realistic) view of medieval England, and then in addition you're getting a view into how people in the 90s felt about history and social issues.
In the long run, this makes for very interesting rhetorical analysis of the work.
Your example of Braveheart, for instance, involves two views of the past through the lens of the _present_. So even in that context, both of those views are tinted by the experience and environment of the observer.
"contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world. I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary outside of... contemporary usage and definition.
It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is about a TV show and not literature.
Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18 year old show that stopped production more than a decade ago contemporary?
I would consider it more of a necessary evil than a flaw. Both the writer and the audience need to be able to connect with the story, and you're just going to have a better connection if it feels more familiar to you.
> Contemporary work culture influenced its creators, so you’re likely seeing a reflection of that when you watch the show.
Many of the writers on the show have only ever worked in show businesses, which is its own mutation of work culture. Not many have actual worked in stereotypical corporate work situations.
Mike Judge (Office Space, Silicon Valley, etc) probably comes closest having started in corporate life and made a transition.
I’m sure you’re right, at least to some extent, but let’s not forget that Mad Men is fictional, and from the 21st century, and might not accurately reflect the 1950’s.
Fictional, but it captures something about work and life in that unique way that art is supposed to.
One of my favorite scenes:
Peggy: "You never say thank you!"
Don: "That's what the money is for!"
It captures a lot of the mismatch in perspective between employer/employee boss/subordinate. You're there to do something for someone who is paying you to do it. That's as far as it goes (despite the constant human pull to perceive it as more).
Or more recently Train Dreams. It's a real shame we had to spend time to bury those three men who were hit by a falling tree, but the company can't afford for us to take a day off. So back to work.
> I hope you learn that if you focus on making money instead of the team lining your pockets, you will end up with a broken team and no money.
Very much this. If you don't actually care about us, don't expect us to care about you or your company or the work. You're going to be left with automatons rather than creative, energetic people (even if the bodies haven't changed).
And the fact is that automatons don't make the line go up nearly as well as people who care. So the really ironic thing is, if all you care about is money, then you better care about the team. And not just care with lip service, but really care.
My current job has problems, but I'll give them this: When I wound up in the ER the weekend before a business trip, nobody was worrying about the effect on the trip.
I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards.
Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?
This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):
`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`
So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.
As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.
That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.
So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.
Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create
Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.
I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.
(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)
I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.
For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.
Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.
On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.
Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.
I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.
I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.
Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.
I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?
But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.
I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.
I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money
imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.
You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.
I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.
All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.
Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.
> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".
I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.
"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.
This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.
It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.
We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)
They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.
If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.
Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.
Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money
I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.
Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.
If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.
I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.
But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.
Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.
The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.
Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.
> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.
These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.
They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.
The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.
The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.
But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't
Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.
The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.
Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.
Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.
I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.
I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".
This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?
Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.
Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.
Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.
Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.
It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.
But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.
I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.
But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.
Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.
How about something like "Yes, we have the resources to handle that project"?
> Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category".
Sure they can -- they are all employees, for example.
I agree that "resource" is an impersonal word when used for "staff" (largely because it can apply to non-human things). I just don't feel the need to be considered more than a resource at work.
I bring special skills and knowledge, I have no concern that I am an interchangeable cog in the wheel of industry -- and yet at the same time, I have no illusions that I cannot be replaced (on some possibly-inconvenient timescale for business operations, although certainly that has varied over time in my employment history).
Actually that raises an interesting question, I think. When I was in high school, I worked a few summer temp jobs as unskilled labor. If anyone had called me a "resource" then, it would have felt patronizingly euphemistic to the point of absurdity. I was just a body. So in that case "resource" would be a silly upgrade.
So I guess it comes down to context. I can see where a four-person company, especially if you've been there a while, has a much higher expectation of personal relationships.
You mentioned that your boss was on the phone. The other party to the conversation might have been further removed (org chart-wise) from their staff. They might think only in resource allocation and not know any names or capacities at the productive level in their own org, never mind yours. Since they are a client, your boss may have mirrored their language, even though he was speaking about a full human, and within earshot of that human.
I don't know, maybe your boss was just a jerk in general, and this word was enough to make you feel like it was a summary of how he thought about you.
But maybe it was just a word. Neither incorrect, nor intentionally offensive.
Obviously, words can be triggers. I'm in the camp that believes they should not be, for all sorts of logical reasons, but I'm not an absolutist. Some words are intended to be triggering, for example, and although I think it's a mistake to give them that power, I understand it's not that simple and that I speak from a position of privilege.
However, I don't think that "resource" has reached the point of social awareness that it is actually offensive to some people. I think that most people who use the word intend no offense, and are not thinking in a way that, if fully explained, would be offensive.
It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.
For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."
The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...
> when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".
Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.
On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.
This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.
That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.
Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.
But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.
Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.
The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.
So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.
I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.
The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.
[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com
[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect
> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.
I admit for a non-tech company I do not know, that's a blind spot for me.
I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.
For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:
The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.
They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.
> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.
To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.
> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.
> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.
They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.
If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.
A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.
What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.
> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".
I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.
And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."
Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.
Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.
It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.
It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.
> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this
That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.
But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.
Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).
And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.
But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.
Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.
And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.
I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.
If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?
I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.
The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.
Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible.
This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
> This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.)
Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.
No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.
What is it really about, in contrast to what I assert? I'm looking at how its being implemented, talked about, thought about, introduced.
I'm happy to re-evaluate my stance in the light of better evidence, but the AI adoption has corresponded to alot of CEOs announcing layoffs with a simultaneous doubling down on AI tools to replace those now displaced workers or those LinkedIn stories from people saying how they will never have to hire X or Y because AI will do it / does it.
> Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm)
This isn't the norm in most STEM industries anymore.
Most of us started off as IC-level engineers before either beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.
Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking domain experience would limit how high you could climb.
When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium.
Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games.
Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event).
This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in.
Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical.
For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to:
1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs
2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership
A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave).
I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.
FP&A is useless for most ICs (I only taught myself when I transitioned into a leadership role with P/L responsibility some time ago).
For marketing and pricing strategy, probably "Monetizing Innovation".
For UX research, CS160's content [0]
For sales strategy, "Blue Ocean Strategy".
For launching products, "The Lean Startup".
But most critically, start having sincere conversations with stakeholders and understand why they do what they do.
Ofc, if you don't work in a major tech and startup hub like in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, TLV, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Prague, Warsaw, or Bucharest, much of this is moot because the kind of organization that would allow you to grow doesn't exist outside of those hubs.
Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.
The gap between performative care and actual leadership seems to be getting wider, and companies still act shocked when turnover spikes or teams quietly disengage. What the author describes isn't some dramatic abuse, it's the slow erosion of trust
I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
I've built viable products where I poured my soul into it just for it to be tossed aside [0]. I've optimized processes that went from 12 hours job to 17 minutes, I was fired shortly after [1]. I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
So when I work with a boss that doesn't care and is mostly performative, unless we are building a product that makes the world a better place, I don't put too much heart into it. I make sure they pay me for my time, and I look for a better job.
>I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives.
If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for. If you do care "too much," then you might just be a thorn in your boss' side. Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him claim success, so you're a problem.
> If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for.
This works in theory, but the problem is that some jobs are complex and require thinking. These jobs will attract people who do not like to be a slaves. They want to enjoy their work, do something good and feel good while doing it. The slave like job mentality you mention has severe limitations on what it can achieve.
> In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives.
I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.
It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.
> Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him claim success, so you're a problem.
HN comments are wildly cynical. People who consume a lot of this cynicism think they're getting a leg up on the workplace by seeing the world for how it really is, but in my experience becoming the uber-cynic who believes all bosses are intentionally destroying the product with bad decisions to claim success (how does that even work?) is the kind of thinking that leads people into self-sabotaging hatred of all bosses. You need to watch out for yourself, but adopting this level of cynicism doesn't lead to good outcomes. Treat it case by case and be open to the idea that you might not have all the information.
>I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.
I think this is also a really important counterpoint -- sometimes the person who "cares too much" is simply wrong, and is causing problems that should be avoidable. In other words, without more details it's hard to know if it's the manager or the direct report who is really the problem here.
> It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.
You're saying it's hard to communicate that, but you've just done it really well. If you were to tell me a bit about those trade offs so I can also consider them the next time, I'd be a perfectly happy camper even if my idea isn't being picked up.
I'll answer for him -- even if he does a great job communicating it, not everyone does a great job receiving it. It's just like honesty: it really takes two and if someone is intransigent enough even the best of us cannot penetrate.
I agree with you, but lately, given the state of my industry and my personal situation I've started to fear that my company is just going to burn if we don't succeed and I need to do as much as possible to prevent that as finding a similar role is going to be pretty damn hard, I also don't have the leverage I used to have a few years ago to just change jobs. All of that has lead me to break my back and confront my boss which is extremely uncomfortable and pushing me closer to burnout. Unsure what my point is other than I wish I had the space to not care
> but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best
How did we get to the point where "deliver work and perform my best" is equivalent to not caring?
Delivering work with reasonably good effort and quality is the baseline expectation. If your version of not caring too much is "perform my best" then I think this is a problem of miscalibrated expectations of the workplace.
The majority of people in the world go into their jobs, try to get their work done with reasonable quality, and go home.
Let's face it. Working for other people sucks. They set the agenda. They make the decisions. Often those decisions and agendas will not be what you think is best. It maybe the case that you are correct. Go start your own thing and run it how you see fit.
Now if you want to see what a really "caring boss" is like watch this video of former employees of Musk. The real interesting thing is some of them seem to like the humiliation, lack of boundaries and over work. Similar to what groups of soldiers feel after serving in a war together and returning with PTSD. Hope the money was worth it. Personally I would avoid it but to each his own.
I worked and even had a business with and/or worked for three people that I've known for a long time. And had loud substantial disagreements with - before going into business. Worked like a charm every single time. The personal side I mean, business was neutral once, a complete failure but I only wanted the paycheck anyway once, and a resounding success in a traditional business where I handle only IT right now.
In the first venture I found out I hated selling and business. Sure, I can do it, but I really really don't want to. I am a minimalist, and I might have become a poor monk in a monastery a thousand years ago. I don't want to sell anyone anything. So in the next two businesses I left all the business stuff to others, and it is sooo much better.
And now that I'm in a non-IT traditional business I'm a servant 100%. And it is nice. My main focus is non IT stuff, and I use computers to achieve that. Finding differences in thousands of EDI messages for invoices, order confirmations and deliveries, for example. HOW - who cares? I am not developing a product. If it's a one-off I may just run some command line tools. Or, shocking!, I actually use Excel. Or I ask ChatGPT for a little helper Python script to run over the raw data files.
Doing servant work without business responsibilities is really nice :) My boss may have the bigger house and car, so what? He also has exponentially more stress (I have pretty much zero). In my youth I may have had a different opinion, but now I don't want his stress level for any amount of compensation. And no, future early retirement by making lots of money now does not change the equation. I don't want to retire at all anyway, keep doing business stuff on the side at least. Without the stress it's no problem! One of my direct colleagues is way past retirement age...
It's true there is no silver bullet. I did contract work after 2000 dot bomb. I enjoyed working for myself.
The thing I liked most is that when my clients would ask me to do things - I would often propose things more reliable and less time to implement solutions. They would then opt for the less optimal thing sometimes for good reasons. If I was an exempt employee that would have meant me spending my personal time on the extra work to meet deadlines. The contractor me would bill them for the hours:)
> I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
To say (yes, with some moderation because it’s hyperbole) that you won’t kill yourself of your boss making a buck needs to be preempted with a “watch out, cynical-sounding opinion” incoming.
Oh wait. I forgot what this website is behind all the quirky/nerdy/hacker submissions.
It's insane to me that this even needs to be written – showing you care is just not that hard! And it absolutely doesn't have to come at the expense of business goals.
I've had some amount of success running a startup, and honestly the only thing that reliably paid off was hiring great (i.e., smart, thoughtful, kind) people and treating them like family.
Caring and showing you care can be independent. Some people care and don't show it. Some people don't care but pretend to. If you don't care, showing you care is harder, and your acts might betray your true feelings
I’m just glad to see more folks realizing the same things I’ve suffered through for much of my career. If anything, I wish my own bosses would read these words (and many more) to understand why I’m so withdrawn, so angry, so tired.
Being a leader means a constant confrontation with choosing political or organizational consequences to a decision. If all you’re doing is operating politically, your reward will always be burned out, tired, and frustrated workers who, for once, want you to do what’s in the best interests of your own organization rather than your personal political advantage. At least until a better political player than you outmaneuvers your ass, because you gave them room for growth in an organization that rewarded such behaviors.
Workers just want to do good work, make good things, get paid good money, and go home. If your decision-making as a boss regularly imperils or impairs those things, you suck as a boss.
It’s gotten to the point where I’m quite literally re-evaluating my tolerance towards politicians in organizations in general. Obviously game theory comes into play in a lot of decision-making between entities, but I feel like within a cooperative unit that sort of behavior should be outright obliterated.
Letting politics (politics != policy) fester within what should be a cooperative unit is toxic to overall cohesion and success.
> You can’t fake care. People feel it. In small moments, in the gaps between your words, in the way you prioritise your business over their wellbeing
This resonates with me. I've seen way too much of this "performative" care. It's pretty grating when they start sounding like therapists: "tell me how you're feeling, this must be pretty upsetting, huh?". Or, "do you need any help?" and I'd be honest and say something like - "yeah, sure, someone could assist with x, y, z", -"oh, unfortunately, we don't have anyone available". They know there is nobody there to help yet they feel like they've ticked their check-mark of showing "care".
This is one of those "you're fly is open". People can see and smell the fakeness a mile a way. There are certainly worse qualities and maybe some people enjoy this "therapeutic" approach but it's certainly not a universally better thing and shouldn't become the default. If the care is just not there I'd rather it be just plain and simple without the extra fake fluff.
This year I started to have the background ideas popping up in my mind about a future where societies put care as the main goal.
More precisely "la société du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit different as in french the term as a very large semantic network. Sure care is the closest general translation.
Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on technological side than on relevant careful social organisation, human inter-help, environmental and moral sides.
Technology is easier to track continuously with proxy metrics which regularly move up some scale. In many other areas, tracking can be more an hindrance, an inhibitor or even a cause of total extinction.
This is a very good thing to want and if you are serious about that, I would implore you to look into socialism. That’s what people who take that idea seriously have written voluminously about how to make it happen.
Its amazing that working is so inhumane and unnatural that people break down like this. There is is nothing you can do except suck it up and create mental barriers to protect your self while participating this weird game of white collar work.
People have been writing about it for years. This is why we have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't need those things
Anonymous whining reads like slander and lack of accountability. What's amazing about that?
> working is so inhumane and unnatural
What is work supposed to be? You either keep yourself alive, or if you can't, you cooperate with others to do so.
Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard? What are you protecting yourself from except your own fragility.
THe union movement (and this is from the english point of view, I don't know much about it in the USA) people literally died for companies because the value of human life from the "lower classes" was so low. You only work week days because people literally fought and died for it.
We can, working together, create a better working world, where people are valued rather than exploited and used up for no real societal gain
My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company.
I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is often.
My 'boss' was an absolute pyschopath who was a direct cause in my, let's just say, poor mental health over a period of years. I'd rather say not say anything to them ever again, but horrible interactions with them replay in my mind constantly. Imagine spending thousands of hours doing your best to make someone happy just to be treated like the worst piece of garbage who ever existed. That's what my 'boss' was like.
I've experienced this too. Luckily, I switched roles, so I don't have to engage with him so much anymore, but I still get his aggressive attitude every once in awhile.
He's made woman employees cry. He's randomly shouted at others for thinking they were being "smart". He's also made me and another coworker contemplate quitting on multiple occasions. Dude has two moods: 1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger.
When I had to work with him full-time, my mental health was getting absolutely destroyed. Imagine a whole 8 hours of someone indirectly/directly calling you stupid, shouting profanity, and just being super passive aggressive. Oh, and not forgetting the threats of being fired. He made it seem like the CTO was discussing it, but I think it was him trying to get me fired.
I felt like shouting at him the most hurtful words I could think of and quitting every single day.
I've just been working on side projects hoping one of them eventually replaces my salary (trying to find a different job in this economy is really unlikely). I don't want to work with people like this.
That was exactly my experience. It was either extremely friendly and fun, or extreme anger. It was terrifying. I would usually stay up 24 hours in a row preparing for meetings because I would be too anxious not knowing what I was going to get.
I feel this. I'd get butterflies knowing I had to call him or hearing the phone ring. I don't know how people like this remain employed for so long.
>I would usually stay up 24 hours
This is wild. Hopefully you never have to deal with someone like that again. Likewise, I would just leave if it ever got to the point of interfering with my mental health again.
If a good leader is somebody who consistently sets a good example, and is willing to sacrifice personally for their team, I don't think there are very many out there. The problem is that companies still need "leaders" the same way TV stations need programming.
If an company decides to invest some money in the pursuit of an opportunity, some managers might get hired or promoted, and the company isn't going to scour the earth for genuinely good leaders. They'll post a job, take a few interviews then promote the person who was going to get it anyway, or hire somebody who looks the part. Generally, one shouldn't take middle-managers seriously.
Managers are what they are, independently from their position on the ladder.
You can have a shitty or wonderful VP, same for the n+5 manager of 2 people down the pyramid. Position rarely defines leadership or setting or not good example.
I don't need my boss to care about me. I need them to care about the team succeeding, and the mission I signed up to.
I need them to show some very baseline decency and honesty so that I can somewhat trust what they say. I need them to not drive their own career at the expense of the company or team.
If the company needs to do layoffs, I want them to pick the right people to stay, to have a good shot at still doing a good job, not pick emotionally.
You don't have to care about people to understand it's better to not burn them out. Staff turnover is expensive and bad for the team performance. Quality and innovation starts suffering long before people implode.
For the care issue, I don't know how I would scale it.
For my direct reports, I care, because I have yet to have take the MBA course where they remove my empathy. Its easy to know how they feel because I have the context.
However, should I be good enough, or lucky enough to climb up the greasy pole and have reports with reports, I don't know how I would be able to scale the attention required to provide valid pastoral care to those reportees.
Large forums only really allow the extrovert, confident, brave or stupid to over supply their opinions. So its not like a group monthly meeting will allow those grumbles to be surfaced before a crisis.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on — because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
These are all true but, to phrase it in SV-speak: having good, sincere management does not scale. We would all be better off with better managers, but if we are really serious about treating workers with respect at scale, unions are the only proven solution.
Burnout and disagreeing with leadership are something we all deal with. But don't quit your job folks. It's a real rookie move. Unless you have something rock solid lined up, you will become radioactive to any potential employers, and idealism doesn't pay the mortgage.
There is a cost-benefit analysis that you need to make here.
Its not a hard and fast rule (unless you're on a visa, or tied to active healthcare), but you don't owe your employer, so killing your sense of joy for them seems unwise. The flip side is that long bits of unemployment is a redflag.
As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what are you going to do about it?"
If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change.
And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness.
Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation could improve.
What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad attitude, and communicate it to others.
Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed, eventually, in terms of their bottom lines.
The only real answer is to unionize. But every time that gets mentioned here, ~90% of people are against it. I notice SWE try to cultivate that "rockstar" persona, the last thing people want to do is admit they need each other / take collective action.
We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the outsourcing started
> What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
That you are framing it for apparent familiarity with the nonsense term quiet-quitting says a lot.
Just more evidence that eng managers (not product managers) and the myriad layers of executives are a waste of time and money. Engineers don't need babysitting. They don't need titles and they don't need someone running interference if people just leave them the fuck alone.
Give them a product goal and they will accomplish it. Tell them what you want to track and they'll figure out how to track it. Tell them what your long term vision is and they'll set you up for it.
Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what. This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless people.
But they don't care. And I don't care. What I care about is my coworkers and boss doing their jobs with talent and integrity so we don't go out of business and I can afford to keep my home and don't have to go through the disgusting job search hoops that are required in my profession.
To the author: You have thought about your boss likely 100x more than he ever thought about you.
Don't do him this favor. You are giving him too much power that way.
And be sure that he forgot about you, like COMPLETELY, maximum 72 hours after you were let go. Do the same. Take your lessons, internalize them, and forget the source. Be like an LLM: have the right conclusion inside your brain after the source material is long gone and thrown out.
Move on.
---
I am in my 40s and just now I am beginning to start understanding only a part of the dynamics involved in companies. But the TL;DR is that executives want to shine and look better, always. They only care about an ever-increasing compensation _and_ bonuses. They care not about the company's long-term success.
If you are in the way of that -- with your pesky technical stability and less resource usage, being one example -- then you are an inconvenience and will be removed. They want people who help them look better to their upper echelons.
That's just one example.
From here on my playbook will be to attend more executive meetings when I start a job, and get a feel of who does what and what are their goals -- and make sure I at least don't stand in the line of the fire when sh1t hits the fan. And will always have something else lined up even if I love my current team to bits. Simply because the said said team has exactly zero say if I get to stay or get booted out simply because somebody two levels above wants a promotion and my salary is making it look like they spend too much.
(I remember how much I regretted losing one job some three years ago. I loved everyone there but I had a terrible health condition and couldn't perform. But you know what? The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me. Reason? Product is done and delivered, we don't need you anymore, nevermind that we get feature requests and the occasional bug reports all the time.)
"Nothing personal. Just business."
Well, two can play at that game. Wish me luck. I want my heart to harden. I want to stop caring. I want to learn to preserve my caring for the things that truly excite me about technology.
I might fail. But I am very quickly learning the game and I will adapt.
You're just at a different place in the curve of rationalizing other humans' behaviors and motivations and how they affect you. Your response is not invalid, but it makes me sad, because you think it's the best response for you. Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
> Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
At least one reason would be because the empathetic person is usually the one bearing most of the cost of this "super power" while at best only sharing in the reward. Quite often entirely thankless work.
How exactly would empathy be a superpower? If I'm empathetic then I'm effectively making excuses for people who don't care that they make my work unbearable.
I'm very interested in your response. I have accepted that I have blind spots and I want to remove them.
That's exactly what happened. I tried improving processes and worked so hard that I neglected my wife.
I was removed because the team lead thought I'm going over his head... while I coordinated every move with him. But the moment I disagreed with him -- once, and for the first time -- I was removed. Zero discussion.
I'm quite empathetic. My original message above comes from bitterness because neither extreme is good. I was in the positive extreme for a while. Too sympathetic, always finding excuses for people who only saw me as a tool to advance their own careers and removed me the minute they thought that was no longer true.
Go somewhere you’re valued? Why compromise your own values to make your manager happy.
Empathy is a super power because it helps you understand people and connect with them, and connecting and collaborating is how we succeed. You’re deciding to cut that off in response to what sounds like a shit situation, like cutting off your own fingers.
I'm currently trying to go where I'm valued. Unlike a lot of privileged people who only have to pick up the phone, I actually have to do interviews. Takes time and a lot of energy.
As mentioned elsewhere, being empathetic landed me in this crappy situation so sometimes I have my doubts of the strategic value of that trait.
I don't punish others for the a-holery of those who wronged me. Seems to work wonders so far and things are turning around in a very positive way. I'm just despairing how much time it all takes.
> The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me
Every team I've been on has had one rockstar. I've seen the rockstar get fired 3 different times. Maybe they were making too much, or rising too fast, I'm not sure. But I do know that being the "most productive" doesn't guarantee employment
Yes, sadly. And before somebody quickly interjects: he not just was not an a-hole, he was extremely kind, calm and always supportive. You almost never hear him say: "I am too busy right now, can we do this later?".
Seriously. Almost never.
Yep. Still got fired.
And he was not rising or anything. Was a small hardcore team, zero politics were involved, they were tight-knit, loved them. But there was only so much the CTO could do; it was a startup that was under the boot of a bigger org he was actually working in. He fought for good paychecks for everyone, and generous severance too. But had no say if the higher echelons said that somebody had to be let go.
There's no moral of the story except "don't sweat your job, they'll replace you the next day". Treat it as a transaction, not as a second family.
Something I _should_ have said to my boss, and their boss the CEO:
"Shut up for 5 minutes and listen:
You have been repeating the same things for a full year, yet nothing is different or better. This is because while the message has been consistent, if vacuous, your weekly changes in direction prevent any initiatives from being successful. We won't become a "Billion Dollar Company" running like squirrels on a highway. Pick a plan, and stick with it. Grow 10% each fiscal year instead of hoping to grow 10X in a single leap.
Abject narcissism is rewarded time and time again. I think this is, at its core the problem in and of itself.
I truly believe that capitalism is the best possible system of financial discourse for the most people. I also believe that anti-trust and regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure competition at a very core level. I don't think govt should be picking winners and losers and in fact, I feel we should expressly format any govt contracts such that there are multiple suppliers. This should go towards all essential infrastructure, bar none.
I also feel that govt should act in terms of a somewhat protectionist front in favor of its own peoples. I think it comes down to real negotiation to keep it that way, but that trying to be fair is only a recipe for long term failure.
Given the inflation of the past couple years, the push to stagnate wages for white-collar work is a bit repugnant at best. The push to stagnate blue collar work is worse still. This can and will only lead to more unionization. One can only hope for a combination of local-focus and worker-lead efforts to stabilize (rebalance) the economy. I say this not in support of socialist efforts, but to keep them at bay, lest we succumb to communism in the longer term, which at a global level will stagnate society as a whole.
It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat things quite so often.
I doubt a human would use it repetitively, even if it is common. This was most likely written paragraph-by-paragraph by AI, causing the repetition, if I had to guess.
I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.
I hope so. Random accusations of "this feels like AI" don't add anything to the conversation and are genuinely harmful to those accused when there is no AI involved.
AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.
I would rather people who don't currently have a voice due to language barriers or simply poor communications skills be able to use LLMs than try to gatekeep them.
And I'm certainly weary of "someone used an em-dash, must be GPT" low-value comments.
I certainly hope we gatekeep them. "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to translate for me" -> "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to refine my thoughts for me" -> "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to generate my comment for me". This is a damn near antithesis of this place.
I had the same reaction. The disclaimer at the bottom doesn't mention AI, but I have a feeling this was generated from a prompt to consolidate the 24 human submissions into a single essay.
Tangentially, I really look forward to the day "Not X but Y" stops being so overused by LLMs. It's a valid and useful construction in a vacuum, one which we should be able to use, but its overuse has gone past semantic satiety into something like semantic emesis.
Because "I haven't seen this literary tool" or "I wouldn't think to use it" or "It doesn't match my perception of human literary tools", it must be artificial.
Kinda funny how we went full circle with you calling me ignorant and illiterate on the basis of not using your preferred terminology, as opposed to the actual, obvious meaning of the subject
Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
> When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened.
First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good character!
I think you are right that good character is the core of being a good manager. It’s the core of being a good person. Virtue and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to “happiness” (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it’s been the heart of western philosophy.
We are all works in progress.
I feel like the solution is ultimately going to be some kind of trust-less or low-trust system that ultimately incentivizes every individual to do the right thing, no matter where they might be in the hierarchy. We can't rely on top-down leadership spontaneously getting it right, let alone bottom-up leadership. This is why we need an external system that can incentivize people effectively, while being fully observable, trustable, reproducible, etc.
Thanks for the vulnerability and full marks for self awareness.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
I think your definition of character is useful, and I tend to agree with Drucker that it's the most important thing, because otherwise a manager will subject to whatever political winds are blowing higher up without any grounding or point of view on what should be pushed back on. On the other hand though, "do[ing] the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself" is easily stated, but in practice is not effective without influence—if you are constantly saying no, you'll quickly be replaced.
The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large scale software development because ground-level expertise really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human communication inherently has limits. I would say most people, and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge they would quickly realize that when they describe that a hundred person org they would get a hundred different interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described 30+ years ago.
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.
I agree that "the right thing" depends on point of view and narrative at hand (the context). And when I quote Drucker and point to character, I see it as the bedrock on which a good manager will stand. But people of good character still need a whole array of other tools to turn them into good managers: Being skillful politicians to navigate the organizational polity, being people who can see the big picture. Having _lots_ of people skills. Having a good grasp of the field of endeavor. An ability to laugh at themselves ...
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened
Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
> "It’s the performance of ‘care’ from leadership. Saying one thing loudly and proudly, yet doing another quietly, repeatedly."
It's the employee engagement survey where you want people to say that the company cares about you, and first line managers get in trouble from the results but executive leadership does not. It's the cognitive dissonance that you expect us to just deal with.
It's the lack of communication when people are fired. There's no good way to fire people, but there sure are bad ways and you've found them.
It's the times that I've told my boss about issues I'm dealing with and those issues show up in my end of year review instead of working on them together.
I used to work in a fairly secure government data center. I was a facility electrician, but also sat on lower-level hire boards (i.e. blue collars). My RFID would grant me access anywhere across multiple facilities.
>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.
Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).
Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).
Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).
Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
“Burnout isn’t a sign of commitment, it’s a sign of organizational failure.”
Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise you’re burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for it
I think it's a bit more complicated. More people can sometimes slow things down. You may need to simplify processes, instead.
I agree with the original quote, though.
Or simply dare to say that the deadline you're shooting for is impossible.
There's value in knowing that too
More people is a really difficult problem to solve in the current job market. You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars. A lot of your honest participants have found alternative ways forward. I stopped applying to "normal" jobs a year ago. 1099 via networking and luck is my life now.
I moved to a new position recently and was involved with hiring my replacement. We got a good hire, but one of the people my bosses initially wanted to shortlist had an impressive resume, but then you go on LinkedIn and there are two profiles. Same exact headshot. Similar names, as if one of them could be a nickname and one a full name. Career timelines are totally different though.
So just by doing a little pre-interview prep, I found out that this person (if it was a real person and not a persona of some kind) had a resume with one career timeline and two LI profiles with two separate and different career timelines.
Fed this to my bosses who proceeded to have an extremely awkward and brief interview with the person (or the person posing as the person) about "so, in 2022, were you at $FIRST_COMPANY, $SECOND_COMPANY, or $THIRD_COMPANY?" I mean, you have to pass a background check to work at my company even if offered; why do people do this?
> You might think it's a buyer's market, but all you wind up hiring right now are the best liars.
And wasting a lot of time on the not-so-good liars. We've recently taken on someone for an infrastructure management role and apparently things are much much worse than they were last time we needed that sort of resource (about five years ago). Padding CVs was always an issue, but completely making them up, or getting ChatGPT to do it for you, now seems to be the default behaviour.
What is 1099?
1099 is a US tax form. They meant contracting probably.
In my experience (as limited as it might be), burnout is a very person thing, usually driven internally by the employee with an out of kilter sense of balance between self-commitment and job performance. Common drivers are broken, centralized processes (e.g. stack ranking) rather than individual managers. Staffing doesn't really help, it just raises the bar, because this is a matter of competition.
In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers could never hope to achieve.
There are cultural differences though.
In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up on your side (worst case).
This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and work ethics) from the US.
Yeah but in general French approach to work and US ones are... not similar, dare I say the opposite of each other. Often 10 weeks of paid vacation vs 2 (4 is already a big perk). How sick leave is treated or general health issues. Number of public holidays. And so on.
So this view difference makes complete sense.
I agree with your sentiment. Work in France sounds like hell -- not for the work-life balance, but for the compensation model. Sorry to all of the French readers here. (You may feel similar to the United States or other places.) In these countries were the labour laws are extremely in favour of the worker (France, Germany, Italy, etc.), the pay for technologists is generally awful and there is very little upside. If you work really hard, you barely get paid more. That would so demotivating to me.
About this part:
I Googled USA vs France. Both have 11 national holidays per year. Did you mean to write something else?Ha today I learned something, you are correct its 11 in US too. But it seems (according to gemini) that in US folks do not get automatically a fully paid day off on every one, which is the default in Europe. We often have 'labor day' wich are other types (acknowledged but no day off)
Yep! It's wild how often companies treat burnout like a motivation problem instead of a math problem
As a side point, some people here seem to think this post specifically came from 24 contributors. The text at the bottom seems to indicate this and I initially got the same feeling.
However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
Thanks for pointing that out. The text at the bottom is rather misleading.
That's what I thought, too - turns out this link is to just one of the essays.
> In the end, good leadership is never proven by what you say about yourself. It’s proven by what people say when you’re not in the room.
> And trust me, they’re talking.
Some of the people I’ve had to railroad into things say stuff like, “well this is the first I’ve heard about it.” That’s a You Problem.
The fact that nobody is discussing this with you should tell you that you’ve been cut out of the loop for being impossible to negotiate with. It’s absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
You know, watching Mad Men, it seems to be that work culture hasn't changed since the 50s. The same fake smiles, the same small talk, the same boss's favorite getting the credit. What's really changed since then?
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
Mad Men isn’t a documentary. Contemporary work culture influenced its creators, so you’re likely seeing a reflection of that when you watch the show.
A very good observation, and true of nearly any contemporary fiction set in the past. People just seem unable to avoid this flaw.
"contemporary fiction set in the past"
Nitpick, but this is a contradiction.
Contemporary fiction doesn't mean "current" (or least it didn't used to) it means "set in the time it was written".
I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick it!
> I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick it!
According to at least a few references, it very clearly applies to the two meanings. I couldn't find a single dictionary that excludes or seems to favor one over the other.
Ah, thanks -- I was just trying to capture the weirdness that happens when a work is set in the past, and then that work itself becomes old. For instance, if you watch Braveheart right now you're getting two views of the past: you're getting a (not-very-realistic) view of medieval England, and then in addition you're getting a view into how people in the 90s felt about history and social issues.
In the long run, this makes for very interesting rhetorical analysis of the work.
Your example of Braveheart, for instance, involves two views of the past through the lens of the _present_. So even in that context, both of those views are tinted by the experience and environment of the observer.
"contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world. I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary outside of... contemporary usage and definition.
It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is about a TV show and not literature.
Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18 year old show that stopped production more than a decade ago contemporary?
I would consider it more of a necessary evil than a flaw. Both the writer and the audience need to be able to connect with the story, and you're just going to have a better connection if it feels more familiar to you.
Most so called documentaries contain a lot of fiction too.
Yep, considering they need actors also for those flashback scenes.
> Contemporary work culture influenced its creators, so you’re likely seeing a reflection of that when you watch the show.
Many of the writers on the show have only ever worked in show businesses, which is its own mutation of work culture. Not many have actual worked in stereotypical corporate work situations.
Mike Judge (Office Space, Silicon Valley, etc) probably comes closest having started in corporate life and made a transition.
I’m sure you’re right, at least to some extent, but let’s not forget that Mad Men is fictional, and from the 21st century, and might not accurately reflect the 1950’s.
Fictional, but it captures something about work and life in that unique way that art is supposed to.
One of my favorite scenes:
Peggy: "You never say thank you!" Don: "That's what the money is for!"
It captures a lot of the mismatch in perspective between employer/employee boss/subordinate. You're there to do something for someone who is paying you to do it. That's as far as it goes (despite the constant human pull to perceive it as more).
Let's also not assume anything about the past based on Hollywood TV shows made 50 years later...
Or more recently Train Dreams. It's a real shame we had to spend time to bury those three men who were hit by a falling tree, but the company can't afford for us to take a day off. So back to work.
>What's really changed since then?
Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
You do realize Mad Men is a TV show made for our modern sensibilities right?
> I hope you learn that if you focus on making money instead of the team lining your pockets, you will end up with a broken team and no money.
Very much this. If you don't actually care about us, don't expect us to care about you or your company or the work. You're going to be left with automatons rather than creative, energetic people (even if the bodies haven't changed).
And the fact is that automatons don't make the line go up nearly as well as people who care. So the really ironic thing is, if all you care about is money, then you better care about the team. And not just care with lip service, but really care.
My current job has problems, but I'll give them this: When I wound up in the ER the weekend before a business trip, nobody was worrying about the effect on the trip.
I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards.
Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?
This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):
`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`
So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.
As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.
That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.
So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.
Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create
Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.
I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.
(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)
I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.
Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?
Never put it this way before, but it's exactly why I started blogging. I was fed up with how bad Python content was online.
It isn't entirely that.
Somewhat, sure.
It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance.
And why are you being laid off?
Your duties are being offshored.
_You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are.
Ostensibly this saves money.
what do we do now?
Why does having different values imply intolerance?
For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.
Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.
On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.
Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.
I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.
I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.
Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.
I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?
But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.
I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.
I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money
imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.
You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.
I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.
All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.
Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.
> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".
I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.
"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.
This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.
It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.
We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)
They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.
If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.
Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.
Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money
Hard not to be motivated by money when simply being alive requires so much of it. It's easy to be principled when your bills are paid.
I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.
Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.
If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.
company into a joke with a bad reputation
... which doesn't really matter anymore either as long as it's profitable, see Facebook, Twitter, Boeing...
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.
I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.
But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.
Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.
The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.
Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.
> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.
These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.
They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.
The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.
The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.
So any extreme is bad.
But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't
Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.
The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.
Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.
Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.
I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.
I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".
There were four of us.
This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?
Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.
Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.
Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.
Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.
It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.
> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?
"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.
But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.
I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.
But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.
Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.
How about something like "Yes, we have the resources to handle that project"?
> Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category".
Sure they can -- they are all employees, for example.
I agree that "resource" is an impersonal word when used for "staff" (largely because it can apply to non-human things). I just don't feel the need to be considered more than a resource at work.
I bring special skills and knowledge, I have no concern that I am an interchangeable cog in the wheel of industry -- and yet at the same time, I have no illusions that I cannot be replaced (on some possibly-inconvenient timescale for business operations, although certainly that has varied over time in my employment history).
Actually that raises an interesting question, I think. When I was in high school, I worked a few summer temp jobs as unskilled labor. If anyone had called me a "resource" then, it would have felt patronizingly euphemistic to the point of absurdity. I was just a body. So in that case "resource" would be a silly upgrade.
So I guess it comes down to context. I can see where a four-person company, especially if you've been there a while, has a much higher expectation of personal relationships.
You mentioned that your boss was on the phone. The other party to the conversation might have been further removed (org chart-wise) from their staff. They might think only in resource allocation and not know any names or capacities at the productive level in their own org, never mind yours. Since they are a client, your boss may have mirrored their language, even though he was speaking about a full human, and within earshot of that human.
I don't know, maybe your boss was just a jerk in general, and this word was enough to make you feel like it was a summary of how he thought about you.
But maybe it was just a word. Neither incorrect, nor intentionally offensive.
Obviously, words can be triggers. I'm in the camp that believes they should not be, for all sorts of logical reasons, but I'm not an absolutist. Some words are intended to be triggering, for example, and although I think it's a mistake to give them that power, I understand it's not that simple and that I speak from a position of privilege.
However, I don't think that "resource" has reached the point of social awareness that it is actually offensive to some people. I think that most people who use the word intend no offense, and are not thinking in a way that, if fully explained, would be offensive.
>Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?
It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.
For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."
The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?
Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...
Human capital is even worse!
> when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".
Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.
Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?
The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.
What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?
OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...
The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)
On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.
This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.
That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.
Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.
But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.
Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.
The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.
So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.
> Profit at any cost
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.
I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.
The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.
[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com
[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect
> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.
I admit for a non-tech company I do not know, that's a blind spot for me.
I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.
For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:
The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.
They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.
luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.
> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.
To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.
> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.
> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.
They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.
If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.
A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.
What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.
> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".
I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.
And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."
Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.
Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.
It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.
It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.
> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this
That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.
But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.
Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).
And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.
But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.
Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.
And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.
I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.
If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?
I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.
Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible.
This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
> This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.)
Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.
> Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about
Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote
No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.
What is it really about, in contrast to what I assert? I'm looking at how its being implemented, talked about, thought about, introduced.
I'm happy to re-evaluate my stance in the light of better evidence, but the AI adoption has corresponded to alot of CEOs announcing layoffs with a simultaneous doubling down on AI tools to replace those now displaced workers or those LinkedIn stories from people saying how they will never have to hire X or Y because AI will do it / does it.
> Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm)
This isn't the norm in most STEM industries anymore.
Most of us started off as IC-level engineers before either beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.
Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking domain experience would limit how high you could climb.
It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.
Tell me more
When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium.
Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games.
Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event).
This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in.
Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical.
For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to:
1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs
2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership
A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave).
I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.
> but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions
Any recommended resources?
FP&A is useless for most ICs (I only taught myself when I transitioned into a leadership role with P/L responsibility some time ago).
For marketing and pricing strategy, probably "Monetizing Innovation".
For UX research, CS160's content [0]
For sales strategy, "Blue Ocean Strategy".
For launching products, "The Lean Startup".
But most critically, start having sincere conversations with stakeholders and understand why they do what they do.
Ofc, if you don't work in a major tech and startup hub like in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, TLV, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Prague, Warsaw, or Bucharest, much of this is moot because the kind of organization that would allow you to grow doesn't exist outside of those hubs.
[0] - https://kwsong.github.io/cs160su23/
Thanks, great list!
> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35
ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s
Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.
I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.
The gap between performative care and actual leadership seems to be getting wider, and companies still act shocked when turnover spikes or teams quietly disengage. What the author describes isn't some dramatic abuse, it's the slow erosion of trust
I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
I've built viable products where I poured my soul into it just for it to be tossed aside [0]. I've optimized processes that went from 12 hours job to 17 minutes, I was fired shortly after [1]. I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
So when I work with a boss that doesn't care and is mostly performative, unless we are building a product that makes the world a better place, I don't put too much heart into it. I make sure they pay me for my time, and I look for a better job.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806948
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903
>I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives.
If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for. If you do care "too much," then you might just be a thorn in your boss' side. Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him claim success, so you're a problem.
> If you really don't care you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for.
This works in theory, but the problem is that some jobs are complex and require thinking. These jobs will attract people who do not like to be a slaves. They want to enjoy their work, do something good and feel good while doing it. The slave like job mentality you mention has severe limitations on what it can achieve.
> In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives.
I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.
It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.
> Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him claim success, so you're a problem.
HN comments are wildly cynical. People who consume a lot of this cynicism think they're getting a leg up on the workplace by seeing the world for how it really is, but in my experience becoming the uber-cynic who believes all bosses are intentionally destroying the product with bad decisions to claim success (how does that even work?) is the kind of thinking that leads people into self-sabotaging hatred of all bosses. You need to watch out for yourself, but adopting this level of cynicism doesn't lead to good outcomes. Treat it case by case and be open to the idea that you might not have all the information.
>I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.
I think this is also a really important counterpoint -- sometimes the person who "cares too much" is simply wrong, and is causing problems that should be avoidable. In other words, without more details it's hard to know if it's the manager or the direct report who is really the problem here.
> It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.
You're saying it's hard to communicate that, but you've just done it really well. If you were to tell me a bit about those trade offs so I can also consider them the next time, I'd be a perfectly happy camper even if my idea isn't being picked up.
I'll answer for him -- even if he does a great job communicating it, not everyone does a great job receiving it. It's just like honesty: it really takes two and if someone is intransigent enough even the best of us cannot penetrate.
Nah, you'll get yelled at if bosses solution you have implemented brings further trouble. Mostly for not fixing it for them.
I agree with you, but lately, given the state of my industry and my personal situation I've started to fear that my company is just going to burn if we don't succeed and I need to do as much as possible to prevent that as finding a similar role is going to be pretty damn hard, I also don't have the leverage I used to have a few years ago to just change jobs. All of that has lead me to break my back and confront my boss which is extremely uncomfortable and pushing me closer to burnout. Unsure what my point is other than I wish I had the space to not care
> but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best
How did we get to the point where "deliver work and perform my best" is equivalent to not caring?
Delivering work with reasonably good effort and quality is the baseline expectation. If your version of not caring too much is "perform my best" then I think this is a problem of miscalibrated expectations of the workplace.
The majority of people in the world go into their jobs, try to get their work done with reasonable quality, and go home.
Let's face it. Working for other people sucks. They set the agenda. They make the decisions. Often those decisions and agendas will not be what you think is best. It maybe the case that you are correct. Go start your own thing and run it how you see fit.
Now if you want to see what a really "caring boss" is like watch this video of former employees of Musk. The real interesting thing is some of them seem to like the humiliation, lack of boundaries and over work. Similar to what groups of soldiers feel after serving in a war together and returning with PTSD. Hope the money was worth it. Personally I would avoid it but to each his own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvDt0lByxJA
> Working for other people sucks.
Depends.
I worked and even had a business with and/or worked for three people that I've known for a long time. And had loud substantial disagreements with - before going into business. Worked like a charm every single time. The personal side I mean, business was neutral once, a complete failure but I only wanted the paycheck anyway once, and a resounding success in a traditional business where I handle only IT right now.
In the first venture I found out I hated selling and business. Sure, I can do it, but I really really don't want to. I am a minimalist, and I might have become a poor monk in a monastery a thousand years ago. I don't want to sell anyone anything. So in the next two businesses I left all the business stuff to others, and it is sooo much better.
And now that I'm in a non-IT traditional business I'm a servant 100%. And it is nice. My main focus is non IT stuff, and I use computers to achieve that. Finding differences in thousands of EDI messages for invoices, order confirmations and deliveries, for example. HOW - who cares? I am not developing a product. If it's a one-off I may just run some command line tools. Or, shocking!, I actually use Excel. Or I ask ChatGPT for a little helper Python script to run over the raw data files.
Doing servant work without business responsibilities is really nice :) My boss may have the bigger house and car, so what? He also has exponentially more stress (I have pretty much zero). In my youth I may have had a different opinion, but now I don't want his stress level for any amount of compensation. And no, future early retirement by making lots of money now does not change the equation. I don't want to retire at all anyway, keep doing business stuff on the side at least. Without the stress it's no problem! One of my direct colleagues is way past retirement age...
It's true there is no silver bullet. I did contract work after 2000 dot bomb. I enjoyed working for myself.
The thing I liked most is that when my clients would ask me to do things - I would often propose things more reliable and less time to implement solutions. They would then opt for the less optimal thing sometimes for good reasons. If I was an exempt employee that would have meant me spending my personal time on the extra work to meet deadlines. The contractor me would bill them for the hours:)
> I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it.
To say (yes, with some moderation because it’s hyperbole) that you won’t kill yourself of your boss making a buck needs to be preempted with a “watch out, cynical-sounding opinion” incoming.
Oh wait. I forgot what this website is behind all the quirky/nerdy/hacker submissions.
It's insane to me that this even needs to be written – showing you care is just not that hard! And it absolutely doesn't have to come at the expense of business goals.
I've had some amount of success running a startup, and honestly the only thing that reliably paid off was hiring great (i.e., smart, thoughtful, kind) people and treating them like family.
Caring and showing you care can be independent. Some people care and don't show it. Some people don't care but pretend to. If you don't care, showing you care is harder, and your acts might betray your true feelings
I’m just glad to see more folks realizing the same things I’ve suffered through for much of my career. If anything, I wish my own bosses would read these words (and many more) to understand why I’m so withdrawn, so angry, so tired.
Being a leader means a constant confrontation with choosing political or organizational consequences to a decision. If all you’re doing is operating politically, your reward will always be burned out, tired, and frustrated workers who, for once, want you to do what’s in the best interests of your own organization rather than your personal political advantage. At least until a better political player than you outmaneuvers your ass, because you gave them room for growth in an organization that rewarded such behaviors.
Workers just want to do good work, make good things, get paid good money, and go home. If your decision-making as a boss regularly imperils or impairs those things, you suck as a boss.
Most workers aren't asking for miracles. Just let them do their jobs without turning everything into a political chess match.
It’s gotten to the point where I’m quite literally re-evaluating my tolerance towards politicians in organizations in general. Obviously game theory comes into play in a lot of decision-making between entities, but I feel like within a cooperative unit that sort of behavior should be outright obliterated.
Letting politics (politics != policy) fester within what should be a cooperative unit is toxic to overall cohesion and success.
> You can’t fake care. People feel it. In small moments, in the gaps between your words, in the way you prioritise your business over their wellbeing
This resonates with me. I've seen way too much of this "performative" care. It's pretty grating when they start sounding like therapists: "tell me how you're feeling, this must be pretty upsetting, huh?". Or, "do you need any help?" and I'd be honest and say something like - "yeah, sure, someone could assist with x, y, z", -"oh, unfortunately, we don't have anyone available". They know there is nobody there to help yet they feel like they've ticked their check-mark of showing "care".
This is one of those "you're fly is open". People can see and smell the fakeness a mile a way. There are certainly worse qualities and maybe some people enjoy this "therapeutic" approach but it's certainly not a universally better thing and shouldn't become the default. If the care is just not there I'd rather it be just plain and simple without the extra fake fluff.
The most galling part of this is that management thinks we're all too stupid to notice.
This year I started to have the background ideas popping up in my mind about a future where societies put care as the main goal.
More precisely "la société du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit different as in french the term as a very large semantic network. Sure care is the closest general translation.
Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on technological side than on relevant careful social organisation, human inter-help, environmental and moral sides.
Technology is easier to track continuously with proxy metrics which regularly move up some scale. In many other areas, tracking can be more an hindrance, an inhibitor or even a cause of total extinction.
This is a very good thing to want and if you are serious about that, I would implore you to look into socialism. That’s what people who take that idea seriously have written voluminously about how to make it happen.
Its amazing that working is so inhumane and unnatural that people break down like this. There is is nothing you can do except suck it up and create mental barriers to protect your self while participating this weird game of white collar work.
People have been writing about it for years. This is why we have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't need those things
There are a bunch of things you can do; this industry refuses to do any of them. "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
Anonymous whining reads like slander and lack of accountability. What's amazing about that?
> working is so inhumane and unnatural
What is work supposed to be? You either keep yourself alive, or if you can't, you cooperate with others to do so.
Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard? What are you protecting yourself from except your own fragility.
> reads like slander
Slander is spoken, libel is written.
> What is work supposed to be?
THe union movement (and this is from the english point of view, I don't know much about it in the USA) people literally died for companies because the value of human life from the "lower classes" was so low. You only work week days because people literally fought and died for it.
We can, working together, create a better working world, where people are valued rather than exploited and used up for no real societal gain
> Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard?
Nobody is saying that. That's super easy to do and most people love it.
> You can’t fake care. People feel it.
My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company.
I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is often.
What's funny is you totally can fake that you care. They just don't want/need to
Wow, brilliantly written. It's been a long time since I've read something I identify so personally with. Bravo.
My 'boss' was an absolute pyschopath who was a direct cause in my, let's just say, poor mental health over a period of years. I'd rather say not say anything to them ever again, but horrible interactions with them replay in my mind constantly. Imagine spending thousands of hours doing your best to make someone happy just to be treated like the worst piece of garbage who ever existed. That's what my 'boss' was like.
I hope you're in a place now where you can start untangling their behavior from your sense of self
I've experienced this too. Luckily, I switched roles, so I don't have to engage with him so much anymore, but I still get his aggressive attitude every once in awhile.
He's made woman employees cry. He's randomly shouted at others for thinking they were being "smart". He's also made me and another coworker contemplate quitting on multiple occasions. Dude has two moods: 1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger.
When I had to work with him full-time, my mental health was getting absolutely destroyed. Imagine a whole 8 hours of someone indirectly/directly calling you stupid, shouting profanity, and just being super passive aggressive. Oh, and not forgetting the threats of being fired. He made it seem like the CTO was discussing it, but I think it was him trying to get me fired.
I felt like shouting at him the most hurtful words I could think of and quitting every single day.
I've just been working on side projects hoping one of them eventually replaces my salary (trying to find a different job in this economy is really unlikely). I don't want to work with people like this.
"1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger."
That was exactly my experience. It was either extremely friendly and fun, or extreme anger. It was terrifying. I would usually stay up 24 hours in a row preparing for meetings because I would be too anxious not knowing what I was going to get.
>It was terrifying.
I feel this. I'd get butterflies knowing I had to call him or hearing the phone ring. I don't know how people like this remain employed for so long.
>I would usually stay up 24 hours
This is wild. Hopefully you never have to deal with someone like that again. Likewise, I would just leave if it ever got to the point of interfering with my mental health again.
I worked indirectly with such a boss, and just a few months of exposure to that toxicity was enough to leave scars.
Sounds like my ex
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If a good leader is somebody who consistently sets a good example, and is willing to sacrifice personally for their team, I don't think there are very many out there. The problem is that companies still need "leaders" the same way TV stations need programming.
If an company decides to invest some money in the pursuit of an opportunity, some managers might get hired or promoted, and the company isn't going to scour the earth for genuinely good leaders. They'll post a job, take a few interviews then promote the person who was going to get it anyway, or hire somebody who looks the part. Generally, one shouldn't take middle-managers seriously.
Managers are what they are, independently from their position on the ladder.
You can have a shitty or wonderful VP, same for the n+5 manager of 2 people down the pyramid. Position rarely defines leadership or setting or not good example.
I don't need my boss to care about me. I need them to care about the team succeeding, and the mission I signed up to.
I need them to show some very baseline decency and honesty so that I can somewhat trust what they say. I need them to not drive their own career at the expense of the company or team.
If the company needs to do layoffs, I want them to pick the right people to stay, to have a good shot at still doing a good job, not pick emotionally.
You don't have to care about people to understand it's better to not burn them out. Staff turnover is expensive and bad for the team performance. Quality and innovation starts suffering long before people implode.
These are good solid points.
For the care issue, I don't know how I would scale it.
For my direct reports, I care, because I have yet to have take the MBA course where they remove my empathy. Its easy to know how they feel because I have the context.
However, should I be good enough, or lucky enough to climb up the greasy pole and have reports with reports, I don't know how I would be able to scale the attention required to provide valid pastoral care to those reportees.
Large forums only really allow the extrovert, confident, brave or stupid to over supply their opinions. So its not like a group monthly meeting will allow those grumbles to be surfaced before a crisis.
You hire caring direct reportees.
Things I want to say to past and future bosses:
>If you hire your own prodigal child, I'm quitting effective immediately.
May we both suceed in our future untogetherness.
"In the end, good leadership is never proven by what you say about yourself. It’s proven by what people say when you’re not in the room."
The Whatsapp corollary is if your team has a separate chat group without you in it, you should look at your leadership style.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on — because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
― Noam Chomsky
These are all true but, to phrase it in SV-speak: having good, sincere management does not scale. We would all be better off with better managers, but if we are really serious about treating workers with respect at scale, unions are the only proven solution.
Burnout and disagreeing with leadership are something we all deal with. But don't quit your job folks. It's a real rookie move. Unless you have something rock solid lined up, you will become radioactive to any potential employers, and idealism doesn't pay the mortgage.
There is a cost-benefit analysis that you need to make here.
Its not a hard and fast rule (unless you're on a visa, or tied to active healthcare), but you don't owe your employer, so killing your sense of joy for them seems unwise. The flip side is that long bits of unemployment is a redflag.
As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what are you going to do about it?"
If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change.
And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness.
Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation could improve.
What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad attitude, and communicate it to others.
Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed, eventually, in terms of their bottom lines.
The only real answer is to unionize. But every time that gets mentioned here, ~90% of people are against it. I notice SWE try to cultivate that "rockstar" persona, the last thing people want to do is admit they need each other / take collective action.
We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the outsourcing started
I agree. No use in breaking yourself over a "top business priority" that'll change next week.
Maybe I'd dispute the last point - seems companies with such employees can do rather well.
> What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
That you are framing it for apparent familiarity with the nonsense term quiet-quitting says a lot.
Pedantically there is nothing worse than cliches that are literally nonsense.
Fortunately communication is usually conceptual like a metaphor.
Unionization is an approach that would work.
Posts like this make me appreciate my boss.
I've been very lucky to work for some great people, even/especially when the situation above them is borked.
Just more evidence that eng managers (not product managers) and the myriad layers of executives are a waste of time and money. Engineers don't need babysitting. They don't need titles and they don't need someone running interference if people just leave them the fuck alone.
Give them a product goal and they will accomplish it. Tell them what you want to track and they'll figure out how to track it. Tell them what your long term vision is and they'll set you up for it.
Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what. This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless people.
We can't even agree to let people WFH and stop burning capital on useless leases / real estate
Attitude matters. How ambitious or timid were you? And, are we so helpless?
id love to see these people lead a team whilst sticking to their own advice
We found the boss guys
i used to say stuff like this until i was given a team, I then never wanted to be in charge of people again.
OP, your boss seems so cute compared to mine.
I love the design of this website, especially having the body text on the right, but I find the website looks a lot better zoomed out to 80%.
imo it reads best if you switch to a narrow view
in desktop firefox I ctrl-shift-m to compact the left/right'isms of the design
But they don't care. And I don't care. What I care about is my coworkers and boss doing their jobs with talent and integrity so we don't go out of business and I can afford to keep my home and don't have to go through the disgusting job search hoops that are required in my profession.
To the author: You have thought about your boss likely 100x more than he ever thought about you.
Don't do him this favor. You are giving him too much power that way.
And be sure that he forgot about you, like COMPLETELY, maximum 72 hours after you were let go. Do the same. Take your lessons, internalize them, and forget the source. Be like an LLM: have the right conclusion inside your brain after the source material is long gone and thrown out.
Move on.
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I am in my 40s and just now I am beginning to start understanding only a part of the dynamics involved in companies. But the TL;DR is that executives want to shine and look better, always. They only care about an ever-increasing compensation _and_ bonuses. They care not about the company's long-term success.
If you are in the way of that -- with your pesky technical stability and less resource usage, being one example -- then you are an inconvenience and will be removed. They want people who help them look better to their upper echelons.
That's just one example.
From here on my playbook will be to attend more executive meetings when I start a job, and get a feel of who does what and what are their goals -- and make sure I at least don't stand in the line of the fire when sh1t hits the fan. And will always have something else lined up even if I love my current team to bits. Simply because the said said team has exactly zero say if I get to stay or get booted out simply because somebody two levels above wants a promotion and my salary is making it look like they spend too much.
(I remember how much I regretted losing one job some three years ago. I loved everyone there but I had a terrible health condition and couldn't perform. But you know what? The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me. Reason? Product is done and delivered, we don't need you anymore, nevermind that we get feature requests and the occasional bug reports all the time.)
"Nothing personal. Just business."
Well, two can play at that game. Wish me luck. I want my heart to harden. I want to stop caring. I want to learn to preserve my caring for the things that truly excite me about technology.
I might fail. But I am very quickly learning the game and I will adapt.
I wish OP does the same.
"I want my heart to harden."
You're just at a different place in the curve of rationalizing other humans' behaviors and motivations and how they affect you. Your response is not invalid, but it makes me sad, because you think it's the best response for you. Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
> Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
At least one reason would be because the empathetic person is usually the one bearing most of the cost of this "super power" while at best only sharing in the reward. Quite often entirely thankless work.
How exactly would empathy be a superpower? If I'm empathetic then I'm effectively making excuses for people who don't care that they make my work unbearable.
I'm very interested in your response. I have accepted that I have blind spots and I want to remove them.
Not "OP", but I will say that empathy can certainly help you build better things (tools, processes, policies, etc) for the people they affect.
It can also help you understand where coworkers or peers are coming from, and work with them better.
The problem comes when it's a one way road where the empathetic person is doing all the work.
That's exactly what happened. I tried improving processes and worked so hard that I neglected my wife.
I was removed because the team lead thought I'm going over his head... while I coordinated every move with him. But the moment I disagreed with him -- once, and for the first time -- I was removed. Zero discussion.
I'm quite empathetic. My original message above comes from bitterness because neither extreme is good. I was in the positive extreme for a while. Too sympathetic, always finding excuses for people who only saw me as a tool to advance their own careers and removed me the minute they thought that was no longer true.
Go somewhere you’re valued? Why compromise your own values to make your manager happy.
Empathy is a super power because it helps you understand people and connect with them, and connecting and collaborating is how we succeed. You’re deciding to cut that off in response to what sounds like a shit situation, like cutting off your own fingers.
I'm currently trying to go where I'm valued. Unlike a lot of privileged people who only have to pick up the phone, I actually have to do interviews. Takes time and a lot of energy.
As mentioned elsewhere, being empathetic landed me in this crappy situation so sometimes I have my doubts of the strategic value of that trait.
I don't punish others for the a-holery of those who wronged me. Seems to work wonders so far and things are turning around in a very positive way. I'm just despairing how much time it all takes.
> The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me
Every team I've been on has had one rockstar. I've seen the rockstar get fired 3 different times. Maybe they were making too much, or rising too fast, I'm not sure. But I do know that being the "most productive" doesn't guarantee employment
Yes, sadly. And before somebody quickly interjects: he not just was not an a-hole, he was extremely kind, calm and always supportive. You almost never hear him say: "I am too busy right now, can we do this later?".
Seriously. Almost never.
Yep. Still got fired.
And he was not rising or anything. Was a small hardcore team, zero politics were involved, they were tight-knit, loved them. But there was only so much the CTO could do; it was a startup that was under the boot of a bigger org he was actually working in. He fought for good paychecks for everyone, and generous severance too. But had no say if the higher echelons said that somebody had to be let go.
There's no moral of the story except "don't sweat your job, they'll replace you the next day". Treat it as a transaction, not as a second family.
Something I _should_ have said to my boss, and their boss the CEO:
"Shut up for 5 minutes and listen:
You have been repeating the same things for a full year, yet nothing is different or better. This is because while the message has been consistent, if vacuous, your weekly changes in direction prevent any initiatives from being successful. We won't become a "Billion Dollar Company" running like squirrels on a highway. Pick a plan, and stick with it. Grow 10% each fiscal year instead of hoping to grow 10X in a single leap.
In other words, grow up."
Abject narcissism is rewarded time and time again. I think this is, at its core the problem in and of itself.
I truly believe that capitalism is the best possible system of financial discourse for the most people. I also believe that anti-trust and regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure competition at a very core level. I don't think govt should be picking winners and losers and in fact, I feel we should expressly format any govt contracts such that there are multiple suppliers. This should go towards all essential infrastructure, bar none.
I also feel that govt should act in terms of a somewhat protectionist front in favor of its own peoples. I think it comes down to real negotiation to keep it that way, but that trying to be fair is only a recipe for long term failure.
Given the inflation of the past couple years, the push to stagnate wages for white-collar work is a bit repugnant at best. The push to stagnate blue collar work is worse still. This can and will only lead to more unionization. One can only hope for a combination of local-focus and worker-lead efforts to stabilize (rebalance) the economy. I say this not in support of socialist efforts, but to keep them at bay, lest we succumb to communism in the longer term, which at a global level will stagnate society as a whole.
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this has ai writing smell all over it. entire paragraphs that just say it's-not-this-it's-that over and over again
It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat things quite so often.
I doubt a human would use it repetitively, even if it is common. This was most likely written paragraph-by-paragraph by AI, causing the repetition, if I had to guess.
I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.
> EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.
No thanks. How would you find violators, with AI detectors? Might as well go back to throwing people into lakes to see if they float.
The AI turned me into a newt!
Why does it matter? The information in the post still accurately captures a sentiment held by many people.
The complaint is definitely getting old. I wonder how many HN threads at this point don't have someone speculating about AI-generated content.
Hopefully @dang adds something to the guidelines to discourage it.
I hope so. Random accusations of "this feels like AI" don't add anything to the conversation and are genuinely harmful to those accused when there is no AI involved.
AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.
AI generated content in the comments is already prohibited. I hope we extend the restrictions to submissions entirely.
I would rather people who don't currently have a voice due to language barriers or simply poor communications skills be able to use LLMs than try to gatekeep them.
And I'm certainly weary of "someone used an em-dash, must be GPT" low-value comments.
I certainly hope we gatekeep them. "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to translate for me" -> "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to refine my thoughts for me" -> "I just need my hallucinatory text generator to generate my comment for me". This is a damn near antithesis of this place.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
perhaps it is the nature of their thought process
perhaps they blur their poetry
did they use an LLM in 2020: https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
I had the same reaction. The disclaimer at the bottom doesn't mention AI, but I have a feeling this was generated from a prompt to consolidate the 24 human submissions into a single essay.
Tangentially, I really look forward to the day "Not X but Y" stops being so overused by LLMs. It's a valid and useful construction in a vacuum, one which we should be able to use, but its overuse has gone past semantic satiety into something like semantic emesis.
Most of the "this is AI" complaints demonstrate the illiteracy of many of those making them.
Say more, I'd love to know how this is a demonstration of illiteracy
Because "I haven't seen this literary tool" or "I wouldn't think to use it" or "It doesn't match my perception of human literary tools", it must be artificial.
It's far more telling that you'd imagine this is a literary tool so interesting or complex that other people haven't seen it or thought of it
https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+not+x+its+y
Speaking about telling it's called negative parallelism not " it's not x it's y". Don't be proud of ignorance even if you don't care for the subject.
Kinda funny how we went full circle with you calling me ignorant and illiterate on the basis of not using your preferred terminology, as opposed to the actual, obvious meaning of the subject
Ignorant and illiterate don't take the whip from me if you are so generous with it on yourself.
this comment has ai writing smell all over it.