7 ms·

This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathiz

This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them. It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.

sidcool 3y ago
At least it's not AI generated junk
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Hah, I've done this with people before! Drop me an email. I can tell from your name that we'd vibe.
yard2010 3y ago
I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style. Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"
t0mas88 3y ago
Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.
dclowd9901 3y ago
You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.
- consp 3y ago
  The Peter principle applies since in a lot of countries engineering is undervalued and the only way to gain anything is to become "management" to the detriment of everybody else.
whoknowsidont 3y ago
>It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon. Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc. >This person sounds like an energy vampire. The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations. As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  > The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations. There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
  - dimask 3y ago
    > Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good. Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.
torginus 3y ago
Management sucks period. As to why management sucks my friend offered a good insight: Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want. These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there. As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.
- t43562 3y ago
  That is probably true to a degree but IMO we make brutal decisions about code when we have to and get it wrong and so on. Why when it comes to organising people into some effort would we not have brutal decisions to make and get them wrong? Why expose yourself to blame when you could hide in the group? It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.
  - torginus 3y ago
    Lol this is all a smokescreen. Let me give you an analogy. There are 3 people in a car, one driver, one navigator, one manager. The manager provides 'oversight' and 'takes responsibility'. If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over. In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers. Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example). Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success. To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).
lijok 3y ago
The line of thinking you're showcasing is exactly of the type I've had to deal with in so many companies before, and is the real energy vampire. Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap. That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI
- watwut 3y ago
  They did not asked for platitudes nor euphemisms. They asked to reduce resentment vomit that lowers actual informational value. If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.
  - lijok 3y ago
    This is exactly what I'm talking about.
    - kys_now 3y ago
      [dead]
robocat 3y ago
> This person sounds like an energy vampire... Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/
gardenhedge 3y ago
"energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs

sidcool 3y ago

At least it's not AI generated junk

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.

ludicity 3y ago
Hah, I've done this with people before! Drop me an email. I can tell from your name that we'd vibe.

yard2010 3y ago

I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style. Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"

t0mas88 3y ago

Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.

dclowd9901 3y ago

You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.

consp 3y ago
The Peter principle applies since in a lot of countries engineering is undervalued and the only way to gain anything is to become "management" to the detriment of everybody else.

whoknowsidont 3y ago

>It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon. Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc. >This person sounds like an energy vampire. The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations. As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.

bowsamic 3y ago
> The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations. There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
- dimask 3y ago
  > Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good. Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.

torginus 3y ago

Management sucks period. As to why management sucks my friend offered a good insight: Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want. These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there. As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.

t43562 3y ago
That is probably true to a degree but IMO we make brutal decisions about code when we have to and get it wrong and so on. Why when it comes to organising people into some effort would we not have brutal decisions to make and get them wrong? Why expose yourself to blame when you could hide in the group? It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.
- torginus 3y ago
  Lol this is all a smokescreen. Let me give you an analogy. There are 3 people in a car, one driver, one navigator, one manager. The manager provides 'oversight' and 'takes responsibility'. If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over. In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers. Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example). Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success. To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).

lijok 3y ago

The line of thinking you're showcasing is exactly of the type I've had to deal with in so many companies before, and is the real energy vampire. Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap. That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI

watwut 3y ago
They did not asked for platitudes nor euphemisms. They asked to reduce resentment vomit that lowers actual informational value. If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.
- lijok 3y ago
  This is exactly what I'm talking about.
  - kys_now 3y ago
    [dead]

robocat 3y ago

> This person sounds like an energy vampire... Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/

gardenhedge 3y ago

"energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs