8 ms·

Things I want to say to my boss

247 points by casca 9mo ago

ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
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.
beeboop0 9mo ago
[dead]
squeefers 9mo ago
id love to see these people lead a team whilst sticking to their own advice
- hnlurker22 9mo ago
  We found the boss guys
  - squeefers 9mo ago
    i used to say stuff like this until i was given a team, I then never wanted to be in charge of people again.
tayo42 9mo ago
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.
- ctkhn 9mo ago
  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
- venturecruelty 9mo ago
  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."
- nh23423fefe 9mo ago
  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.
  - abroszka33 9mo ago
    > 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.
  - KaiserPro 9mo ago
    > 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
reallymental 9mo ago
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.
- pwillia7 9mo ago
  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_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
  - phantasmish 9mo ago
    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.
repeekad 9mo ago
“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
- elicash 9mo ago
  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.
  - bob1029 9mo ago
    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.
    - pdimitar 9mo ago
      What is 1099?
      - pseudalopex 9mo ago
        1099 is a US tax form. They meant contracting probably.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    - psunavy03 9mo ago
      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?
glitchc 9mo ago
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.
- georgeecollins 9mo ago
  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.
- venturecruelty 9mo ago
  >What's really changed since then? Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
- _vqpz 9mo ago
  Let's also not assume anything about the past based on Hollywood TV shows made 50 years later...
- agenticfish 9mo ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    Most so called documentaries contain a lot of fiction too.
    - linhns 9mo ago
      Yep, considering they need actors also for those flashback scenes.
  - everdrive 9mo ago
lukashahnart 9mo ago
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%.
- grimgrin 9mo ago
  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
ivanovm 9mo ago
this has ai writing smell all over it. entire paragraphs that just say it's-not-this-it's-that over and over again
- grimgrin 9mo ago
  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-world-has-changed https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
- jnovek 9mo ago
  Why does it matter? The information in the post still accurately captures a sentiment held by many people.
  - macintux 9mo ago
    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.
    - parliament32 9mo ago
      AI generated content in the comments is already prohibited. I hope we extend the restrictions to submissions entirely.
      - macintux 9mo ago
        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.
        parliament32 9mo ago
tracker1 9mo ago
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.
ArcHound 9mo ago
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.
- AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
  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.
  - ArcHound 9mo ago
    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.
  - cons0le 9mo ago
    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
  - keybored 9mo ago
    > 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.
rdtsc 9mo ago
> 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.
- FatherOfCurses 9mo ago
  The most galling part of this is that management thinks we're all too stupid to notice.
firefoxd 9mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806948 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903
- everdrive 9mo ago
  >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.
  - abroszka33 9mo ago
    > 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.
jcalvinowens 9mo ago
Wow, brilliantly written. It's been a long time since I've read something I identify so personally with. Bravo.
ramesh31 9mo ago
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.
- KaiserPro 9mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
KaiserPro 9mo ago
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.
- mordae 9mo ago
  You hire caring direct reportees.
WhyOhWhyQ 9mo ago
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.
- macintux 9mo ago
  I worked indirectly with such a boss, and just a few months of exposure to that toxicity was enough to leave scars.
- VoodooJuJu 9mo ago
  [dead]
- ls-a 9mo ago
  Sounds like my ex
- eleveriven 9mo ago
  I hope you're in a place now where you can start untangling their behavior from your sense of self
- whatamidoingyo 9mo ago
  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.
yakkomajuri 9mo ago
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.
- pavel_lishin 9mo ago
  That's what I thought, too - turns out this link is to just one of the essays.
- hitekker 9mo ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. The text at the bottom is rather misleading.
dclowd9901 9mo ago
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.
- cons0le 9mo ago
  We can't even agree to let people WFH and stop burning capital on useless leases / real estate
truth_seeker 9mo ago
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
295fge 9mo ago
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.
csours 9mo ago
> "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.
- ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
  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.
pdimitar 9mo ago
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. I wish OP does the same.
- rhyperior 9mo ago
  "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?
AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
> 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.
kermatt 9mo ago
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."
psychoslave 9mo ago
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.
- tehjoker 9mo ago
  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.
orzig 9mo ago
> 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.
- cons0le 9mo ago
  What's funny is you totally can fake that you care. They just don't want/need to
fisherjeff 9mo ago
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.
- procaryote 9mo ago
  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
stego-tech 9mo ago
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.
- eleveriven 9mo ago
  Most workers aren't asking for miracles. Just let them do their jobs without turning everything into a political chess match.
  - stego-tech 9mo ago
    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.
hnlurker22 9mo ago
OP, your boss seems so cute compared to mine.
eleveriven 9mo ago
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
lcuff 9mo ago
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 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
- kakacik 9mo ago
  > 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.
- dasil003 9mo ago
  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.
hinkley 9mo ago
> 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.
procaryote 9mo ago
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.
supjeff 9mo ago
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.
- BrandoElFollito 9mo ago
  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.
dwoldrich 9mo ago
Attitude matters. How ambitious or timid were you? And, are we so helpless?
CaptWillard 9mo ago
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.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ElevenLathe 9mo ago
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.
thewileyone 9mo ago
"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.
anders35 9mo ago
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jadenconelly6 9mo ago
[dead]

247 points by casca 9mo ago

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.

beeboop0 9mo ago

[dead]

squeefers 9mo ago

id love to see these people lead a team whilst sticking to their own advice

hnlurker22 9mo ago
We found the boss guys
- squeefers 9mo ago
  i used to say stuff like this until i was given a team, I then never wanted to be in charge of people again.

tayo42 9mo ago

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.

ctkhn 9mo ago
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
venturecruelty 9mo ago
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."
nh23423fefe 9mo ago
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.
- abroszka33 9mo ago
  > 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.
- KaiserPro 9mo ago
  > 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

reallymental 9mo ago

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.

pwillia7 9mo ago
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_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
- phantasmish 9mo ago
  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.

repeekad 9mo ago

“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

elicash 9mo ago
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.
- bob1029 9mo ago
  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.
  - pdimitar 9mo ago
    What is 1099?
    - pseudalopex 9mo ago
      1099 is a US tax form. They meant contracting probably.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  - psunavy03 9mo ago
    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?

glitchc 9mo ago

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.

georgeecollins 9mo ago
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.
venturecruelty 9mo ago
>What's really changed since then? Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
_vqpz 9mo ago
Let's also not assume anything about the past based on Hollywood TV shows made 50 years later...
agenticfish 9mo ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  Most so called documentaries contain a lot of fiction too.
  - linhns 9mo ago
    Yep, considering they need actors also for those flashback scenes.
- everdrive 9mo ago

lukashahnart 9mo ago

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%.

grimgrin 9mo ago
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

ivanovm 9mo ago

this has ai writing smell all over it. entire paragraphs that just say it's-not-this-it's-that over and over again

grimgrin 9mo ago
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-world-has-changed https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
jnovek 9mo ago
Why does it matter? The information in the post still accurately captures a sentiment held by many people.
- macintux 9mo ago
  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.
  - parliament32 9mo ago
    AI generated content in the comments is already prohibited. I hope we extend the restrictions to submissions entirely.
    - macintux 9mo ago
      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.
      - parliament32 9mo ago

tracker1 9mo ago

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.

ArcHound 9mo ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
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.
- ArcHound 9mo ago
  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.
- cons0le 9mo ago
  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
- keybored 9mo ago
  > 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.

rdtsc 9mo ago

> 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.

FatherOfCurses 9mo ago
The most galling part of this is that management thinks we're all too stupid to notice.

firefoxd 9mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806948 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903

everdrive 9mo ago
>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.
- abroszka33 9mo ago
  > 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.

jcalvinowens 9mo ago

Wow, brilliantly written. It's been a long time since I've read something I identify so personally with. Bravo.

ramesh31 9mo ago

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.

KaiserPro 9mo ago
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.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]

KaiserPro 9mo ago

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.

mordae 9mo ago
You hire caring direct reportees.

WhyOhWhyQ 9mo ago

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.

macintux 9mo ago
I worked indirectly with such a boss, and just a few months of exposure to that toxicity was enough to leave scars.
VoodooJuJu 9mo ago
[dead]
ls-a 9mo ago
Sounds like my ex
eleveriven 9mo ago
I hope you're in a place now where you can start untangling their behavior from your sense of self
whatamidoingyo 9mo ago
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.

yakkomajuri 9mo ago

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.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago
That's what I thought, too - turns out this link is to just one of the essays.
hitekker 9mo ago
Thanks for pointing that out. The text at the bottom is rather misleading.

dclowd9901 9mo ago

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.

cons0le 9mo ago
We can't even agree to let people WFH and stop burning capital on useless leases / real estate

truth_seeker 9mo ago

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

295fge 9mo ago

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.

csours 9mo ago

> "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.

ProllyInfamous 9mo ago
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.

pdimitar 9mo ago

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. I wish OP does the same.

rhyperior 9mo ago
"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?

AnimalMuppet 9mo ago

> 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.

kermatt 9mo ago

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."

psychoslave 9mo ago

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.

tehjoker 9mo ago
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.

orzig 9mo ago

> 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.

cons0le 9mo ago
What's funny is you totally can fake that you care. They just don't want/need to

fisherjeff 9mo ago

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.

procaryote 9mo ago
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

stego-tech 9mo ago

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.

eleveriven 9mo ago
Most workers aren't asking for miracles. Just let them do their jobs without turning everything into a political chess match.
- stego-tech 9mo ago
  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.

hnlurker22 9mo ago

OP, your boss seems so cute compared to mine.

eleveriven 9mo ago

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

lcuff 9mo ago

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 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243

kakacik 9mo ago
> 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.
dasil003 9mo ago
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.

hinkley 9mo ago

> 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.

procaryote 9mo ago

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.

supjeff 9mo ago

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.

BrandoElFollito 9mo ago
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.

dwoldrich 9mo ago

Attitude matters. How ambitious or timid were you? And, are we so helpless?

CaptWillard 9mo ago

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.

deleted 9mo ago

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ElevenLathe 9mo ago

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.

thewileyone 9mo ago

"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.

anders35 9mo ago

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jadenconelly6 9mo ago

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