A few years back I got a new manager and this was her first people manager role. She was awful. Micromanaged about useless things, bother you at odd hours for not very important topics. Her whole team would usually just sit around and say “I can’t believe how bad she is.”
I got a feedback request from her boss, so I listed 3 things she could do better. Pretty sure her boss wouldn’t follow up.
Had my 1-on-1 with her and she asked “Any feedback?”. I thought for a second, then just went “what the hell, let’s do it”, and spent the next 10 minutes telling her all the things she does wrong.
She was incredibly thankful for the feedback as no one else was willing to give her direct feedback.
She didn’t change overnight, but we had an absolutely great relationship after that. If I didn’t like something she did, I told her right away.
I even blew up at her about a year later because she kept cutting me off on a big presentation. She apologized and it never happened again.
My opinion is that if you give direct, honest feedback that's about the thing-that-is-done rather than about the person who's doing it, you do the other person a service. If they're offended about it or don't take it well, that's on them.
It matters a lot how you say it, though. I like the shit sandwich a lot, where you do compliment-criticism-compliment, but that's just a method of ordering the feedback, you shouldn't lie about it.
Do you think it's better to start with the shit and end with the compliments, or to start with the compliments and end with the shit? I think it's better to sandwich the shit in-between, so yes, shit sandwiches don't work, but they work better than the alternatives.
When I see people using the "sandwich" method on me it is usually pretty clear that the only reason they are giving compliments is just to soften their criticisms, so I would rather just get the criticisms on their own. Not every criticism or set of criticisms needs to be accompanied with something positive. If there are many points of feedback, some positive and some negative, I think they should be split into logical categories, mixing together positive and negative feedback, rather than trying to completely surround criticisms with compliments.
However you order it, though. Be honest and direct, and include corrections to give them a path forward. That's the best way to end on a positive note.
> However you order it, though. Be honest and direct, and include corrections to give them a path forward. That's the best way to end on a positive note.
OK, I think your comment is the best example of why lots of people don't like the shit sandwich. You're literally acknowledging that the goal was to deliver the shit and that the ordering is just a detail on delivering it (i.e. the details of the compliments are rather unimportant, but the details of the shit are). Furthermore, the goal wasn't even to deliver the shit, but to "include corrections".
I would strongly recommend people read good communications books (e.g. Difficult Conversations, Crucial Conversations, etc). If your goal is to deliver a message, with corrective action already prepared, you are not having a discussion, nor are you having a conversation. What is generally missing in such interactions are:
- Discussing your role in creating the other person's bad performance. Take this a number of degrees further (the role of your team, department, organization, etc)
- Getting the other person's perspective
- Identifying barriers to better performance
And quite a bit more.
Perhaps many managers are open to discuss all of the above, but they never indicate it, and their posture doesn't match. Certainly, delivering shit with corrective action at the ready does not.
Difficult Conversations is a very good book. I'd also recommend The Culture Map.
Yes, you do want to have those conversations where you try to discover and work through the reasons behind behavioral or performance problems.
When communicating the problem, however, you often need to communicate expectations. Discussing and listening to feedback on the expectations is vital. But clarity in presenting your view of the problem is just as vital, so as to be talking about the same thing.
The initial discussion I was responding to was about delivery of an assessment. You should have many conversations and observations before you reach the point of assessment. Once there, you've moved on to instigation of correction or improvement (either for you or for the other person, often both).
> Do you think it's better to start with the shit and end with the compliments, or to start with the compliments and end with the shit? I think it's better to sandwich the shit in-between
False trichotomy?
Set up a culture of honest feedback. And set up a culture promoting change vs sticks. Lots of other approaches. You can't divorce the culture from the presentation. If your focus is only on how you present your feedback without examining the wider culture, then you're focusing on theater.
I prefer to get them separately and directly . Make a compliment and leave it there. Criticize and leave it there. If you often use the sandwich method I will just wait for what comes after the first part so the compliment is worthless. Don’t give a long speech before you get to the point.
Spot on. I have to wait for the actual feedback and suggestions which to my managers credit are often useful and insightful and on point. But what precedes the feedback can be mind numbing.
An alternative is context, counter-argument, argument
"we currently xxxx, and although yyyyy, zzzz is still better. Make the case against your own argument or for an alternative first, to show you understand both sides, can exhibit some empathy, and to prevent the inevitable rebuttal. If your argument isnt well received, youve still framed the counter-argument in a way that leaves the subsequent conversation about moving forward with it in an easier place, because now everyone knows you understand what is being asked of you.
I just want the feedback. Here's what I saw happening, I think that was wrong because of this and that and you should try doing this other thing more instead. That's just helpful, no need to cushion it.
If the shit sandwich doesn't work on you, that's on you. In fact the goal for personal growth is to be able to take the shit with or without the sandwich. Feedback delivered roughly is still feedback, in fact the roughest feedback is often the most valuable. It's the stuff that should have been said a long time ago.
When someone is given feedback they'll walk away with one prominent takeaway. If the first piece of feedback was positive, the second corrective and the last positive, that person is going to walk away thinking they're doing a great job.
If you have a piece of feedback just give that feedback. Don't decorate it. Don't sweeten it up. Be direct, objective and be helpful if it requires support to implement.
> If the shit sandwich doesn't work on you, that's on you.
And if people never believe your compliments, then that's on you, because you'll quickly get the reputation of manufacturing compliments only for the purpose of delivering shit (regardless of whether this is true or not).
> In fact the goal for personal growth is to be able to take the shit with or without the sandwich.
You misread the GP. When he said "Shit sandwiches don't work." he explicitly added "People can still tell when they're being fed a load of shit." His complaint isn't that people can't handle the shit. It's that they realize they're being given shit and have a problem with the (real or perceived) artifice around it.
He is projecting his personal preferences on the human race. The idea that all the people in the world handle criticism exactly the same way is absurd. I have come across many people in my career who needed criticism to be broken to them gently. Others (evidently highly represented on Hacker News, but not from my experience in the general US population, maybe in some other cultures) prefer that it be direct.
Other comments in the thread were along the lines of "it's not good criticism if it's not delivered the way I like it" which is basically just saying that you enjoy shooting yourself in the foot.
Yeah, at a couple of companies I worked as a middle manager we had training on how to manage people and they made a point of telling us to avoid the shit sandwich. That it's really not effective and managers use it because they don't feel strong enough to give the feedback without sugar coating it. My anecdata doesn't include enough points for me to be sure if it is effective or not, but those trainers who had seen large numbers of cases insisted it was ineffective.
I think it depends a lot on how it's done, and what the speaker's genuine feelings are.
If someone holds me in contempt, they're not going to magically make me feel okay about their negative feedback by going through the motions of sandwiching it.
But if they respect me and genuinely think I'm doing some significant things well, then making those things clear can help me to avoid taking the negatives personally.
How can this person make you feel that they respect you?
I work with a lot of Junior engineers. I do want to believe in them but want to express to them that their fuck ups are pretty serious and they shouldn’t repeat that. But there isn’t really a way to be both direct and also not an asshole ️
Probably it depends at least as much on context (the sum of all your interactions) as on how you present any single critique -- I know that I can take a piece of criticism very differently depending on who is giving it, and that's not just a function of our formal relationship or their position in the hierarchy. So making a point of being sincerely positive whenever appropriate might help, even if you don't have anything good to say while delivering a rebuke.
Also it's important to take into account each individual's temperament: try to learn which ones will be scared straight by a gentle word (and discouraged by anything more than that), and which ones need the severity of their mistakes hammered home. Also where they fall on the 'respect = unvarnished honesty' versus 'respect = niceness and politeness' spectrum.
If you were calling me out on a big mistake, it would definitely be important to control any emotions like exasperation or bafflement, and focus in a matter-of-fact way on what happened/why it was a mistake/what to do next time.
when a junior messes something up, then that's usually because they didn't know better (or they didn't have the skill/experience to avoid it). that's why they are juniors, i don't expect them to know better. but that also means, it's an opportunity for learning:
remember last week, when you brought the server down by typing mkfs instead of fsck? cost us a few days to get the server back up. but that's not your fault. it's our fault for not having a better recovery strategy. nevertheless it is a good idea to avoid mistakes like that. here are a few tips...
You need to create a space where people can fail safely; an area where someone can take a risk, and if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world, but they can get some acclaim if it does work well.
Everyone is attempting to rise to the level of their competence and ambition. I've had the opportunity of dealing with a few billionaires, and their teams. It showed me that we are all just trying to navigate a difficult world.
The more exposure I get to folks way “above” me in business, or riches, or whatever, the more convinced I am that very few people at any level are really much good at what they do and most of what goes on is just very serious role-playing and play-pretend, which realization is at least as horrifying as it is comforting.
Honestly, I think most want an honest wage, or as much as they can get, and then having work that doesn't interfere with their lives outside of 9-5 too much.
> Had my 1-on-1 with her and she asked “Any feedback?”
Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago.
My current bosses are all the smartest people that they have ever met. Here I am not bragging, I only mention this to give credence to my argument: I have performance reviews that would knock you down they are so good; 400 points out of a possible 400 points on 3 out of 6 sections, with 347 ponts being my lowest score for an overall average of 370. That puts me in the uppermost category. Clearly I'm appreciated... Any idea I have is not. These folks only want yes men.
Recently I saw my direct supervisor watching the department director doing something that I know my supervisor knew was wrong--yet he never said a word. I did though. Incidentally my Supervisor was recently promoted by the Deptarment Director.
Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.
>Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.
I've been paying a high cost for having urges like this for a long time.
I'm curious. How many people are like this? Is this the majority or the minority? I've had trusted friends tell me that I'm crazy and I'm in the minority.
I think it's the minority, I work on a floor with about 4 other people like that in a floor of 200 or so, so it's a small amount of people.
It's still the approach I take. If I think something isn't right, I'm going to call it out. Try and convince me I'm wrong! I won't be offended, it's the idea I'm attacking, not you personally.
I've tried to model different ways at giving the feedback/cc, I don't think it matters, most people tie their ego to their idea, a few do not.
// Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago.
How does one find good managers(or entrepreneurs) who are really open to great ideas and value them well(in money)?
"Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago."
I think this is more a case of rose-colored glasses about the past. There has always been a wide variety of personality types who can/can't deal with criticism/perceived threats to their status as being above the people below them.
Ages ago I was a crappy manager at a crappy job and honestly too young to manage myself even.
It was one of those places where managers saw themselves as little hall monitors or police looking at what people had on their desk and I'm ashamed to say I played along.
So one day I'm talking to this guy who was fed up and labeled a problem and he says something like:
"Does any of this even matter, do we do a better job because of it or do any of us get paid more?"
Everyone complained bickered about the rules, but nobody has said it like that...I didn't have an answer.
I suddenly realized, yeah this is all just pointless aggravation for everyone. So I quit enforcing dumb rules and we all had a better time... the managers above me talked about these rules and sent out all sorts of emails and directives to enforce them, and somehow me not doing it wasn't even noticed.
The place didn't get any better, but at least if you were on my team you didn't get hassled about stupid things.
It's like tragedy of commons for management. The manager gets nothing by enforcing corporate rules on his team. But not enforcing them usually doesn't cost them anything while improving team morale, good will and in most cases retention, productivity.
I see many managers strictly follow up on logging leaves or restricting work from homes or enforcing release deadlines as if it personally costs them something while usually enforcement is just discretionary. The managers who have figured this out usually have happier teams.
Sounds like mismanagement in the higher echelon. The team leader should lead up the chain to ensure deadlines are realistic and hindering restrictions are dealt with.
How does he do this? By complying with corporate rules to show good faith and intervene when necessary.
It's also important that he understands the rules and communicates them to the team.
The team manager should be on good terms with upper management and the team.
We've had the same reply at a previous company. The answer was "this comes straight from the general manager, so we must do this". I'm 100% sure the GM had no idea what's going on, so, yeah, terrible manager right there refusing to budge.
I would be careful with selectively dismissing rules if I were just beginning a management career, as I would potentially be opening up myself for liability in case something goes wrong.
It takes lot of experience and wisdom to accurately distinguish between useless and seemingly useless but critical rules.
The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure. If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved. If you hold back from talking to your boss, build up grudges, then launch them uphill.... even if your facts are correct, you have just become a problem.
On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
> On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
Your optimism is refreshing.
Escalation is basically a waste of time. At that point, you need to have your ejection position set up anyhow, so you might as well just leave and have all the offending idiots still think you're a "great dude" who just moved on.
If you have an effective external social relationship higher in the power structure, then you're better off just getting the offending manager removed behind the scenes.
This is ignoring the obvious power imbalance, because your boss can fire you.
I completely agree that you should try to communicate openly whenever possible, but let's not pretend like it's a level playing field. Of course, if the situation is so bad you can't talk openly with your boss, I'm not sure how much you're really losing by being fired (assuming you are able to find employment elsewhere, as is often the case for engineers today).
Communicating openly is a mistake. You should communicate in the way it serves both your purpose and the enterprise and to communicate you must know your audience and how the message should be passed in order to succeed.
Sometimes the only way to change things is to incept the idea.
How do you know beforehand what sort of environment you're really involving yourself with? What sort of heuristics exist during the hiring / interview phase that let's you sort good from bad? I have a few of my own sniff tests, but outside of knowing (and really trusting) a contact at a place, it's sort of a crap shoot.
My experience has shown me that it can take years to find the seams that you need to tug on to expose deep-seated work culture problems.
During every interview, I always ask "what do you like about working here?" It's extremely easy to tell by how they react whether or not they're being forthcoming. So far it's been 100% effective for me, at least for choosing good places (it's possible I filtered good places erroneously but I wouldn't know because I never accepted the offer).
There are other more specific questions you can ask, but they tend to vary enough I wouldn't offer them as general advice.
Can you share an example of an answer that would discourage you from working somewhere? Just the interviewer's reluctance to answer or giving a superficial answer?
I have asked interviewers the opposite: what aspects of the team or company need improvement and what steps are being taken to address them? Of course they will sugarcoat their answer, but you can still glean some insight into the company culture for addressing problems.
The only thing I look for is whether or not they seem happy while answering. If people really like their jobs, they will smile and tell you how great it is and you'll believe them.
In my experience most people don't really like their jobs and are just in it for the paycheck (there's nothing wrong with that, bit if you're talented enough to be picky you should be).
Power imbalance, income imbalance, responsibility imbalance.
Your boss is more responsible at everything you should also do - communicating, noticing issues, noticing morale issues, being able to understand an issue beyond half-sentences, raising issues with management, trying to fix the issues, etc.
So I say, damn it. If the boss doesn't understand that I'm making my last warning before going over his head, bad luck for him.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough but if I wasn't clear enough, bad luck for him. Should have noticed it anyway, he/she is being payed to do so.
What you say is true per course, but it's uncommon to find managers that are humble and secure enough in their own personal value to treat everyone with respect and growth mindset. It's an IC's market right now, keep moving til you find someone that treats you well and encourages this.
It feels like this comment and the other comments in this thread are all dancing around the same issue: The problem is incompetent people getting ahold of power in an organization. How that comes to pass makes little difference: maybe they have personal connections to leadership, maybe they just got lucky and failed upward, whatever it might be: as soon as leadership fails in their jobs in this way, i.e. promoting the incompetent, then the company is already dead.
These people are like a cancer, and just like a cancer, as their influence grows and their power grows, the patient, the business, suffers. Sometimes businesses can last years, decades, with a number of these tumors if they're controlled, or if the business is just so healthy that it can take the strain they put upon it. But in my mind, as soon as competence takes a back seat to who you know, as soon as that line is crossed by any member of the company leadership, then that's the end. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
And this one I don't know how to solve. Were I a C level executive in a company, I'd constantly have my eyes out for this kind of shit, and excise it as soon as I could. But it seems most C-levels don't care all that much. Maybe I wouldn't if I was at that level.
It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. That also might be the C-Suite attitude, that if they select only for what they think is performant, they lose diversity of ideas.
Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. I'ts a cultural failure to keep people that only try and make people (they self select as competent) better.
In the case of the op story. It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. It's evaluating the idea too quickly. It's rowing upstream, when they are asking everyone else to row down. When they are looking for momentum, and the details come later, that person can derail the process. The reason they started working in secret, where everybody in the company but op knew, is that op was disruptive to the culture of trying. They were too pragmatic, too literal, too technical. Sit down, listen to what management is asking for, then go work on a pitch, where your delivery is "we can deliver what you are asking for (and also reuse most of our old work, saving you time and money!) Be on their team, not in opposition to it.
Replace but with yes, and at the beginning of sentences.
If we're talking about what's best for the company, then only the relevance of the facts should matter.
Up to a certain point, of course. But all this talk of how to deliver information so the recipient feels nice about receiving bad feedback (shit sandwiches and such) shouldn't matter.
Its very possible for one person in a meeting to be ahead of everyone else, and that they need to sit back and let the rest of the room organically catch up. Sometimes it feels like its your place to either "get everyone on the same page" or "move forward because we are stuck in a rut" but actually youre just being disruptive to everyone elses learning.
To a point. While any given speaker should always endeavor to deliver their point for maximum effectiveness, by the same token, discounting or outright ignoring feedback simply because it's worded poorly or timed poorly is like rejecting your paycheck because it's printed on green paper instead of white. The money is still there, and it's still usable, and you're only hurting yourself because it didn't come how you thought it should.
Frankly, as someone who leads a team myself, yeah I've had to take colleagues aside and say "this isn't how we do things" but I certainly wouldn't just bin their entire point without consideration to save "face."
I don’t know—“culture of trying” sounds too much like “reality distortion field.”
Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. I’ve seen far more half-baked money pit projects than risks that paid off in my career. In tech in general there is way too much optimism and ignoring inconvenient facts/constraints until disaster is clear. Someone who can EFFECTIVELY steer teams away from horrible decisions is worth their weight in gold.
In the OP’s case, he simply couldn’t effectively communicate this, and failed to notice the rampant nepotism up his management chain, but his heart was in the right place.
>Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas.
Absolutely. And not just crazy ideas, but maybe we'll intended ideas that are misaligned with each other or the overall goals and strategic roadmap. Too many autonomous silos that are all high functioning tend to not like a skeptic saying, "this is great in isolation but the sum of these parts don't fit coherently." They also don't like "this works, but it's an MVP at best, and isn't sustainable." Skeptics cognizant of technical debt, may meet unwelcomness in an org not willing to acknowledge it.
> It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to.
This is entirely possible but in the case of OP, and in the larger scope, it's irrelevant. If you have a product manager, for example, who's job it is to oversee the development of a product, they can be the best damn communicator, they could be the nicest person, they could be financially minded and have great marketing skills, they could have excellent personal hygiene and be fantastic husbands. All of that means precisely nothing if they are so bad at managing the product that they cannot deliver that product. I'm not saying that everybody like OP's boss here should be fired, per se, there's probably a place in the organization for them. But once they become entrenched in a place they don't belong in the organization, again, it's cancer. And it's fatal.
> Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude.
Except this assumes a rising tide. If the tide falls, perhaps because your captain is not good at gauging tides, you're beached.
> It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees.
Or it's recognizing that the problem management is trying to solve has already been solved. This can mean one of many things, but the two that spring immediately to mind is that a competitor (or competitors) have already solved this problem, and that management just wants a slice of that pie too, failing to consider that simply offering isn't enough, you need to have a differentiator. See, for example, all the game developers who chased the various trends like Battle Royale, and before that Military Shooters, and before that MMO's, and all the failed businesses that those trends left in their wake. Alternately, and this seems to be the situation where OP was, their own business had already solved this need; this is a good place to be, and wanting to increase revenue by providing a new product is a damn hard, borderline arcana level task to do without either A) alienating existing customers or B) cannibalizing the users of an existing product.
I don't think management is by default full of shit, and must prove themselves wrong. That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees. If I have questions you're damn right I'm going to ask them, and I want answers commensurate with a level of respect that I'm sure my given boss would expect from me. And if your answer is to out me as a nonbeliever, I'm sending out resumes. I have no interest in finding out how this place is going down.
> That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees.
100% agree with that line. If negative upward feedback is a dead end or met with retribution, an organizations communication structure and culture is broken.
In the case of the story the project was a total failure, so it's moot - in hindsight it is simply a fact (trusting the narrator of course) that the manager was incompetent.
If your technical lead doesn't understand your "vision" or perceives that it has major problems, or has deep concerns about process and attrition rate and doesn't feel they can communicate them because the last time they tried you "literally ran away", then that is unquestionably a failure of management.
Don't blame the subordinate calling foul for being "too pragmatic". That's not how hierarchical management works.
The self appointed technical lead, while management was announcing a new project, stood up and said "this project is a bad idea." It probably wasnt the time and the place, even if the technical person was correct. The entire company moved forward and left this person out. There were other better ways to handle dissent.
Maybe they aren't incompetent; that's a story we tell ourselves.
The choices, as I see them: own responsibility for making sure the recipient understands our communications. If they don't, that's on me. If they do, but don't do what I want... I can either accept their decision or move on.
I know changing jobs is hard, but all I can control is to communicate better (differently! and with compassion/empathy!) or leave.
Thats not true. I have worked in many teams and organizations where manaagement and direct supervisors are well regarded. There are inevitably comparative weak links, but thats not the same as incompetence.
The place I work now has a good mix of hyper-competent 1st level managers. Its almost weird, but for sure its a result of the expectation that "team leads" or whatever you want to call them are also managers.
I'm not sure I agree with having the technical guy be the personal manager, but when they only have a couple direct reports a good percentage seem be able to herd the cats semi competently.
That isn't to say there aren't plenty of disasters, but when it works, it works fairly well. I guess you just have to be willing to throw away some of your best technical people when it turns out they don't make good managers, or they turn into just another layer of middle mgmt that needs to be cut in a few years.
Is there a distinction between competency and being any good at your job? I would hesitate to call (most of) my management chain incompetent. I would also hesitate to call (most of) my management any good at their job.
That's not true. In fact I think ALL of my previous bosses have been extremely competent and super smart. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe I've had realistic expectations.
I disagree. No one magically becomes good at their job and management is a different job to engineering. Inevitably every manager is going to suck atleast a little for a period of time.
What we need is more training and culture around feedback at work.
> On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
This assumes that your boss is at all interested in mutual escalation. What if your boss regards it as a non-problem, and thus escalation entirely a waste of time?
You are assuming good faith. This is perhaps not always an accurate model of corporate political life.
Indeed, it's a completely laughable scenario in any corporation that's bigger than, say, 30-50+ employees. (Alternatively: Any corp. that has a dedicated HR department.)
It's just the reality of an asocial entity acting for its own benefit. Once you grow beyond a certain scale incompetence and indifference beyond personal benefit will start to rule the day.
I don’t think this is a function of organization size...
At the megacorp where I work, my manager and I have a very positive relationship. He values me and my contributions. When I am frustrated, he tries to help.
My partner works in a very small firm. Nepotism is the norm, and an utterly incompetent person is tolerated because firing them is politically untenable.
I have no doubts that similar dysfunction can exist anywhere. Surely this is a very per-company, per-department, per-manager sort of thing.
A smaller place can revolve around one or two personalities who create/drive/dictate the internal culture. These people are needed and doing a bad job is only one factor when letting someone go.
Big companies have these people. They are act all social events, know many in senior management. They make friends with everyone have been promoted in areas they have no background but can force a project through because of relationships or understanding internal policy.
Size matters, statistically. About 1% of males are sociopaths a little less for females. Socipaths are drawn towards positions of power. In organizations much larger than 100 people it is quite likely to be lead by a sociopath. APA doesnt call them that anymore. Antisocial personality. It isnt even considered a disorder necessarily. Sometimes they can actually be good leaders precisely because of their lack of empathy.
I am an introvert. It is readily apparent to all, but not a disorder. I am not a psycologist and I don't know more than I have read from non journal sources. But the wiki page lists things like superficial charm, repeated failed relationships, inability to take responsibility for mistakes, diminished affect etc. Again, that i no longer the term preferred. Movies gave the term so much loaded meaning that was inaccurate. They also once had homosexual as a diagnosis and a disorder. Different is only a problem if it is a problem. If suddenly none of us felt sad when we harmed others, I don't think it would turn into mad max.
This is interesting... maybe it's fractal-like? Maybe there are these microcosm(oses,a) that experience these failures of communication and cooperation?
Even if we're being cynical, I think we should still be mindful that (usually) large corporations have dysfunctionaly dynamics. (This is not news, obviously.)
This is the best comment. The only mistake this guy made was giving too much of a fuck about garbage for too long. I was burned by a bad manager early on in my career and in retrospect I'm grateful that I learned the lesson early. In this situation I would be looking at one thing only: how to get out in a way that maximizes my future career success elsewhere.
If your boss' boss is unable to even hear your input (then rightfully delegate it to your boss), that's a failure of being a manager's manager and failure at communication. This is not bypassing your boss, but evidence of possessing two ears, something between them and a heart.
What is a failure, is to expect one employee (your boss) to fix everything, when such initiatives need to be supported by several managers. Changing culture happens from top-downwards and changing the course of culture might take years and years of slow progress.
If your function is being badly managed, you're probably screwed anyway, though it is reasonable to expect assists with other departments and their leaders. If such issues are chronic, change will be slow and you will often find yourself back at square one after the next reorg.
You are absolutely right that is the organization perspective in almost every organization I know that's larger than say 100 employees.
That's why I avoid them. They have every right to their perspective, just as I have every right to interpret it: status quo is supreme. Efficiency, effectiveness and progress are far second. In fact, larger organizations are INTENTIONALLY inefficient, as it limits the damage any one bad actor can accomplish. This makes sense for the large organization, but for the individual perspective, it means those who play politics are more valuable than those who actually get shit done.
It's why I love small businesses. Generally getting shit done is supreme and the need for appearances is less.
I get the appearance game, and many people who refuse to play also get it. But I find it sleazy and fickle. I mean it's mostly based on heuristics. Funny, Adam Smith seems to agree on large corporations being less focused on results: "This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own."
Is this one thing the military does better? They have an open door policy, and plenty of people have used it when faced with a toxic leader. Doesn't always seem like it works out based on my limited reading, but it does work out sometimes, especially if the person one level up the chain of command is a decent leader.
I see a number of specific advantages the military has.
One is civilian oversight. You literally can write your Congressman and complain, and there is an IG office to curb some of the worst abuses. But, that's really only helping you in the worst cases.
Two, the military is a bit like an enormous union where job descriptions are so precise people are relatively interchangeable. And, unlike a union, it applies to management, too, and they will tell people to pack up and move across the world. So if your job description is large enough, your chain of command is constantly cycling as senior people come and go, often from another part of the nation entirely. It's breaking up those cozy connections that the OP was detailing, where all those people were buddies from a long way back.
Three, when senior people have all lost friends to war, suicide, or even training accidents, it injects a healthy degree of candor into every day interactions. I noticed this when I had a mess of errands to run, simply walking from the troop to a commo shop to central in-processing to finance that there was a shift in attitude, an increasing degree of "unreality". (OTOH, we could spend all day standing around with our gear laid out for inspection because our leadership was entirely insulated from the wages paid to 120 men.)
Four, there is some explicit filtering for competence. If you're in a combat arms unit in the Army, your senior leadership is almost certainly Ranger qualified, and they can fail out if their peers don't think they're a good leader. The downside is those guys are routed into the military bureaucracy, so again, it kinda sucks to not be combat arms. But, at least they're not going to bumbling around in a firefight.
Kind of not understanding the reality of the military's mission, and a disconnect from the consequences of their actions. It looked, to me, that they were just following a bunch of steps without thinking about whether any of it works.
> The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure.
Don't forget that your boss' boss may not want to hear about how they hired (and/or keep) the wrong person in the role. It can look like an attack on their own judgment.
Unfortunately, to me this sounds like a politically correct corporate-approved reply an HR would give when explaining why you got fired. In real life, the situation is usually much simpler. If you jump over your bosses' head, and your bosses' boss supports you, they are:
1. Opening themselves for a situation where you'll try to jump over their head next.
2. Giving others a reason to question their own loyalty.
>If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved.
I have never seen this work. Really. If your boss doesn't like you and is not willing to put that aside, there's usually some ego and petty feelings involved and there is no good way out. You can pour endless time and energy into attempts to get it to work, and have it flushed by your boss because not letting you win is an ego thing for them. Or you can shut up, smile and pour that energy into getting the right things on your CV, networking, learning relevant technology and eventually getting a better offer and escaping.
>Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
Nope, it's important because in a BigCo, most ambitious people don't care for being right. They care for maximizing their own income, political influence and career perspectives. And being able to navigate and communicate that will help you align your interests with theirs and get them to actually support you.
>I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.
Isn't at all once you start your own business.
Being smart and stubborn is like having race car. Will make you go nuts sitting in a traffic jam all day. But once you discover where the race track is, you'll find it rewarding to hit the gas and leave everyone else in the dust.
This entire comment is not applicable in the situation described, where there is a huge imbalance of power. The manager is not an equal to be “worked with” the same way fellow ICs are in the way you describe.
What the article describes is a case of nepotism, and expecting someone to “work with” that to a mutually beneficial end seems a bit naive.
The communication failure begins with management. Don't blame the employees if there are no mechanisms/systems/processes in place to report your managers.
You're right, it will build up a grudge that gets launched uphill. That's what I did, after letting my manager litter my codebase for months until he made the big mistake of telling me to shut my mouth, giving me a reason to go to HR.
Everything has its limits. The author of this claimed the guy literally ran away from him. Not much you can do to fix a communication issue when the other party won't engage in a conversation.
That's a useful attitude in many cases, but you must have read a different story than I did, because it seems very unlikely that it would have been effective in this case.
This assumes both parties are after the same thing. There are people that doesn't actually care what the right thing to do is, and only want to do what benefits them.
Ideally incentives should align, but often times what is good for the team / company isn't necessarily what's good for the manager and vice versa.
> Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
I don't follow. In this example Mr. Manager and Mr. Lead single-handedly torpedoed the companies prospects, and were promoted for it. What benefit and growth was accomplished there?
> I don't know if there is a lesson here. But if you are bad at your job, it pays to have good connections.
The lesson here is that companies are social entities, not technical ones. Relationships matter more than profit. If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Developer Hegemony" [0], a book about dealing with this sorts of garbage. Even thought it's forward looking there's a lot of practical advice. Here's a review [1] that does it justice:
> It’s not a book about software development, it is a book about the industry of software development and why it is fundamentally different than “traditional” industries. And it is a book that promises an outlook on “the future of labor”, at least for us developers... It’s about finding your way in an industry that is in very high demand and mostly consists of players that play by the rules of an entirely different game: industrial manufacturing.
That's an interesting read. However what it describes looks like a very shallow version of lam-rim chen-mo, volumes 4-5, that explain the concept of emptiness and the danger of falling into nihilism. Edit: the tricks like "powertalk" and "information poker" are interesting, but rephrasing the book, manipulating people is not a game worth getting good at.
I found that the article (I haven't read the book) makes a reasonable defense of "loserdom" - it's not a bad life if you seek meaning external to work and it certainly offers a more fulfilling existence than that of the deluded clueless.
> If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.
Agreed. Or decide to not play. And just leave to a different job.
One thing though that I see far too commonly is that engineers think that people in power "don't know or care" as opposed to "don't want to know or care" or "know damn well and want it this way". People in power may not be geniuses, but they likely aren't incompetent either. They probably have a fairly solid level of political skill or they wouldn't have gotten to that level.
Start from the assumption that things are shitty for a reason or you are going to miss something important.
To me, starting with the assumption that things are shitty for a reason doesn't mean "start with the assumption that it is ok that things are shitty", but instead, "start with the assumption that the 737-max is shitty because letting it be so is serving someone's interest". Indeed, if someone with technical and political savvy and the talent to think ahead had figured out what interests in Boeing were prioritizing shittiness over safety, that someone might have been able to intervene effectively. If the engineers or statisticians at the FAA who wrote the buried report [1] had had the political savvy to understand why management was burying it and understood how to escalate it, they might have been able to get it out before the second plane crashed.
There is often a (political or human) reason why things are shitty, and if you can understand and game that, you can be more effective in changing the shitty stuff.
no tribe is perfectly flat and knowing which way the gradient goes is a good way to climb it; somewhere it is social and somewhere it is more technical and leaving for a company that's more technical oriented is still playing the game.
however what's common everywhere at the bottom of the gradient is that there lies worse work and the least gratifications and that not playing the game is the sure way to end up at the bottom, from where of course everything looks like it's shit.
so basically, the bad manager was there to intentionally run the departments into the ground so there would be clear spots to axe following the company's acquisition
This is completely typical story. I worked at a bunch of companies and had a chance observing this over and over again.
The truth is that life is not fair.
You and your manager were playing a different game. While you were spending your time and resources trying to do good for your company and to get better at doing that, your manager was spending time scheming in his own interest and also getting better at it.
He beat you with experience. You were spending your time in Jira and IDE while he was building up his own image, perfecting ways to shift blame and building connections.
And you know what? It is fine. Just ask yourself, "would I want to be that person?"
I have a deep lack of respect and huge hatred for these types of ass holes. If I became this type of person I would hate myself.
However, you are right in the fact that many people are like this exist and life is not fair. My hatred is just a personal preference. I can see a lot of people answering your question with a yes... which says a lot about people in general. Most people are ass holes and that's life.
Whilst I tend to agree with this "between the lines" as it were, it's not an attitude I can healthily recommend. Re-shape it to "most people are trying to get ahead and that's life" is a much more helpful way of looking at various situations, and makes human behavior much easier to understand and predict.
You may also find that it reflects back on you some.
It's fine as long you know the game you're playing.
And this is the big issue : no one learn has told you, neither taught you how to play it. But some people were. Those are fine.
For the others (me included) we had to figure out on our own. Learn that we played the game the wrong way, or find another place. It took time, and a lot of investment and efforts are wasted in the process. And some people never learn. Meanwhile, those people stole undeserved credit. And if you ask them, they will tell you its thanks to their leadership and all that bullshit.
Actually, the most important thing you said is that : life is not fair. 100% fully agree.
It is fine. You do your own thing and try to be best at it.
Don't get slowed down by dishonest, non-cooperating types unless you have a lot of people supporting. There is more of them than you alone and they will drag you in their own territory and defeat you with their experience.
Doing something bad is not okay or fine just because you are good at it and passive support by a majority is also not an indicator for whether something is okay or not. Never was and never will be.
I think you are getting it wrong. It is not fine as we should accept it. I mean you, personally, if you want to also succeed in your life, should not get bogged down by it. Shrug, tell yourself "I will learn from it and look for it in the future but right now I am not going to spend resources fighting it because it doesn't matter as much. It's fine."
I read it all. Mistakes were made due to inexperience. Lessons should have been learnt. Wiser should he be by now.
Being aware of enterprise politics and learning how to play them will give you the opportunity to really impact the business.
Never be the guy who says:
1. "nobody does this in the enterprise"
2. "we are doing all of this wrong"
3. "we need to start from the beginning"
4. "my manager is wrong"
Whispers and grabbing coffees with people are much better weapons than being the one that always brings the harsh truth into the meetings.
Beware: pointing fingers to a colleague or your manager to upper management is telling them that they are not making their job good enough, they are not noticing things, and since they tend not to fail and to notice everything, the failure must be you.
At some point you have to decide if the business deserves your effort, and if it were me I would've decided no and walked away long before this guy did.
to put it more succinctly: There are a lot of business I can help be successful, fuck spending my time doing it for this sort of culture.
> There are a lot of business I can help be successful, fuck spending my time doing it for this sort of culture.
That's a reasonable attitude to have. Broadly, it's much easier to get promoted by joining another company anyhow.
However. The higher up in the power structure you get the less able you will be to avoid politics if you want to be effective in your role. This is true, even in technical leadership.
I wouldn't put that so boldly, as I've done that many times and so far have had a relatively successful career as a consultant but also full timer (including manager). Admittedly, it made people very skeptical initially and made the first months less pleasurable, including ruffling feathers. Longer term, somehow that approach has been fairly rewarding.
However I'm sure there's a better way. I'm just the inherently direct type.
I agree with you, and I've done that approach, but it is really more painful and it only works if later on you are considered a Guru (by them, not by you), hard worker and a go-to guy who always helps. And it takes longer to work.
The subtle way is less painful and you begin with the right foot.
> Whispers and grabbing coffees with people are much better weapons than being the one that always brings the harsh truth into the meetings.
There was a point where I was noticing that I was being less politically effective than I had previously been, and I realized that a good bit of that had to do with open office plans. Having these little intimate exchanges is much harder to pull off reliably.
> Other departments rose, the company changed its business model and was bought for 1.1 billion dollars by a private firm....
> They were not fired. They were promoted. The manager is now the Vice President. The lead now leads in the most profitable department. The old VP is now Chief Product Officer....
> But if you are bad at your job, it pays to have good connections.
Were they bad at their jobs? Maybe their job wasn't actually doing good work. It was getting the company purchased for 1.1 billion dollars.
Not the company I want to work at either where that's your job, but it's apparently a lot of the world.
Once I understood this, it made a lot of organizational behavior make more sense to me. It didn't make me like it. But most organizations aren't actually oriented around doing quality work (of any kind of work, internal or external). That is not the job anyone is actually set up to do or incentivized to do. And I'm not totally sure they'd succeed as organizations if they were, that's not the way the world is set up, apparently. Yes, I am having some cynicism problems.
In preparation for their first lousy boss (I hope that I'm not it), I advise my less experienced reports to first think hard on what's important to them about their job before acting. Since the organization might not be working from their view of what's fair or rational, they should plan around some best and worst case scenarios of acting on that belief.
For instance, if working at that company in a particular position is the most important thing to you, then standing up to your bosses is a bad tactic. They could clip your wings or worse. Or if the pay is the most important thing to you but you can get that pay somewhere else, then you should probably leave on good terms for another job. I've seen a lot of people put themselves through unnecessary drama because they just reacted.
In my case, I find bad bosses to be intellectually and emotionally offensive. So, I will work the system to either see if they can be better or manage them out. This is a terrible way to manage your career if you care about job security.
But I plan accordingly. I had to build up my savings, create a strong internal network of people across departments with similar values, deliver business results to build credibility with more senior managers and execs, etc. And most importantly, recognize that I could lose and be ok with it. There are some real downsides, but it works for who I am.
I know folks here are beating up the author for being naive or whatever, but I respect people who put skin in the game for what they believe is right, trying to build a better environment, and helping people that they care about.
Once a company gets past ~20 employees the CEO can't evaluate employee competence directly and has to rely on proxies.
In sufficiently large companies, gaming these proxies gets you promoted faster than doing great work. This is one reason big incumbents eventually fail.
I propose required anonymous 3 month evaluations from all team members to be evaluated by a department that is unbiased.
Maybe even a computing system that raises alarms when a score falls too low to prevent corruption.
You gotta balance this right with more checks and balances though as you don't want employees overpowering management either. It's a complicated thing.
This has always been a rule that I’ve followed throughout my working career. Whenever someone leaves or is fired, invite them for a coffee or a drink and listen to their side of the story.
There’s this Latin legal maxim that I learnt from my mum when I was a child, and have always remembered ever since: “Audi alteram partem”[1] which roughly translates to the same.
A companies may value folks in non-management roles who:
* Do what they are asked to
* Don't cause problems
* Solve their own problems
* Make the boss look good?
Note that being right on technical matters may not be on this list! Sometimes the hero's would be great managers - but if they are not manager's, all that good energy may be wasted or a negative from a companies view.
I've had this (unfortunate) experience and learned from it! I really did have the capacity to do all this great stuff. But not in that position.
Some quick suggestions.
* Provide feedback if asked, but get on with things if its not adopted (don't make business personal if you can help it)
* Make some of your own suggestions in areas the boss isn't addressing. That can look a lot like good initiative.
* If you have options take them, don't hang around too long!
* If you don't have good options outside of your current position - check to see if you are overestimating your skill etc.
* Ask yourself - will my pattern of behavior, ignoring the specific technical details, result in others (managers / co-workers) interested in working for me?
* If you want to fight the product fights / set direction - become a manager!
You generally can do this by a) getting some cert / education somewhere AND b) switching jobs OR telling your boss you'd like to become a manager and get them to describe the pathway needed - then check if the timeline they share + 1 year is reasonable.
If you become a manager make sure you can efficiently write memos and can write reasonably well.
If that doesn't work and you are really great - start consulting or start your own shop.
I've been in a similar situation. Very well liked and popular at the company, including with the founders. Often gets praised in public and is the go to person from many employees when they want advice or just to gripe. Saw somethings at the company that I thought weren't good, and most of the employees complained about to me as well. I thought I had some influence with the powers that be, and so did many of the other folks (e.g. I was encouraged to speak up because I had influence). So I did, quietly and privately at first, and a little louder as time went on. Everything I did was completely ineffective. I learned that public praise and apparent influence is very superficial, and evaporates when it comes to anything deep rooted.
I've been this person a few times, so I sympathize while seeing all the mistakes they made.
Some people have no problem with office politics. Some people don't notice or seem unaffected by it. I have a hero complex (or a sense of ethics if you want to be generous), and I can't be a full time employee anymore. Freelance work helps me keep boundaries in my work.
I'm having this problem too. It's hard for me to stay silent. I tell my friends about the things I do or say and they tell me that I'm just giving away all my intentions and political moves.
I don't manipulate people and I'm told I'm extremely straightforward. I'm not a hero though but when politics affects me like it always inevitably does, I don't play the game, I'm emotionally unable to.
Refusing to play politics is also a political strategy. It won't work in every situation. Sometimes, being blunt will work out very badly, but sometimes your candor will be respected and your opinion will be sought out because of it. Refusing to play the game can put you in a position above the fray.
You won't be promoted to management, but if that is not your goal, it may not matter.
Well, our values and norms say that being an employee, that some 40 of our hours per week are owned by another person, is good and normal. Freedom has very little value it seems. I'm like you and I just love to be free. I do whatever I want to do! And I love it, I love my life. With the perspective of freedom, signing over 40 hours a week to some random guy seems like a totally completely ludicrous thought. I would literally rather live in a tent eating only noodles, but luckily everything seems to work out anyway :)
If you have this experience of "not being egocentric enough" a lot -- which I have had -- you might like to check out the developmental model called Spiral Dynamics, it put things into place for me.
Everybody in non-tech companies should realize they are viewed as stupid ants doing all the work while another class rules them with different governance they have no chance to penetrate.
The main issue of our industry is that it is now transforming from tech-friendly into the "same old" approach of other industries, including all FAANGs. There is no space for apolitical geniuses any longer.
This blog was painful to read because it hits home on several points. I've been in the working world since the mid-1980s and have seen this type of scenario several times. It's unfortunate, it's frustrating, but there's usually nothing you can do about incompetent management except simply to leave.
Fortunately, technology is a good profession and there are always choices. I've learned over the years not to fight City Hall; if you have no power, you're just a faint buzzing in their ears. Those who are busy sucking all the money out of an organization aren't going to just stop because of a lecture from a technical lead.
Your first duty is to take care of yourself and your family. That may mean removing yourself from a toxic environment and starting over elsewhere, possibly for a cut in pay or seniority, but over the long haul you'll likely be emotionally and professionally better off.
The only way to get a serious promotion in this field is to change companies. Start over elsewhere with a boost in pay and seniority, when the getting's good. The company has absolutely no loyalty to you, so you owe it none.
But individuals do deserve loyalty. Try not to lose touch.
I read this story and found it interesting to notice how the author seemed not to have any perspective other than his own.
He seemed to regard himself as central to the company, when in reality he was just one of many employees, who had been hired to do a job.
Those hiring him seemed to be interested in the sale of the company and securing their own positions, which they appear to have managed well, by running a sham department, that they could present as being a success.
The author is suffering from "Bridge over the river Kwai" syndrome - being wholly concerned about technical implementation while ignoring larger strategic concerns.
Nothing gets fixed if you don't say anything, but the odds are always supporting the fact that this bozo was placed by another top bozo.
The leaders who appreciate this, will go the extra mile to develop trust and/or open door with ICs but if you aren't 100% sure you have this, it means you don't.
Bozos excel at social aerodynamism and those who start to like them are to be worried about just as much.
Bozos can even end up on boards, VCs or public figures.
Never assume there are rules, never assume someone is addressing the obvious problem.
In the end, if you sniff a bozo, pack up and go.
That's your only move.
This might not be helpful, but it appears the OP struggled for so long because they were too attached to the project or an unrealistic expectation of growth. It’s critical to get feedback about your choices and to second-guess your attachment, if only to have that evidence or perspective available to you. Without it, it’s highly likely unexpected events carry greater personal risk, like a re-org causing a lot of distress or even happening unexpectedly at all. How aligned are you with the business leaders? It’s worth trying to meet people outside the team on a quarterly basis.
The other sad result here is that the OP chose to fight leveraging a rational argument versus the buy-in of others. It’s easy to call the other side stupid, but the reality is you have to convince them of your perspective and not necessarily that your argument is right. To make matters worse, corporate structure is fundamentally opposed to threats from below. You can have green hair and get fired because they only want people with purple hair.
Stories like these suggest (at least to me) that engineers need to work a bit more to reshape the industry into a gig economy. That means being more open to changing jobs, supporting portable and open technologies, and also establishing a more transparent hiring process. There’s a huge gap between supply and demand for engineers. That gap will be around for a while. Leveraging that gap should provide a path for preventing stories like these.
To the downvoters: would love to hear stories similar to that of the OP. I personally have never seen somebody in that situation win without major buy-in, especially from managers or C-levels. But wouldn’t mind being shown wrong.
> While she was a great lead, we saved the managerial position for someone who was more suited for the job. Someone who could talk engineer and business all at the same time. Someone who has been groomed for the job.
I'm struggling with this, and I've struggled with it before. What I think you're saying is that you have an ideal candidate, but they're not enough so you need to pull in the perfect one from the outside. You don't want to invest in them instead, which would be cheaper.
"Someone who has been groomed for the job."
Why not train/groom them yourself? You already have the talent and the potential. That £10k signup bonus could pay for a whole course of training to get a loyal and well educated leader who already knows the business intimately.
It's a problem in its own making because a business fails to appreciate the talent it already has. Which is the same reason why so many people leave for new jobs, because their talent isn't recognised.
Best way to get some acknowledgment is to get a fresh job offer 50+% above what you currently get with wild enthusiasm to get you on board.
My impression was that there were two open positions, one for a lead and one for a manager. The team wanted to promote someone from within to be lead and look for a new manager because they didn't have a good candidate to promote from within. The company moved a new manager in from another part of the company and this manager brought in their choice for lead, displacing the person that was favored by the team.
I stayed too long in a job at a company that was turning / had turned toxic. It takes that experience to be able to not only recognize it in the future, but also know to act on it before it goes too far.
The combination of these two statements in the post give me the "chills of recognition" of a bad situation:
> In a company of a thousand, everyone knew me by name. I've created dozens of tools that are still used in the company to this day.
> I was assuming a position of leadership, I was very popular, yet I had no power.
If this is you, you need to evaluate your situation coldly and logically. Why do you have no power? You're either delusional about your level of influence and utility within the company, or the company is a boys club (I believe the term 'lifestyle company' was used to describe a previous place of employment of mine) and you're not a member.
And fundamentally, do your "network of influence" research before you tattle on ANYONE. That's a primary school lesson.
This is a tough lesson for engineers to learn, but whether you are right or not doesn't even really matter, it's the relationships and how you present it. I cringed when I ready about going over your manager's head in front of all the other managers. Life at work is not a code review where everyone is equal and you get to +1 and -1 everyone's ideas.
If you have to take every problem to a VP or council of managers that means that you are ineffective and unable to sway anyone with your ideas. If the site is truly down like he said and his manager won't fix it, he should let his manager take the fall after raising it. Nobody thanks the messenger in a situation like this.
Most problem and change requests should not require manager involvement at all. In practice though, an org tend to optimize for top-brass to micromanage more and more (see: Scrum and "Agile"). You will be told to solve the issues, while higher-ups make all the shots, unwittingly causing some long-term trouble. If you correctly identify gaps and skillfully tell the right managers, they will be very glad for you pointing out risks and suggestions. Just don't expect too much at once and play the long-term game.
> This is a tough lesson for engineers to learn, but whether you are right or not doesn't even really matter, it's the relationships and how you present it.
Relationships are everything. How you tell someone they are wrong is important. You can shear a sheep over and over, but only skin it once. If you're going to skin someone, understand you're also ending a relationship.
Every person is different. At an old job everyone in the office thought a coworker and I hated each other. They would hear the fights coming out of our office while we fought for our ideas around a whiteboard. The reality is that we were great friends and still talk 15 years later. But, we knew each other and how to interact with each other. The people I work with now are different types of people, and would not respond that sort of interaction.
Finally, many decisions are not right/wrong or black/white. In fact any of number of solutions could typically work. If someone else is really passionate about their idea, then let them run with it. Either it works - great! Or it doesn't work and we loop back around to a different idea.
Sorry, but I absolutely hate this. Especially considering we're talking about businesses. It's crazy that in this thread the consensus is that you have to manage people and relationships at the expense of being pragmatic and exposing the truth.
Sometimes, especially in the startup world, decisions need to be made because it's make or break. And if your boss is wholly incompetent and they're the ones calling the shots, they will take the entire company down with them. Or worse: you get blamed for their failures and then you get sacked.
I've seen it happen multiple times in my career and I'll gladly speak the truth and get fired or forced to leave than sit around and watch an incompetent leader run the entire company to the ground while I stand idly by, doing grunt work and fighting all of the fires they create.
Better, then to just leave. You aren't the only one who knows, you are just the only one who insists on talking.
Go somewhere else where competence is welcome. There are pockets of it everywhere. The only reason incompetence works is the crowds around holding things together. If everyone dispersed, the bad ones would drop through the floor. Staying enables them.
HN enforces this as a system and a contract similar to how agile enforces a certain philosophy. Perhaps something similar can be done for how to build a company of managers that must answer to the +1 -1 system.
Going over your boss’s head won’t end well because of misaligned incentives.
Your boss’s boss is responsible for the boss. Responsible for any failures and any successes. Acting on a failure you reported would be a black mark on their report card. That’s not gonna happen.
Few managers care about doing the right thing — that’s why they’re in politics... ahem....management.
Whew, I've seen this one first- and second-hand a few times.
I worked for a global multi-national for around 17 years, through a few acquisitions, and through a 6-9 month lay-off cadence that often came with overall restructuring and rotating/changing managers. I remember one individual, in particular, we'll call him "Bob". This guy's ignorance was rivaled only by his arrogance. Bob ended up taking over the team that myself and a coworker (who I shared an office with) and almost immediately started causing grief. A series of boneheaded, and very expensive decisions were made which effectively eliminated the department at the next lay-off cycle. Somehow the Bob not only survives another set of layoffs, he gets promoted and is now in my direct reporting chain. Almost immediately, any interdepartmental communication was forbidden (and I'm talking "Database Admins" not being allowed to e-mail "Unix sysadmins"), and similarly, much of his department started crumbling. I got out quick and my coworker, Greg (not really), entered a new level of hell.
Though my department changed, my location didn't, and I still worked with Greg 75% of the time. Greg felt his wrath, daily and I got a bit of it "by splash". Then Greg saw an opportunity -- he was asked to discuss a project with the CIO, our department Director and VP. Greg didn't hesitate to bring up Bob[0]. It went over like a lead baloon; holy cow, the whole mood in the room changed. Something we hadn't known -- Bob hung out with a lot of folks in the office outside of work. He worked at the main office, which was much larger and in a different time zone than us and our Director. The VP in the room was also from the main office. Shortly after the meeting, he was informed by his boss that she had spent the last hour "begging for them to not fire [coworker]". Yep. They were all friends.
Well, my story has a bit of an uglier ending, but not one that isn't deserved. The struggling company was purchased by a competitor and the CIO was replaced. Several layers were added above Bob. The new headquarters was in a city far enough away that they had their own networks, isolated from the old guard. Incredibly, Bob started making in-roads well before the acquisition was complete and had already begun trying to sully the reputations of people he considered "enemies". One of those people was Greg.
Now, Greg had a few people who didn't like him. He was very cut-and-dry, blunt, but he was an "attack the idea, not the person" kind of guy and if you understood that, you got along well with him. He was/is crazy smart, articulate and has a personality of the kind that you want to get behind because you know he's going to be doing something great. And he'd slept at the new office the entirety of the previous week making sure that the infrastructure side of things went off without a hitch.
We're in a 9-person meeting "war-room" for the acquisition, and the CIO walks in -- I throw him a (sadly, over-prepared question) about REST and our (non-existent) service infrastructure and he mentioned something about Clojure. My coworker is introduced[1] him and he said "So, what's the deal with Bob? ...". He attacked the person. And went on for 15 minutes, deadpan, facts-only, listing every failure and its inevitable origin: a decision Bob forced down the department's throat. I watched the new CIO get more and more disgusted -- he was a rare beast -- a C-level at a multi-national who understood systems and didn't have a skillset that was a decade out-of-date[2]. The CIO politely excused himself from the room, which was completely silent at this point save for my coworker and remained that way for a solid minute after the guy left the room[3]. Greg had gotten a little loud.
Then we remembered that we were there to watch him address the IT department on the big screen in the room[4]. Someone in tech announced that things would be getting started about 5 minutes late. They started 15-minutes late. Shortly after introducing himself, the CIO apologized and said he had to take care of a "personnel issue" that required a little more time than he had expected. The door opened and our (new) department VP walked in, "[CIO] just got off the phone with HR and Bob. He was informed his services are no longer needed." Greg was on his feet and the room erupted. For literally months after that happened, people from the "old company" would call Greg (remote office) to thank him. What was amazing to me was that literally everyone except for 3 people in IT management and leadership knew this guy was at fault and yet he continued to increase in his ability to cause problems. It turned out that the prior week had been spent by the new CIO trying to wrap his head around the boneheaded architectural decisions he was inheriting. All of these decisions had one name behind them and that guy had been with the company for 10 years!
[0] I don't recommend it. This guy, though, had stones and if given the opportunity to address the issue with someone higher on the chain, it trumped any fears of him losing the job. "If they're not going to trust me to tell the truth when it's hard to hear, they're not someone I can morally work for." He had brought it up to every single person from above him up to the CIO, why not the CIO?
[1] That's an understatement. He was one of the major reasons infrastructure integration happened at all. The CIO looked at him like he was some mad genius.
[2] I recognized the same on the development side when his Clojure response, despite not being a choice I would have made (unfamiliarity), was backed up with an argument that wasn't marketing or otherwise buzz-wordy.
[3] Someone started with a "So......" at some point, I'm sure.
[4] The company had a studio -- really cool -- and complete stage/audience room. We could have gone, and some did, but we were "war rooming" for the past week and a few of us weren't sure if it was just the left-overs from lunch that had stunk up the place.
Reading this over a little bit, I wanted to clarify a few points. At least a few of the things Bob was responsible for fell into the category of questionable ethics, if not outright illegal behavior. There was cases where incredibly expensive, far inferior solutions were chosen over the recommendations of everyone else which turned out to involve a purchase from a company that had some connection to Bob. Server hardware vendors changed from major brands to lesser-knowns at a higher sticker and much higher support cost. Bob was very-much about connections.
Where you had to get used to Greg crapping on a bad idea, and accept that he still had utmost respect for you as an engineer, you had to deal with Bob crapping all over you, especially if you were an engineer with a good idea. If it was a really good idea, it became Bob's idea shortly after he badmouthed you onto the next lay-off list.
We noticed early on that if someone appeared to be smarter/more capable than Bob, Bob would target that manager. We lost my favorite two managers to Bob's relentless bad-mouthing inside and outside the main office ... which neither of these managers shared.
So incredible. It still feels like it happened to somebody else. While writing that, yesterday, I realized that I was a participant in the whole situation most of the time. Not the first CIO meeting; George was downright crazy for doing that, but he disagrees with me on that. In that second CIO meeting, I contributed a few points of my own; but really, Greg had the stones to speak up -- I wouldn't have had he not gotten the ball rolling, so my contribution isn't something I really remember much of.
I'm pretty sure I got the quote from the new director perfectly, though -- it was a moment in my life where I felt like I had witnessed "the right decision being made, even though it was tough to make" along with a whole mess of vindication for the tens of times I had butted heads with Bob. Someone looking skeptically might attribute some form of good will toward Bob. That's cool and I hope he's all right. He had family and friends; I'm sure someone found him to delightful. We never met the great Dad that he might be. We got stuck with laser-focused pure-rage.
My favorite Greg, not Bob, story, though is the reason he's among my best friends years after that job. I had started in Desktop Support at a company that was 80% VT-something-or-other terminals in 1997[0]. Greg started a month after me, and shared my work-aholic tendencies[1]. The new VP of our new IT department, who's name is not Wesley, but who was one you could count on to correct you if you didn't use his full, given name, came to our office. We were HQ#2 back then.
To set the stage, he picked a 25-person conference room for all ... 70-or-so? of us, for an hour-long mandatory meeting[2]. He's sitting with his butt leaning against the edge of a whiteboard, standing in the corner, wearing Birkenstock sandals and socks (nothing against Birks; owned 6 pairs in my life), addressing the tightly packed, mostly standing group. Greg is sitting at the oval table in the center. Before Wesley starts talking, it's obvious, he's going for a certain look. It wasn't hipster (AFAIK, too early). Then he started, trying to communicate ... something ... what ... the fsck ... are these words ...? Everyone in the room has a look on their face that resembles some form of straining. He mis-used words, he made new words made out of combinations of obscure words. Poly-isomorphic was used twice among several words that "I don't think it means what you think it means".
Greg told me about a habit he had when people drone on and on. He starts counting those "annoying words", "uh's" and "um's", "you know's" and such and keeps score. It's a curse. I can't help but do the exact same thing[3]. I had to stop when the Migraine hit. Greg was in rapt attention, awkwardly, the only one in the room feigning interest.
Q&A comes up and I ask about our mess-of-an-e-mail[4] platform, and he responds "Netscape"-something-or-other. Greg speaks up and asks if we had evaluated GroupWise, Exchange or another option[5], carefully elevating his vocabulary to sound "intelligent, but not douche-y" and mid-sentence he pauses, blinks, and says "...I'm sorry, ... did you want me to fluff you?"
Now, it's hard to convey how that was delivered without the accompanying voice. Greg's voice is right in the middle; neither booming nor weak. I'd guess he sings around a Tenor range. He delivered this in with the same tone a server at a restaurant, might. There a desire to help in his tone, along with a tinge of innocence, and empathy: "Oh, that's my fault, I forgot to hold the mushrooms for you. Let me just run back and fix that." The words were at a total disconnect with the delivery. He delivered a slap in the face that you feel obligated to tip him for.
It sucked the air out of the room. Wesley lets out an uncomfortable laugh and says, and in his first display of humanity, says "No, no, ..." and the room erupts in laughter. It's 55-minutes into this meeting. Many of the participants in the room are middle-aged very-overweight men who are visibly wet with sweat because it's mid-summer and you don't jam that many people into a conference room for an hour. The collective laughter was like a bomb going off; people left cubicles out of concern to see what the noise was.
Greg was early 20s, I was 19, we were the youngest in the department by at least 5 years, and younger than most by 15. Here's this "equivalent to the cashier" spanking the district manager in front of his entire team on his day of introduction. And he was saying exactly what everyone in that room was thinking. Stones on this guy[6].
Funny thing is, for the most part, it became a story and that's it. Our, collective, manager told him "That was awesome" and he never took any heat for it. I'm guessing Wesley was a little embarrassed and just let it go. He stuck around for another year-and-a-half until the first acquisition or-so, and occasionally worked on things with Greg, but it was never brought up between them. Though it wasn't a Hollywood-style "and Wesley had a new found respect for Greg" ... I think Wesley realized, rightly, that Greg was an "equivalent to a cashier" at the time and wouldn't be competing for his job before he was long gone.
[0] That was flipped in 6 months, but the most used app was a $100 product we had to install to handle whatever VT-weird escape sequences this thing used to display colors and accept input.
[1] My dad is a happily retired small business owner with a fierce work-ethic. Some would say workaholic. I was his son. He was an awesome Dad growing up, and is an awesome Dad, now (he doesn't read HN).
[2] I'm bitching, but he brought a fountain coke machine with him for permanent installation on the IT floor only, so we weren't unhappy. Suck it, Google! :)
[3] My apologies if the curse strikes you, now. :(
[4] Lotus CC:Mail - I became an expert in recovering people's inboxes. It was a fantastic piece of software. You could read mountains of e-mail provided you had an IT guy near by who could kill a day helping you de-corrupt your inbox file. It's like your whole inbox was just that .pst file. Still gives me nightmares
[5] I want to say Greg was leaning the lines of postfix/a unix/open-source option, or a straight up Microsoft Exchange buy into the Borg scenario (he was an admirer of Bill Gates back when that was frowned upon /s).
[6] Apologies for the graphic reference ... no better way to describe. It's part bravery. And were it anyone else I'd say "It's a little bit of stupid mixed in" but no, with rare exception this guy knew those were the right words at that time and knew full well he might be forced to walk out of the building (at least, in the early days). I think I've heard him speak a profanity twice, all placed very intentionally to make a point, and used as though they were high explosives to be used in the most dire of situations.
I'd be someone who would have responded to the first HN comment about his workplace as "its a toxic environment, pack your parachute and get out."
I think life is too short to waste it sharing with toxic people. You are just withholding it from the good people. Tolerating political nonsense is a particular kind of fun or challenge for awhile but its really just an opportunity cost in the long term. Be clear about what you see as the benefit when doing so.
This doesn't mean you run from adversity but it does mean you evaluate adversity knowing that it still needs an actual benefit that exceeds its very real cost.
Kind of interested in knowing if this was his first job, as there were many, many mistakes made here. This is simply a case of him not understanding his role. Went over bosses head without knowing anything about the relationship between said boss and upper management. Didnt inquire as to why a boss who "burned a team to the ground" in previous position was promoted to his team to begin with. Kept trying to come back to the company for social gatherings even after leaving. Am not sure what the story is here, but I hope he learned some lessons, plural.
That's a good one too - but the fact that managers are promoted to their level of incompetence, while engineers are DEMOTED to their level of incompetence... it makes it quite hard to justify staying on the technical track for all but the most talented of engineers (which 98% of engineers are not)
As somebody who was probably promoted up to or above his Peter Principle skills, I sympathize. This isn't how maximally efficient places should work.
But having said that, maximally efficient places are heading to being truly horrible. Taylor time-and-motion and 'sack till it works' is not condusive to good longterm outcome. It works for something like D Day right up until you exhaust the pool of new officers. Then you have to go back and try and instill some motivation in the ones you sidelined hunting for perfection.
This story is why you need to spend your f*s carefully. The author care way too much about his day job. If he’s that passionate he needs to start his own company.
About 2006, I stood up to my boss trying to cajole me into weakening a credit card processing private network at a big name university. And then I was fired for refusing to do it immediately when all I asked for was to slow down and review the changes. Narcissists throw tantrums if they don't always get their way because they hate not being in complete control. sigh
A few years back I got a new manager and this was her first people manager role. She was awful. Micromanaged about useless things, bother you at odd hours for not very important topics. Her whole team would usually just sit around and say “I can’t believe how bad she is.”
I got a feedback request from her boss, so I listed 3 things she could do better. Pretty sure her boss wouldn’t follow up.
Had my 1-on-1 with her and she asked “Any feedback?”. I thought for a second, then just went “what the hell, let’s do it”, and spent the next 10 minutes telling her all the things she does wrong.
She was incredibly thankful for the feedback as no one else was willing to give her direct feedback.
She didn’t change overnight, but we had an absolutely great relationship after that. If I didn’t like something she did, I told her right away.
I even blew up at her about a year later because she kept cutting me off on a big presentation. She apologized and it never happened again.
It was a gamble, but it paid off.
My opinion is that if you give direct, honest feedback that's about the thing-that-is-done rather than about the person who's doing it, you do the other person a service. If they're offended about it or don't take it well, that's on them.
It matters a lot how you say it, though. I like the shit sandwich a lot, where you do compliment-criticism-compliment, but that's just a method of ordering the feedback, you shouldn't lie about it.
Shit sandwiches don't work. People can still tell when they're being fed a load of shit.
Do you think it's better to start with the shit and end with the compliments, or to start with the compliments and end with the shit? I think it's better to sandwich the shit in-between, so yes, shit sandwiches don't work, but they work better than the alternatives.
When I see people using the "sandwich" method on me it is usually pretty clear that the only reason they are giving compliments is just to soften their criticisms, so I would rather just get the criticisms on their own. Not every criticism or set of criticisms needs to be accompanied with something positive. If there are many points of feedback, some positive and some negative, I think they should be split into logical categories, mixing together positive and negative feedback, rather than trying to completely surround criticisms with compliments.
This depends on culture actually.
However you order it, though. Be honest and direct, and include corrections to give them a path forward. That's the best way to end on a positive note.
> However you order it, though. Be honest and direct, and include corrections to give them a path forward. That's the best way to end on a positive note.
OK, I think your comment is the best example of why lots of people don't like the shit sandwich. You're literally acknowledging that the goal was to deliver the shit and that the ordering is just a detail on delivering it (i.e. the details of the compliments are rather unimportant, but the details of the shit are). Furthermore, the goal wasn't even to deliver the shit, but to "include corrections".
I would strongly recommend people read good communications books (e.g. Difficult Conversations, Crucial Conversations, etc). If your goal is to deliver a message, with corrective action already prepared, you are not having a discussion, nor are you having a conversation. What is generally missing in such interactions are:
- Discussing your role in creating the other person's bad performance. Take this a number of degrees further (the role of your team, department, organization, etc)
- Getting the other person's perspective
- Identifying barriers to better performance
And quite a bit more.
Perhaps many managers are open to discuss all of the above, but they never indicate it, and their posture doesn't match. Certainly, delivering shit with corrective action at the ready does not.
Difficult Conversations is a very good book. I'd also recommend The Culture Map.
Yes, you do want to have those conversations where you try to discover and work through the reasons behind behavioral or performance problems.
When communicating the problem, however, you often need to communicate expectations. Discussing and listening to feedback on the expectations is vital. But clarity in presenting your view of the problem is just as vital, so as to be talking about the same thing.
The initial discussion I was responding to was about delivery of an assessment. You should have many conversations and observations before you reach the point of assessment. Once there, you've moved on to instigation of correction or improvement (either for you or for the other person, often both).
> Do you think it's better to start with the shit and end with the compliments, or to start with the compliments and end with the shit? I think it's better to sandwich the shit in-between
False trichotomy?
Set up a culture of honest feedback. And set up a culture promoting change vs sticks. Lots of other approaches. You can't divorce the culture from the presentation. If your focus is only on how you present your feedback without examining the wider culture, then you're focusing on theater.
I prefer to get them separately and directly . Make a compliment and leave it there. Criticize and leave it there. If you often use the sandwich method I will just wait for what comes after the first part so the compliment is worthless. Don’t give a long speech before you get to the point.
Spot on. I have to wait for the actual feedback and suggestions which to my managers credit are often useful and insightful and on point. But what precedes the feedback can be mind numbing.
An alternative is context, counter-argument, argument
"we currently xxxx, and although yyyyy, zzzz is still better. Make the case against your own argument or for an alternative first, to show you understand both sides, can exhibit some empathy, and to prevent the inevitable rebuttal. If your argument isnt well received, youve still framed the counter-argument in a way that leaves the subsequent conversation about moving forward with it in an easier place, because now everyone knows you understand what is being asked of you.
This is good. It opens a real discussion about the issue at hand.
I just want the feedback. Here's what I saw happening, I think that was wrong because of this and that and you should try doing this other thing more instead. That's just helpful, no need to cushion it.
They work if you set the right expectation that you're gonna feed them a load of shit, but still be gentle about it.
If the shit sandwich doesn't work on you, that's on you. In fact the goal for personal growth is to be able to take the shit with or without the sandwich. Feedback delivered roughly is still feedback, in fact the roughest feedback is often the most valuable. It's the stuff that should have been said a long time ago.
When someone is given feedback they'll walk away with one prominent takeaway. If the first piece of feedback was positive, the second corrective and the last positive, that person is going to walk away thinking they're doing a great job.
If you have a piece of feedback just give that feedback. Don't decorate it. Don't sweeten it up. Be direct, objective and be helpful if it requires support to implement.
The shit sandwich is just bad management advice.
> If the shit sandwich doesn't work on you, that's on you.
And if people never believe your compliments, then that's on you, because you'll quickly get the reputation of manufacturing compliments only for the purpose of delivering shit (regardless of whether this is true or not).
> In fact the goal for personal growth is to be able to take the shit with or without the sandwich.
You misread the GP. When he said "Shit sandwiches don't work." he explicitly added "People can still tell when they're being fed a load of shit." His complaint isn't that people can't handle the shit. It's that they realize they're being given shit and have a problem with the (real or perceived) artifice around it.
He is projecting his personal preferences on the human race. The idea that all the people in the world handle criticism exactly the same way is absurd. I have come across many people in my career who needed criticism to be broken to them gently. Others (evidently highly represented on Hacker News, but not from my experience in the general US population, maybe in some other cultures) prefer that it be direct.
Other comments in the thread were along the lines of "it's not good criticism if it's not delivered the way I like it" which is basically just saying that you enjoy shooting yourself in the foot.
Yeah, at a couple of companies I worked as a middle manager we had training on how to manage people and they made a point of telling us to avoid the shit sandwich. That it's really not effective and managers use it because they don't feel strong enough to give the feedback without sugar coating it. My anecdata doesn't include enough points for me to be sure if it is effective or not, but those trainers who had seen large numbers of cases insisted it was ineffective.
I think it depends a lot on how it's done, and what the speaker's genuine feelings are.
If someone holds me in contempt, they're not going to magically make me feel okay about their negative feedback by going through the motions of sandwiching it.
But if they respect me and genuinely think I'm doing some significant things well, then making those things clear can help me to avoid taking the negatives personally.
How can this person make you feel that they respect you?
I work with a lot of Junior engineers. I do want to believe in them but want to express to them that their fuck ups are pretty serious and they shouldn’t repeat that. But there isn’t really a way to be both direct and also not an asshole ️
Probably it depends at least as much on context (the sum of all your interactions) as on how you present any single critique -- I know that I can take a piece of criticism very differently depending on who is giving it, and that's not just a function of our formal relationship or their position in the hierarchy. So making a point of being sincerely positive whenever appropriate might help, even if you don't have anything good to say while delivering a rebuke.
Also it's important to take into account each individual's temperament: try to learn which ones will be scared straight by a gentle word (and discouraged by anything more than that), and which ones need the severity of their mistakes hammered home. Also where they fall on the 'respect = unvarnished honesty' versus 'respect = niceness and politeness' spectrum.
If you were calling me out on a big mistake, it would definitely be important to control any emotions like exasperation or bafflement, and focus in a matter-of-fact way on what happened/why it was a mistake/what to do next time.
when a junior messes something up, then that's usually because they didn't know better (or they didn't have the skill/experience to avoid it). that's why they are juniors, i don't expect them to know better. but that also means, it's an opportunity for learning:
remember last week, when you brought the server down by typing mkfs instead of fsck? cost us a few days to get the server back up. but that's not your fault. it's our fault for not having a better recovery strategy. nevertheless it is a good idea to avoid mistakes like that. here are a few tips...
You need to create a space where people can fail safely; an area where someone can take a risk, and if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world, but they can get some acclaim if it does work well.
I dislike shit sandwiches but I think they generally do work, at least to remind people that you can't just shit on someone.
Everyone is attempting to rise to the level of their competence and ambition. I've had the opportunity of dealing with a few billionaires, and their teams. It showed me that we are all just trying to navigate a difficult world.
The more exposure I get to folks way “above” me in business, or riches, or whatever, the more convinced I am that very few people at any level are really much good at what they do and most of what goes on is just very serious role-playing and play-pretend, which realization is at least as horrifying as it is comforting.
Don't we all want to be in a position that puts us at the edge of our comfort and abilities, with doing something new? I know that's my goal.
Honestly, I think most want an honest wage, or as much as they can get, and then having work that doesn't interfere with their lives outside of 9-5 too much.
> Had my 1-on-1 with her and she asked “Any feedback?”
Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago.
My current bosses are all the smartest people that they have ever met. Here I am not bragging, I only mention this to give credence to my argument: I have performance reviews that would knock you down they are so good; 400 points out of a possible 400 points on 3 out of 6 sections, with 347 ponts being my lowest score for an overall average of 370. That puts me in the uppermost category. Clearly I'm appreciated... Any idea I have is not. These folks only want yes men.
Recently I saw my direct supervisor watching the department director doing something that I know my supervisor knew was wrong--yet he never said a word. I did though. Incidentally my Supervisor was recently promoted by the Deptarment Director.
Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.
I'm glad things went your way!
Jesus Christ you couldn't pay me enough (or maybe you wouldn't want to) to live by point systems.
I dunno dude, you can make some pretty good money working under a bullshit FAANG point system ( levels.fyi )
This crazy points system doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard of at FAANG.
Facebook does not have a point system, and I'm fairly sure none of the others do.
> Jesus Christ you couldn't pay me enough (or maybe you wouldn't want to) to live by point systems.
I took the gig to get myself straight after a failed business venture. It took 5 long years but at last I'm ready to launch another venture.
Gotta do what you gotta do. C'est la vie!
>Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.
I've been paying a high cost for having urges like this for a long time.
I'm curious. How many people are like this? Is this the majority or the minority? I've had trusted friends tell me that I'm crazy and I'm in the minority.
I think it's the minority, I work on a floor with about 4 other people like that in a floor of 200 or so, so it's a small amount of people.
It's still the approach I take. If I think something isn't right, I'm going to call it out. Try and convince me I'm wrong! I won't be offended, it's the idea I'm attacking, not you personally.
I've tried to model different ways at giving the feedback/cc, I don't think it matters, most people tie their ego to their idea, a few do not.
// Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago.
How does one find good managers(or entrepreneurs) who are really open to great ideas and value them well(in money)?
I think one way is to have lateral movements always ready. Be prepared to leave when you find too strong opposing forces.
>Personally, I can't Not say anything when I see people doing the wrong thing. For sure I try to be tactful, but there it is.
I'm the exact same. In fact it's the primary reason I got into tech, because as an industry it's way more open to that style than others.
Any advice on capitalizing on that ability?
"Tangentially, there was a time when I believed if you had a great idea your boss would be delighted to hear about it. Sadly, that was a long time ago."
I think this is more a case of rose-colored glasses about the past. There has always been a wide variety of personality types who can/can't deal with criticism/perceived threats to their status as being above the people below them.
I think the OP meant when they were young and naive, rather than an actual time period.
Ages ago I was a crappy manager at a crappy job and honestly too young to manage myself even.
It was one of those places where managers saw themselves as little hall monitors or police looking at what people had on their desk and I'm ashamed to say I played along.
So one day I'm talking to this guy who was fed up and labeled a problem and he says something like:
"Does any of this even matter, do we do a better job because of it or do any of us get paid more?"
Everyone complained bickered about the rules, but nobody has said it like that...I didn't have an answer.
I suddenly realized, yeah this is all just pointless aggravation for everyone. So I quit enforcing dumb rules and we all had a better time... the managers above me talked about these rules and sent out all sorts of emails and directives to enforce them, and somehow me not doing it wasn't even noticed.
The place didn't get any better, but at least if you were on my team you didn't get hassled about stupid things.
It's like tragedy of commons for management. The manager gets nothing by enforcing corporate rules on his team. But not enforcing them usually doesn't cost them anything while improving team morale, good will and in most cases retention, productivity.
I see many managers strictly follow up on logging leaves or restricting work from homes or enforcing release deadlines as if it personally costs them something while usually enforcement is just discretionary. The managers who have figured this out usually have happier teams.
Sounds like mismanagement in the higher echelon. The team leader should lead up the chain to ensure deadlines are realistic and hindering restrictions are dealt with.
How does he do this? By complying with corporate rules to show good faith and intervene when necessary.
It's also important that he understands the rules and communicates them to the team.
The team manager should be on good terms with upper management and the team.
This is hard and requires skill.
A great manager shields off their team from all the bullshit, so good job!
I have heard it said that there are two kinds of managers: shit funnels and shit umbrellas.
We've had the same reply at a previous company. The answer was "this comes straight from the general manager, so we must do this". I'm 100% sure the GM had no idea what's going on, so, yeah, terrible manager right there refusing to budge.
I would be careful with selectively dismissing rules if I were just beginning a management career, as I would potentially be opening up myself for liability in case something goes wrong.
It takes lot of experience and wisdom to accurately distinguish between useless and seemingly useless but critical rules.
Yeah I was careful about what rules I "ignored".
First of all I still communicate those rules so everyone knew what the folks above me were talking about.
Second any rule that had real world impact, other teams, involved other people's expectation and experience we totally complied with.
It was very much calculated rule ignoring.
> ..., and somehow me not doing it wasn't even noticed.
This strikes me as a big ole red flag that hints at the true nature of those rules.
The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure. If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved. If you hold back from talking to your boss, build up grudges, then launch them uphill.... even if your facts are correct, you have just become a problem.
On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
> On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
Your optimism is refreshing.
Escalation is basically a waste of time. At that point, you need to have your ejection position set up anyhow, so you might as well just leave and have all the offending idiots still think you're a "great dude" who just moved on.
If you have an effective external social relationship higher in the power structure, then you're better off just getting the offending manager removed behind the scenes.
This is ignoring the obvious power imbalance, because your boss can fire you.
I completely agree that you should try to communicate openly whenever possible, but let's not pretend like it's a level playing field. Of course, if the situation is so bad you can't talk openly with your boss, I'm not sure how much you're really losing by being fired (assuming you are able to find employment elsewhere, as is often the case for engineers today).
Communicating openly is a mistake. You should communicate in the way it serves both your purpose and the enterprise and to communicate you must know your audience and how the message should be passed in order to succeed.
Sometimes the only way to change things is to incept the idea.
The above statement is certainly true in some places of employment. Been there, done that.
I choose not to work in such places anymore. Obviously, not everyone can do that.
How do you know beforehand what sort of environment you're really involving yourself with? What sort of heuristics exist during the hiring / interview phase that let's you sort good from bad? I have a few of my own sniff tests, but outside of knowing (and really trusting) a contact at a place, it's sort of a crap shoot.
My experience has shown me that it can take years to find the seams that you need to tug on to expose deep-seated work culture problems.
During every interview, I always ask "what do you like about working here?" It's extremely easy to tell by how they react whether or not they're being forthcoming. So far it's been 100% effective for me, at least for choosing good places (it's possible I filtered good places erroneously but I wouldn't know because I never accepted the offer).
There are other more specific questions you can ask, but they tend to vary enough I wouldn't offer them as general advice.
Can you share an example of an answer that would discourage you from working somewhere? Just the interviewer's reluctance to answer or giving a superficial answer?
I have asked interviewers the opposite: what aspects of the team or company need improvement and what steps are being taken to address them? Of course they will sugarcoat their answer, but you can still glean some insight into the company culture for addressing problems.
The only thing I look for is whether or not they seem happy while answering. If people really like their jobs, they will smile and tell you how great it is and you'll believe them.
In my experience most people don't really like their jobs and are just in it for the paycheck (there's nothing wrong with that, bit if you're talented enough to be picky you should be).
Some places = every big corp and big consultancy firms.
Power imbalance, income imbalance, responsibility imbalance.
Your boss is more responsible at everything you should also do - communicating, noticing issues, noticing morale issues, being able to understand an issue beyond half-sentences, raising issues with management, trying to fix the issues, etc.
So I say, damn it. If the boss doesn't understand that I'm making my last warning before going over his head, bad luck for him.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough but if I wasn't clear enough, bad luck for him. Should have noticed it anyway, he/she is being payed to do so.
What you say is true per course, but it's uncommon to find managers that are humble and secure enough in their own personal value to treat everyone with respect and growth mindset. It's an IC's market right now, keep moving til you find someone that treats you well and encourages this.
It feels like this comment and the other comments in this thread are all dancing around the same issue: The problem is incompetent people getting ahold of power in an organization. How that comes to pass makes little difference: maybe they have personal connections to leadership, maybe they just got lucky and failed upward, whatever it might be: as soon as leadership fails in their jobs in this way, i.e. promoting the incompetent, then the company is already dead.
These people are like a cancer, and just like a cancer, as their influence grows and their power grows, the patient, the business, suffers. Sometimes businesses can last years, decades, with a number of these tumors if they're controlled, or if the business is just so healthy that it can take the strain they put upon it. But in my mind, as soon as competence takes a back seat to who you know, as soon as that line is crossed by any member of the company leadership, then that's the end. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
And this one I don't know how to solve. Were I a C level executive in a company, I'd constantly have my eyes out for this kind of shit, and excise it as soon as I could. But it seems most C-levels don't care all that much. Maybe I wouldn't if I was at that level.
It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. That also might be the C-Suite attitude, that if they select only for what they think is performant, they lose diversity of ideas.
Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. I'ts a cultural failure to keep people that only try and make people (they self select as competent) better.
In the case of the op story. It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. It's evaluating the idea too quickly. It's rowing upstream, when they are asking everyone else to row down. When they are looking for momentum, and the details come later, that person can derail the process. The reason they started working in secret, where everybody in the company but op knew, is that op was disruptive to the culture of trying. They were too pragmatic, too literal, too technical. Sit down, listen to what management is asking for, then go work on a pitch, where your delivery is "we can deliver what you are asking for (and also reuse most of our old work, saving you time and money!) Be on their team, not in opposition to it.
Replace but with yes, and at the beginning of sentences.
Well said! At the same time, it's sad to live in the world were being honest and straightforward pays off so poorly.
One person's straightforward is another person's rude. Delivery matters!
If we're talking about what's best for the company, then only the relevance of the facts should matter.
Up to a certain point, of course. But all this talk of how to deliver information so the recipient feels nice about receiving bad feedback (shit sandwiches and such) shouldn't matter.
If you find a company that‘s run by robots instead of people you might get what you advocate for
Its very possible for one person in a meeting to be ahead of everyone else, and that they need to sit back and let the rest of the room organically catch up. Sometimes it feels like its your place to either "get everyone on the same page" or "move forward because we are stuck in a rut" but actually youre just being disruptive to everyone elses learning.
Nothing at all to do with feelings.
To a point. While any given speaker should always endeavor to deliver their point for maximum effectiveness, by the same token, discounting or outright ignoring feedback simply because it's worded poorly or timed poorly is like rejecting your paycheck because it's printed on green paper instead of white. The money is still there, and it's still usable, and you're only hurting yourself because it didn't come how you thought it should.
Frankly, as someone who leads a team myself, yeah I've had to take colleagues aside and say "this isn't how we do things" but I certainly wouldn't just bin their entire point without consideration to save "face."
I don’t know—“culture of trying” sounds too much like “reality distortion field.”
Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. I’ve seen far more half-baked money pit projects than risks that paid off in my career. In tech in general there is way too much optimism and ignoring inconvenient facts/constraints until disaster is clear. Someone who can EFFECTIVELY steer teams away from horrible decisions is worth their weight in gold.
In the OP’s case, he simply couldn’t effectively communicate this, and failed to notice the rampant nepotism up his management chain, but his heart was in the right place.
>Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas.
Absolutely. And not just crazy ideas, but maybe we'll intended ideas that are misaligned with each other or the overall goals and strategic roadmap. Too many autonomous silos that are all high functioning tend to not like a skeptic saying, "this is great in isolation but the sum of these parts don't fit coherently." They also don't like "this works, but it's an MVP at best, and isn't sustainable." Skeptics cognizant of technical debt, may meet unwelcomness in an org not willing to acknowledge it.
> It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to.
This is entirely possible but in the case of OP, and in the larger scope, it's irrelevant. If you have a product manager, for example, who's job it is to oversee the development of a product, they can be the best damn communicator, they could be the nicest person, they could be financially minded and have great marketing skills, they could have excellent personal hygiene and be fantastic husbands. All of that means precisely nothing if they are so bad at managing the product that they cannot deliver that product. I'm not saying that everybody like OP's boss here should be fired, per se, there's probably a place in the organization for them. But once they become entrenched in a place they don't belong in the organization, again, it's cancer. And it's fatal.
> Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude.
Except this assumes a rising tide. If the tide falls, perhaps because your captain is not good at gauging tides, you're beached.
> It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees.
Or it's recognizing that the problem management is trying to solve has already been solved. This can mean one of many things, but the two that spring immediately to mind is that a competitor (or competitors) have already solved this problem, and that management just wants a slice of that pie too, failing to consider that simply offering isn't enough, you need to have a differentiator. See, for example, all the game developers who chased the various trends like Battle Royale, and before that Military Shooters, and before that MMO's, and all the failed businesses that those trends left in their wake. Alternately, and this seems to be the situation where OP was, their own business had already solved this need; this is a good place to be, and wanting to increase revenue by providing a new product is a damn hard, borderline arcana level task to do without either A) alienating existing customers or B) cannibalizing the users of an existing product.
I don't think management is by default full of shit, and must prove themselves wrong. That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees. If I have questions you're damn right I'm going to ask them, and I want answers commensurate with a level of respect that I'm sure my given boss would expect from me. And if your answer is to out me as a nonbeliever, I'm sending out resumes. I have no interest in finding out how this place is going down.
> That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees.
100% agree with that line. If negative upward feedback is a dead end or met with retribution, an organizations communication structure and culture is broken.
In the case of the story the project was a total failure, so it's moot - in hindsight it is simply a fact (trusting the narrator of course) that the manager was incompetent.
This doesnt need to be a tribal either or. It could be both incompetent management and tactlessness and strategic ineptitude on the tech leads part.
If your technical lead doesn't understand your "vision" or perceives that it has major problems, or has deep concerns about process and attrition rate and doesn't feel they can communicate them because the last time they tried you "literally ran away", then that is unquestionably a failure of management.
Don't blame the subordinate calling foul for being "too pragmatic". That's not how hierarchical management works.
The self appointed technical lead, while management was announcing a new project, stood up and said "this project is a bad idea." It probably wasnt the time and the place, even if the technical person was correct. The entire company moved forward and left this person out. There were other better ways to handle dissent.
Maybe they aren't incompetent; that's a story we tell ourselves.
The choices, as I see them: own responsibility for making sure the recipient understands our communications. If they don't, that's on me. If they do, but don't do what I want... I can either accept their decision or move on.
I know changing jobs is hard, but all I can control is to communicate better (differently! and with compassion/empathy!) or leave.
The trouble is, everyone thinks their boss is incompetent.
Thats not true. I have worked in many teams and organizations where manaagement and direct supervisors are well regarded. There are inevitably comparative weak links, but thats not the same as incompetence.
I don't. He can be a bit of a space cadet at times and sometimes get stuck on the wrong things, but I would never call him incompetent.
The place I work now has a good mix of hyper-competent 1st level managers. Its almost weird, but for sure its a result of the expectation that "team leads" or whatever you want to call them are also managers.
I'm not sure I agree with having the technical guy be the personal manager, but when they only have a couple direct reports a good percentage seem be able to herd the cats semi competently.
That isn't to say there aren't plenty of disasters, but when it works, it works fairly well. I guess you just have to be willing to throw away some of your best technical people when it turns out they don't make good managers, or they turn into just another layer of middle mgmt that needs to be cut in a few years.
I don't.
Our upper management is incompetent because they are so removed from what we actually do, and show no interest in learning about it.
But my immediate manager is very far from incompetent.
This is universally true of all upper management. See the SNAFU principle[1]
[1] http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SNAFUprinciple.html
Is there a distinction between competency and being any good at your job? I would hesitate to call (most of) my management chain incompetent. I would also hesitate to call (most of) my management any good at their job.
That's not true. In fact I think ALL of my previous bosses have been extremely competent and super smart. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe I've had realistic expectations.
I don't - my boss is great person, good manager and great programmer.
My team, boss included, is one of few reasons keeping me at this company.
Not true. I had good bosses, neutral bosses and bad boss. Narrowly dodged awful one.
I think its fairer to say you can only appreciate a truely competent boss once you have suffered an incompetent one.
I disagree. No one magically becomes good at their job and management is a different job to engineering. Inevitably every manager is going to suck atleast a little for a period of time.
What we need is more training and culture around feedback at work.
> On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.
This assumes that your boss is at all interested in mutual escalation. What if your boss regards it as a non-problem, and thus escalation entirely a waste of time?
You are assuming good faith. This is perhaps not always an accurate model of corporate political life.
Indeed, it's a completely laughable scenario in any corporation that's bigger than, say, 30-50+ employees. (Alternatively: Any corp. that has a dedicated HR department.)
It's just the reality of an asocial entity acting for its own benefit. Once you grow beyond a certain scale incompetence and indifference beyond personal benefit will start to rule the day.
I don’t think this is a function of organization size...
At the megacorp where I work, my manager and I have a very positive relationship. He values me and my contributions. When I am frustrated, he tries to help.
My partner works in a very small firm. Nepotism is the norm, and an utterly incompetent person is tolerated because firing them is politically untenable.
I have no doubts that similar dysfunction can exist anywhere. Surely this is a very per-company, per-department, per-manager sort of thing.
A smaller place can revolve around one or two personalities who create/drive/dictate the internal culture. These people are needed and doing a bad job is only one factor when letting someone go.
Big companies have these people. They are act all social events, know many in senior management. They make friends with everyone have been promoted in areas they have no background but can force a project through because of relationships or understanding internal policy.
Size matters, statistically. About 1% of males are sociopaths a little less for females. Socipaths are drawn towards positions of power. In organizations much larger than 100 people it is quite likely to be lead by a sociopath. APA doesnt call them that anymore. Antisocial personality. It isnt even considered a disorder necessarily. Sometimes they can actually be good leaders precisely because of their lack of empathy.
If it isn't considered a disorder, how do you identify it? That is, how do you know if a person is a sociopath or not?
I also expect this being a spectrum, as many other things. Are there way to recognize the traits of a sociopath?
I am an introvert. It is readily apparent to all, but not a disorder. I am not a psycologist and I don't know more than I have read from non journal sources. But the wiki page lists things like superficial charm, repeated failed relationships, inability to take responsibility for mistakes, diminished affect etc. Again, that i no longer the term preferred. Movies gave the term so much loaded meaning that was inaccurate. They also once had homosexual as a diagnosis and a disorder. Different is only a problem if it is a problem. If suddenly none of us felt sad when we harmed others, I don't think it would turn into mad max.
This is interesting... maybe it's fractal-like? Maybe there are these microcosm(oses,a) that experience these failures of communication and cooperation?
Even if we're being cynical, I think we should still be mindful that (usually) large corporations have dysfunctionaly dynamics. (This is not news, obviously.)
The lesson is there is no winning in a toxic environment. Leaving was the only good thing that happened in his story.
This is the best comment. The only mistake this guy made was giving too much of a fuck about garbage for too long. I was burned by a bad manager early on in my career and in retrospect I'm grateful that I learned the lesson early. In this situation I would be looking at one thing only: how to get out in a way that maximizes my future career success elsewhere.
Watch out, especially, for Death March assignments. A Death March is an unmistakeable, clear message: move on. Move now.
If your boss' boss is unable to even hear your input (then rightfully delegate it to your boss), that's a failure of being a manager's manager and failure at communication. This is not bypassing your boss, but evidence of possessing two ears, something between them and a heart.
What is a failure, is to expect one employee (your boss) to fix everything, when such initiatives need to be supported by several managers. Changing culture happens from top-downwards and changing the course of culture might take years and years of slow progress.
If your function is being badly managed, you're probably screwed anyway, though it is reasonable to expect assists with other departments and their leaders. If such issues are chronic, change will be slow and you will often find yourself back at square one after the next reorg.
You are absolutely right that is the organization perspective in almost every organization I know that's larger than say 100 employees.
That's why I avoid them. They have every right to their perspective, just as I have every right to interpret it: status quo is supreme. Efficiency, effectiveness and progress are far second. In fact, larger organizations are INTENTIONALLY inefficient, as it limits the damage any one bad actor can accomplish. This makes sense for the large organization, but for the individual perspective, it means those who play politics are more valuable than those who actually get shit done.
It's why I love small businesses. Generally getting shit done is supreme and the need for appearances is less.
I get the appearance game, and many people who refuse to play also get it. But I find it sleazy and fickle. I mean it's mostly based on heuristics. Funny, Adam Smith seems to agree on large corporations being less focused on results: "This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own."
Is this one thing the military does better? They have an open door policy, and plenty of people have used it when faced with a toxic leader. Doesn't always seem like it works out based on my limited reading, but it does work out sometimes, especially if the person one level up the chain of command is a decent leader.
One of the benefits of the military treating people as property that they'd rather not have killed is that they take poor leadership seriously.
I see a number of specific advantages the military has.
One is civilian oversight. You literally can write your Congressman and complain, and there is an IG office to curb some of the worst abuses. But, that's really only helping you in the worst cases.
Two, the military is a bit like an enormous union where job descriptions are so precise people are relatively interchangeable. And, unlike a union, it applies to management, too, and they will tell people to pack up and move across the world. So if your job description is large enough, your chain of command is constantly cycling as senior people come and go, often from another part of the nation entirely. It's breaking up those cozy connections that the OP was detailing, where all those people were buddies from a long way back.
Three, when senior people have all lost friends to war, suicide, or even training accidents, it injects a healthy degree of candor into every day interactions. I noticed this when I had a mess of errands to run, simply walking from the troop to a commo shop to central in-processing to finance that there was a shift in attitude, an increasing degree of "unreality". (OTOH, we could spend all day standing around with our gear laid out for inspection because our leadership was entirely insulated from the wages paid to 120 men.)
Four, there is some explicit filtering for competence. If you're in a combat arms unit in the Army, your senior leadership is almost certainly Ranger qualified, and they can fail out if their peers don't think they're a good leader. The downside is those guys are routed into the military bureaucracy, so again, it kinda sucks to not be combat arms. But, at least they're not going to bumbling around in a firefight.
Can you expand on what you mean by "unreality"?
Kind of not understanding the reality of the military's mission, and a disconnect from the consequences of their actions. It looked, to me, that they were just following a bunch of steps without thinking about whether any of it works.
That's what you get when you demand people follow orders without questioning.
So, system working as designed?
I thought breaking the chain of command was a huge no-no in the military.
> The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure.
Don't forget that your boss' boss may not want to hear about how they hired (and/or keep) the wrong person in the role. It can look like an attack on their own judgment.
Unfortunately, to me this sounds like a politically correct corporate-approved reply an HR would give when explaining why you got fired. In real life, the situation is usually much simpler. If you jump over your bosses' head, and your bosses' boss supports you, they are:
1. Opening themselves for a situation where you'll try to jump over their head next.
2. Giving others a reason to question their own loyalty.
>If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved.
I have never seen this work. Really. If your boss doesn't like you and is not willing to put that aside, there's usually some ego and petty feelings involved and there is no good way out. You can pour endless time and energy into attempts to get it to work, and have it flushed by your boss because not letting you win is an ego thing for them. Or you can shut up, smile and pour that energy into getting the right things on your CV, networking, learning relevant technology and eventually getting a better offer and escaping.
>Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
Nope, it's important because in a BigCo, most ambitious people don't care for being right. They care for maximizing their own income, political influence and career perspectives. And being able to navigate and communicate that will help you align your interests with theirs and get them to actually support you.
This was the hardest lesson for me to learn. I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.
Get out. Get out fast and clean, if you can, fast, if you can't. Clean is secondary.
There is a whole world of projects that value competence. They deserve it far more than these bozos.
>I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.
Isn't at all once you start your own business.
Being smart and stubborn is like having race car. Will make you go nuts sitting in a traffic jam all day. But once you discover where the race track is, you'll find it rewarding to hit the gas and leave everyone else in the dust.
Wow! I will try to remember that metaphor when I start to plan going into self-employment (in a year or two). Thank you!
"You come at the king, you best not miss."
This entire comment is not applicable in the situation described, where there is a huge imbalance of power. The manager is not an equal to be “worked with” the same way fellow ICs are in the way you describe.
What the article describes is a case of nepotism, and expecting someone to “work with” that to a mutually beneficial end seems a bit naive.
The communication failure begins with management. Don't blame the employees if there are no mechanisms/systems/processes in place to report your managers.
You're right, it will build up a grudge that gets launched uphill. That's what I did, after letting my manager litter my codebase for months until he made the big mistake of telling me to shut my mouth, giving me a reason to go to HR.
> It is seen as a communication failure.
So right! In most instances it becomes victim shaming: "It's your fault for not managing up."
But what else can do you after you've tried many different respectful ways to communicate and you have basically zero power?
Everything has its limits. The author of this claimed the guy literally ran away from him. Not much you can do to fix a communication issue when the other party won't engage in a conversation.
That's a useful attitude in many cases, but you must have read a different story than I did, because it seems very unlikely that it would have been effective in this case.
This assumes both parties are after the same thing. There are people that doesn't actually care what the right thing to do is, and only want to do what benefits them.
Ideally incentives should align, but often times what is good for the team / company isn't necessarily what's good for the manager and vice versa.
> The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure.
I've seen one guy who was able to pull this off at multiple companies. He was always able to get the position of his boss by going to the bosses boss.
The story that he brought was that his fellow colleages were suffering from the mismanagement of his boss.
> Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.
I don't follow. In this example Mr. Manager and Mr. Lead single-handedly torpedoed the companies prospects, and were promoted for it. What benefit and growth was accomplished there?
> I don't know if there is a lesson here. But if you are bad at your job, it pays to have good connections.
The lesson here is that companies are social entities, not technical ones. Relationships matter more than profit. If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.
Here are the rules: http://ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle
And they make for uncomfortable reading.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Developer Hegemony" [0], a book about dealing with this sorts of garbage. Even thought it's forward looking there's a lot of practical advice. Here's a review [1] that does it justice:
> It’s not a book about software development, it is a book about the industry of software development and why it is fundamentally different than “traditional” industries. And it is a book that promises an outlook on “the future of labor”, at least for us developers... It’s about finding your way in an industry that is in very high demand and mostly consists of players that play by the rules of an entirely different game: industrial manufacturing.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35051753-developer-hegem... [1] https://schneide.blog/2019/10/14/book-review-developer-hegem...
That's an interesting read. However what it describes looks like a very shallow version of lam-rim chen-mo, volumes 4-5, that explain the concept of emptiness and the danger of falling into nihilism. Edit: the tricks like "powertalk" and "information poker" are interesting, but rephrasing the book, manipulating people is not a game worth getting good at.
I found that the article (I haven't read the book) makes a reasonable defense of "loserdom" - it's not a bad life if you seek meaning external to work and it certainly offers a more fulfilling existence than that of the deluded clueless.
> If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.
Agreed. Or decide to not play. And just leave to a different job.
One thing though that I see far too commonly is that engineers think that people in power "don't know or care" as opposed to "don't want to know or care" or "know damn well and want it this way". People in power may not be geniuses, but they likely aren't incompetent either. They probably have a fairly solid level of political skill or they wouldn't have gotten to that level.
Start from the assumption that things are shitty for a reason or you are going to miss something important.
Start from the assumption that things are shitty for a reason
Problematic when the shit is something safety-critical, a large chemical plant, the 737-MAX, even a banking app with vulnerabilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
I'm glad you cited the 737-MAX, because that's a PRIME example of "things are shitty for a reason."
If you tried to move the system and it conflicted with "we will not recertify this plane under any circumstances" you were DOOMED.
At that point, you have to leave or become a whistleblower as you are fighting legions of managers united around a common purpose.
To me, starting with the assumption that things are shitty for a reason doesn't mean "start with the assumption that it is ok that things are shitty", but instead, "start with the assumption that the 737-max is shitty because letting it be so is serving someone's interest". Indeed, if someone with technical and political savvy and the talent to think ahead had figured out what interests in Boeing were prioritizing shittiness over safety, that someone might have been able to intervene effectively. If the engineers or statisticians at the FAA who wrote the buried report [1] had had the political savvy to understand why management was burying it and understood how to escalate it, they might have been able to get it out before the second plane crashed.
There is often a (political or human) reason why things are shitty, and if you can understand and game that, you can be more effective in changing the shitty stuff.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/internal-faa-review-saw-high-ri...
does "decide to not play" ever worked out well? I have never seen it.
Get financial independence and escape the need to kowtow to those who don’t have your interests in mind.
Tech is one of the few industries where this is possible fast.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
You've never met an entrepreneur with a solo lifestyle business?
OP doesn't mention any problems with their work life until they decided to play.
no tribe is perfectly flat and knowing which way the gradient goes is a good way to climb it; somewhere it is social and somewhere it is more technical and leaving for a company that's more technical oriented is still playing the game.
however what's common everywhere at the bottom of the gradient is that there lies worse work and the least gratifications and that not playing the game is the sure way to end up at the bottom, from where of course everything looks like it's shit.
so basically, the bad manager was there to intentionally run the departments into the ground so there would be clear spots to axe following the company's acquisition
This is completely typical story. I worked at a bunch of companies and had a chance observing this over and over again.
The truth is that life is not fair.
You and your manager were playing a different game. While you were spending your time and resources trying to do good for your company and to get better at doing that, your manager was spending time scheming in his own interest and also getting better at it.
He beat you with experience. You were spending your time in Jira and IDE while he was building up his own image, perfecting ways to shift blame and building connections.
And you know what? It is fine. Just ask yourself, "would I want to be that person?"
My answer is no.
I have a deep lack of respect and huge hatred for these types of ass holes. If I became this type of person I would hate myself.
However, you are right in the fact that many people are like this exist and life is not fair. My hatred is just a personal preference. I can see a lot of people answering your question with a yes... which says a lot about people in general. Most people are ass holes and that's life.
> Most people are ass holes and that's life
Whilst I tend to agree with this "between the lines" as it were, it's not an attitude I can healthily recommend. Re-shape it to "most people are trying to get ahead and that's life" is a much more helpful way of looking at various situations, and makes human behavior much easier to understand and predict.
You may also find that it reflects back on you some.
It's fine as long you know the game you're playing.
And this is the big issue : no one learn has told you, neither taught you how to play it. But some people were. Those are fine.
For the others (me included) we had to figure out on our own. Learn that we played the game the wrong way, or find another place. It took time, and a lot of investment and efforts are wasted in the process. And some people never learn. Meanwhile, those people stole undeserved credit. And if you ask them, they will tell you its thanks to their leadership and all that bullshit.
Actually, the most important thing you said is that : life is not fair. 100% fully agree.
> And you know what? It is fine.
No, it's not fine at all ... it happens, but it's not fine. Just as getting good at stealing is not fine.
It is fine. You do your own thing and try to be best at it.
Don't get slowed down by dishonest, non-cooperating types unless you have a lot of people supporting. There is more of them than you alone and they will drag you in their own territory and defeat you with their experience.
Doing something bad is not okay or fine just because you are good at it and passive support by a majority is also not an indicator for whether something is okay or not. Never was and never will be.
I think you are getting it wrong. It is not fine as we should accept it. I mean you, personally, if you want to also succeed in your life, should not get bogged down by it. Shrug, tell yourself "I will learn from it and look for it in the future but right now I am not going to spend resources fighting it because it doesn't matter as much. It's fine."
I read it all. Mistakes were made due to inexperience. Lessons should have been learnt. Wiser should he be by now.
Being aware of enterprise politics and learning how to play them will give you the opportunity to really impact the business.
Never be the guy who says:
1. "nobody does this in the enterprise"
2. "we are doing all of this wrong"
3. "we need to start from the beginning"
4. "my manager is wrong"
Whispers and grabbing coffees with people are much better weapons than being the one that always brings the harsh truth into the meetings.
Beware: pointing fingers to a colleague or your manager to upper management is telling them that they are not making their job good enough, they are not noticing things, and since they tend not to fail and to notice everything, the failure must be you.
At some point you have to decide if the business deserves your effort, and if it were me I would've decided no and walked away long before this guy did.
to put it more succinctly: There are a lot of business I can help be successful, fuck spending my time doing it for this sort of culture.
> There are a lot of business I can help be successful, fuck spending my time doing it for this sort of culture.
That's a reasonable attitude to have. Broadly, it's much easier to get promoted by joining another company anyhow.
However. The higher up in the power structure you get the less able you will be to avoid politics if you want to be effective in your role. This is true, even in technical leadership.
And with just a tiny bit of effort in corporate politics your technical (or whatever you aim for) impact can become so much larger.
>2 "we are doing all of this wrong"
I wouldn't put that so boldly, as I've done that many times and so far have had a relatively successful career as a consultant but also full timer (including manager). Admittedly, it made people very skeptical initially and made the first months less pleasurable, including ruffling feathers. Longer term, somehow that approach has been fairly rewarding.
However I'm sure there's a better way. I'm just the inherently direct type.
If you can enforce the change, eventually it's going to be better.
I agree with you, and I've done that approach, but it is really more painful and it only works if later on you are considered a Guru (by them, not by you), hard worker and a go-to guy who always helps. And it takes longer to work.
The subtle way is less painful and you begin with the right foot.
> Whispers and grabbing coffees with people are much better weapons than being the one that always brings the harsh truth into the meetings.
There was a point where I was noticing that I was being less politically effective than I had previously been, and I realized that a good bit of that had to do with open office plans. Having these little intimate exchanges is much harder to pull off reliably.
> Other departments rose, the company changed its business model and was bought for 1.1 billion dollars by a private firm....
> They were not fired. They were promoted. The manager is now the Vice President. The lead now leads in the most profitable department. The old VP is now Chief Product Officer....
> But if you are bad at your job, it pays to have good connections.
Were they bad at their jobs? Maybe their job wasn't actually doing good work. It was getting the company purchased for 1.1 billion dollars.
Not the company I want to work at either where that's your job, but it's apparently a lot of the world.
Once I understood this, it made a lot of organizational behavior make more sense to me. It didn't make me like it. But most organizations aren't actually oriented around doing quality work (of any kind of work, internal or external). That is not the job anyone is actually set up to do or incentivized to do. And I'm not totally sure they'd succeed as organizations if they were, that's not the way the world is set up, apparently. Yes, I am having some cynicism problems.
In preparation for their first lousy boss (I hope that I'm not it), I advise my less experienced reports to first think hard on what's important to them about their job before acting. Since the organization might not be working from their view of what's fair or rational, they should plan around some best and worst case scenarios of acting on that belief.
For instance, if working at that company in a particular position is the most important thing to you, then standing up to your bosses is a bad tactic. They could clip your wings or worse. Or if the pay is the most important thing to you but you can get that pay somewhere else, then you should probably leave on good terms for another job. I've seen a lot of people put themselves through unnecessary drama because they just reacted.
In my case, I find bad bosses to be intellectually and emotionally offensive. So, I will work the system to either see if they can be better or manage them out. This is a terrible way to manage your career if you care about job security.
But I plan accordingly. I had to build up my savings, create a strong internal network of people across departments with similar values, deliver business results to build credibility with more senior managers and execs, etc. And most importantly, recognize that I could lose and be ok with it. There are some real downsides, but it works for who I am.
I know folks here are beating up the author for being naive or whatever, but I respect people who put skin in the game for what they believe is right, trying to build a better environment, and helping people that they care about.
Once a company gets past ~20 employees the CEO can't evaluate employee competence directly and has to rely on proxies.
In sufficiently large companies, gaming these proxies gets you promoted faster than doing great work. This is one reason big incumbents eventually fail.
I propose required anonymous 3 month evaluations from all team members to be evaluated by a department that is unbiased.
Maybe even a computing system that raises alarms when a score falls too low to prevent corruption.
You gotta balance this right with more checks and balances though as you don't want employees overpowering management either. It's a complicated thing.
Some managers have
The lesson is:
Next time your favorite manager and tech lead quit the company, ask them why.
No kidding, after reading about all the antics, I forgot how the story started. That should've been a huge red flag.
This has always been a rule that I’ve followed throughout my working career. Whenever someone leaves or is fired, invite them for a coffee or a drink and listen to their side of the story.
There’s this Latin legal maxim that I learnt from my mum when I was a child, and have always remembered ever since: “Audi alteram partem”[1] which roughly translates to the same.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_alteram_partem
A bit of a different angle on this.
A companies may value folks in non-management roles who:
* Do what they are asked to
* Don't cause problems
* Solve their own problems
* Make the boss look good?
Note that being right on technical matters may not be on this list! Sometimes the hero's would be great managers - but if they are not manager's, all that good energy may be wasted or a negative from a companies view.
I've had this (unfortunate) experience and learned from it! I really did have the capacity to do all this great stuff. But not in that position.
Some quick suggestions.
* Provide feedback if asked, but get on with things if its not adopted (don't make business personal if you can help it)
* Make some of your own suggestions in areas the boss isn't addressing. That can look a lot like good initiative.
* If you have options take them, don't hang around too long!
* If you don't have good options outside of your current position - check to see if you are overestimating your skill etc.
* Ask yourself - will my pattern of behavior, ignoring the specific technical details, result in others (managers / co-workers) interested in working for me?
* If you want to fight the product fights / set direction - become a manager!
You generally can do this by a) getting some cert / education somewhere AND b) switching jobs OR telling your boss you'd like to become a manager and get them to describe the pathway needed - then check if the timeline they share + 1 year is reasonable.
If you become a manager make sure you can efficiently write memos and can write reasonably well.
If that doesn't work and you are really great - start consulting or start your own shop.
I've been in a similar situation. Very well liked and popular at the company, including with the founders. Often gets praised in public and is the go to person from many employees when they want advice or just to gripe. Saw somethings at the company that I thought weren't good, and most of the employees complained about to me as well. I thought I had some influence with the powers that be, and so did many of the other folks (e.g. I was encouraged to speak up because I had influence). So I did, quietly and privately at first, and a little louder as time went on. Everything I did was completely ineffective. I learned that public praise and apparent influence is very superficial, and evaporates when it comes to anything deep rooted.
I've been this person a few times, so I sympathize while seeing all the mistakes they made.
Some people have no problem with office politics. Some people don't notice or seem unaffected by it. I have a hero complex (or a sense of ethics if you want to be generous), and I can't be a full time employee anymore. Freelance work helps me keep boundaries in my work.
I'm having this problem too. It's hard for me to stay silent. I tell my friends about the things I do or say and they tell me that I'm just giving away all my intentions and political moves.
I don't manipulate people and I'm told I'm extremely straightforward. I'm not a hero though but when politics affects me like it always inevitably does, I don't play the game, I'm emotionally unable to.
Be ready to move at all times, then.
Refusing to play politics is also a political strategy. It won't work in every situation. Sometimes, being blunt will work out very badly, but sometimes your candor will be respected and your opinion will be sought out because of it. Refusing to play the game can put you in a position above the fray.
You won't be promoted to management, but if that is not your goal, it may not matter.
This is true. I've been in this type of situation before but I always attributed to luck rather then a political strategy.
I'm thinking a combination of bluntness and deception is the best middle ground.
Well, our values and norms say that being an employee, that some 40 of our hours per week are owned by another person, is good and normal. Freedom has very little value it seems. I'm like you and I just love to be free. I do whatever I want to do! And I love it, I love my life. With the perspective of freedom, signing over 40 hours a week to some random guy seems like a totally completely ludicrous thought. I would literally rather live in a tent eating only noodles, but luckily everything seems to work out anyway :)
If you have this experience of "not being egocentric enough" a lot -- which I have had -- you might like to check out the developmental model called Spiral Dynamics, it put things into place for me.
Everybody in non-tech companies should realize they are viewed as stupid ants doing all the work while another class rules them with different governance they have no chance to penetrate.
The main issue of our industry is that it is now transforming from tech-friendly into the "same old" approach of other industries, including all FAANGs. There is no space for apolitical geniuses any longer.
Not at big companies. But there are lots of smaller ones.
This blog was painful to read because it hits home on several points. I've been in the working world since the mid-1980s and have seen this type of scenario several times. It's unfortunate, it's frustrating, but there's usually nothing you can do about incompetent management except simply to leave.
Fortunately, technology is a good profession and there are always choices. I've learned over the years not to fight City Hall; if you have no power, you're just a faint buzzing in their ears. Those who are busy sucking all the money out of an organization aren't going to just stop because of a lecture from a technical lead.
Your first duty is to take care of yourself and your family. That may mean removing yourself from a toxic environment and starting over elsewhere, possibly for a cut in pay or seniority, but over the long haul you'll likely be emotionally and professionally better off.
The only way to get a serious promotion in this field is to change companies. Start over elsewhere with a boost in pay and seniority, when the getting's good. The company has absolutely no loyalty to you, so you owe it none.
But individuals do deserve loyalty. Try not to lose touch.
I read this story and found it interesting to notice how the author seemed not to have any perspective other than his own. He seemed to regard himself as central to the company, when in reality he was just one of many employees, who had been hired to do a job. Those hiring him seemed to be interested in the sale of the company and securing their own positions, which they appear to have managed well, by running a sham department, that they could present as being a success.
The author is suffering from "Bridge over the river Kwai" syndrome - being wholly concerned about technical implementation while ignoring larger strategic concerns.
The only thing you can do to hurt a bad manager is to quit, depriving him of your good services. Eventually he will be sacked, but not before you.
Nothing gets fixed if you don't say anything, but the odds are always supporting the fact that this bozo was placed by another top bozo.
The leaders who appreciate this, will go the extra mile to develop trust and/or open door with ICs but if you aren't 100% sure you have this, it means you don't.
Bozos excel at social aerodynamism and those who start to like them are to be worried about just as much. Bozos can even end up on boards, VCs or public figures. Never assume there are rules, never assume someone is addressing the obvious problem.
In the end, if you sniff a bozo, pack up and go. That's your only move.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/31/why-ever...
This might not be helpful, but it appears the OP struggled for so long because they were too attached to the project or an unrealistic expectation of growth. It’s critical to get feedback about your choices and to second-guess your attachment, if only to have that evidence or perspective available to you. Without it, it’s highly likely unexpected events carry greater personal risk, like a re-org causing a lot of distress or even happening unexpectedly at all. How aligned are you with the business leaders? It’s worth trying to meet people outside the team on a quarterly basis.
The other sad result here is that the OP chose to fight leveraging a rational argument versus the buy-in of others. It’s easy to call the other side stupid, but the reality is you have to convince them of your perspective and not necessarily that your argument is right. To make matters worse, corporate structure is fundamentally opposed to threats from below. You can have green hair and get fired because they only want people with purple hair.
Stories like these suggest (at least to me) that engineers need to work a bit more to reshape the industry into a gig economy. That means being more open to changing jobs, supporting portable and open technologies, and also establishing a more transparent hiring process. There’s a huge gap between supply and demand for engineers. That gap will be around for a while. Leveraging that gap should provide a path for preventing stories like these.
To the downvoters: would love to hear stories similar to that of the OP. I personally have never seen somebody in that situation win without major buy-in, especially from managers or C-levels. But wouldn’t mind being shown wrong.
All talent should leave these types of companies. Can’t be the VP of anything if everyone gets tired of your shit, leaves, and the company fails.
> While she was a great lead, we saved the managerial position for someone who was more suited for the job. Someone who could talk engineer and business all at the same time. Someone who has been groomed for the job.
I'm struggling with this, and I've struggled with it before. What I think you're saying is that you have an ideal candidate, but they're not enough so you need to pull in the perfect one from the outside. You don't want to invest in them instead, which would be cheaper.
"Someone who has been groomed for the job."
Why not train/groom them yourself? You already have the talent and the potential. That £10k signup bonus could pay for a whole course of training to get a loyal and well educated leader who already knows the business intimately.
It's a problem in its own making because a business fails to appreciate the talent it already has. Which is the same reason why so many people leave for new jobs, because their talent isn't recognised.
Best way to get some acknowledgment is to get a fresh job offer 50+% above what you currently get with wild enthusiasm to get you on board.
My impression was that there were two open positions, one for a lead and one for a manager. The team wanted to promote someone from within to be lead and look for a new manager because they didn't have a good candidate to promote from within. The company moved a new manager in from another part of the company and this manager brought in their choice for lead, displacing the person that was favored by the team.
I stayed too long in a job at a company that was turning / had turned toxic. It takes that experience to be able to not only recognize it in the future, but also know to act on it before it goes too far.
The combination of these two statements in the post give me the "chills of recognition" of a bad situation:
> In a company of a thousand, everyone knew me by name. I've created dozens of tools that are still used in the company to this day.
> I was assuming a position of leadership, I was very popular, yet I had no power.
If this is you, you need to evaluate your situation coldly and logically. Why do you have no power? You're either delusional about your level of influence and utility within the company, or the company is a boys club (I believe the term 'lifestyle company' was used to describe a previous place of employment of mine) and you're not a member.
And fundamentally, do your "network of influence" research before you tattle on ANYONE. That's a primary school lesson.
This is a tough lesson for engineers to learn, but whether you are right or not doesn't even really matter, it's the relationships and how you present it. I cringed when I ready about going over your manager's head in front of all the other managers. Life at work is not a code review where everyone is equal and you get to +1 and -1 everyone's ideas.
Should be a minor problem, unless the leaders are psychopaths, which they obviously were in the story so worthless of any effort.
If you have to take every problem to a VP or council of managers that means that you are ineffective and unable to sway anyone with your ideas. If the site is truly down like he said and his manager won't fix it, he should let his manager take the fall after raising it. Nobody thanks the messenger in a situation like this.
Most problem and change requests should not require manager involvement at all. In practice though, an org tend to optimize for top-brass to micromanage more and more (see: Scrum and "Agile"). You will be told to solve the issues, while higher-ups make all the shots, unwittingly causing some long-term trouble. If you correctly identify gaps and skillfully tell the right managers, they will be very glad for you pointing out risks and suggestions. Just don't expect too much at once and play the long-term game.
I'd bet most leaders in large corporations are psychopaths.
> This is a tough lesson for engineers to learn, but whether you are right or not doesn't even really matter, it's the relationships and how you present it.
Relationships are everything. How you tell someone they are wrong is important. You can shear a sheep over and over, but only skin it once. If you're going to skin someone, understand you're also ending a relationship.
Every person is different. At an old job everyone in the office thought a coworker and I hated each other. They would hear the fights coming out of our office while we fought for our ideas around a whiteboard. The reality is that we were great friends and still talk 15 years later. But, we knew each other and how to interact with each other. The people I work with now are different types of people, and would not respond that sort of interaction.
Finally, many decisions are not right/wrong or black/white. In fact any of number of solutions could typically work. If someone else is really passionate about their idea, then let them run with it. Either it works - great! Or it doesn't work and we loop back around to a different idea.
Sorry, but I absolutely hate this. Especially considering we're talking about businesses. It's crazy that in this thread the consensus is that you have to manage people and relationships at the expense of being pragmatic and exposing the truth.
Sometimes, especially in the startup world, decisions need to be made because it's make or break. And if your boss is wholly incompetent and they're the ones calling the shots, they will take the entire company down with them. Or worse: you get blamed for their failures and then you get sacked.
I've seen it happen multiple times in my career and I'll gladly speak the truth and get fired or forced to leave than sit around and watch an incompetent leader run the entire company to the ground while I stand idly by, doing grunt work and fighting all of the fires they create.
Better, then to just leave. You aren't the only one who knows, you are just the only one who insists on talking.
Go somewhere else where competence is welcome. There are pockets of it everywhere. The only reason incompetence works is the crowds around holding things together. If everyone dispersed, the bad ones would drop through the floor. Staying enables them.
Just saw this comment but I wish I had seen it earlier: I did just that. Cheers.
HN enforces this as a system and a contract similar to how agile enforces a certain philosophy. Perhaps something similar can be done for how to build a company of managers that must answer to the +1 -1 system.
Something between a union and unionless company.
Going over your boss’s head won’t end well because of misaligned incentives.
Your boss’s boss is responsible for the boss. Responsible for any failures and any successes. Acting on a failure you reported would be a black mark on their report card. That’s not gonna happen.
Few managers care about doing the right thing — that’s why they’re in politics... ahem....management.
Whew, I've seen this one first- and second-hand a few times.
I worked for a global multi-national for around 17 years, through a few acquisitions, and through a 6-9 month lay-off cadence that often came with overall restructuring and rotating/changing managers. I remember one individual, in particular, we'll call him "Bob". This guy's ignorance was rivaled only by his arrogance. Bob ended up taking over the team that myself and a coworker (who I shared an office with) and almost immediately started causing grief. A series of boneheaded, and very expensive decisions were made which effectively eliminated the department at the next lay-off cycle. Somehow the Bob not only survives another set of layoffs, he gets promoted and is now in my direct reporting chain. Almost immediately, any interdepartmental communication was forbidden (and I'm talking "Database Admins" not being allowed to e-mail "Unix sysadmins"), and similarly, much of his department started crumbling. I got out quick and my coworker, Greg (not really), entered a new level of hell.
Though my department changed, my location didn't, and I still worked with Greg 75% of the time. Greg felt his wrath, daily and I got a bit of it "by splash". Then Greg saw an opportunity -- he was asked to discuss a project with the CIO, our department Director and VP. Greg didn't hesitate to bring up Bob[0]. It went over like a lead baloon; holy cow, the whole mood in the room changed. Something we hadn't known -- Bob hung out with a lot of folks in the office outside of work. He worked at the main office, which was much larger and in a different time zone than us and our Director. The VP in the room was also from the main office. Shortly after the meeting, he was informed by his boss that she had spent the last hour "begging for them to not fire [coworker]". Yep. They were all friends.
Well, my story has a bit of an uglier ending, but not one that isn't deserved. The struggling company was purchased by a competitor and the CIO was replaced. Several layers were added above Bob. The new headquarters was in a city far enough away that they had their own networks, isolated from the old guard. Incredibly, Bob started making in-roads well before the acquisition was complete and had already begun trying to sully the reputations of people he considered "enemies". One of those people was Greg.
Now, Greg had a few people who didn't like him. He was very cut-and-dry, blunt, but he was an "attack the idea, not the person" kind of guy and if you understood that, you got along well with him. He was/is crazy smart, articulate and has a personality of the kind that you want to get behind because you know he's going to be doing something great. And he'd slept at the new office the entirety of the previous week making sure that the infrastructure side of things went off without a hitch.
We're in a 9-person meeting "war-room" for the acquisition, and the CIO walks in -- I throw him a (sadly, over-prepared question) about REST and our (non-existent) service infrastructure and he mentioned something about Clojure. My coworker is introduced[1] him and he said "So, what's the deal with Bob? ...". He attacked the person. And went on for 15 minutes, deadpan, facts-only, listing every failure and its inevitable origin: a decision Bob forced down the department's throat. I watched the new CIO get more and more disgusted -- he was a rare beast -- a C-level at a multi-national who understood systems and didn't have a skillset that was a decade out-of-date[2]. The CIO politely excused himself from the room, which was completely silent at this point save for my coworker and remained that way for a solid minute after the guy left the room[3]. Greg had gotten a little loud.
Then we remembered that we were there to watch him address the IT department on the big screen in the room[4]. Someone in tech announced that things would be getting started about 5 minutes late. They started 15-minutes late. Shortly after introducing himself, the CIO apologized and said he had to take care of a "personnel issue" that required a little more time than he had expected. The door opened and our (new) department VP walked in, "[CIO] just got off the phone with HR and Bob. He was informed his services are no longer needed." Greg was on his feet and the room erupted. For literally months after that happened, people from the "old company" would call Greg (remote office) to thank him. What was amazing to me was that literally everyone except for 3 people in IT management and leadership knew this guy was at fault and yet he continued to increase in his ability to cause problems. It turned out that the prior week had been spent by the new CIO trying to wrap his head around the boneheaded architectural decisions he was inheriting. All of these decisions had one name behind them and that guy had been with the company for 10 years!
[0] I don't recommend it. This guy, though, had stones and if given the opportunity to address the issue with someone higher on the chain, it trumped any fears of him losing the job. "If they're not going to trust me to tell the truth when it's hard to hear, they're not someone I can morally work for." He had brought it up to every single person from above him up to the CIO, why not the CIO?
[1] That's an understatement. He was one of the major reasons infrastructure integration happened at all. The CIO looked at him like he was some mad genius.
[2] I recognized the same on the development side when his Clojure response, despite not being a choice I would have made (unfamiliarity), was backed up with an argument that wasn't marketing or otherwise buzz-wordy.
[3] Someone started with a "So......" at some point, I'm sure.
[4] The company had a studio -- really cool -- and complete stage/audience room. We could have gone, and some did, but we were "war rooming" for the past week and a few of us weren't sure if it was just the left-overs from lunch that had stunk up the place.
Reading this over a little bit, I wanted to clarify a few points. At least a few of the things Bob was responsible for fell into the category of questionable ethics, if not outright illegal behavior. There was cases where incredibly expensive, far inferior solutions were chosen over the recommendations of everyone else which turned out to involve a purchase from a company that had some connection to Bob. Server hardware vendors changed from major brands to lesser-knowns at a higher sticker and much higher support cost. Bob was very-much about connections.
Where you had to get used to Greg crapping on a bad idea, and accept that he still had utmost respect for you as an engineer, you had to deal with Bob crapping all over you, especially if you were an engineer with a good idea. If it was a really good idea, it became Bob's idea shortly after he badmouthed you onto the next lay-off list.
We noticed early on that if someone appeared to be smarter/more capable than Bob, Bob would target that manager. We lost my favorite two managers to Bob's relentless bad-mouthing inside and outside the main office ... which neither of these managers shared.
That would have been incredible to witness.
So incredible. It still feels like it happened to somebody else. While writing that, yesterday, I realized that I was a participant in the whole situation most of the time. Not the first CIO meeting; George was downright crazy for doing that, but he disagrees with me on that. In that second CIO meeting, I contributed a few points of my own; but really, Greg had the stones to speak up -- I wouldn't have had he not gotten the ball rolling, so my contribution isn't something I really remember much of.
I'm pretty sure I got the quote from the new director perfectly, though -- it was a moment in my life where I felt like I had witnessed "the right decision being made, even though it was tough to make" along with a whole mess of vindication for the tens of times I had butted heads with Bob. Someone looking skeptically might attribute some form of good will toward Bob. That's cool and I hope he's all right. He had family and friends; I'm sure someone found him to delightful. We never met the great Dad that he might be. We got stuck with laser-focused pure-rage.
My favorite Greg, not Bob, story, though is the reason he's among my best friends years after that job. I had started in Desktop Support at a company that was 80% VT-something-or-other terminals in 1997[0]. Greg started a month after me, and shared my work-aholic tendencies[1]. The new VP of our new IT department, who's name is not Wesley, but who was one you could count on to correct you if you didn't use his full, given name, came to our office. We were HQ#2 back then.
To set the stage, he picked a 25-person conference room for all ... 70-or-so? of us, for an hour-long mandatory meeting[2]. He's sitting with his butt leaning against the edge of a whiteboard, standing in the corner, wearing Birkenstock sandals and socks (nothing against Birks; owned 6 pairs in my life), addressing the tightly packed, mostly standing group. Greg is sitting at the oval table in the center. Before Wesley starts talking, it's obvious, he's going for a certain look. It wasn't hipster (AFAIK, too early). Then he started, trying to communicate ... something ... what ... the fsck ... are these words ...? Everyone in the room has a look on their face that resembles some form of straining. He mis-used words, he made new words made out of combinations of obscure words. Poly-isomorphic was used twice among several words that "I don't think it means what you think it means".
Greg told me about a habit he had when people drone on and on. He starts counting those "annoying words", "uh's" and "um's", "you know's" and such and keeps score. It's a curse. I can't help but do the exact same thing[3]. I had to stop when the Migraine hit. Greg was in rapt attention, awkwardly, the only one in the room feigning interest.
Q&A comes up and I ask about our mess-of-an-e-mail[4] platform, and he responds "Netscape"-something-or-other. Greg speaks up and asks if we had evaluated GroupWise, Exchange or another option[5], carefully elevating his vocabulary to sound "intelligent, but not douche-y" and mid-sentence he pauses, blinks, and says "...I'm sorry, ... did you want me to fluff you?"
Now, it's hard to convey how that was delivered without the accompanying voice. Greg's voice is right in the middle; neither booming nor weak. I'd guess he sings around a Tenor range. He delivered this in with the same tone a server at a restaurant, might. There a desire to help in his tone, along with a tinge of innocence, and empathy: "Oh, that's my fault, I forgot to hold the mushrooms for you. Let me just run back and fix that." The words were at a total disconnect with the delivery. He delivered a slap in the face that you feel obligated to tip him for.
It sucked the air out of the room. Wesley lets out an uncomfortable laugh and says, and in his first display of humanity, says "No, no, ..." and the room erupts in laughter. It's 55-minutes into this meeting. Many of the participants in the room are middle-aged very-overweight men who are visibly wet with sweat because it's mid-summer and you don't jam that many people into a conference room for an hour. The collective laughter was like a bomb going off; people left cubicles out of concern to see what the noise was.
Greg was early 20s, I was 19, we were the youngest in the department by at least 5 years, and younger than most by 15. Here's this "equivalent to the cashier" spanking the district manager in front of his entire team on his day of introduction. And he was saying exactly what everyone in that room was thinking. Stones on this guy[6].
Funny thing is, for the most part, it became a story and that's it. Our, collective, manager told him "That was awesome" and he never took any heat for it. I'm guessing Wesley was a little embarrassed and just let it go. He stuck around for another year-and-a-half until the first acquisition or-so, and occasionally worked on things with Greg, but it was never brought up between them. Though it wasn't a Hollywood-style "and Wesley had a new found respect for Greg" ... I think Wesley realized, rightly, that Greg was an "equivalent to a cashier" at the time and wouldn't be competing for his job before he was long gone.
[0] That was flipped in 6 months, but the most used app was a $100 product we had to install to handle whatever VT-weird escape sequences this thing used to display colors and accept input.
[1] My dad is a happily retired small business owner with a fierce work-ethic. Some would say workaholic. I was his son. He was an awesome Dad growing up, and is an awesome Dad, now (he doesn't read HN).
[2] I'm bitching, but he brought a fountain coke machine with him for permanent installation on the IT floor only, so we weren't unhappy. Suck it, Google! :)
[3] My apologies if the curse strikes you, now. :(
[4] Lotus CC:Mail - I became an expert in recovering people's inboxes. It was a fantastic piece of software. You could read mountains of e-mail provided you had an IT guy near by who could kill a day helping you de-corrupt your inbox file. It's like your whole inbox was just that .pst file. Still gives me nightmares
[5] I want to say Greg was leaning the lines of postfix/a unix/open-source option, or a straight up Microsoft Exchange buy into the Borg scenario (he was an admirer of Bill Gates back when that was frowned upon /s).
[6] Apologies for the graphic reference ... no better way to describe. It's part bravery. And were it anyone else I'd say "It's a little bit of stupid mixed in" but no, with rare exception this guy knew those were the right words at that time and knew full well he might be forced to walk out of the building (at least, in the early days). I think I've heard him speak a profanity twice, all placed very intentionally to make a point, and used as though they were high explosives to be used in the most dire of situations.
I'd be someone who would have responded to the first HN comment about his workplace as "its a toxic environment, pack your parachute and get out."
I think life is too short to waste it sharing with toxic people. You are just withholding it from the good people. Tolerating political nonsense is a particular kind of fun or challenge for awhile but its really just an opportunity cost in the long term. Be clear about what you see as the benefit when doing so.
This doesn't mean you run from adversity but it does mean you evaluate adversity knowing that it still needs an actual benefit that exceeds its very real cost.
Kind of interested in knowing if this was his first job, as there were many, many mistakes made here. This is simply a case of him not understanding his role. Went over bosses head without knowing anything about the relationship between said boss and upper management. Didnt inquire as to why a boss who "burned a team to the ground" in previous position was promoted to his team to begin with. Kept trying to come back to the company for social gatherings even after leaving. Am not sure what the story is here, but I hope he learned some lessons, plural.
It's common to promote someone to just get rid of that person :) Sometimes promoting is just easier that firing.
Failing upwards, as someone here said
Reinforces the idea that managers fail up; engineers fail down.
"Promoted to their level of incompetence" is a phrase I've heard before to describe this phenomenon.
There is a whole book.
The book is The Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
This leads to Peter's Corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."
The Wikipedia article is a pretty thorough summary of the book:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
That's a good one too - but the fact that managers are promoted to their level of incompetence, while engineers are DEMOTED to their level of incompetence... it makes it quite hard to justify staying on the technical track for all but the most talented of engineers (which 98% of engineers are not)
As somebody who was probably promoted up to or above his Peter Principle skills, I sympathize. This isn't how maximally efficient places should work.
But having said that, maximally efficient places are heading to being truly horrible. Taylor time-and-motion and 'sack till it works' is not condusive to good longterm outcome. It works for something like D Day right up until you exhaust the pool of new officers. Then you have to go back and try and instill some motivation in the ones you sidelined hunting for perfection.
This story is why you need to spend your f*s carefully. The author care way too much about his day job. If he’s that passionate he needs to start his own company.
I like the inverted pyramid. ;) While not perfect, it is pretty good at exposing unproductive people.
Ah the follies of ignoring and not having social capital
About 2006, I stood up to my boss trying to cajole me into weakening a credit card processing private network at a big name university. And then I was fired for refusing to do it immediately when all I asked for was to slow down and review the changes. Narcissists throw tantrums if they don't always get their way because they hate not being in complete control. sigh