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Comment by mbrock | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I don't want to be condescended to by managers that invite me to meetings about improving me, assessing my personality, helping me "grow."

I want to help improve the product, and the most fundamental way to engage me with that is to ask me for input and take my ideas & concerns seriously.

Just coffee and a chat every now and then is a great setting for that. No need for made-up agendas and bullet point lists and awkward quizzes.

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On the third hand, if you have some kind of career goals, then you probably want to be making some kind of progress towards them. While it's not always possible to discuss such goals with your employer (eg. if your goal is "become the CTO" and your immediate manager's goal is also "become the CTO" then discussing this with them is likely to end poorly), it's important to at least let them know which direction you want to go in.

At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.

> At my last job, I was the primary fire-putter-outer on a number of fronts, and it was very disheartening watching new projects (that I'd put my hand up for) get handed off to others while I was busy fixing up the previous efforts of said others.

I've seen this happen at an even bigger scale. The site I was part of was very successful, and was therefore completely unable to get any time or capital to do independent (non-contract) projects. And some of the projects we wanted to do were to improve our IP holdings within the space we were working! Meanwhile, the entire site that lost two contracts to rebids all got put on cool, independent, green-field projects. Completely bananas, and a symptom of a much larger problem of not rewarding success that eventually caused me to leave.

I feel your pain. :( It's the Dilbert Principle in action, except that rather than less effective people/groups being deliberately selected for advancement, those groups are selected by default because they're sitting around doing nothing important. The most effective people/groups are too busy getting the critical work done to risk letting them change roles.

If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

I've seen similar behavior and the theory I came up with is that managers are engaged/rewarded by being associated with successful projects and technical people that report to them are engaged/rewarded by new projects and challenges.

I speculated that from their perspective someone tied down to maintaining a very successful project (that continues to make succeed or make money) is in a great position politically and those getting the new green-field projects are being exposed to risk.

It reminds me of meetings–managers don't realize that they are a drain on the people performing the work because that's of course how they work and accomplish things.

The underlying problem for you and mbrock is that managers are rarely rewarded for doing these things.

Mbrock is essentially asking for a one on one that isn't filled with Status Updates and platitudes. One that fosters genuine conversation and values their input.

You're talking about real growth and whether it's a specific title or new skills, that's also a huge motivator.

Unfortunately, in most companies, managers are not rewarded for doing either of those things, nor punished for failing to do them.

The only company I know that even measures it is Google, who uses something called the "Upward Feedback Survey" to gauge it and found correlation between scores on the survey and quality of managers (team output, turnover, etc). More on the survey and some of the research behind it here: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/google-management/

At my first job, the only one-on-one I ever had with my manager was a yearly scheduled "performance review" (in Swedish, the word used is the same as that used in grade school), during which we assessed my competence.

When a higher level manager wanted to know why the product development wasn't as good as it could be, an external consultant came in to observe for a couple of weeks. He actually did talk one-on-one with each employee. He asked me what I thought really needed to be done, in a genuine way.

He produced some kind of report. We asked for several months to see the report, but it never surfaced. Then I left to join a small startup...

Sounds about right. So many undervalue tapping into the ideas and feedback from their teams and it's a massive missed opportunity. Unfortunately, I bet even at the small startup, as you grew these kinds of problems re-emerged unless the company had one on ones and good management habits.

Toyota actually even brought this to their blue collar workers with their "Total Product System" which allowed anyone to stop the assembly line if they caught a problem and engaged them in feedback to find solutions. (More here: http://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota/ar/1)

You basically want to be treated as an adult and your expertise respected and used - everything after this is just window dressing.

Not to mention that aforesaid quizzes, often based on faulty "science", can brand one in a manner that may not be advantageous to one's future. A previous employer in the early 2000s got the MBTI religion and everyone had to be evaluated. Fortunately, they gave people a chance to opt out of sharing their results, which I gladly took. The idea of someone dismissing my opinion because I might be too "judge-y" or "feely" raised my hackles.

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