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Comment by logall | Hacker News Reader

"In America, 75% of employees consider their direct line manager the worst part of their job, and 65% would take a pay cut if they could replace their boss with someone else."

It is happening because every company is super exploiting the workers to increase the profits, because we have a capitalist crisis

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>"It is happening because every company is super exploiting the workers to increase the profits, because we have a capitalist crisis"

Eh, the statistics are better explained by the fact that most people (adults especially) don't like being told what to do. They'll be bitter about anyone handing them orders on a daily basis, especially if their manager isn't gentle or subtle in their managing. If a manager has enough emotional intelligence and empathy then they should be able to set direction and delegate without being disliked, but that ability is reserved for an elite few. Hence the statistics.

Worse if the manager is incompetent; quibbles over minor details in code review, yet railroads through massive PRs with endless methods just haphazardly strewn into monster classes with no modularity or sense.

The problem is that, in most cases, managers are people who were good workers (and good at office politics) and who then got promoted into supervisory roles with little, if any, additional training.

Peter's principle and whatnot, but I think there is something deeper. The manager positions are designed, by definition of the word, to manage, and the top goal is to extract values from workers. Managers (and product managers in tech companies) are encouraged to create a `healthy` tension with line workers (software engineers included) in work estimation and commitments. This is supposed to make the work challenging enough, but not so demanding that burn out the workers. The best managers can do that by providing the intellectual challenges and motivational goals. Most resort to processes and plain OKRs though (reflected in the worst ever software tool, JIRA. Also any line manager who's got any clue, meaning who can provide technical/business directions, would be quickly promoted to directors (where they are supposed to direct :-).

Protip for frontline managers: The percentage of time you spend on JIRA is negatively correlated to the chance of being promoted to the director level.

I would also add that most corporations are dysfunctional - basically, they develop a cash cow that brings in profit, become secure, then allow incompetent management to spread, since there's little to no impact to the revenue.

This creates corporations with terrible management for individual employees and yet no reason for the corporation to care.

That "capitalist crisis" raised billions of people out of poverty. :] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/global-povertys...

You might like how living standards are higher than they have ever been in human history?

>capitalist crisis

If not liking your boss is a capitalist crisis I much prefer it to the current socialist crisis going on in Venezuela.

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