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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

tldr; programmers are creatives, so don't treat them as just resources.

Realistically, though, programmers are just resources, as are creatives, as are their managers, as is every other employee. That's the way nearly every business works.

To expect otherwise from one's relationship with an employer, particularly in an at-will employment environment, can be dangerously self-destructive.

You can be a resource and still make a suggestion or notice something. Outright ignoring suggestions because of rank is dangerous. In software, it’s probably a programmer “in the trenches” who first realizes that something won’t work, or that you need X in addition to Y, and it can be very cost-effective to fix these things early.

I think I'd say the same if I worked for my first employer for the rest of my life. At this current company I enjoy hugs from the CEO. If you treat all the interactions in life like family and with respect you might find the world can change.

You might have a great place, but I would generally avoid any company with the "family" talk - it's a very common tactic to generate additional loyalty for no monetary investment, and you later find you might be in an abusive family.

When the budget gets tight and they need to reduce headcount, see how well you're treated by your "family".

If my household budget got tight I wouldn't throw one of my kids out on the street.

I also haven't had 6 different families over 20 years because I didn't like the environment or by getting a new spouse I could make more money...

Or in the words of Netflix "we are a team not a family".

https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

You say that like it's an inviolable law of nature to be fucked by your employer.

It may not be an inviolable law of nature, but the power dynamic of employment is designed to never be equitable. That's always worth keeping in mind when one is tempted to seek emotional or intellectual validation from a company, which is something programmers and other creative types can fall prey to.

A story was posted here and on /r/gamedev not long ago about a game developer who quit their job and moved to a new town on promise of an interview with some AAA studio (I CBA to remember the specifics right now) but they were so emotionally invested in the hype and culture of that company that they were left in dire straits... when that company simply canceled the interview and passed them up because they said a negative thing about the studio in a forum once.

Unless you're independently wealthy, or not living in the US, and thus protected by a social safety net and strong employment laws, you really can't afford to approach the job market with anything but cynicism.

This is something I think a lot of managers fail to understand. You are not "in the club", you are not an "owner", etc. You are an employee paid by the company's owner(s) to oversee resources. You yourself are a resource. Once you start thinking that your job is about "getting wins", making yourself look good, etc. you will start running your group like a fiefdom and engaging in rent-seeking behavior, basically stealing from the company since you're seeking your own aggrandizement/comfort/job security over the bottom line for the company. And since you're overseeing realistically multiple million dollar projects, you doing so is 10x, 100x, 1000x bigger of a deal than some developer being lazy at work or trying to use the new framework so he can put it on his resume. In this sense I think poor managers are actually the worst employees.

if you made it to part 3 of the article, it's also:

tldr; programmers need to be leaders too, and schedule regular 1-on-1 meetings with their boss.

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