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Comment by messit | Hacker News Reader

> She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's little privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard and typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant against people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started openly taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample documentation of who failed what.

That sounds pretty horrendous to me, I would wish her all the best and leave.

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This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well in a company with a good culture.

Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader during wartime but terrible during peacetime.

Depends on who you ask. Winston Churchill was a racist bigot who starved 4 million people in India to feed his armies.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...

It's not that Churchill was a different person in wartime than in peacetime, it's just that most people's morals change from wartime to peacetime. So the same atrocity could be viewed as an atrocity or heroic and brave depending on what the public at large feels like their situation was like at the time. That's the point being raised about the manager: every statement the parent made was basically an accusation, but because the team was desperate the success in the end overwrote the other things in everybody's mind.

If the team had failed in the end, all of the qualities that are presently being lauded would be held at fault. True morals may not be relative and situational, but the average person's mental implementation of morals sure can be.

This book A First-Rate Madness by Nassir Ghaemi [0] is about that. He looks at various historical leaders and how one half of them make good wartime leaders, but bad peacetime leaders, and the other half -- the opposite. Some of his case studies are, as far as I can remember (couldn't find a summary online): generals in US civil war (Lee and the scortched-earth-guy), Chamberlaine, Churchill, Hitler, JFK, Lincoln, Napoleon, Nixon, Bush. US centric, but still pertaining to anyone.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/First-Rate-Madness-Uncovering-Between...

> the scortched-earth-guy

William Tecumseh Sherman, of "Sherman's march to the sea"

During his first war, he was absolutely terrible in wartime as well.

Churchill was a complex man, but it was his party that got defeated in the 1945 election not Churchill. (Churchill it should be said, was a Liberal, not a Conservative before the war, and joined the party to prevent conflict in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak - he would later describe it (in his diaries) as a mistake.)

We don´t know if he would have been a good or bad leader during peacetime (by the time the conservatives got back into office he was no longer in his prime shall we say), but what he would most certainly have been is a leader with a lot of experience in dealing with Stalin, and a British Imperialist. Which would have been entertaining at least.

For pretty much all teams I'd agree. But if it comes to the point as described, you pretty much have to revert to treat everybody at children and gradually build it up from there. Privileges is something you work to get.

Not within the existing culture. It seems necessary.

Most of that is "blank slate, let's start again" with expectations made clear. Obviously that was lacking in this place.

When you've got people successfully blaming others for their own failures, this manager, with experience on the front lines, did the most effective thing to remedy that. I'm sure nobody got fired for someone else's failings after that.

Exactly. The deal wasn't static: people got their freedom back when they showed they were worthy of it.

The aftermath was that a few people left the company for better jobs after we shipped (unavoidable, some had set their minds even before she joined and actually stayed longer because of her). For the rest, it was promotions. The engineers on a PIP exited the PIP by being promoted(!), were allowed to move to their favorite projects. Even the scheming engineers who turned us into a toxic team got promoted for the work they did under her management (though personally I think they should have been shown the door for their attitude). Manager moved to a more prestigious peacetime team, where I am sure she runs things differently.

Why? It sounds like she was giving direction to her directs and holding them to account. Every manager who gets stuff done does the same thing in their own style.

There arguably are less blunt ways to do it - but for that team, it seems like it was the right approach. Also, OP is presumably overstating the need to be typing all the time since that's not how programming works.

People who are high performers in a group of slackers like these kinds of managers.

She was dealing with bad children so they had to be treated like children.

In context of a toxic enviroment this may be more like a reset. See who has substance and who doesn't. If you do this in a clear and fair way it doesn't seem unreasonable for a non-performing enviroment. The benifits and flexibility can return when earned and the bad eggs are discovered and removed.

To me it seems a lot of people in these teams were more interested in climbing the corporate ladder than working in nice teams. Those kinds of people might perhaps be hesitant to leave the company.

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