Half of us have quit our job because of a bad boss (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Half of us have quit our job because of a bad boss (2015)

fortune.com

135 pointsalexellisuk75 comments

Not everyone has the freedom to quit their job, small towns, limited skill sets, transportation issues, family issues, etc. etc. etc, otherwise the number would probably be at 75%.

Would likely be 100 if you remove all factors keeping somebody from quitting a job.

Only if all bosses are bad :).

But what if all employees are humans. And like humans, they are irrational in their criteria of what makes a boss "good". For example, they want bosses that never demand work from them and let them go home early every day. Even if they get this, their standards will adjust and they will take the same level of issue with smaller things. Being a boss and attempting to be liked by your employees is a lost cause and foolish endeavor.

But this is not true. If this is true no reputable company would have employees staying >3 years. If you're hired at a reputable company >1 year, chances are you do get offers or you have a greater chance to get it. Good bosses are rare, but they do exist.

I've had a number of great bosses, whose example I attempt to emulate in all my interactions - with both subordinates and superiors.

My 3/4 bosses as intern were great. One guy was really incompetent, but he got me when the manager, who hired me, quit. So it’s almost ok.

After graduation the quality of managers varied greatly. There was a guy with 20 yeas experience, who took my mentoring very seriously. He fired me when I started my own company. Good decision actually! A boss before him was a great narcissist, if I were smarter, I would be able to play him and got higher. Not really the one to run from. Then there was a bunch of old dudes (totally incompetent) building big corp’s first electronics. They had no experience in the field and were really annoying. I quit. There was small company later with whole family in management: 2 sons, dad and mom. And a 2nd engineer. It was a part time position, so I was able to stay and suffer. No chance to stay with them for a 5 day workweek. My current manager is very restrictive. I can do things only old good way, all cost saving efforts and innovations are not needed. Heck, I could save company my early salary dozen times, but all the ideas were rejected.

>There was a guy with 20 yeas experience, who took my mentoring very seriously. He fired me when I started my own company. Good decision actually!

That sounds like a truly great mentor.

Not at all. It would only imply that everyone has had 1 bad boss at some point in their career.

I quit my job because of my manager. There was a policy of instilling fear to gain control. There was also a push to reduce remote work in the company despite the said remote teams performing well.

I quit because the manager was incompetent, but also because the policy was one of instilling fear into employees.

How did they instill fear?

Salami tactics.

- Reduce flexibility over time

- Every expense needs to be justified a hundred times

- delaying approval of vacation days to the point that you take a vacation, and it is still not approved

- Adding unnecessary process where none is required

- Adding compromised people to the team (limited contract, needs the job desperately, needs a raise for kid's education etc)

- Strict butts-on-seats policy

- Constantly saying that we are going to remove technology <x>, where <x> is what you are hired for. Company will still need <x> for the foreseeable future.

And there are more, but I don't want to re-live dark moments. I hope no one actually tries to implement this stuff, because it shows that your manager is a control-freak, and you need to run for the hills.

You might be interested in reading this:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-...

That is very long, what is the TLDR?

This might help: https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/499qyw/th...

The thesis is a company employs Sociopaths, Losers, and Clueless. The Losers accept whatever quid pro quo they get in their current position. The Clueless struggle to distinguish themselves from Losers. The Sociopaths talk to each other in coded language during conversations that the unwitting Clueless believe they’re participating in. The shared understanding of the Sociopaths, who have a real ability to navigate the corporate structure, keeps the Clueless from advancing. The Losers are smarter than the Clueless because they perceive the Sociopaths’ game is unwinnable and don’t play. It’s all illustrated with characters from The Office. It’s not really instructive, but it’s a great read.

For example:

Sociopath: Adam Neumann

Clueless: middle management types who fully bought in to WeWork’s “vision”

Losers: Everyday employees just trying to make a living and go about their lives. End up just as hosed as the clueless, but at least they’re not surprised.

Companies make rules to bog down any proposal or idea that doesn't benefit the executives.

These are all legitimate issues and would certainly have me looking for another job, but I think to say these "instill fear" trivializes truly fearful situations. Being an immigrant using a coyote to cross the border into the US seems like a fearful situation and a far fetch from not getting your vacation days approved. Were you legitimately afraid during these situations?

I don't think "actually afraid for your life" is necessarily the floor for whether or not management tactics are fear-based. I can easily see a lot of these problems, in a certain environment, originating as a means of making people fearful of workplace instability.

Lots of these are really just someone justifying their job. Basically, you "do your job" by creating actionable items.

Seems like par for the course for a startup transitioning to a more established company.

I've lived that a few times, now I know the warning signs and bail as soon as possible.

However, I wouldn't call these "scare tactics". In fact, there globally weren't any scare tactics for developers in any company I've worked for: they're simply too difficult to find, good ones especially.

Scare tactics is when you are a single mom afraid of losing your minimum wage job and knowing unemployment won't cover your expenses because your deadbeat ex isn't paying alimony on your 2 kids. That's when your boss starts touching you...

Like I said, there are more but I dont want to mention them publicly.

> Constantly saying that we are going to remove technology <x>, where <x> is what you are hired for. Company will still need <x> for the foreseeable future.

I've had a VPE who did this but much more subtly.

- VPE arrives & inherits a prototype written in <x> and a team heavily experienced and passionate about <x>

- VPE says that passion for technology <x> is a hiring red flag. "We want people to join due to passion for domain <y> not technology <x>". VPE is frequently the sole thumbs-down resulting in a rejection of many capable <x> engineers.

- <x> team is understaffed but has a near-term milestone defined (but not owned) by the VPE

- Simultaneously, VPE is hiring new members in another office with no experience in or interest in learning technology <x>

- Milestone is cut in scope multiple times because initial goal was never reasonable. However, the milestone is delivered and is ready to be iterated on with all the new engineers hired.

- VPE suggests moving away from technology <x> entirely and standardizing on alternative <z> because the engineers he hired are more interested in <z> and we are lacking in experts in <x>

- End result is a wholesale rewrite of the <x> project using <z>. A year of my time and years of others' gone to waste. Not to mention the project itself is in a high-profile and competitive space.

Clearly a bad actor but also adept at maintaining plausible deniability thanks to everyone's deference to the VPE's authority. Not to mention a variety of other shitty leadership behaviors employed.

Really goes to show that the Amazon leadership principle "Leaders are always right" can be perverted by way of authoritarian self-fulfilling prophecy.

Per this post, once this VPE forced out my direct manager who I actually liked (making VPE my new manager)...I peaced out :)

I was a manager with an employee who was actively trying to defraud the company with a tool <x> he had developed (claiming he had developed it before being hired) while moonlighting.

I instituted a strict butts-on-seats policy, planned to remove technology <x>, forced process to ensure source control, code review and deployment by other team members, etc.

Being a manager isn’t all glamour. There are many people who are trying to scheme, lie and cheat their way to fortune at your company’s expense, and if the manager lets them.... bad news for the manager.

Well, thats just how things are. If the person is trying to defraud, then that is a serious problem.

We are talking about just normal people, who want freedom and flexibility and haven't done anything wrong.

I understand that you had to do what you had to.

Based only on anecdotal evidence (and yeah the plural of anecdote is not data) I'd sugges that figure wildy, wildly underestimated.

I'm trying to think if I know /anyone/ over 35 who hasn't? Maybe, but I have to think quite hard.

It's probably closer to 100%. People quit bosses, not jobs.

That's a nice meme from LinkedIn but I'm sure there a few other reasons including a better paycheck, flexibility, or even benefits.

> paycheck, flexibility, or even benefits

At many, many companies, your manager directly decides or at least influences all three of these, so if you quit due to them, you're also quitting because of your manager.

Few direct managers have the ability to give you a raise that a new employer would, in cases where you're being underpaid relative to the market.

They also rarely have much influence over work flexibility or benefits.

> Few direct managers have the ability to give you a raise that a new employer would

I'm usually very up-front with my reports on this. I make it very clear that I cannot compete with other companies on an immediate short-term compensation bump, so if they prioritize "money now" over everything else, then they should go out and interview.

However in the four years that I was a manager at my previous company, nobody on my team ever took me up on the advice to switch companies to get more money faster.

>immediate short-term compensation bump

Did you believe you could deliver better long term compensation? This phrasing suggests that, it's a clever way to suggest something without promising it.

> Did you believe you could deliver better long term compensation?

Usually, but not always. Of course it's impossible to predict 4+ years into the future, because so many factors can come into play on that time scale.

External forces (spouse moving, money, other life changes) would be the other big factors. It's going to come down on one side of that fence or the other.

That's a cute saying, but it's not a universal truth.

I have quit bosses before. But I have also quit jobs where I had excellent bosses before, because the job (or the company) had problems.

It also depends on how the question is asked. I've left jobs where I respected my manager...but not someone higher up the chain. At least once the manager left almost immediately after I did, for the same reasons.

This is a good point. I’ve never left due to a direct manager but definitely have left due to leadership above them

I haven't.

I was once fired because of my idiot boss. I didn't quit. Maybe I should have, but getting fired meant I could fight it just enough to get some severance pay out of it.

He fired me the day I returned from a month long illness. Before that, he was sometimes annoyed he saw me leaning back while watching my scripts write my code for me.

None of the jobs I quit were because of my boss. One was because I really needed to do something more interesting than maintaining a bunch of legacy sites. One where I volunteered to get fired was because I wanted to start my own company.

I've never quit because of a manager. Maybe I'm just lucky. I've been able to work reasonably well with all of my managers, even the ones who saw things very differently from how I do. I've only ever quit a company because I had a better offer and they wouldn't match it.

I left my very first job out of college because of it. I think you're probably right.

I'm glad I got it out of the way early, I'm a few years into my next job now and loving it.

I think all of the jobs I've left since I graduated College 15 years ago were because of managers, except the very first one.

Funny how little things change. In their 1999 book "First, Break All the Rules", Gallup laid out their findings from over 1M interviews that:

- People join companies for the vision, brand, comp etc...but they leave because of their direct manager

- The direct manager determines how long an employee stays and how productive he/she is during their tenure

The 2 main parts of the book look at:

a) how you attract and retain the most talented employees, what things matter to them the most (compensation didn't make the cut)

b) traits of great managers

Book still holds up, worth a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50937.First_Break_All_th...

If you enjoy your work then the next thing that's going to likely drive you from your job is a human factor and which human will you consistently have to interact with, your manager. And so it does in some way stand to reason.

Also as a middle manager I can relate to some of the struggles. You will have potentially competing points of view from what your team would like to do and what the company wants them to do.

But also as an additional point of view. As a manager you may have worked your way up the hierarchy learning your craft and honing your skills. Unfortunately very few of these may actually relate to management but at some point you reach that level of seniority and then the company says "here's a team, I'm sure you'll be fine" and leaves it at that very little training or coaching you just now have to learn on the job. Unfortunately unwinding mistakes at a managerial level is very difficult because it invariably had that human component and sometimes we struggle to forgive and forget.

>Unfortunately very few of these may actually relate to management but at some point you reach that level of seniority and then the company says "here's a team, I'm sure you'll be fine" and leaves it at that very little training or coaching you just now have to learn on the job.

Thats my experience.

Being a manager of role x is not the same as being in role x.

Becoming a manager is a career change.

Managerial abuse is endemic to industry. It's simply in the businesses medium-term favor to 1) punish employees for exercising freedoms, 2) instill fear, and 3) reify management's power fantasies.

It's like any abusive relationship[1], only compounded by the profit motive.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

― Upton Sinclair

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/224552.Why_Does_He_Do_Th...

Key passage from my last two letters of resignation: "There is exactly one person in the world who is allowed to speak to me in that tone of voice, and I am MARRIED TO THAT PERSON."

I remember asking my manager to stop talking over me in a con-call. I was gone within a month

Were you fired or did you quit?

I had a 1:1 with the manager shortly after that meeting where we discussed me telling the manager to 'shut up'. I quickly made alternate arrangements before I got the boot.

I’ve quit because my boss didn’t have the political clout to protect our team from the expected next wave of corporate mandated layoffs.

I wish we talked more about being boiled slowly. I quit on the spot when the boss called a meeting of all 30 employees to replace my code with his, while being connected to a projector. But for months, I've believed my coding skills could help me outdo his favourite two and win some freedom. I'm so thankful for the last incident as the wakeup call. The other board members I never met (yes he was CTO) promised he will be kicked out. They removed my two month notice period (minimum for India).

Clearly there are bad bosses. But there are also bad employees and a good boss probably seems like a bad boss to a bad employee.

I hadn’t ever until recently. Openly hostile and toxic specifically towards me. Not my imagination, co-workers would periodically come up to me and ask me what her problem was with me. There is a company culture that protects bad behavior from the few bad actors. One bad boss was stronger than 40+ great coworkers.

The other half doesn't want it to somehow get back to their old manager, that they left to escape them!

It's probably higher than that...

"People leave managers, not companies"

https://getlighthouse.com/blog/people-leave-managers-not-com...

That seems surprisingly low.

Sure, but it takes two to tango. Humans are great in selective memories, post-facto rationalizing their own failings.

Once you've been a manager you'll understand the other side of this.

I think good people try to take responsibility for themselves before blaming others. So, yeah.

But the manager has more power than subordinates, so it's not quite symmetric. -- I don't often hear of managers leaving because of bad subordinates.

I've left jobs for two reasons: 1. I got a much better offer, unsolicited 2. The company had no future, which maybe is due to management but not a particular manager.

Last job was because of low pay and bad leadership. Fortunate I was able to move internally to another group with a pay increase.

Can we get a (2015) tag on this?

There are tons of horrible managers (and horrible employees) out there, do your best to avoid them.

That's cool because it means you can actually do that if your manager is bad. In some countries there are no jobs so all you can do about having a bad manager is... nothing.

That is true in the US for a lot of people, and it was especially true during the recession. The fact that we've been in a situation where most skilled workers can easily job hop for that last 5 or so years is an aberration, not the norm! And frankly, we should probably take advantage of the situation while we still can.

> The fact that we've been in a situation where most skilled workers can easily job hop for that last 5 or so years is an aberration, not the norm

Are you talking about workers in general, or software development in particular?

In software development, I don't remember a time in the last three decades where a skilled dev couldn't find other employment with relatively little trouble. Of course, in some periods it was easier than in others.

I was a dishwasher/line cook in my 20's, I could hop jobs on a dime. Got fired one Friday, and had a better paying job Monday and that was in 2008. I wasn't even that good.

Also some jobs makes it very costly to quit.

Like if you have tenure at a University or are in public union.

Seems to me those jobs also often have really bad personal chemistry.

The definition of a "bad" boss is totally subjective and at the mercy of an individual's motivations at a given point in time.

Some bosses are bad in a sense that they conduct or behave themselves in ways that transgress laws, but they'd be a minority of those deemed "bad".

There are a lot of people over 40 in tech and some of them are ignorant. They try to manage something they don't know or can't fully understand. I think that's one of the reasons.

This is not limited to the tech sphere, nor is it limited to people over 40. It’s actually really simple. Some people are great managers and some are awful. You know only know where people fall in that spectrum once they have been given a chance to perform those duties.

Age has nothing to do with that.

That ageism is unnecessary here. You could equally say there are a lot of people under 40 and a lot of them are ignorant and do not understand business goals.

Experience is a pretty good teacher in a lot of cases and a good manager must handle the balance between their own knowledge limits and learning how to enable their team effectively use their varying skills to deliver results.

How is that ageism? the older you are the more experience one would expect you to have. If you are over 40 and you learned nothing then what did you do? Younger people that have no experience... well that's to be expected.

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