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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure. If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved. If you hold back from talking to your boss, build up grudges, then launch them uphill.... even if your facts are correct, you have just become a problem.

On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.

Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.

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> On the other hand, if you had been having ongoing discussions with your boss so everything was out on the table, and just weren't getting anywhere with your boss, then you could mutually escalate it in a productive way, working together to request some higher-level assistance.

This assumes that your boss is at all interested in mutual escalation. What if your boss regards it as a non-problem, and thus escalation entirely a waste of time?

You are assuming good faith. This is perhaps not always an accurate model of corporate political life.

Indeed, it's a completely laughable scenario in any corporation that's bigger than, say, 30-50+ employees. (Alternatively: Any corp. that has a dedicated HR department.)

It's just the reality of an asocial entity acting for its own benefit. Once you grow beyond a certain scale incompetence and indifference beyond personal benefit will start to rule the day.

I don’t think this is a function of organization size...

At the megacorp where I work, my manager and I have a very positive relationship. He values me and my contributions. When I am frustrated, he tries to help.

My partner works in a very small firm. Nepotism is the norm, and an utterly incompetent person is tolerated because firing them is politically untenable.

I have no doubts that similar dysfunction can exist anywhere. Surely this is a very per-company, per-department, per-manager sort of thing.

A smaller place can revolve around one or two personalities who create/drive/dictate the internal culture. These people are needed and doing a bad job is only one factor when letting someone go.

Big companies have these people. They are act all social events, know many in senior management. They make friends with everyone have been promoted in areas they have no background but can force a project through because of relationships or understanding internal policy.

Size matters, statistically. About 1% of males are sociopaths a little less for females. Socipaths are drawn towards positions of power. In organizations much larger than 100 people it is quite likely to be lead by a sociopath. APA doesnt call them that anymore. Antisocial personality. It isnt even considered a disorder necessarily. Sometimes they can actually be good leaders precisely because of their lack of empathy.

If it isn't considered a disorder, how do you identify it? That is, how do you know if a person is a sociopath or not?

I also expect this being a spectrum, as many other things. Are there way to recognize the traits of a sociopath?

I am an introvert. It is readily apparent to all, but not a disorder. I am not a psycologist and I don't know more than I have read from non journal sources. But the wiki page lists things like superficial charm, repeated failed relationships, inability to take responsibility for mistakes, diminished affect etc. Again, that i no longer the term preferred. Movies gave the term so much loaded meaning that was inaccurate. They also once had homosexual as a diagnosis and a disorder. Different is only a problem if it is a problem. If suddenly none of us felt sad when we harmed others, I don't think it would turn into mad max.

This is interesting... maybe it's fractal-like? Maybe there are these microcosm(oses,a) that experience these failures of communication and cooperation?

Even if we're being cynical, I think we should still be mindful that (usually) large corporations have dysfunctionaly dynamics. (This is not news, obviously.)

Unfortunately, to me this sounds like a politically correct corporate-approved reply an HR would give when explaining why you got fired. In real life, the situation is usually much simpler. If you jump over your bosses' head, and your bosses' boss supports you, they are:

1. Opening themselves for a situation where you'll try to jump over their head next.

2. Giving others a reason to question their own loyalty.

>If your boss is bad at their job, you are still supposed to be able to communicate with them, work with them, and get problems resolved.

I have never seen this work. Really. If your boss doesn't like you and is not willing to put that aside, there's usually some ego and petty feelings involved and there is no good way out. You can pour endless time and energy into attempts to get it to work, and have it flushed by your boss because not letting you win is an ego thing for them. Or you can shut up, smile and pour that energy into getting the right things on your CV, networking, learning relevant technology and eventually getting a better offer and escaping.

>Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.

Nope, it's important because in a BigCo, most ambitious people don't care for being right. They care for maximizing their own income, political influence and career perspectives. And being able to navigate and communicate that will help you align your interests with theirs and get them to actually support you.

This was the hardest lesson for me to learn. I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.

Get out. Get out fast and clean, if you can, fast, if you can't. Clean is secondary.

There is a whole world of projects that value competence. They deserve it far more than these bozos.

>I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.

Isn't at all once you start your own business.

Being smart and stubborn is like having race car. Will make you go nuts sitting in a traffic jam all day. But once you discover where the race track is, you'll find it rewarding to hit the gas and leave everyone else in the dust.

Wow! I will try to remember that metaphor when I start to plan going into self-employment (in a year or two). Thank you!

"You come at the king, you best not miss."

This is ignoring the obvious power imbalance, because your boss can fire you.

I completely agree that you should try to communicate openly whenever possible, but let's not pretend like it's a level playing field. Of course, if the situation is so bad you can't talk openly with your boss, I'm not sure how much you're really losing by being fired (assuming you are able to find employment elsewhere, as is often the case for engineers today).

Communicating openly is a mistake. You should communicate in the way it serves both your purpose and the enterprise and to communicate you must know your audience and how the message should be passed in order to succeed.

Sometimes the only way to change things is to incept the idea.

The above statement is certainly true in some places of employment. Been there, done that.

I choose not to work in such places anymore. Obviously, not everyone can do that.

How do you know beforehand what sort of environment you're really involving yourself with? What sort of heuristics exist during the hiring / interview phase that let's you sort good from bad? I have a few of my own sniff tests, but outside of knowing (and really trusting) a contact at a place, it's sort of a crap shoot.

My experience has shown me that it can take years to find the seams that you need to tug on to expose deep-seated work culture problems.

During every interview, I always ask "what do you like about working here?" It's extremely easy to tell by how they react whether or not they're being forthcoming. So far it's been 100% effective for me, at least for choosing good places (it's possible I filtered good places erroneously but I wouldn't know because I never accepted the offer).

There are other more specific questions you can ask, but they tend to vary enough I wouldn't offer them as general advice.

Can you share an example of an answer that would discourage you from working somewhere? Just the interviewer's reluctance to answer or giving a superficial answer?

I have asked interviewers the opposite: what aspects of the team or company need improvement and what steps are being taken to address them? Of course they will sugarcoat their answer, but you can still glean some insight into the company culture for addressing problems.

The only thing I look for is whether or not they seem happy while answering. If people really like their jobs, they will smile and tell you how great it is and you'll believe them.

In my experience most people don't really like their jobs and are just in it for the paycheck (there's nothing wrong with that, bit if you're talented enough to be picky you should be).

Some places = every big corp and big consultancy firms.

Power imbalance, income imbalance, responsibility imbalance.

Your boss is more responsible at everything you should also do - communicating, noticing issues, noticing morale issues, being able to understand an issue beyond half-sentences, raising issues with management, trying to fix the issues, etc.

So I say, damn it. If the boss doesn't understand that I'm making my last warning before going over his head, bad luck for him.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough but if I wasn't clear enough, bad luck for him. Should have noticed it anyway, he/she is being payed to do so.

If your boss' boss is unable to even hear your input (then rightfully delegate it to your boss), that's a failure of being a manager's manager and failure at communication. This is not bypassing your boss, but evidence of possessing two ears, something between them and a heart.

What is a failure, is to expect one employee (your boss) to fix everything, when such initiatives need to be supported by several managers. Changing culture happens from top-downwards and changing the course of culture might take years and years of slow progress.

If your function is being badly managed, you're probably screwed anyway, though it is reasonable to expect assists with other departments and their leaders. If such issues are chronic, change will be slow and you will often find yourself back at square one after the next reorg.

The lesson is there is no winning in a toxic environment. Leaving was the only good thing that happened in his story.

This is the best comment. The only mistake this guy made was giving too much of a fuck about garbage for too long. I was burned by a bad manager early on in my career and in retrospect I'm grateful that I learned the lesson early. In this situation I would be looking at one thing only: how to get out in a way that maximizes my future career success elsewhere.

Watch out, especially, for Death March assignments. A Death March is an unmistakeable, clear message: move on. Move now.

You are absolutely right that is the organization perspective in almost every organization I know that's larger than say 100 employees.

That's why I avoid them. They have every right to their perspective, just as I have every right to interpret it: status quo is supreme. Efficiency, effectiveness and progress are far second. In fact, larger organizations are INTENTIONALLY inefficient, as it limits the damage any one bad actor can accomplish. This makes sense for the large organization, but for the individual perspective, it means those who play politics are more valuable than those who actually get shit done.

It's why I love small businesses. Generally getting shit done is supreme and the need for appearances is less.

I get the appearance game, and many people who refuse to play also get it. But I find it sleazy and fickle. I mean it's mostly based on heuristics. Funny, Adam Smith seems to agree on large corporations being less focused on results: "This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies who would, upon no account, hazard their own fortunes in any private copartnery. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own."

This entire comment is not applicable in the situation described, where there is a huge imbalance of power. The manager is not an equal to be “worked with” the same way fellow ICs are in the way you describe.

What the article describes is a case of nepotism, and expecting someone to “work with” that to a mutually beneficial end seems a bit naive.

Your optimism is refreshing.

Escalation is basically a waste of time. At that point, you need to have your ejection position set up anyhow, so you might as well just leave and have all the offending idiots still think you're a "great dude" who just moved on.

If you have an effective external social relationship higher in the power structure, then you're better off just getting the offending manager removed behind the scenes.

The communication failure begins with management. Don't blame the employees if there are no mechanisms/systems/processes in place to report your managers.

You're right, it will build up a grudge that gets launched uphill. That's what I did, after letting my manager litter my codebase for months until he made the big mistake of telling me to shut my mouth, giving me a reason to go to HR.

Everything has its limits. The author of this claimed the guy literally ran away from him. Not much you can do to fix a communication issue when the other party won't engage in a conversation.

> The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure.

Don't forget that your boss' boss may not want to hear about how they hired (and/or keep) the wrong person in the role. It can look like an attack on their own judgment.

That's a useful attitude in many cases, but you must have read a different story than I did, because it seems very unlikely that it would have been effective in this case.

> Working well with people is often more important than being right. Because a group of people who work well together will work mutually find the correct answers, using everyone's strengths, and helping each other grow in the process.

I don't follow. In this example Mr. Manager and Mr. Lead single-handedly torpedoed the companies prospects, and were promoted for it. What benefit and growth was accomplished there?

> The lesson is that going over your bosses head and complaining higher up the chain is not seen as initiative. It is seen as a communication failure.

I've seen one guy who was able to pull this off at multiple companies. He was always able to get the position of his boss by going to the bosses boss.

The story that he brought was that his fellow colleages were suffering from the mismanagement of his boss.

Is this one thing the military does better? They have an open door policy, and plenty of people have used it when faced with a toxic leader. Doesn't always seem like it works out based on my limited reading, but it does work out sometimes, especially if the person one level up the chain of command is a decent leader.

One of the benefits of the military treating people as property that they'd rather not have killed is that they take poor leadership seriously.

I see a number of specific advantages the military has.

One is civilian oversight. You literally can write your Congressman and complain, and there is an IG office to curb some of the worst abuses. But, that's really only helping you in the worst cases.

Two, the military is a bit like an enormous union where job descriptions are so precise people are relatively interchangeable. And, unlike a union, it applies to management, too, and they will tell people to pack up and move across the world. So if your job description is large enough, your chain of command is constantly cycling as senior people come and go, often from another part of the nation entirely. It's breaking up those cozy connections that the OP was detailing, where all those people were buddies from a long way back.

Three, when senior people have all lost friends to war, suicide, or even training accidents, it injects a healthy degree of candor into every day interactions. I noticed this when I had a mess of errands to run, simply walking from the troop to a commo shop to central in-processing to finance that there was a shift in attitude, an increasing degree of "unreality". (OTOH, we could spend all day standing around with our gear laid out for inspection because our leadership was entirely insulated from the wages paid to 120 men.)

Four, there is some explicit filtering for competence. If you're in a combat arms unit in the Army, your senior leadership is almost certainly Ranger qualified, and they can fail out if their peers don't think they're a good leader. The downside is those guys are routed into the military bureaucracy, so again, it kinda sucks to not be combat arms. But, at least they're not going to bumbling around in a firefight.

Can you expand on what you mean by "unreality"?

Kind of not understanding the reality of the military's mission, and a disconnect from the consequences of their actions. It looked, to me, that they were just following a bunch of steps without thinking about whether any of it works.

That's what you get when you demand people follow orders without questioning.

So, system working as designed?

I thought breaking the chain of command was a huge no-no in the military.

This assumes both parties are after the same thing. There are people that doesn't actually care what the right thing to do is, and only want to do what benefits them.

Ideally incentives should align, but often times what is good for the team / company isn't necessarily what's good for the manager and vice versa.

> It is seen as a communication failure.

So right! In most instances it becomes victim shaming: "It's your fault for not managing up."

But what else can do you after you've tried many different respectful ways to communicate and you have basically zero power?

What you say is true per course, but it's uncommon to find managers that are humble and secure enough in their own personal value to treat everyone with respect and growth mindset. It's an IC's market right now, keep moving til you find someone that treats you well and encourages this.

It feels like this comment and the other comments in this thread are all dancing around the same issue: The problem is incompetent people getting ahold of power in an organization. How that comes to pass makes little difference: maybe they have personal connections to leadership, maybe they just got lucky and failed upward, whatever it might be: as soon as leadership fails in their jobs in this way, i.e. promoting the incompetent, then the company is already dead.

These people are like a cancer, and just like a cancer, as their influence grows and their power grows, the patient, the business, suffers. Sometimes businesses can last years, decades, with a number of these tumors if they're controlled, or if the business is just so healthy that it can take the strain they put upon it. But in my mind, as soon as competence takes a back seat to who you know, as soon as that line is crossed by any member of the company leadership, then that's the end. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

And this one I don't know how to solve. Were I a C level executive in a company, I'd constantly have my eyes out for this kind of shit, and excise it as soon as I could. But it seems most C-levels don't care all that much. Maybe I wouldn't if I was at that level.

It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. That also might be the C-Suite attitude, that if they select only for what they think is performant, they lose diversity of ideas.

Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. I'ts a cultural failure to keep people that only try and make people (they self select as competent) better.

In the case of the op story. It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. It's evaluating the idea too quickly. It's rowing upstream, when they are asking everyone else to row down. When they are looking for momentum, and the details come later, that person can derail the process. The reason they started working in secret, where everybody in the company but op knew, is that op was disruptive to the culture of trying. They were too pragmatic, too literal, too technical. Sit down, listen to what management is asking for, then go work on a pitch, where your delivery is "we can deliver what you are asking for (and also reuse most of our old work, saving you time and money!) Be on their team, not in opposition to it.

Replace but with yes, and at the beginning of sentences.

Well said! At the same time, it's sad to live in the world were being honest and straightforward pays off so poorly.

One person's straightforward is another person's rude. Delivery matters!

If we're talking about what's best for the company, then only the relevance of the facts should matter.

Up to a certain point, of course. But all this talk of how to deliver information so the recipient feels nice about receiving bad feedback (shit sandwiches and such) shouldn't matter.

If you find a company that‘s run by robots instead of people you might get what you advocate for

Its very possible for one person in a meeting to be ahead of everyone else, and that they need to sit back and let the rest of the room organically catch up. Sometimes it feels like its your place to either "get everyone on the same page" or "move forward because we are stuck in a rut" but actually youre just being disruptive to everyone elses learning.

Nothing at all to do with feelings.

To a point. While any given speaker should always endeavor to deliver their point for maximum effectiveness, by the same token, discounting or outright ignoring feedback simply because it's worded poorly or timed poorly is like rejecting your paycheck because it's printed on green paper instead of white. The money is still there, and it's still usable, and you're only hurting yourself because it didn't come how you thought it should.

Frankly, as someone who leads a team myself, yeah I've had to take colleagues aside and say "this isn't how we do things" but I certainly wouldn't just bin their entire point without consideration to save "face."

I don’t know—“culture of trying” sounds too much like “reality distortion field.”

Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. I’ve seen far more half-baked money pit projects than risks that paid off in my career. In tech in general there is way too much optimism and ignoring inconvenient facts/constraints until disaster is clear. Someone who can EFFECTIVELY steer teams away from horrible decisions is worth their weight in gold.

In the OP’s case, he simply couldn’t effectively communicate this, and failed to notice the rampant nepotism up his management chain, but his heart was in the right place.

>Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas.

Absolutely. And not just crazy ideas, but maybe we'll intended ideas that are misaligned with each other or the overall goals and strategic roadmap. Too many autonomous silos that are all high functioning tend to not like a skeptic saying, "this is great in isolation but the sum of these parts don't fit coherently." They also don't like "this works, but it's an MVP at best, and isn't sustainable." Skeptics cognizant of technical debt, may meet unwelcomness in an org not willing to acknowledge it.

> It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to.

This is entirely possible but in the case of OP, and in the larger scope, it's irrelevant. If you have a product manager, for example, who's job it is to oversee the development of a product, they can be the best damn communicator, they could be the nicest person, they could be financially minded and have great marketing skills, they could have excellent personal hygiene and be fantastic husbands. All of that means precisely nothing if they are so bad at managing the product that they cannot deliver that product. I'm not saying that everybody like OP's boss here should be fired, per se, there's probably a place in the organization for them. But once they become entrenched in a place they don't belong in the organization, again, it's cancer. And it's fatal.

> Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude.

Except this assumes a rising tide. If the tide falls, perhaps because your captain is not good at gauging tides, you're beached.

> It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees.

Or it's recognizing that the problem management is trying to solve has already been solved. This can mean one of many things, but the two that spring immediately to mind is that a competitor (or competitors) have already solved this problem, and that management just wants a slice of that pie too, failing to consider that simply offering isn't enough, you need to have a differentiator. See, for example, all the game developers who chased the various trends like Battle Royale, and before that Military Shooters, and before that MMO's, and all the failed businesses that those trends left in their wake. Alternately, and this seems to be the situation where OP was, their own business had already solved this need; this is a good place to be, and wanting to increase revenue by providing a new product is a damn hard, borderline arcana level task to do without either A) alienating existing customers or B) cannibalizing the users of an existing product.

I don't think management is by default full of shit, and must prove themselves wrong. That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees. If I have questions you're damn right I'm going to ask them, and I want answers commensurate with a level of respect that I'm sure my given boss would expect from me. And if your answer is to out me as a nonbeliever, I'm sending out resumes. I have no interest in finding out how this place is going down.

> That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees.

100% agree with that line. If negative upward feedback is a dead end or met with retribution, an organizations communication structure and culture is broken.

In the case of the story the project was a total failure, so it's moot - in hindsight it is simply a fact (trusting the narrator of course) that the manager was incompetent.

This doesnt need to be a tribal either or. It could be both incompetent management and tactlessness and strategic ineptitude on the tech leads part.

If your technical lead doesn't understand your "vision" or perceives that it has major problems, or has deep concerns about process and attrition rate and doesn't feel they can communicate them because the last time they tried you "literally ran away", then that is unquestionably a failure of management.

Don't blame the subordinate calling foul for being "too pragmatic". That's not how hierarchical management works.

The self appointed technical lead, while management was announcing a new project, stood up and said "this project is a bad idea." It probably wasnt the time and the place, even if the technical person was correct. The entire company moved forward and left this person out. There were other better ways to handle dissent.

Maybe they aren't incompetent; that's a story we tell ourselves.

The choices, as I see them: own responsibility for making sure the recipient understands our communications. If they don't, that's on me. If they do, but don't do what I want... I can either accept their decision or move on.

I know changing jobs is hard, but all I can control is to communicate better (differently! and with compassion/empathy!) or leave.

The trouble is, everyone thinks their boss is incompetent.

Thats not true. I have worked in many teams and organizations where manaagement and direct supervisors are well regarded. There are inevitably comparative weak links, but thats not the same as incompetence.

I don't. He can be a bit of a space cadet at times and sometimes get stuck on the wrong things, but I would never call him incompetent.

The place I work now has a good mix of hyper-competent 1st level managers. Its almost weird, but for sure its a result of the expectation that "team leads" or whatever you want to call them are also managers.

I'm not sure I agree with having the technical guy be the personal manager, but when they only have a couple direct reports a good percentage seem be able to herd the cats semi competently.

That isn't to say there aren't plenty of disasters, but when it works, it works fairly well. I guess you just have to be willing to throw away some of your best technical people when it turns out they don't make good managers, or they turn into just another layer of middle mgmt that needs to be cut in a few years.

I don't.

Our upper management is incompetent because they are so removed from what we actually do, and show no interest in learning about it.

But my immediate manager is very far from incompetent.

This is universally true of all upper management. See the SNAFU principle[1]

[1] http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/s/SNAFUprinciple.html

Is there a distinction between competency and being any good at your job? I would hesitate to call (most of) my management chain incompetent. I would also hesitate to call (most of) my management any good at their job.

That's not true. In fact I think ALL of my previous bosses have been extremely competent and super smart. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe I've had realistic expectations.

I don't - my boss is great person, good manager and great programmer.

My team, boss included, is one of few reasons keeping me at this company.

Not true. I had good bosses, neutral bosses and bad boss. Narrowly dodged awful one.

I think its fairer to say you can only appreciate a truely competent boss once you have suffered an incompetent one.

I disagree. No one magically becomes good at their job and management is a different job to engineering. Inevitably every manager is going to suck atleast a little for a period of time.

What we need is more training and culture around feedback at work.

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