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Comment by PascLeRasc | Hacker News Reader

I have pretty bad work-related anxiety and I recently started seeing a therapist who specializes in it. She recommended I start thinking of my role as solely "to make my manager look good". This changed my whole mindset from trying to be a better/more efficient developer to trying to look out for what's on my manager's plate and how my behavior would reflect on her and her team. It's really helped me and I know my manager appreciates it. I can expand on this more if anyone thinks it'd help them too.

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This is great advice. As an employee, I've found success with the following:

- Send an agenda beforehand. This gives your manager an idea about what you'd like to discuss, so then they can prepare themselves and/or not get caught off-guard.

- At the end, I try to ask, "do you have anything for me?", which typically opens the door for them giving you feedback/thoughts if they have it. It also is a nice way to prep myself for receiving feedback vs. it coming without me "opting in."

I wrote about some other ideas on 1-1s in this guide...not sure if useful: https://www.friday.app/p/employee-1-1-meetings

This sounds good if your organisation is political. However if the coding work is below par it’ll probably get found out sooner or later. Schmooze the boss but wax on wax off make sure the basic job function is being done well enough.

In fairness, schmoozing your manager arguably makes your manager look worse, as it makes them look like their team considers them schmooz-able while producing good code automatically helps your boss look better, as it shows they, at least in part, are managing their team effectively.

Sure, would love to know what a change your actions would take with this mindset, thanks.

For example, we're changing some of our server infrastructure. This was supposed to be a huge project and was anticipated to take at least 6 months. I found and modified a script that will do it in ~30 seconds, took me a few hours. Instead of presenting it at our team meeting, I sent it to my manager and let her present it to her managers. Everyone was very impressed with her work writing it. I don't really care about getting credit for it since:

(1) if I want to stay here and get a promotion or raise, it'll be my manager approving that.

(2) if I decide to leave (the much more likely scenario), I don't care about how much credit I got here. My close coworkers know what I do/have accomplished which is all that matters for a reference.

After learning this, I've been trying to go to my manager with potential issues and solutions preemptively. I'll present a few solutions like "would it be helpful to you if you had ___ or ___?" and let her micromanage which one.

This is kind of ridiculous that a manager would take credit for something you wrote on your own initiative and present it as hers.

Don't hate the player hate the game.

I've had a manager take credit for my work, gaslight, and fire me when he was getting in trouble for underpreforming. I had no relationship with his bosses; I kept my nose down and did my work. I documented the craziness, but it happened so fast I could not defend myself. I learned to toot my horn some too. But really I should have left that department/company sooner. Yrmv. I don't think a good manager will take full credit for underlings work.

An old quote I found from 20 years ago:

"When you're heads down in your work, some other asshole is running around behind you taking credit for your accomplishments"

> if I want to stay here and get a promotion or raise, it'll be my manager approving that

Is this truly solely up to your immediate manager? In a lot of (most? almost all?) cases, it takes people above your manager approving it too. And if those higher-ups think that your manager did the things that are being used to justify your promotion/raise, you might not like the outcome.

Did your manager mention you at all when presenting this? That's kind of a no-go in my opinion.

I am just curious how is that helping you?

Aren't you pidgin holing yourself into a 'person I can't promote as I would have no work to steal from'?

IMO, that a manager would do this is pretty messed up. Even if YOU don't care, if this continues this manager will start to develop a reputation for taking credit from others. Then it will be much harder to recruit people internally to their team.

The best managers constantly are talking up people on THEIR team. They are responsible for creating an environment where people can excel. This makes them look good at a manager ("Everyone on my team consistently over-performs!"), everyone on the team looks great and it makes it easier for them to get recognition and promotions, and it makes it a very desirable team to work on which makes recruiting internally much easier.

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