I am really surprised one has to write a blog post about this.
I am not a manager, but here is a question for managers, have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone?
In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.
I am not a manager, but here is a question for managers, have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone?
In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.
Usually, it's more ignorance rather than (intentional) cruelty. If your office has a relaxed atmosphere, as a manager, it is very easy to make the mistake of thinking that you are just a regular part of the gang. But of course, you're not, and everyone (except you) is aware of your status and the fact that you control their continual employment, bonuses/raises and career advancement.
This view is reinforced in modern tech culture which is deeply uncomfortable with power and status hierarchies without realizing that a proper hierarchy with defined roles and responsibilities actually makes everyone more comfortable because everyone knows where they stand. The Valve case study of a fully horizontal organization is complete bullcrap because they replaced defined roles and responsibilities and chain of command with an ambiguous and implicit set of roles, responsibilities and chain of command. Nobody there believes that Gabe Newell is just a regular joe, regardless of what his title says.
Yes, and that ignorance is a _privelege_ of power. Most employees don't think they can risk-free joke about firing their boss.
No it's not.
There we go. My statement has as much evidentiary support as yours.
Have you ever thought about the usefulness and evidentiary support of using this weird leftist nomenclature to reframe traditionally understood concepts? Like what value did you bring by reframing 'ignorance' as 'privilege' - but 'privilege' not in the sense of the dictionary definition but as a loaded concept that came out of dark recesses of some leftist writings that has no actual backing and does not actually lead to a better understanding of the world.
Who has more reason to worry, a manager making a joke about firing someone, or an employee making a joke about forming a union with their coworkers? There's a reason that one of these two groups needed to be given legal protection for their joke.
I'm sure it does, but it's not.
>Powerful people are punished less for their lack of understanding of less powerful
That's not true. Or it's true in some situations and not in others. It is also true in some situations of subordinates.
>Who has more reason to worry, a manager making a joke about firing someone, or an employee making a joke about forming a union with their coworkers?
There are occasions where an employee can make a joke that would get a manager into trouble or into MORE trouble if they made that joke. There are behaviours that would get a manager into trouble and not the employee. The managerial and subordinate positions each come with their own set of rights, responsibilities, and privileges. My good friend, for example, declined a managerial 'promotion' because he was happy doing what he was doing and didn't want the extra stress and pressure. Back in uni when I worked as a part-timer at Staples, my manager was the hardest worker I've ever seen. She pulled crazy hours while some of us messed around and did as little as we could to get through the shift. To top it all off, she is the one that got yelled at by difficult customers, and not us - even if we screwed up. You can come up with alternative examples where the manager was a lazy bum and employees were super hard workers ... why? Because human organizations are complex and each one has different dynamics at play and different cultures. So thinking about it terms of the idiotic and shallow 'privilege' idea misses all those dynamics and complexity. So no, 'privilege' is not the right metaphor for the discussion at hand, and it isn't straightforward.
https://google.com/search?q=define+privilege
> a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.
Back to the topic at hand, another way to look at a position of 'manager', that actually matches reality, is to admit that it is a necessary role in any sized organization of people focusing on completing a common task. This is true if the organization is a club, or a sports team or a corporation because there will always be a need, to manage and organize groups of people. This position comes with its own set of responsibilities and accountability and as such frequently the punishments and repercussions for 'misbehaviour' are greater than what a subordinate employee would receive for the same action. It's not an intrinsically 'privileged' position. I made this argument to another poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479872
More powerful[1] people are more insulated from the consequences of their ignorance.
The response to you did not contradict your statement. It added important context to it.
[1] Two people can have more, or less power, relative to eachother, depending on the social context they are in.
Yes it is.
>it's a well-documented fact about how the world works
Maybe in marxist writings, but it isn't a 'well-documented fact'.
>More powerful[1] people are more insulated from the consequences of their ignorance.
And that statement is factually wrong in the general case. I made this argument to another poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479872
>Some people receive less blow-back for their misbehavior than others, because of their position in society.
Talk about a truism. Yes, some people receive less blow-back for their misbehavior due to their position in society.
It could be the case that one individual receives blow-back for this misbehaviour because, for example, they are in a position of responsibility whereas someone who isn't, wouldn't. That happens all the time. How about this, in my city, vagrancy is completely unpunished, even though it's illegal, but you're going to get tagged if you let your chihuahua off-leash in an empty park. Are homeless people privileged? Under a colloquial reading of definition, they sure are. But we know you don't mean that because you're importing extreme Leftist ideas into this definition and being dishonest that you are doing that.
I grew up on the other side of that power dynamic and it still affects me in a number of unpleasant and sometimes crippling ways.
I've heard and seen way worse than jokes about being fired. I started out in the web hosting industry, it was insanely toxic, unless that's just how jobs were during the 08 recession. I was pretty much a kid and had no experience back then, so I had no frame of reference.
The whole point however is that in the moment, in the context, with familiar people, as a new manager, there will be part of your brain that says "Do this". The advice is not even targeting the jerk-manager, who is ignorant and boisterous and does this consistently. It is targeting a manager in transition who may do this accidentally, as a misfiring instinct. It's the stereotypical best man / maid of honours making an inappropriate joke at a wedding with best intentions... but consequences.
To your question therefore:
Yes, there frequently is that part of one's brain for new team leads in some situations.
No, don't do it.
FWIW: To those taking a cynical view on such articles - There are any number of things, managementy or technical, that seem obvious when written down... but still get done wrong any day of the week :). In related but different context: my previous transition from hands-on to architect was similarly enlightening - all the designs and solutions that seemed so obvious and easy when presented with finished document; were so much more intimidating when faced with a blank slate, an empty sheer where any design pattern, infrastructure architecture can go :O.
It's scary to be a new architect, it's scary to be a new manager, and simple, actionable, clearly-good advice can be a good way to gain comfort and confidence, and provide a starting point to build on.
The reason the blog post was written is that jokes that would usually be fine among friends can take on a different tune as soon as the power dynamic changes, and that's not always obvious to the person with the upper hand.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...
In general, though, never a good joke. And even with friends, be careful.
But yeah, it's basic professionalism -- don't joke about firing people, quitting, pay cuts/raises, etc.
As a counter to this, I have seen multiple managers make jokes like this and they all came from nontechnical backgrounds and had 20+ years of experience. I literally had a (nontechnical) manager say in a supposedly joking manner once about going to some meeting “Well you want to put food on the table for your family don't you? So remember that you have to be there for <some not-that-important meeting> Ha ha ha”.
So the whole “it's just coders learning basic professionalism” narrative might not be as cut-and-dried as you think it is. One (unproven) hypothesis I have is that it's possible that people who went to college and had their first decade's worth of jobs in a comfortable economic climate are more comfortable making these kind of jokes than others who were not so fortunate.
It's probably both that and how financially secure they are in general, whether that be via grunt work, inheritance, safety net, whatever.
I spent the first 5 years of my career spending the equivalent of minimum wage or less. Now I don't need to give a fuck. Realistically, on a starter dev salary, you can save >50% if that's your target.
As a result, it's a manual process for me to empathise with people who actually _need_ their job.
Don't get me wrong - I understand their predicament - it's just not an automatic impulse, because for me, work is like a side quest I do to keep myself ticking over in the long term, a bit like regular exercise or a good diet, it's never present constantly in my mind like I imagine it must be for a wage slave.
True. Privilege, and assumptions of “But of course you can find another job” probably play a huge part too. I've never had a manager belonging to an underrepresented community in tech, but I imagine they would be far less likely to say something like that.
I've sort of become inoculated to it though. Was tough at first though, especially since I have some (undiagnosed) manner of anxiety disorder. So the joke would happen and I would think about it for the rest of the day, if not longer.
In some places you can ask "Are you smoking crack?" when someone suggests something silly or wrong. In other places that would be very wrong.
In some places certain words are insults and other places they're euphemisms.
Some places tolerate or encourage "harmless" sexual innuendo, others do not.
I have had employees that would appreciate a joke about performance or firing so long as it was obvious that it wasn't a veiled threat. I've had employees who that would probably have them working on finding another job. I'm not the type to joke about that, but I know who would appreciate it and who wouldn't.
Edit: typo
It can be a good joke if it is immediately obvious that it is a joke.
I would rather work with alright people that make stupid jokes than some of the more formally correct ones who'd mess up my salary month after month, drag me through stupid American-style personal-improvement-programs in hope of finding a firable offense etc. (And no, they didn't find anything, and I had my job until I was ready for something else ;-)
That said I certainly wouldn't recommend that sort of jokes and my guess is the people who come up with those kinds of jokes are mostly exactly the same people who shouldn't try them as it really isn't obvious at all.
Or if you're in line and the cashier can't ring up your stuff for some technical reason, and you blurt out "well, I guess it must be free, huh?" But they have heard that one ever single day since they started.
Even I, paragon of ...uh... stuff... I once cracked a joke in the TSA line.
I would just imagine that most of this is human nature and I expect graduating to a higher level of power and responsibility has the same sort of well-traveled detours.
So I saw situations where it was said as a joke and taken as one, I wouldn't describe it as cruel or stupid.
And this is not the worst that has come out of his mouth.
Refuse to sing, from then on they can't fire you without a strong possibility you'll win an unfair dismissal suit. YMMV.
Many think that leadership IQ is something innate, but some aspects definitely either have to be explained, or learned the hard way. That's totally ok though - it means most of us have what it takes to manage if we're willing to learn.
So to your first point, I think the managerial relationship is complicated enough that it warrants thinking about it, anyway.
But it still shouldn't be done.
Cases, where it's used as a tiny micro-aggression or kind of with a dark undertone, are especially bad.
New managers may not quite comprehend the existential nature of the comment.
There are a ton of worse things that new managers do, usually, things need to be spelled out clearly.