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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

This is a good post and I have been Nick a few times. I have felt the anger and shock that Nick faces.

My gripe was that if management wants me to handle all aspects of a project, why can't they just spell it out? What about communicating this to other stakeholders? Do I barge into meetings and tell people in sister teams to drop their other work and start listening to me because Gloria asked me to change my shape to a full circle?

The hand off from regular shape to wholesome shape is not obvious to Nick. And even if it was, they have no authority or power or resources to drive "others" until Gloria spells it out at least one time.

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I understand your upset and feel the same. One thing that I dislike here is this: we are starting somehow with the premise that people are malformed.

The job of a manager is not to mold people into correct shapes. Unless you are dealing with trivial work, you cannot bend other intelligent beings to your tyrannical circle shaped will.

If you are a triangle, the manager is supposed to help you be the best triangle you can be. They are supposed to arrange and connect the pieces of the puzzle together.

Instead, this manager believes that is the managers job to mold their units into identical circles. Disgusting.

You are definitely misinterpreting the metaphor...

‘Shape’ != personal identity or ability. Shape is the sum of the work someone does (in fact, a triangle—if that even has any meaning over a circle in this framework—is a perfectly acceptable shape bc it’s convex and simple).

If one of a manager’s jobs isn’t to coordinate what work everyone does I’m not sure what you think managers do.

This. If I am handling all the work, what exactly does a manager do?

A manager is supposed to coordinate you and help you be the best you can be. They are not supposed to shape you, only to provide you with the resources that you may need.

And they often don't coordinate and instead choose to criticize because apparently at that level, an engineer needs to figure out "everything".

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