Hacker News Reader

I've encountered it a little bit, and in both cases I left as soon as I realized I wasn't going to make any more headway.

But the key is here:

> They immediately asked who was giving up this information and wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather than trying to address the issue

One of the key elements of the "boss" social role is to enforce subordination: people doing what you tell them to do. This is kind of intrinsic to the interpersonal dynamic, and it's quite hard to avoid doing at least some of the time even if you're aware of how it can be a problem.

The problem with people doing what you tell them to do is that what you tell them to do may be wrong or incomplete. You then have two choices:

- admit error. This is uncomfortable.

- increase the effort to subordinate the person so the boss does not lose face.

There are all sorts of examples and case studies of this kind of thing in command situations. Here's it causing a plane crash: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-pursue-co...

The boss role does not have to enforce subordination, there's multiple styles of management which encourage self-leadership in terms of what people work on and how they do it. I'm personally a fan of David Marquet's "Leader-Leader" style.

But, because so many people expect to be subjugated in their roles it does require some hurdles to get past normal societal expectations and not everyone is a fit for it, some people just want a task list and to be told what to do. I think the world could be a better place if we could effectively help people sort into the companies with the leadership style that best suits their working style.

> so many people expect to be subjugated

Was thinking something along the same lines. I work in an environment where a tiny bit of self initiative does very well for one's work and career, and still some people can't get it over their heads. Unless something is very clearly stated somewhere, they won't do it no matter how obvious it is, even people who are trying to get a promotion. I swear sometimes I think people would let the office burn because "yelling fire!" is not of their stated position responsibilities.

This primarily can be attributed to how people perceive risk and risk aversion mechanisms, don't think this would be false to assume it also relates to responsibility.

Self initiative people willing to take more risk and thus responsibility if things don't work out, where not self initiative people if things don't work out, take substantially less responsibility by default.

I have explicitly instructed my team to let me know if I ask them to do something stupid so we can avoid the mistake. I was so excited the first time someone spoke up to alert me that I was overlooking a better option & made sure to celebrate the alert in order to keep the transparency going.

There may be teams where this direct approach wouldn’t work out, but so far it’s seemed to help.

To very large degree Boss/Management role is to support (indirect control) allocation of human capital resources to tasks in relation to objectives with minimal inefficiencies such as; conflicts, overlap in tasks, miscoordination.

I would argue there is virtually no justification to manage people by means direct control, virtually for any team/group sizes.

That's the organizational role. The interpersonal, social one is often a lot more primitive and has nothing to do with capital or resources.

Sorry, for being so direct, but are we still talking about small business/enterprise organization or family and friends ?

> has nothing to do with capital or resources.

Is most confusing point for me.

In general, if you meant enforcing compliance, I would have different response, but you clearly did not mean that in your original post.

In any organisation, although it's more likely to be bad in small ones. I'm talking about the difference between the formal, process-related aspects of management and the social/anthropological/dominance aspects. All the stuff that matters once voices get raised and feelings get high.

To tie this back to the original post: why is there information that subordinates have that would potentially improve the business, that they want to give to their seniors, but they don't? It's because that information is uncomfortable.

Also, all the stuff in the original article below "Incredible amounts of harassment of any kind". Why do business deals get done at strip clubs in the first place? It's not in the company's interest, it happens because those involved have enough power to use company resources for their own purposes and enjoy all the little displays of dominance involved in such an outing.

> social/anthropological/dominance aspects

Are highly subjective when compared to "formal" management functions.

> All the stuff that matters once voices get raised and feelings get high.

This is clear aspect of conflict resolution, if management process is optimal such situation are rare cases. Undoubtedly, there are cases where you have to change tone to get point across, this only can be rationally justified if all other means fails.

> why is there information that subordinates have that would potentially improve the business, that they want to give to their seniors, but they don't? It's because that information is uncomfortable.

This is only one of the so many reason why this can happen, in general, learning, negations, feedback, are all uncomfortable processes to a degree. The major factor why there is failures to improve organization process is shared understanding that is bases of communication, in addition to risks, responsibility individual mechanisms.

> Why do business deals get done at strip clubs in the first place?

There some aspect important aspect of social interaction before business deal similarly as there is dating before marriage.

> It's not in the company's interest, it happens because those involved have enough power to use company resources for their own purposes and enjoy all the little displays of dominance involved in such an outing.

Such narrow view is simply false.

That seems extreme. Managers have to lead and make decisions. If they don't then you rapidly end up with chaos. That's how some firms end up with 10 different languages being used, where no engineer can work on anyone else's codebase because there's no consistency about anything, where progress is minimal because decisions don't get made due to some people disagreeing with each other and having no way to break the deadlock, etc.

I think it's become sort of fashionable to claim bosses are always clueless or shouldn't actually try to manage because their employees are always smarter than they are. The "servant manager" idea. That is dead wrong in my experience. Or rather, if the manager has no idea how to do the work their employees are doing and just sits out that part of their role, the team has much bigger problems.

Concept of empowerment within a context of mission command and science of control, arguably, is by far the most complex matter in humans.

> Managers have to lead and make decisions. If they don't then you rapidly end up with chaos. That's how ...

I thought I made this point clear in terms of inefficiencies example.

While it is oversimplification I attempt to exemplify this using spatial navigation analogy.

Owners select area and resources.

Managers of Managers who make decisions on approach to area and to a degree by what resources.

Operational Manager make decision on routes way points a given resources.

Workers will make decisions in between way points.

With such example: one can argue this should be top down one way hierarchical approach, the old school inefficient approach. (eg. Direct Control)

In my perspective, modern approach is to utilize indirect control by establishing conditional triggers (eg. only specifying limitations on areas, approaches, routes, and way points) based on horizontal feedback (top/down or down/up hierarchy) and vertical feedback (side way communication).

Have you formally managed people before?

Throughout life in small business environments 2-50 people and multiple times in emergency management exercises up to ~100 people.

In any innovative field if a manager is a full time manager (not a tlm) then after rather short amount of time they really have no idea beyond some universal process/common sense things. This is not the same thing as “clueless” provided he/shes realizes this and goes to sr engineers for council.

>Managers have to lead and make decisions.

No, managers have to create the processes by which decisions are made and then make sure the processes are followed. One way of doing that is to make the process be to do whatever they say but it's not the only way.

A manager being the single point of final decision making doesn't scale since they will eventually not be knowledgeable enough to make a good decision and be bottleneck to any decisions being made. The only manager who is smarter than their team in regards to every decision is one who hires only idiots.

> The only manager who is smarter than their team in regards to every decision is one who hires only idiots.

Reading this reminded me of quote from Skunkworks PM (if I recall correctly); "I only want to hire people who are smarter then me."

If that were true choice of CEO would be irrelevant or pointless as long as they had some sort of generic manager training. But in reality CEOs can make enormous differences. The textbook example of a non servant manager being Steve Jobs of course but most successful tech CEOs are famous for micro-managing some aspects of the business.

You seem to be really underestimating the difficulty of what I wrote. First of all, workable processes differ based on industry and the strategic goals of the company. If you apply the Google way of doing things to Pepsi you won't have a good time. Second of all, ensuring processes are followed when you have very intelligent managers under you trying to bypass them for their own benefit is amazingly difficult. Third of all, managers are also in charge of hiring and firing which ties into all of this.

The old joke that "Consultants tell you what you already knew but didn't want to face." has been around forever for a reason. It's even an accepted tactic by business units to hire a consultant to document all these known problems as a means to force themselves to clean up their own act.

I have a close friend who's a director. I've always treated him like an equal but one day I told him that he was never getting the whole story. He felt devastated because he thought it was him but it's not him, it's just the title.

Part of getting the fancy title is understanding that you will never get the truth from subordinates, you will get a sugar-coated version of the truth that is close enough to the truth, but not so close that you'd rage and fire someone on the spot. Even if you've never even do that in a million years, somewhere, somehow, someone who is giving you good and bad news will always sugarcoat the truth on the bad news yet hype up the good news.

It’s only natural though, one way to play the salary game is to maximize your perceived involvement and truck factor, while reducing actual efforts needed, all while avoiding getting upsetting colleagues.

Workloads at full capacity, with stakes distributed precisely according to power structures, with zero meaningful/impactful output thus zero uncertainty, is Pareto optimal, if you view a corporate as a salary distribution game that you’re a player of.

More often than not technical issues are in fact management issues. Plenty of evidence for that.

Sometimes it's an easy conversation starter. People like to bitch about work and speaking about all the things they dislike at the workplace. Often times it is pointing to an underlying problem though and some communication breakdown at the least.

>It should be noted that I don't work in the games industry though

Well there's yer problem!

The games industry is basically terrible - the management is full of people who don't understand the industry they're in and see their employees as cheaper-than-slave labor and their customers as open pocketbooks to take. In management's defense, nobody understands the game industry; it's ridiculously hit-driven and producing a "good" game involves taking on as much unmitigated risk as possible. The only risk mitigation strategy you can adopt is diversification - funding as many projects as possible. But that went away along with the PS2 when game development budgets skyrocketed and audience numbers plateaued.

Each one of the factors I mentioned above can be gone into with great detail:

1. "Cheaper-than-slave labor": Game studio employees are frequently replaced with fresh hires to keep costs down; expertise is a liability in an industry that remakes how to build a videogame every 5-10 years. You can survive this but it's at the expense of your own health and sanity. You will be abused, mentally and physically, by your studio for the privilege of working at a games company until you quit.

2. "Ridiculously hit-driven": Game studios can spend literal billions of dollars on a project nobody likes. Management wants to do this because games that don't screenshot well don't market well, so you need literal armies of artists to texture every tiny detail in these games and you need them to work 996 so the project ships anywhere close to on time. But that also increases risk which means we need the games to cost more, both in terms of up-front price and after-purchase DLC and microtransactions.

3. "No diversification": Diversification works well when your audience is large relative to your production costs. This hasn't been true since the PS2 era; most companies struggle to afford to make even one game that's up to modern quality standards - now you want to make hundreds of them so we can just "see what works"!? In fact, if you look at the libraries of, say, the PS3 to the PS4; you can almost spot the point at which publishers decided to just focus on one or two online games (which monetize very well) rather than tens or hundreds of projects (which are one-and-done things).

This has resulted in an extremely abusive working culture and I highly advise everyone I know getting into software development to not touch videogames with a ten-foot pole. Hell, I wouldn't even recommend it as a hobby: the "more, more, more, better, faster, and yesterday" mentality has even sunk into the people who play videogames. If your boss isn't berating you for not fixing up his fuckups fast enough, your customers will be literally threatening to kill you for having the balls to delay a broken game.

This has all been known since the early 2000s (look up easpouse on Wikipedia sometime if you want to know how much HASN'T changed); the entire games industry needs to crash and it needs to crash yesterday before any of this can be fixed.