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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Some degree of mistrust - or should I say, fear - is normal when communicating with your manager/supervisor, because there's a power imbalance in that relationship. Your manager has the power to significantly complicate or even derail your whole life. They're also themselves in a similar relationship with the person above them in the org chart. So no matter how much you trust them, there's always the possibility they're bringing bad news, and vague communication helps people play up that possibility in their heads.

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Exactly. What this article leaves out is the correct opening to the story.

"A person who can arbitrarily make your life hell, including by ending your job right now, tells you 'let’s talk when you get a minute.'"

I think the standard American corporate system of power is kinda ridiculous. But it is what it is, and whenever I'm a manager in that kind of system I try hard to remember that everything I say has that preface to it whether I like it or not. Everything. And everything people "beneath" me say to me will have an equivalent preface about what they think they can safely say.

The American system is designed to keep the power balance by making it easy to get another job.

Yes, there's some economic power difference - and sometimes it is out of balance. The idea that your boss has control over you is silly; your boss has the control over you that you give them in exchange for compensation, and you can always just quit - I wish people would do so more, because many of the worst attributes of the modern workplace are because people don't just quit.

With health insurance connected to your employment, references checks, previous salary leveling, noncompetes, the interview process.. the American system doesn't make it easy to get another job.

Yeah I felt bad for writing the comment a while back “if you want a big vacation just take time off between jobs” and then I realised in the US that means you’d probably have no health insurance for that time.

I saw another comment saying you need more than 10M to be truly financially independent in case you get sick … to a single person!

COBRA allows retroactive opt-in. That could help with taking a long vacation, depending on how your healthcare costs come in

I mean, I think designed is a bit strong here. And the long history of labor restriction, including today's tendency toward non-competes, clearly suggests it's not working so well. But to the extent that people do quit jobs, that does certainly help.

But you're very breezy here about quitting jobs. It's easy enough for a young, single guy in a hot industry. It's quite difficult for others, especially given how things like health care are tied to employment.

Health care tied to employment is an invention within our lifetime. Free health care from employers has been a thing for a long time - since the 50s, but the rise in costs to the point where it's untenable to purchase individually is new, driven by laws forcing employers to provide it.

In the 1980s, it was possible for families - Two adults, two kids - To buy health insurance for <$100/mo. https://listwithclever.com/research/healthcare-costs-over-ti... . Prices started spiking in the 90s, but really skyrocketed in the 2010s.

While I agree that quitting should be the way, to add to the rest of the comments, there are also other forces at play like the length of your tenure at your previous company, references from previous employers, reason for leaving and the stigma around mentioning anything negative about your previous boss/employer in an interview in the answer to that question can make this a tricky thing.

It seems to me that much of the system is designed in a way that gives a lot of power to the employer.

I don't disagree, but I think it's more about establishing a good rapport where statements like "let's talk" can be informative and not just confusing. If you trust your manager and have good communication with them, "let's talk" should get you worried. Management obviously has a power advantage, but good managers that communicate effectively know how to become reliable signals, even when they aren't in a good position to divulge more information. In other words, I take it that the problem OP raised is not "don't signal that bad news is coming" but rather "don't put out confusing signals." If you are a manager, and you say to someone "let's talk" and they can't figure out how to interpret that - they can't figure out whether they are about to be fired or whether you simply want to ask them about such-and-such - you have already done a bad job at establishing a rapport. A good manager, who has established good communication, can use a carefully placed vague statement to communicate that something unpleasant is coming.

And what, exactly, is the purpose of a manager communicating that something unpleasant is coming without actually giving context for what that domain is going to be?

If you’re going to tell me something unpleasant is coming, at least give me enough clues to steel myself for news about:

- technology problem

- customer problem

- team communication problem

- team performance problem

- personal performance problem

- litigation problem

- etc

Any of those things still might lead to me getting fired for any number of reasons, but at least my imagination can spin something potentially productive to bring to the meeting.

If you say only “let’s talk” all the time, it just becomes a background anxiety due to being acclimated to it, sure, but I don’t see how it’s productive.

This whole “you need to have anxiety now” makes absolutely zero sense to me. The meeting can be for the details that you’re not prepared to dig into right now, that’s fine, just give me enough broad context to hang a hat on.

Edit: I guess if there’s zero power imbalance, I might be fine with just “let’s talk,” but I still don’t see why providing zero context results in a better meeting.

>I don't disagree, but I think it's more about establishing a good rapport where statements like "let's talk" can be informative and not just confusing.

Can take years to establish something like that. That isn't a luxury most managers have.

Moreover, having enough empathy to understand the power imbalance and going out of your way to not be "spooky" when you first start working together is partly how a rapport like that is built.

Even in intimate personal relationships "we need to talk" is frequently assumed to be something bad. You're asking for co-workers to have better rapport than a typical significant-other relationship, which is just not realistic for most working relationships.

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