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Comment by xenihn | Hacker News Reader

There are still too many managers who don't understand one of their primary responsibilities in a market that favors employees: making sure that their best engineers don't leave. The job market won't always be like this, but you'd think that they would have figured it out by now during the current run. It's been nearly a decade at this point, and the pandemic has tipped things even further in the favor of the people who make the sausage.

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To be fair to the managers, from my experience managers themselves have little to say and it is mostly HR that determines rules like compensation. In our case, insanely, salaries are frozen. Nothing that your direct manager can do about it. Except, leave, and get hired the next day.

There's an exception for every rule. As a manager I've fought HR to get pay rises during pay freezes. And won. Bad managers roll over when presented with obstacles, great ones fight for their team.

The great ones also realize that there are other things employees value and build upon those, along with compensation.

The great ones also just leave themselves, rather than suffering the toxic culture on two fronts.

I think this is an often missed point. The managers are often just as overworked as the employees but have to handle negativity from 2 directions, both their employees and their managers. They are just people and often their hands are tied due to company policy. They are often just cogs in the wheel as much as we are.

Pushy, bossy, extroverted, or "people person" managers do that. The whole thing is stacked against docile introverts, no matter how many reasoned and well thought out arguments they make.

This is a fair point. It seems like standard policy at lots of places is to not budge significantly on comp unless a Valued Employee is prepared to leave. You then end up with one of the three scenarios:

- the employee leaves anyways, since it's too late to change their mind

- the employee stays, but there's a loss of trust and loyalty

- the employee never planned to leave in the first place, and exploited your broken system

Valued Employees should be rewarded preemptively.

Willing to be there is a study that shows that most of the time the employee will not leave or is bluffing and that financial analysis shows its better to just let it play out. This analysis is probably true in a lot of industries but tends to not work so well in tech. So many tech workers are just mercenary with our jobs that we just ask for what we want and by the time we ask we are already out the door. In tech the business should realize their job is to actively work to keep employees from seeking competing offers especially in the current job market.

I have been surprised how emotionally unaware many of my managers are. They are engineers who moved to management and seem to think reading a bunch of books on management will make them adept at the social skills needed to read and adapt to individuals and a teams emotional state. Compensation is huge but good software devs are all making enough to where a 20-30% swing in either direction isn't going to make or break us. I would happily take a 20% cut if I loved what I was doing and felt endeared of my manager and our goals.

20-30% ?? What kind of money are you assuming most people make. at anything over 100k a year that is a lot of extra money anything less and it is probably needed. It could simply be used to retire a few years earlier if nothing else. It could pay for vacation. It could pay off a vehicle. It could pay down a mortgage or appraisal gap in this market.

A 20% raise is huge at any income level.

Except that it isn't.

Assume you are a superstar of some persuasion and you earn $100M/yr. Is a 20% raise a lot of money? It's not! Sure, it's an extra twenty million dollars, but what could you possibly want to buy with that money that you can't already purchase?

At some point $100k --> $100M the math changes. That point will be different for different people.

A nice yacht, a sports team, your name on a building .. there's always something.

Expenses always rise to meet income.

You and other people are discussing amounts of money that you could simply walk away from the world buy a yacht and travel the world for your entire life. This adds nothing to the discussion.

Surely in the higher income brackets the tax on it brings down the net considerably?

Marginal value of money decreases the more money you have as consumption doesn't really scale up. Easily one should take a nice 500k/year job vs a stressful 600k/year job.

Most people aren't in a position where their choice is a nice 500k/year job versus a stressful 600k/year job thought.

The OP was explicitly talking about people making >>100k. At any rate, 5-600k is a staff/principle swe at a lot of tech companies, or even just a senior in some. Given this forum I am guessing that’s not an insignificant percentage of readers.

Managers can't control whether or not you love what you do, though. They can do their best to build an environment you enjoy being in, but that's about it. If you're bored or not enjoy the software or whatever else, they can't fix that.

They can control your compensation and make sure if they want to keep you you have at least a monetary reason to stay

"Loved what I was doing"

"and felt endeared of my manager"

"our goals"

So 1 and 3 are a little bit more objective, you can determine those on your own.

But #2?

If you're worried about your managers 'EQ' - why do you not contemplate your own?

Do you assume a lack of visceral empathy from your manager means that they 'don't care' - and - even if they didn't care that much, why do you care?

It's nice when my manager says 'Great Work' and it's important to know I'm respected - that's a matter of professionalism, i.e. recognition of competence.

But I do don't care one bit otherwise.

My manager is busy. Putting out fires, dragged into stupid meetings. I would not want his job.

Why would I want to burden him with having worry about 'me'.

Reading this thread I'm a bit dismayed by a lot of emotion just brimming beneath the surface, I think small things have a tendency to collect up on people over time ... but I also don't suspect that staffers realize how much control they have over their disposition towards most of these things things.

I wish more people had experience managing or even with directorships, it can be brutal - those are probably the two, worst jobs in the system, and it's interesting how far the gap in understanding is between front-line contributor, and just one layer up.

I wasn't saying a manager should need to babysit the emotional state of all the team members, but I think they should be generally socially adept. I have had many managers who were unable to engage meaningfully in any way. People who could eagerly analyze my Meyers Briggs type but would be unable to talk about their vacation. My last manager would unintentionally haze new employees when they asked questions in meetings, he just could not express compassion and understanding with his face/tone so he seemed belittling and annoyed with them.

This is not quite right and I think this is where we let our egos get away with us. Their responsibility is to maintain a good team, not the best person. In the cost benefit analysis, keeping a couple of pretty good people at the expense of your 'best' person might work out better. And a high maintenance person costs more than money.

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