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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

> I chose to not do what they asked.

I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do. When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

I tell you this as an older person because you won't be able to push out everyone. You'll make this mistake with someone, somewhere, in another company, and they'll fuck you six ways from Sunday for it. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I lost one of most enjoyable jobs I ever had by doing not only what I wanted to do, but what I knew was correct. I was even proven correct, but I ignored my boss and in doing so sealed my fate.

You're definitely correct to have put "won" in quotes, because what actually happened was you got lucky.

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> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do. When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

All of the worst organizations I’ve worked in have been chock full of people who had this mindset. It’s good for job stability, not so good for actually doing good work. Maybe that doesn’t matter. Personally I hate having my fate assigned to the whims of incompetent management. I think the culture of treading the line between making bad leaders feel like they’re being listened to and doing what is actually effective for getting work done is actually much more common than you’d expect.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

You seem to think it is the job of a manager to instruct people what to do.

Moreover, you seem to think that if a manager manages someone, that person is automatically a subordinate.

This is not always the case, especially for more senior positions or in organizations such as certain tech companies where engineering has most of the power and may well be at the same level as the manager.

Managers and bosses are not the same thing.

Moreover, some people are unwilling to do bad work, even if they are told to do so. Sometimes these people are harder to replace than a manager, especially one who defaults to trying to fire people that don’t do what they say.

Pushing back against bad decisions is in my opinion a responsibility and not something to avoid. You do it one to one and not in the middle of a meeting or in public and you steel-man your arguments, assume that there are compromises etc. but this top down view of shifting all the responsibility up is incredibly brittle and wasteful. Also the best leaders are the ones who respect that, or even want that.

Choose your battles though, not every opinion/issue is precious.

" When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance. "

Disobedience is one of the most important civil and moral duties. Maybe it should even be regularly trained... The people you call for, the Yes-Men, are superb for demonstrating the Milgram experiment and what it stands for.

So NO.

Disobedience in the face of a direct order is insubordination, and grounds for summary dismissal (IANAL).

As GP says, some bosses avoid direct orders; Robert E. Lee was famous for vague orders with lots of room for "discretion".

Unless you are a junior, then any decent boss will expect you to give him advice - maybe strongly-phrased. If the decision is delegated, you don't have to discuss it with the boss anyway. But if you do discuss it with the boss, and his reply is "Do as I say", and you don't comply, then for sure you are "hard to work with", and also insubordinate. Time to polish your resume.

The other side of this coin is that if you are are forced into actions which you "know" are wrong and just accept it, then maybe the job is already dead for you anyway. By fighting back you are testing a number of stress points, like the conflict-avoidance of your management and the belligerence of the person you know to be "wrong". The important part is having the maturity to understand the consequences of being mistaken yourself, and being able to decide whether the fight is worth having even if it is going to have drastic results. In other words, is this a hill worth dying on?

No hill is worth dying on for a company, unless perhaps its an early stage startup and you're running out of cash.

I have a family to support, and saying "OK" to bad decisions from on high has never threatened my livelihood.

> No hill is worth dying on for a company

Wish I got this advice much earlier in my career

Though on the flip side, don't sit and eat shit from your company when you have extremely high value in the fastest growing industry in the world.

> I have a family to support, and saying "OK" to bad decisions from on high has never threatened my livelihood.

This doesn't necessarily work out in practice. When bad decisions have consequences many people will look for scapegoats, and blindly following orders can still make you a scapegoat.

In my own past I’ve pointed out issues non-confrontationally. But I smile and go along with it if the feedback is discarded. I’ve seen tens of millions of dollars lost to bad tech decisions. Occasionally someone will mention that I predicted the failure a year or two prior, and I shrug.

> Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I've never seen it happen. Managers don't tend to get fired for making the people under them miserable, unless it's causing problems for the company's bottom line.

And even then, I've seen such managers who are excellent at blaming the people under them.

You have to ask yourself, "Is this worth getting fired over?" Sometimes the answer is, "yes."

And on the other hand, I’ve been asked “why did you do it if you knew it was wrong?”. I always voice my reasoning about why something is wrong and it would be better for the team to not do it, or do something else. Just following like a sheep doesn’t help the team overall.

I don't think it's always as simple as that. Some wrongs are more important than others. The little wrongs, wouldn't be worth that mark on your career as being seen as unreliable, other wrongs would be worth it.

I forgot I’m on HN and used the word “always”, my bad.

A manager is not necessarily a ‘leader’, just someone hired at a different level of the abstraction pyramid. Turning that into a hard authority structure is a fast way to a hostile workplace culture. New managers should actually have humility and listen to what their team is telling them, because they have all the details.

There are worse things than getting fired. And companies are not the military. You are not obligated in a legal sense to comply with most orders from management. Without knowing the situation, it's hard to know for sure whether the original commenter made the best move for their career.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired

I'm shocked this sir-yes-sir mentality still lingers around in 2022

doing what you're told is for robots, most of the managers I had should thank me that I did not do exactly what they asked and saved their stupid asses .

If I did what they wanted, they would be the ones to be fired for giving stupid directives that failed miserably.

Just to be clear: I agree with you that I handled it badly. I disagree that just because a manager says something you automatically should do it, but I’ve learned to play ball and sometimes make the best of a bad situation instead of swimming against the tide. There are some policies that I disagree with at my current job, but I explained my disagreement to the right people and then moved on and followed them anyway. In my opinion knowing when to push back and when not is something that depends a lot on internal politics and personalities involved, less on technical “objective” realities. There are usually many ways to get to the destination, and the long way around may be the quickest if all the right people are bought in to that approach. I failed to appreciate these subtleties at the time.

> they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance.

This is a joke right? Poor leaders get into their positions by blaming everyone they work with, they will just blame their poor performance on you.

> I was even proven correct, but I ignored my boss and in doing so sealed my fate.

Your boss was a bad leader, firing you for making the right call doesn't make them a good leader. You have picked up their bad leadership and taken it with you.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

A manager is not a boss. If a new manager isn't able to get a team to do what they ask, either the team is horribly incompetent, or the manager isn't very good.

Furthermore, if a new manager suddenly wants to fire people from the team, it looks very bad. (Unless the team has a reputation for underperforming.)

In the OP's case, I suspect that the +1 had a lot of respect for the team and its past accomplishments; or that the OP had a good reputation with the +1. In some organizations, underperformers are left to simmer in hopes that they leave voluntarily; I suspect that the "interpersonal conflict" approach was a way to nudge the bad manager out the door.

> I'm shocked this manager didn't have you fired. I would never tolerate someone doing what they want instead of what I instructed them to do.

In addition to other sibling replies here, so much middle management is "fire and forget" - they really don't care much what you do as long as you don't make them look bad, and not doing what you're told isn't relevant. They can report up that they "took care of it" and in our transactional world if something bad comes as a result, they'll start fresh with another tack (or sometimes the same one) and then can report they took care of double the number of issues. Big raise.

There's a spectrum from a manager not expressing an opinion to a manager giving a direct order. I have had managers that never gave a direct order that I witnessed. Usually the implied meaning when they "told" you what to do was, "I really think you should do it this way, and if you do it a different way and things go badly, the responsibility is entirely yours." The closest they came to a direct order was when you could tell they thought something was so colossally stupid they would fire you on the spot for doing it. If they thought it was only mildly stupid, the consequences would not be absolute unless they felt it was part of a pattern.

I've also had bosses that gave orders, so I'm not saying it's always that way, just that it's not always black and white.

There are situations where N disobeys N+1 but N+2 knows the value of N, which makes N+1 unable to fire N.

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