Manager's Handbook (2020)
themanagershandbook.com
themanagershandbook.com
As a manager, I make it a point to try to turn my own video on most of the time, but I'd never ask someone to turn their camera on in any particular call. I want people to be able to do their best work. Building a solid team culture means you should see one another from time to time, but it doesn't have to be every call, or even most calls, and there are a lot of people who struggle from time to time to do their best work on camera.
Sometimes people are in a messy room or feel self conscious about their appearance. Sometimes people are just distracted staring at their own image on a call. Some people have to share their workspace with a partner or roommate who might be distracting in the background. Sometimes people are running something compute intensive in the background while taking a call and their computer gets too bogged down trying to encode video while also running whatever more important task it should be doing. Whatever the reason, I want people focusing on the work they are trying to do and if having their camera off lets them focus better, I'm going to encourage them to do that.
At my company, all the ICs I respect have camera off meetings. Only managers, obnoxious ladder climbers, and outside consultants are constantly pushing face time.
Just a couple of years ago the standard medium for a meeting was a conference phone call.
Just because it’s easy to always have a videoconference doesn’t mean that we should.
For me, the standard medium for a meeting for decades been face to face, with videoconference in second, long before covid changed everything.
I have always hated phone calls, and conference calls specifically are one of the circles of hell.
For individuals choosing camera on vs. off when participating in meetings, whatever the choice, I bargain more than would admit are making some form of status calculation.
Personally I bias towards on often as it feels more... friendly?
I don't mind having cameras on at all really but they don't add much - it is largely just a novelty. Audio is everything.
This isn't to say we've cracked that nut with the current state of internet-transmitted video. A blanket "humans communicate via audio neglects these other channels of communication.
If true you should be able to communicate effectively without audio. Clearly this is not the case.
Obviously the fact that we're communicating 100% of our information currently using text shows that the 90% figure is extremely misleading. 90% of our understanding of a person's character or something maybe comes from their physicality.
If you feel your meetings don’t benefit from non-verbal cues, consider if you really need these meetings? Maybe it’s just a status call that could have also been solved via an online status tracker?
The person who this is attributed to is Albert Mehrabian. According to wikipedia it is more related to the "liking" of the person who puts forth the same message delivered with various vocal tones with photographs of various facial expressions, etc.
Body langugage and facial expressions are entire, distinct channels that primarily communicate information around emotion and attitude towards objects of attention. How relevant this information in any given situation is one question.
The impact of those channels not being there, and the ability (let alone willingness) of senders and receivers (read: people in an interaction) to send and interpret that information over another channel is a whole other matter.
We have gone through the very same error for the entire IT history: after the Xerox era all tried to mimic the real life in a virtual one, like many GNU/Linux newcomers try to mimic Windows paradigm and some criminals with a keyboard improperly named developers sometimes even try that path. All such moves were big failure. The virtual world have it's rules, not the same of the physical one. We do NEVER try to mimic one in the other but to elicit the maximum profit from any tools.
Working distributed is not "a way to be together but with physical distance", oh we see many consider that, we see even infra designed for that with crappy VDIs hosted somewhere to have "the virtual managed office" around the world, even some in the metaverse to try mimicking real life conferences rooms. See in the past General Magick UIs and you'll understand why that can't work.
WFH is not work in a virtual office, we need a paradigm for it, witch is totally different than the in-person one.
[1] At least nothing that we didn’t have so far. And nothing of what we have so far seems to have had any real breakthrough (actually, with the exception of video calls ;)
Just because is so far from perfection to a point of being just waste of bandwidth resources, a security risk [1] and an annoyance who force people a certain dress code, others with shows of decorated background and animations, others shows misery of their homes while some show their wealth status as a way to impress etc.
> telling people that it will never be a replacement for physical presence, would actually quite support the crowd asking for a 100% return to office fearing that innovation and team cohesion will suffer
Honestly, without much data but hearing climate in my circles and reading the press, those who want back in office are just middle managers and some old people who will retire in few years. So the crowd will be a very small one against a far bigger one who just say, as happen right now in various part of the world "if you want me back in the office I resign, go look for someone else"... You can't made soft paradigm changes, you can only change softly witch means for instance start pushing 99% remote work just to a series of jobs where people have enough money, interests and willingness to live cities and going full remote instead of pushing it worldwide "for the pandemic" and for all possibly remote jobs. For instance instead of pushing crappy proprietary platforms like Meet, Teams, Zoom developing a company infra on company iron, negotiating seriously with workers: "if you want full remote you need to offer us a spare room in your house at a given little monthly fee, like the same you get in office to eat, with possible sufficient connectivity to work, electricity and a closed door. We gives you all the needed furniture and gears, we pay the connection or we negotiate a compensation for them if you provide them and what you offer meet our demand" instead of giving craptops and craphones etc. When a first batch of humans, skilled, educated and wealthy enough to test the new model will finally arrive to a good stability than offering a similar paths to other workers also a bit at a time to make the migration possible, the softer possible, with enough experience already made to avoid making full-society-scale or full-company-scale disasters. You can't switch paradigm in small steps though, hybrid work does not work, mixed work in the same workforce does not work. It's a classic error common in countless situations, from the military where a general want a strategy another an almost totally different one and the chief finally choose a middle ground between the two making both a failure to the classic IT horror stories and anything in between.
Consider a thing: there is no success without risk, you can mitigate the risk reducing the risk surface, like "hey we build masonry houses only, we want to try new materials like wood, so instead of change all houses a big risk surface, we build just some few houses to see how they work" but you can't get anything from "we start with a wood based floor and one masonry".
[1] you know deepfakes need much data to be trained, the more you face/body is shown on-line the more data some model get to produce a realistic video of you stating terrorist intention or perhaps confessing a love betrayal etc realistic enough to be believed. In real life no one can hold good cam and grab data without you noticing, with modern platforms like Zoom, Teams, Meet, their owners harvest gazillions of data, and deepfakes aside what you think about holding a talk in a public place discussing works stuff? You normally want a private room, isn't it?
To just provide a counterpoint to your anecdote (obviously, also nothing but another anecdote): of our team of 30 almost all came back to the office several days a week (despite it being fully optional and also management choosing various models). I think it is very much driven by the fact that the team just had a really enjoyable team spirit prior to WFH plus it is a pretty diverse team (esp. age and gender wise) which also brings up a wide variety of reasons for people opting for / against WFH
Another point is made the environment aside: in a small/medium and spread city, with various amenities, people might like live there not just because it's near the office and once there it's a pleasure going outside. However for instance in my old big & dense city going outside was and still is definitively not a pleasure, too much traffic, pollution, noise, only the social aspect of having a big choice of people to be together instead of just accept some neighbors because there is no much choice in place is actually a pleasure, here now however I have nature around, with countless of activities, no traffic etc, so much of the issue of the city are not worth just the better social/service part. Surely, I'm not that rural, and cities are still just half an hour around...
There are many things shaping life so shaping work preferences though for what I've read here and there (different posts from different sources around the world) and my personal experience much more prefer WFH, at least those who have a voice, who know how to spread their feelings and ideas, witch left me a bit uncertain about how many prefer the office vs how many prefer living in a spread and vast Riviera, WFH... No doubt however about the abundance of advantages vs disadvantages in the short and potentially, with a bit of incertitude, in the mean/long run.
The dream of a less dense society where moving by flying cars is normal as now moving with actual road cars, so a society where a vast riviera is also a dense city since anything is few minutes of fly away is the dream. Potentially can be real in tech terms, but I do not know if / when it will ever be in reality, nor I know how many time, issues etc we will see before having experimented WFH enough to have a new paradigm working and tested enough to made general comparisons.
Upon deeper investigation, I found out (to my great surprise) that most people's experience of communication is different from mine in a profound way. They really are taking most of their cues about meaning from things other than my actual words, and they were trying to communicate a great many things to me without words that I was missing completely.
I (obviously) don't know you from anyone, but if this claim has seemed as transparently false to you as it did to me, I'd just encourage you to try to keep your mind open to the possibility that your experience is anomalous.
The good news is that once I knew this was true, I was able to focus on trying to learn to compensate. It's almost like people are speaking two languages at once, whatever they're saying out loud, and then another whole set of things in a kind of full body sign language that most of them picked up intuitively from earliest childhood and use constantly without even being aware they're doing it.
All languages are learnable if you're determined, so once you know to look for them, you can start.
If you want to come at it from a formal angle (which might be necessary), check out the old TV show "Lie to Me." It touches on the science of interpreting body expressions and facial cues. I think it'll help you see some of what I mean.
Personally, I think the only good reasons to turn off a camera are either technical issues or if you indeed briefly want to send the message “I am distracted for a short while, but will be back with full focus in a while”
To your other points:
- Don’t like your own image: turn self-view off
- Messy background: enable blurring (or an alternative background)
I always turn the cam off when I share my screen. I want people to focus on the content I’m sharing, not the pimples in my face.
If people are disinterested, you might want to invite less people to your meeting or use email.
When I’m sharing my screen I don’t see anyones face. When I’m looking at what someone else is sharing I want to see it full screen.
I’m not really looking at anyone unless we are speaking on a direct call.
1- where my manager would visibly get annoyed at the slightest auditory or visual disturbance. He wouldn’t say anything but it was clear he was displeased to see kids in the background.
2- we all accepted each other (except this one person who didn’t understand that people with kids have different issues to deal with). My kids would barge in through the door and my team mates would wave to them, smile and continue our conversation. We’d all joke about how our shower times are all messed up so we don’t look “presentable” and yet we’d turn on our cameras because we liked seeing each other.
My current perspective is that the team culture has a big bearing of comfort level on videos.
I’ve done this with people who report to me, with peers, and with people higher in the org chart.
I find the mental overhead of the always-on camera exhausting, and I prefer voice only communication for certain types of conversations so I can dedicate all my processing power to what's being said. I also pace when I'm thinking, make coffee, lay down, etc.
In a pleasant twist of fate, migrating our full company (20ish people) into gather.town has largely made it a moot point for me now.
I have the choice between zoom like video boxes or switching to small thumbnails I largely ignore in favor of viewing/interacting with the 2D scene.
Also, when you see someone walking by and they "drop in" for a quick chat, the context for the visual feed seems more natural and less encumbering than spinning up a zoom meeting: they approach, you talk, they walk away, and you're alone again. If I pace IRL during the discussion and am off camera, my avatar is reinforcing that I'm still in the same space with the other participants.
If I don't want to be interrupted I go to a blocked off private area; the 2D equivalent of a DnD status.
(Wish I didn't have to add this disclaimer but this is the internet: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with gather in any way. That friends was just an earnest anecdote and soft reccomendation)
Swinging by with a guest, like other real world experiences translated into a 2D world, require developing a new set of social norms. For instance, if you're screen sharing through their app, you won't see someone approaching and the screen share feed will show up expanded by default for whomever enters. That can be problematic for a number of reasons (client data, personal info you were sharing with a close coworker, etc.).
We also have recreated games like tag using the confetti feature, have rituals like hitting a lap around the entire space on go karts after code reviews, and occasionally raid Client Experience's office for supplies.
It is a jealous god when it comes to CPU though and since modern JS environments are greedy as well, my fan gets a lot of work.
This reads like a toxic culture playbook.
Managers can commit to nothing, or commit to things and fail when there are inevitably things they can't control and face "consequences."
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
The people who can keep commitments they make would enjoy working there.
I’m sure once they’ve developed a track record of keeping the commitments they make, it won’t be as draconian as it seems.
However this disincentivizes the often productive approach of “throwing your hat over the fence” so to speak and committing to something you may not already know is achievable.
Perhaps clearbit’s business model doesn’t hinge on their employees driving innovation and they need more predictable results at a reliable cadence.
This approach doesn’t work for everyone or every company. This seems to be by design.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital...
> suggests that half of all large IT projects—defined as those with initial price tags exceeding $15 million—massively blow their budgets. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. Software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns.
So, either this clearbit management magic makes all the normal scaling and estimation problems go away magically, or it is a really toxic management approach.
Right--you're trying to choose the winning move: not to play. That's not really an option.
Did you read the section in question?
Advice about avoiding zero sum games isn't relevant to a discussion of a specific zero sum game prescribed by the manual we're discussing.
I do think it's good to point it out right away. How you do so depends on whether it mattered or not.
If it mattered: I noticed you weren't able to get X done as planned. Marketing will need to postpone campaign Y which will affect our numbers for the quarter. Can you give me a heads up early next time?
If it didn't: I noticed you weren't able to get X done as planned. It's not a big deal, but were there any blockers I can help clear for you? I want you to feel good about being able to deliver on your promises.
An when you do that, the toxic manager responds with "Is that all you can do?"
Ugh. "Your apology is irrelevant. Just never make this mistake or we will fire you."
Strongly dislike this quietly, creepily hostile communication style.
I would argue most employees want to do a good job. The problem is similar to the "Peter Principle." In many cases, clueless managers demand their employees to sculpt the next Pieta or paint the next Mona Lisa with sticks and crayons and no prior training. When the employees push back against hard estimates, the clueless managers double down and say they are insubordinate. I am including Product Owners and Scrum Masters in clueless managers category. In many cases, they took on these titles but have not changed their behavior according to the Agile Manifesto. They see themselves as the order givers and the developers as the order takers.
The only people problem here is the management idea that managers/product owners/scrum masters don't need to know anything about the technology they are implementing.
I also really dislike the notion of being "promoted" into management. It's another profession altogether. You're not promoted, you're transferring. At best its a graduation if you actually succeeded in some form of training. But let's get real, people get slapped with a manager title, and one in a thousand will care enough to open a book or even just a blog post about anything related to learning the job. Most new managers are "trained" by a combination of their own clueless bosses, and inspirational memes on LinkedIn telling you should be a leader rather than a manager. Stop pretending there is a real notion of hierarchy between managers and ic, managers are equally incompetent as anybody else (well, that's not true, they tend to be worse since lots are driven by ego and power hunger rather than a genuine interest in the job), thinking that it is a promotion is stupid.
"It is not an exact science. It is not there to pigeonhole people or to be an excuse for bad behavior. It is just a useful framework for understanding yourself and others a little better. And the better you understand someone, the better you can work together."
Unfortunately, the fact is that promotion and hiring decisions are made based on things like this. The people promoting it are usually business and HR people who don't have an understanding of how shakey their underpinning is. They just think "we want a reformer, and this fancy test says that Cam has the highest reformer points out of the applicants we've seen so let's hire them".
That site should not be used, at least not directly, by anybody in a professional managerial setting.
the critics would say it is not useful for that purpose - that the results do not reflect people's actual personality whatsoever.
Promotions for example are always based on nebulous criteria that are often made up on the fly. Yea there are career ladders and stuff but those are totally ignored for all practical purposes. As a manager you have to make up BS on the fly when an employee asks you why they were not promoted despite doing everything you asked them to do. Pomotions aren't really in your control as a low lever manager.
In companies with mature (which doesn't mean old - a relatively young company can also be well-run!) structures, the criteria for promotion are not nebulous. I struggle to see the wisdom in setting goals for an employee's promotion without the intention of rewarding them for working hard to meet those goals.
In general, I would encourage anyone who is in a working situation described above to look for another job - and ask about the management and leadership philosophy when you interview! As interviewers, we are comfortable asking hard questions, I don't see why being a candidate should be any different. Is there a structured feedback system in your company? What is it, and how closely does your team follow it? When was the last person in your team promoted, and how long were they in their previous role? etc.
In theory, I agree. The reality is these orgs are crap for a reason...they drink too much of their own Kool Aid, they don't realize they have blindspots, etc.
The point being, good luck getting a transparent and honest answer as that's the antithesis of their philosophy.
It's been a while since I've been a candidate, so I kinda winged it in the above comment, but if you want to be balsy (and why not!) you can ask something like "Can you tell me about the last time you had to give negative performance feedback?" You might want to preface such a question a bit to qualify your reasons for asking it, but that sort of thing is not easy to BS.
Full disclosure: I just left a marketing agency that wasn't 25% of what they said it was. I had asked questions and the answers didn't match what was actually happening. Nice people. I don't think it was intentional per se. But they were so not self-aware that they had little idea how far off they were.
Is this really useful though. They will always tell you what you want to hear, just like you say what they want to hear.
> I struggle to see the wisdom in setting goals for an employee's promotion without the intention of rewarding them for working hard to meet those goals.
Because low level managers don't really have the power to grant that promotion and are not in position to properly explain why they lost out the promotion to a peer from another team. There are a whole of unspoken things that factor into a promotion like gaining favor by pumping your manager/VP by giving them credit publicly, thanking them for their support ect.
100% it's useful.
First, not everyone is going to just tell you what you want to hear. I for one am entirely transparent in interviews, often criticizing the org. Hiring someone who doesn't like the culture is an absolute disaster.
Second, you should ask the same question to every person that interviews you. If you get a bunch of different answers you're probably getting bullshitted, or they just don't have a consistent answer across the org for what you are asking. That's valuable info either way.
Third, ask questions that don't have a "right" answer. If you ask "do people who work here care about the mission?" you're going to get a yes every time. If you ask "what would you say is the biggest source of motivation for you and your team?" you'll get lots of varied answers. I know because I've asked that question and gotten countless different ones.
For the leadership/management question they have no way to know what answer you are looking for when you ask about the management philosophy. If they give a nothing answer like "we try not to micromanage" then you push. You'll either find out what it is or you'll find out that the people you are asking don't know, which suggests that there isn't one.
Imagine a local unit with the budget given for promotions from global is announced after the yearly promotion discussions of all team leaders happened.
So they had to come up with some form of ranking so that the cut off can be made based on the available budget.
So even if 15 people had done all that their team leads said would be necessary for a promotion the decision hinges on some internal ranking as well as a globally decided budget.
But is in no way a standard across companies.
Sounds horrific to be honest. Having to BS employees on the fly?
I think you’ve worked at some very toxic work environments, but it’s a mistake to suggest that your experience is the norm.
It’s funny to read HN comments about how all managers are terrible, devious people who are only out to abuse employees. Most of us managers started out as ICs. Do you really think we surrender our humanity and adopt evilness as our SOP on the day they give us our manager title? No, most of us enter management because we really like working with people and like helping people succeed. This idea that we only exist to spite employees is very childish.
A lot of people who go into management are just ladder climbers at companies where management means more money, status, and power. They aren't particularly interested in or good at the actual job.
Its just the unfortunate reality that people are put into this desperate position. And desperate people do desperate things. For many people Being a sycophant yesman beats having to code another crud app millionth time being bossed around by someone who is a decade younger than them. I don't blame people choosing the way out.
'helping people' :)
The way this actually looks, from the management side, is that people by and large do mediocre work, and fail to ever increase the scope or quality of the work they deliver.
The manager has visibility into the work of many engineers, and can see how one person implements major features quickly, cranks out design documents, fixes a ton of bugs, helps to organize the work of their teammates, brings people together from different teams to make technical decisions... meanwhile almost everyone else takes at least two weeks for even the smallest change, can't answer simple questions about the work they're doing, they don't help their teammates in any significant way, and so on. And those people are bewildered and frustrated that they're not getting promoted.
This is almost superhuman. Basically combines everything from a entry level all the way to staff engineer. tons of , quickly, cranks out, helps, brings together. Sounds like a parody.
Yea if this is what is required to get a promotion with 2% increase in pay, no surprise most ppl aren't motivated to step up. And managers are bewildered and frustrated why people take 2 weeks to implement a feature when they should be "cranking out" code.
> And those people are bewildered and frustrated that they're not getting promoted.
They shouldn't be if these superhuman requirements are clearly understood by everyone. Example of previous promotions where people achieved this and concrete examples of what you mean by "fixes tons of bugs". Not something secret in your head. What does "ton" mean to you as a manager. You should have no problem saying, You didn't get promotion because you didn't fix "tons of bugs" , end of discussion. Expecting people to read your mind and wondering why are 'bewildered' is total failure of management.
>people by and large do mediocre work, and fail to ever increase the scope or quality of the work they deliver.
Your explanation for why people arent performing to your expectations seems to be that they are lazy or stupid or both. I really pray i don't work for someone like this.
And yet as I wrote this, I had several specific people in mind, who do literally all the things I listed: they design, they code, they help organize the project, they reach out to other teams, etc. I didn't say they do all those things every day! :-) Their productivity stands out clearly above that of most of their peers. It's not just me that notices -- I've get slacks from other people on how these folks kick ass. And I've seen this at every company I've worked at. There are the top engineers who deliver the most features and functionality, at the highest quality standards, and done quickly... and then the rest of the team.
> Expecting people to read your mind and wondering why are 'bewildered' is total failure of management.
Of course. Goes without saying. Helping people increase their productivity --through clear communication-- is one of the main jobs of an eng manager.
> Your explanation for why people arent performing to your expectations seems to be that they are lazy or stupid or both. I really pray i don't work for someone like this.
I know my statement may offend egos, but again: any manager will tell you that the productivity of engineers --by any metric-- is very unevenly distributed. It's not because of laziness or stupidity. Talent and skills are simply not evenly distributed. Sucks, but that's just how it is.
And then during performance-review season, promotions will go to those engineers who are performing clearly better than their job-level peers.
Curious why people are 'bewildered' on your team when you have to clearly pointed out the to get promotion you have crank out maximum number of features than anyone else ( for example). There was also failure to 'increase their productivity' if they are taking 2 weeks to deliver basic stuff.
I might be wrong here but sounds like management style is that of a passive observer that rewards 'top N' , punishes 'bottom N' and lets everyone else just stagnate.
> I know my statement may offend egos
It has nothing do with ego, you are obviously right, people are different. I just dislike 'fixed mindset' managers. Managers who have absolved themselves of any responsibility to improve or elevate their teams by proclaiming things like
> people by and large do mediocre work
> Talent and skills are simply not evenly distributed. Sucks, but that's just how it is.
There is just no benefit to me working for someone who holds these attitudes about me and my 'talent and skills'. I simply have nothing to gain.
Their frustration (and “bewilderment”) stems from the gap in what they want to accomplish versus what they’re able to accomplish at this point in their career. They reject the feedback that they're not performing at the next career level, because from their POV, they're working hard and feel that their own results and deliverables are the max a person can achieve.
While this certainly could be attributed to a communication failure on the manager's part, my experience (and my POV as manager) is that it rather reflects on the individual engineers themselves -- some just naturally get a ton of shit done, some are able to push themselves and grow, and others struggle to grow despite the effort they put in and despite my attempts to coach them.
I've gone through this step countless times and every time I just reword what's already on my LinkedIn profile. If you like what you read there, there really is no reason to have this conversation.
Ok - so quick thoughts - companies are moving to run all processes on software. software is eating the world and if they are not already (manufacturing) the essence of a business (core competency) is becoming digitised.
that means you need to be a coder to create the core competency, monitoring it or chnage it. Some people will be experts who learn to code, more often it seems coders will learn to be experts (mostly because you cannot create the code if you don't understand the job)
(side note I argue that software is a form of literacy so substitute "able to read and write for coder)
This leads to a number of issues - the first one here is that managers in say the 1960s bestrode the world, before digitisation one person had to be the nexus for information in order to make day to day decisions. but software replaces that (cf the bank manager replaced with algorithm) and all managers are going that way because it allows more efficient decisions - and so we have the Google manager - not a decision maker but a coach for the real decision makers - coders.
which leads us to - management only applies at the level of hiring and firing (i mean if a non coder is telling coders what to write it's already broken). so if you are not the person with hiring / firing / internal team allocation you are not a manager - and if you are and you are not focused on pull requests and automated testing you are doing it wrong
Which also leads us to managers are the new VC/investors - funding teams for results.
I present it as business impact / use cases, they decide what “policy” (non-tech) changes they want to make, and I decide how to technically best implement that considering the existing design and new changes.
That's like "artists impression" view on a building and actually what gets built.
What gets built matters. It's all that matters.
And anyone who says "i built this building" when they were the one who pointed at a set of different artists impressions is frankly deluded.
(I have my inner socialist rearing up inside !)
more conciliatory, we all try to pay lip service to "business" in charge and "business decisions" that is less and less a reality - the policies are in code. Read the code, don't pretend the powerpoint based on the meeting based on the comments in the code will get you an understanding
Edit:
ok more conciliatory- there is always going to be politics, so there is always debate amoung voters (employees? stakeholders?) and there are always politicians holding a manifesto of changes - but that person (manager) should be able to read the code and understand the implications of the different changes
which also nearly follows to my next great idea - vote for policies in a company which is same as vote for executives, Let's make annual baord elections binding and competitive :-)
k?
Ok. Thanksssss.
Sips coffee
Remote work and office work are different, there is NO POINT in mimicking the latter in the former, like there is no point in making big north-facing windows in cold climate because that's normally done in hot south and vice versa. That's just blind ignorance and fear of change.
I can understand both, but please do not encourage such behaviors, instead try to craft a REAL new remote paradigm too many have no idea about how to shape it.
Does anyone know what app they used to create the handbook?
> A senior employee comes to you with a competitive offer in hand, asking for a promotion. You investigate the situation and decide that, since you really don’t want to lose this employee, you will cave and give them a promotion.
> You have just created a strong incentive for political behavior.
Hard disagree. People look for more responsibility / jobs all the time and when they come to you saying they want to stay and this is their condition, you better honor it and not call it "politics". They don't have to do that at all and now you're back to hiring or backfilling.
This is also literally the opposite of the highlights saying:
> Attract, nurture, coach, and retain talent.
> Keep an eye on your team's health and happiness.
> Give your team a clear path to progress in their careers.
Also this section on remote work is so out of touch:
> Always have your camera on for meetings and touchpoints. Please ask others to do so as well. This is non-negotiable. There should be no state in which you are working where your camera can't be turned on. If you look like ass, own the fact that you look like ass and understand that at some point the people you are talking to will look like ass too. If you don't want to turn the camera on because you are sitting in bed and it's all messed up, then get out of the bed and go sit at a table or something. This isn't rocket science. Be 100% of yourself at all times, but be professional.
An executive definitely wrote this. I bet they don't show their face to every call they take. The pandemic has made this normal, but prior to it I think this would be challenged. I don't need to see your face to work with you. Sure let's do it often, but not 24/7.
> The terms “management” and “leadership” are often used interchangeably, but they are actually two distinct things. In short, management is tactical and leadership is strategic.
This attitude I think harms the merit of what management really is. Management is a noble profession that people think is separate from leadership. They are the same regardless of what you think. I think Clayton Christensen said it best:
> “I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But….I [have] concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.”
I would overall call this a generic self-help guide for someone who happens to be a manager. It literally includes word for word ideas in the most random places like GTD, stoicism, and even a section on sales?
Promoting someone to staff engineer who doesn’t meet the bar lowers the bar for a staff engineer at the company.
Promoting based on a threat to leave communicates that one path forward is negotiation through counter-offers. Maybe that’s the culture some company are after, I don’t know.
Management and leadership are distinct. There are people managers who don’t lead their teams and senior ICs who do.
my rules, since i started working remotely (so ~10y ago) regarding cameras are: on if the meeting has less than 10 people. on at the beginning from 10 to 20~30. after that number, off (since it doesn't matter anymore).
that means that for team and project meetings, my camera is always on. for dept meetings, it's on at the beginning because i want people to know i'm around and paying attention (usually i turn it off after the meeting starts properly). and for company wide meetings, it's off because there are so many people that it doesn't really matter if the CEO can see me or ont.
I can totally imagine a different scenario where people who are clearly underpaid must follow a different strategy. It all boils down to a) does the employer underpay the employee b) does the employer understand how much the employee feels sincerely underpaid?
Point (b) is an important nitpick because often employers and employees have radically different measures of what is "right", in particular when you throw in rules about location-based compensation.
It’s often hard to identify a proximate cause right before - usually it goes back a long way.
When you first get into management, you immediately realize that your job is to serve an entire team in ways that will some times not make individuals happy. You have to focus on doing what’s best for the team, not just giving the loudest team member what they demand.
> Hard disagree. People look for more responsibility / jobs all the time and when they come to you saying they want to stay and this is their condition, you better honor it and not call it "politics".
If the person is deserving of the promotion then withholding it just because is silly. But in the real world that doesn’t really happen. What manager would actively withhold something that would motivate their team? Remember, managers don’t get compensated and promoted for keeping their team members miserable and depriving them of what they want. We get compensated and promoted based on getting the job done.
The problem in these scenarios is that you can’t start trading promotions as leverage. You need to give out promotions as earned according to the criteria spelled out to the team.
If you start giving out promotions to people who seek competing job offers, you’re telling the team that the promotion path is not based on merit or performance, but rather on your ability to hold your manager over a barrel with threats of quitting.
Reward this once and you’ll start seeing much of the team threaten to quit whenever they want something. Motivation will fall as employees realize that their best option to get ahead of their peers is not to work hard, but to threaten to quit. Resentment will grow as team members learn that their peer was promoted for getting competing job offers, not for doing good work. That’s the definition of politics.
Of course, you need to have a valid promotion structure and criteria in place and you need to honor it. But no, you should not get into the habit of giving employees whatever they want in response to threats to leave.
Exactly, that's why you go get a competing offer when you do not feel heard from your manager regarding what will make you happy. Especially when you have said career conversations with them and no progress is being made and you're tired of waiting because they are too busy "serving an entire team".
> If the person is deserving of the promotion then withholding it just because is silly. But in the real world that doesn’t really happen.
This happens all the time. People who are more "visible" or "political" can often see promotions before those who may actually deserve them waiting patiently in line. Also fiscal years and promotion cycles are a thing. So it does happen in the real world all the time. Why do you think boomerang employees are a thing?
> If you start giving out promotions to people who seek competing job offers, you’re telling the team that the promotion path is not based on merit or performance, but rather on your ability to hold your manager over a barrel with threats of quitting.
It's really not. If you see it that way, I think you're part of the problem. It's your direct telling you they do not feel heard and this is how they are resorting to being heard. This is usually a last resort for many people. You can "honor" it in many ways. You can decline it because you have no tools to address their concerns, you can accept it because you do have a tool to address their concern, or you can even let them know they are on the path and work with them to make sure they reach that destination. It doesn't even have to be tied to a promotion either, but for many bigger companies that's one of few tools they have to address them. Often they don't play ball and lose the tribal knowledge as well causing even worse issues for the team than just "resentment". Too many great people are lost this way. I'd argue that retaining employees is infinitely better than hiring. Who is going to train the new hires? A manager's first priority is results. Their second priority? Retaining their people.
Ah, yes, the Amazon school of management.
But it definitely reduces communication bandwidth significantly. There are always silent gaps when discussing anything technical. The silence of "I'm just totally befuddled" and "I'm digesting what you just told me, and about to understand it" is indistinguishable on a voice-only call, but instantly communicated when you can see the other person's face.
IMO a workplace culture of having video on by default would be necessary for me to be interested in remote technical collaboration for anything actually difficult.
If people can collaborate over IRC and email they can certainly do it over a voice call.
The camera thing is very HIPPO (highest paid person's opinion). We don't need explanations of the pros and cons of different policies so that people can make their own choices. We're lowly, dumb, lazy employees! We need to be ordered around!
> After you fold, three things happen:
> Word gets out that “all you need to do to get a raise is to ask for it.” You have sent out the message that raises aren’t tied to performance.
> Less aggressive employees will be denied a raise simply by being apolitical.
> The lesson to your team is that the most politically astute employees get raises. Prepare for more politics!
If an employee comes to you with a 'competitive offer' (read: pays more), then it means someone else judges their market wage to be higher than what you are paying. If your assessment of that employee's value is higher than the amount they're being offered, you should admit to yourself that the jig is up, they're no longer going to accept being paid below their market wage, and you should match or better the offer. It's not 'caving', it's paying a sufficient wage to retain a valued employee. It's not 'politics', it's the labour market. I find the whole undertone of this section, that it's somehow being sneaky or 'political' for an employee to figure out that you're underpaying them, to be borderline offensive.
Fine, your perfectly rational strategy might be to sacrifice one high-value employee so you can continue to underpay your other employees (wouldn't want them to get the idea that they can ask for a raise, right?), but it's the dishonesty of this section that gets me.
Their proposed solutions are equally silly:
> Put a process around raises. Do them annually, and don’t make them out of band.
> Create a leveling system that can be referred to objectively.
> Never cave to people who have competing offers.
Sounds like a good way to steadily lose your best talent to your labour market competitors.