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If you are a manager, and you make this type of remark, do not get it twisted. You have made a threat, and you have created an adversarial situation that limits your report's ability to trust you. You've telegraphed to them that you're willing to throw them under the bus, and they will remember.

If it doesn't feel like you're making a threat - it may feel to you like you're genuinely giving advice - then you have not really understood what it means to be a manager and what sort of power you have over your reports. Try to think of things from their perspective and imagine this coming from your boss.

What do you think an IC is doing when they walk into a room full of managers and declare the project they're managing is horribly mismanaged?

Delivering information.

Now, it takes a lot of company culture work to make it safe to actually deliver that, but you have to choose: do you want to have some awkward meetings, or some awkward subpoenas?

Presumably you're conveying the results of your research, which means new facts are on the table that the "mismanagers" weren't previously aware of. They assigned you that research work presumably because they wanted to know those facts. Now that you're showing up with useful information, they can go back and deliver an even better estimate of the project than they had before.

If you show up and are like "hey idiots, you fucked up the estimate, man you're dumb" then, sure, people will react negatively. If you show up and say "you were right that we needed to look into this more; we found 9 months of work we hadn't incorporated into the plan" then they're going to have a lot of work to do, but they probably aren't going to be unhappy about being in a position of higher certainty.

To some extent, it's not really different from what engineers do. Are you mad when there's a production outage? No. You just debug it and mitigate it. Project planning is no different; new facts are on the table, and the plan has to change. Changing the plan is a lot of work, and that's why project management is a dedicated profession. They can now go do their job better with the data that you collected. No reason to be mad.

I've been naive like that a few times. I managed to get away unharmed most times but once I was publicly blamed for the project's failure by the incompetent managers, in a governmental organisation. I overestimated people's honesty in the face of their own career death. I considered blowing the whistle or taking them to court for slander but I had strong doubts I could clear my name as power corrupts.

This is 100% correct.

It doesn’t matter if it was intended as a threat because if it wasn’t, it was still an appallingly judged comment.

Seeing this and the todolu work advice girl ... I think educating people on how threats are composed and used is something that everyone should understand.

I'm now realized that I've been soft threatened quite a lot.

I had a similar disagreement with a manager once about a project, and I said something like, "I'm stressed and working around the clock, I don't need you threatening me," and they were genuinely taken aback and even hurt that I would interpret it that way (as they felt they were offering advice). When I asked them to reverse the situation, they immediately understood. When the pressure is on, it's an easy mistake to make.

For reference: https://youtube.com/channel/UCCtfpN-3GkF7HKvj5qs2EPQ ("toodaloo advice girl" Lou Whaley, who makes videos about office politics and setting boundaries with your manager.)

Yep that's the one. I can never remember the person. But this is the video I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gr8AgR42sDo

Being able to understand threats is not always beneficial.

Could you elaborate?

You're harder to effectively blackmail (and therefore less likely to be blackmailed) if you can't understand when someone's blackmailing you, for example.

Semi-related to this, but this type of statement and the reaction to it is how I discovered that I had basically assumed a manager role in all but title.

For the first little bit of my career, my coworkers and I would often joke about how the mistake one of us had made was going to get us fired. One day, I made a similar joke to another developer and was met with a look of sheer terror. Later that day, he pulled me into a room and asked me if I was serious. After doing my best to calm him down and assure him I didn't even have that type of authority, I came to realize that he viewed me as a manager even though I was technically at the same level in the org chart as he was (something that would be changed a few months later).

So that was the last time I ever made a joke about someone's job security and it made me realize that absent-minded statements from someone in a position of power are absolutely taken by others as things to be concerned about. I've been much more guarded with what I say to team members since that interaction, even those who aren't under me. It's not worth stressing your team over.

As a contractor, I was definitely on some big projects where, from the perspective of an IC in the trenches, it didn't seem like anyone was in charge, or that the people in charge didn't care about it succeeding.

In the two examples I'm thinking of, it's been that the client stakeholder has a lot of pull, but not a lot of experience. For example, the top Sales guy decides they want to run a little tech startup inside the company, but they've never actually launched software before. Or, someone in a load bearing role, like the head of product, knows they are out the door (usually moving up in a different, more glamorous organization) and doesn't really care to devote 60 hours a week to this dumb old company anymore.

I wasn't in the room, and a lot of it depends on the vibe, facial expression, atmosphere, personalities, etc.

But agreed - as read, my initial interpretation was not even remotely as one of the threat. Perhaps advice, or conclusion, or discussion. It depends hugely what else was said though - I doubt it was truly "and that was the end of that" in the sense that those words were the only ones spoken at that meeting, or outside of that meeting.

I'd put it in the category of "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" [0]. There is no way for somebody with authority to express a preference without it coming across as a request. The same words that from a trusted coworker would be advice to keep your head down become an implied threat when given from an executive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

Yeah, that's fair enough. I have been lucky to have had some managers in the past who were great mentors, very transparent, and have several times during my career actively coached me on what are "Career limiting moves". It is a phrase I have heard without it being sent or received as a threat. I have over-extrapolated and under-empathized though, and realize that in majority of situations for majority of involved folks, that would not be the case. (relatedly, I've also tried to internalize and implement the notion that I can no longer joke with any variation of "don't you know that's a fireable offence? :D" etc. )

Good point, and it very much depends on the pre-existing relationship with a manager, along with the context where a statement is given. I could imagine pulling aside a coworker and quietly telling them that they're about to hear about a new project, but that volunteering to work on it would be a dead-end and a career-limiting move. Something in private, informative for an upcoming choice, not a judgment of ongoing projects.

That said, the context of the article, calling somebody out in a public setting based on a large amount of work that they just presented on, is very much the opposite of that hypothetical context.

<<If the customer is not engaged enough to make clear what they want

Tbh, I sometimes wonder if it is a question of engagement. I just finished a project. Major clusterfuck. And it is a part of a much bigger overhaul. Tons of people are involved and there is maybe one person hidden somewhere that understands how it all fits together ( but my real fear is that the project is so big that no one really knows what this monstrosity is supposed to do, how it is supposed to behave or even how it actually behaves ).

People are engaged ( the ones doing the work anyway ), but there is just too many cooks and too many layers to information to be translated from English to English and from English to w/e contractors are from.

<<Someone's career probably _should_ be limited.

Probably, but based on my experience, there is near zero accountability in manager's circle. It is usually the sacrificial scape goat that gets all the blame and limited career opportunities.

Granted, “it would be career limiting” is an ambiguous statement. We can reasonably assume that the story as written omits various context clues, additional communications, body language, and other ensuing events that gave the author a more complete understanding of what the manager meant when they said that.

It’s only ambiguous if you haven’t been exposed to corporatese. It’s as ambiguous as the phrase “as per my last email”. He was directly told he was done getting promotions/raises if that information ever made it to the client

We have a manager that says "like I said" a ton. Pretty sure almost all of them are benign. I don't know that these things are always obvious.

I've been threatened a number of times in my life. The only people who have threatened me directly and without any fig leaves, weren't serious about it; a man on the street once said he'd kill me, and being an dumb 18 year old, I just laughed at him. He didn't do a thing, and I don't think he ever intended to. He just wanted to scare me. (I'm not bragging, this was foolish and cavalier, and I wouldn't respond that way today.)

The people who actually intended to make good on it, they were always circumspect and left room for reasonable doubt. Largely, I expect, to make the process easier on themselves; to create sufficient dissonance that they could think of it as giving advice. But of course the advice was, "if you do X, it will be bad for you, because I will respond with Y."

I read the statement as less of a threat and more of a "we're going to all ignore this" message. In other words, it's bad for everyone in the room if the situation is officially acknowledged, and so it won't be.