Apple's Simple Strategy to Beat Burnout: Freedom | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Simple Strategy to Beat Burnout: Freedom

inc.com

46 pointscebert30 comments

As a manager, when I get a high-performing engineer, I get out of their way. And then I get other things out of their way.

When I talk with these engineers about what they actually want, it's not time to goof off and play ping-pong or cut out early. Rather, they want to be given interesting projects; they want a hand in the decision making without being sucked into endless meetings; and they want acknowledgement.

Basically, they want the opposite of Maslach's three facets of job burnout: depersonalization/cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and inefficacy.

I managed a great engineer who'd been in the business longer than me and had phenomenal tech chops. And in our 1:1s, he said he was content as long as the work was interesting, the meetings were short, and he heard "nice work" every once in a while. I assure you, he heard it much more frequently than every once in a while!

It really is this simple most of the time, but I have not yet been fortunate enough to land a manager who understands this. So burnout and on to the next job it is every few years.

This has been my experience.

I hated being a manager, but I didn’t trust anyone else to do it.

My style draws a great deal of contempt from the HN crowd, but it worked extremely well, for 25 years.

As a new (ish) manager, curious to hear more about your style and what has worked well for you for 25 years.

Mostly, individual Respect for each of my employees, and the backbone to negotiate with, and feed back to, my superiors, when they tried to get me to be a bad manager.

I don't think my advice will be helpful, though. I have found that it is something that would probably get you fired, in today's companies. Even the people that work for you are completely indoctrinated in the Tech Industry Zeitgeist, and will refuse to work with you.

Look at some of the comments that I get, when I talk about it. Really nasty. People take it as a personal attack, when I talk about my own experience.

I've found that management is an intensely human vocation, and efforts to commoditize it, fall flat.

I'm very curious to hear more about your approach. Do you happen to have any blog posts describing your management style?

Frankly, as I stated in another post, I think it would be worthless. If you tried it my way, you'd probably get fired.

In any case, I absolutely hated being a manager. Since being forced into retirement, I've returned to my tech roots, and couldn't be happier. I'd much rather talk about that, and I do[0].

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

I appreciate the response and will take some time to peruse those articles.

I have limited experience as a manager, but I'm starting a new SAAS company and one of our priorities is to establish a humane and engineer-friendly culture.

I am always happy to talk about my experience, but it seems quite incompatible with today's startup/MANGA culture.

Yep. You listed all the bullet points. It's incredible how few managers will actually even discuss what engineers actually want.

The absolute worst is when you run a project, you do it well and independently, and the only feedback your hear is tiny nitpicks about stuff you didn't do because it didn't make sense, or some tiny nonsensical improvements that were out of scope. And never a Great work!

Or you're in a company meeting and they thank the PM for "building" the project, not the actual team. It makes me kinda mad.

This. Only sad thing is how normalized/formulaic perf reviews have become. You have to hit X rubriks and have to show potential for growth and you have to be a leader and ....

Author has published similar vague articles

https://www.inc-aus.com/kelly-main/apple-secretly-looks-for-...

https://www.inc-aus.com/kelly-main/apple-uses-rule-of-3-es-t...

I can't confidently say that the articles aren't a product of an LLM.

Also seems funny that author does not actually have first-hand experience of working or managing folks at Apple.

The article could use more clarity on freedom.it seems to be that " employees get to do what they want.”

Does that mean work on pet projects, goof off on Facebook all day, go home?

It seems work at their own pace... there's lots to do.

Yeah this is like a tweet that was expanded into an article or something. I guess freedom to work from home.

Gonna assume you're not trolling.

If you do that, people will notice and you lose the freedom.

Freedom means autonomy. It means giving people a salary and let them figure out themselves how to create the most value for the company. Sometimes that might mean to improve a system your team isn't responsible for, for example. Or to do a job others in the team find annoying, but you find ok. It can be to redefine the problem in the first place.

Feels like this was written by an extremist libertarian extolling the virtues of the highly generic term "freedom" without being able to explain in any detail whatsoever what they actually mean and what tangible impact it has.

They should have defined what they mean by freedom. I skimmed through half of it and gave up.

How does this mesh with their hard stance on three days in office or you get fired?

Did Apple’s PR department write this? Like, I know they didn’t, because they’re not this stupid, but still this blog post has literally no substance. Apple has insane amounts of burnout. It’s also a large company. Some engineers surely get a ton of freedom to work on things. A lot of them get told that a feature is shipping at WWDC next year and whatever they complete by then is going on stage.

Great! That means if I’m a high performing person I can remote work? Oh, wait. Not that free?

Can someone explain why this submission was flagged?

I interviewed with Apple a long long time ago and they mentioned the sabbatical program as a benefit. Do they still offer that?

The sabbatical program was ended by Jobs in '98. Lots of folks were really unhappy about it. That one and profit sharing both got dropped right about the same time.

So _hard_ work makes you free?

Seems familiar, somehow . . .

I get why people may not like the comparison you're making, but that aside, I agree that the article insists uncomfortably often that the freedom only comes if "the work" gets done (in various phrasings). As if to ensure that nobody gets the impression that a pleasant work experience is something anyone deserves rather than a generous gift by such a magnanimous employer.

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