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Comment by vsnf | Hacker News Reader

The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes. At one job, I reported directly to the still-reigning cofounder of a long lived company. Never have I felt a stronger sense of job security than that.

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It's different security. Like in game of thrones in that scenario you're as safe as your boss is, which will depend on the evolving politics. Even founders get housted sometimes, but I'd agree that I'd choose your scenario over others.

I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO.

If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.

What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?

I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved.

So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific CTO but was a common agreement. If the CTO wasn't doing that, I guess I should have called his attention to it or done it myself.

To be honest, middle managers not thinking it was important is just baffling but that's another long story.

As for keeping ear to the ground, I wouldn't even attempt that because I really suck at that (and it's distracting, I'd rather leave). But many people have success with that approach.

There's a troubling/fascinating implication here: generally we just want to 'do the thing', but it's rarely that simple.

Often to be able to just 'do the thing' you have to game out a bunch of this political/strategic stuff, and start maneuvering across those dimensions, in order to create or maintain the conditions under which you can just keep doing the thing.

Yet the more you do that, and the more you think in that way, the less of the thing you're doing...

>>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved."

I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place.

So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.

I'm on the same page. The problem in this case was a very hands-free approach to management that suddenly changed to top-down when the chaos produced almost daily outages. So the very relaxed environment now had to somehow have rigorous engineering practices... mandated from the top.

Reminds me of holacracy and how companies picked up the pieces after that fad went away.

I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well.

I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something that most people can do at a minimum level. Being a manager who's always employed is more about social connections, if you don't befriend the right people your job security might also be at risk.

Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.

If you ask people who come here, probably most of them would choose a technical over a managerial position, but I talk about the general population, of course. Being someone who coordinates the work of other people is much more amenable to human nature than banging your head against a many times unintelligible mass of code.

But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.

trick is to hire women into technical positions and fast track them into management. My company uses this strategy and almost 90% of low/mid management and admin are women.

You must be in a bubble. Majority of people hate reading a document. Staring at a screen and googling would be misery for them.

It is really the minority who can do tech for the long haul.

> The higher up the org chat you report to is, the safer your position becomes

Last layoff at my company was predominantly of middle managagers and very few line workers. Even meta layoff was "the flattening".

surprised by your comment. Is there any data supporting this?

No data, just an intuition about being closer to the power centers.

I guess that makes sense. Level 1 and 2 managers are not really closer to power centers despite being higher in the org chain.

Because no manager would layoff him selfs even if his position and project is obviously unnecessary. In other words only above people can layoff below people :)

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