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Comment by vrosas | Hacker News Reader

Naturally. I’m being hyperbolic but barely. It’s middle management’s entire job to squeeze as much productivity out of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in the system. And it’s not my belief - I fight it where I can but it’s literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?) and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff flung to prod, quality need not apply).

Source: am middle management.

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Sounds like you work at a pretty toxic org if this is the case. Even at Amazon a big component of management promotions is how many people did you get promoted this year and what are the highest levels of people reporting to you.

The fastest way to go from Senior Manager to Director is to get as many people as possible promoted to Principal Engineer, or hire more PEs. Or better yet get your Principal Engineer promoted so that they have to become your peer.

And you can guess what shenanigans result from such a strong incentive. People should be promoted when they are ready, not when their manager’s empire-building aspirations will benefit.

People were promoted after they were ready, because they had to convince a promo committee that they were ready. The manager was your advocate but did not have a say in if you were promoted beyond being your advocate.

So the incentives were aligned. The manager was incentivized to put you up for promotion as soon as they thought you might be ready, not the other way around. The toxic part was actually that your manager didn't have final say.

Even when they thought you were ready they had to convince others in an overburdensome process.

I’d be inclined to believe you if the company in question wasn’t legendary for being an awful, toxic dumpster fire of a place to work for SDEs.

I don't think what you wrote and I wrote are at all in conflict. I said managers are incentivized to promo people and that it's super hard for them to do so, which means people don't get their promos when they should. But it still contradicts what OP wrote about managers being incentivized to not promo.

I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy your organization by promoting mediocre people.

I suggest you look for another job, and don’t know how you can work in such toxicity

I’ve worked for several companies of various sizes and industries in my career and I can’t say any of them have been remarkably different than what I described. Being a manager now explained the confusing behavior and outcomes I experienced earlier in my career, in fact.

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