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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal

This is fair. But it obviously constrains someone to being a worker. You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.

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Senior leadership will word it more diplomatically; but that is the only mindset that makes sense for them. Once you have the power to choose to add or remove resources from a project it doesn't make sense to interact with the company in any way other than transacting skills and time for money. Except people with substantial equity stakes, for obvious reasons. One of the tells of a high-performing management culture is everyone can do their job in working hours with the skills that they have formal training in.

There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.

Unless I misunderstand you, this would mean "leadership" translates to "my time is valued at $xyz per hour which I can get at companies A, B and C, but I love company D so much I will work for them for less than that". Or alternatively, "leadership" means "leaving money on the table because of a feeling of loyalty towards a corporation"?

Please correct me if I misunderstood you.

Yes, you misunderstand. It's ironic, but it's a well known irony, that being outwardly transactional about a relationship can be a losing strategy. (Example: bringing a gift to a cocktail party versus giving the host the cash value of that gift.)

Loyalty shouldn't be freely given. But it's not particularly hard to spot the overly transactional types, and it also shouldn't surprise anyone that while those tactics work for a while, they cliff out before leadership. Again, that cliff is well within the range of a really good salary. But it's a cliff nonetheless.

Your work contract isn't a relationship, you're example doesn't make sense here. My company isn't a person hosting a party, so why should I bring a gift?

I'm not disagreeing with you on the premise that work should be mostly transactional and there should be no expectation of loyalty, but the spirit of the other guy's example is that your coworkers, the other human beings who work there and have to interact with you, will find it offputting if you are aggressively transactional with them about everything all the time.

My experience disagrees with this analysis. Everyone in leadership has enough of a seasoning of cynicism and sociopathy to trivially evade the common filter for transactionality.

You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.

> can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow

I really don’t believe this is possible, but maybe others can hide it better.

> People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one

Agree on loyalty. But that’s different from holding a limited view of engagement.

> perhaps others can hide it better

Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.

>You’re not going to develop someone for leadership

Could've ended that sentence there and it would better reflect 99% of organisations, while also explaining part of the attitude you're referring to.

Companies have limited leadership opportunities for developers. It's pointless trying to make everyone a leader when there's 1 leadership position for every 20 developers.

Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".

I suppose that's true if you believe leadership is telling people what to do. That idea, however, is equally as wrong-headed as thinking you shouldn't develop leaders unless you have management headcount.

https://www.google.com/search?q=informal+leadership

> You’re not going to develop someone for leadership with that attitude.

Most people will self-develop anyway, and at some point you'll need somebody to fill that leadership position anyway.

So this is not a problem.

Things change constantly, such is life, we'll get used to it.

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