Comment by hansonkd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hansonkd | Hacker News Reader

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> #1 was always keeping the company's interests in mind

While I understand your intent on saying this, I think the reaction you get is because that is essentially a Sycophant which historically for the past known duration of human history has thrown vulnerable people under the bus in order to make the powerful more powerful.

I think what you probably want to say is that as a manager you should balance the 3. If you have to sacrifice the wellbeing of your employees or yourself for the company, well maybe the company isn't worth it. Also your employees probably don't like knowing you are making sacrifices for them instead of setting boundaries for yourself in order to take care of yourself. Nobody likes a martyr.

Especially in the tech world were theoretically you can leave a job and find a new one that doesn't conflict with this balance.

The general view in 2024 at least in my circles is to establish boundaries, find balance. Not blindly make the company your "#1 priority" in every decision.

The way I interpret "#1 Company, #2 Team, #3 Me" is that faced with a decision that benefits the company as a whole (i.e., all teams at the company) one that benefits only your team or you, you should favor the decision that benefits everyone.

For example, say your team has a huge hardware budget, and you notice another fledgling team that's working on something potentially more impactful to the company is struggling to get a decent budget. Ideally, you should transfer most or all of your budget over to them to benefit the company overall. (Mind you, I have never really seen this happen voluntarily, but again... we're talking about ideal/desirable behavior.)

It does not mean that if the company is acting in bad faith and is, for example, putting policies in place to force people to quit to save on severance or something, you go along with that and throw your team under the bus.

Eh. Whatevs. That was not the case. I won't really get into it, but I draw my personal experience from many unusual places, and I have found that I have been able to blend them into all of my activities.

These days, I'm retired, and generally working on projects with a more humble scope, but still quite important, to a number of folks.

OK, I am agreeing with you that in practice you probably didn't follow these priorities. Your original complaint was "But mentioning that, tends to draw real scorn, from today's tech folks. Not exactly sure what it is, they want from managers."

You were looking for clarification about how the way you expressed your views were met with a negative reaction. I am agreeing with you.

So it is a problem how you frame priorities in the past when you did work. Not that when you worked you did something wrong. Today's workforce has a different vocab and a person needs to learn why the conversation changed if you want to communicate effectively and not get negative reactions.

Probably. My experience, hereabouts, is that there's a number of folks that automatically despise me, simply because I'm old, and will usually interpret whatever I write, in the nastiest possible way, so it doesn't really matter what I say. Someone will imply pretty abhorrent motives to it.

I'm a pretty decent person, and the folks that know me, know that quite well. I'm not trying to get a job, and I already know that I won't impress people, here, so I guess it doesn't matter.

That sucks to hear. Sorry about that.

> it doesn't really matter what I say. Someone will imply pretty abhorrent motives to it.

Just a bit of feedback though. You wrote a complaint that was affecting you and you didn't understand. I took time out and wrote a thoughtful reply and your response was:

> Eh. Whatevs.

Being immediately dismissive to someone trying to help you is a good way to make people not like you and react negatively to what you are trying to say.

Communication is a two way street. If you want respect you have to show some. Its an outdated view that respect comes with age.

Hope you have a great day and enjoy your retirement.

That is a good point, and you have my sincere apologies.

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