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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

This is very true and I learned this quickly when moving to a management role. As an IC, when someone is out for some life event, it might mean more work for you to pick up the slack. As a manager, everyone on your team's problems become your problems.

Cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc all weigh heavily on my mind when something happens to one of my direct reports.

Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.

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> Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.

I've been a manager, and I've also been a volunteer firefighter for many years. I've seen a lot of things no person should see.

My relatively brief stint in management kept me awake at night more than the shotgun vs face suicide, or fatal motor vehicle accidents that I attended in the same period. I think it was because the fate of those people was well out of my hands, but the livelihood of my direct reports was not.

you sound like a very empathetic person. But hear me out - at end of the day, it's all just business. I was let go on Thursday, 1 hour before end of shift, in a 60 seconds zoom call. Got told that core team is working hands on in the office, has high velocity, and me being remote is slowing them down. I strongly suspect it was also about the fact that this week they had me work on a project I haven't touched yet, and I got no support to set the dev env properly even. So I was developing blind, while also working overtime to push changes to backend I joined to work on. My wife just lost a kid, this was first job I had in 8 months, just started on new year. We are in small debt. I worked from 6 in the afternoon to 5 in the morning (timezone difference) to output a lot, so they keep me and raise my rate. Company raised 16mm but they're still startup, yknow. So when push comes to shove you get let go without them asking about any of that, or concern themself with it. CEO almost bitterly thanked me for working with them and notified me my contact is over and that's it, hung up and left to work on their launch. Team didn't even notice I m gone. I still went to coworking space today to send CVs because I didn't have heart to tell wife we are cooked again. But look, it happened before, I chose to do this job. I'll deal with the fallout, find new one. It is O.K., I'm not entitled to anyone's pitty. Like I said, that is the risk of business. As manager you cannot set rules of the company. And even if you could, sometimes you still need to make hard decisions. You're not a rock in the stream they can latch on, you are another man floating downstream. Don't lose sleep.

> it's all just business

People use those as magic words to absolve people of responsibility, humanity, and guilt. Nothing about 'business' mitigates those, IMO. Why would it?

I think it's laziness and irresponsibility to just elminiate essential requirements and responsibilities because you don't want to put in the effort.

At the same time, the risks of 'business' are affordable to some people: They can get another job, can afford the layoff, etc. But for many people, especially in the US with a poor workers comp situation for very many people and where health care, housing, education, and nutrition (for many) depend on income, it's not affordable.

I wouldn't call them magic words to absolve people of responsibility, but rather a cliche name for situations like that. Of course you can have ethical business, I mean business ethics were first class we had in economy. But in real world you WILL get bulldozed sooner or later by "it's just business". Read the geravis principle. It's not condoning, it's observing.

> in real world

Another cliche or magic word is 'reality' - as in, 'my point is reality' and therefore anything that disagrees must be fantastical. It's also the old rhetorical tactic of claiming inevitability.

The reality is that everyone acts with ethics; it's a matter of degree: businesses don't murder people, for example. Another reality is that we make reality the way we want it; to say we can't make it otherwise is simply to fold.

As much as I loved matrix I still can't bend the spoon or be my own boss.

I don't quite understand your point. It's not about bending spoons, but about the arrogance of certainty.

And why not be your own boss? It might take some work to get there, but I think the most important requirement for being your own boss is the drive and adaptability to overcome all the challenges.

I'm very sorry to hear that. I hope you'll find new, better work soon. Where I work, we do not have any open positions I'm aware of at the moment. But if you like we can connect. I'm trying to start my own start-up rn. But can't promise anything.

Good luck with your product! Don't forget to update profile with info about it

In addition to me being terrible at not taking my reports personal problems home with me, what did me in was pouring large amounts of time and effort in getting people to improve (e.g. if they were on a PIP, but just in general as well), and that effort not being reciprocated.

It was a great learning experience and fun track to be on, but I'm a happy IC again.

s/has a heavy emotional toll/is emotional labor/

Sustainable labor requires care, including of the manager.

I'm not trying to make light of your experience, and I do appreciate that you care about people you have to look after deeply.

However, I also don't think what you described is professional with respect to being a manager. A manager's job is to balance the interest between stakeholders and their reports, make sure things happen as promised (and adjust scope when promise can't be met), and make sure everyone in their team grows (skill, remuneration, etc.).

> Cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc all weigh heavily on my mind when something happens to one of my direct reports.

These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems. It's unhelpful, or even narcissistic, to think that you're actually quietly taking on more burden for everyone without being appreciated.

You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.

> Not asking for pity, but being a manager has a heavy emotional toll if you have even the slightest bit of empathy that I don't think most ICs appreciate fully.

I disagree. That's just an excuse of not doing what you should be doing as a manager: manage things. See above.

If you are an empathetic person, if you work in a team where people have/had "cancer/long-term illness, death in the family, miscarriages, etc.", then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager. In fact, if you can't manage your emotions and get what needs to be done done (damage control, repriortization, etc. to get things shipped), then you're not doing your job as a manager.

Edit: feel free to downvote if you don't agree but much appreciated if you also leave a response to say why you disagree. Otherwise, I hope you feel good "punishing" people just because you feel differently but don't actually have a concrete argument against.

> You should absolutely have empathy as a manager, but if your empathy is weighing on you instead of enabling you to be a better manager, then you're probably not doing a very good job as a manager.

That sounds... very peculiar, un-empathetic a point of view, like you are blaming someone for facing a difficult moment.

Case in point, if you were to manage managers, and you had to tell that to one of your report facing such a situation... that would be, in that case, a fail in management on your part.

You don't tell people in a tough spot to "toughen up", "not good for that role", not even in corporate environments.

That's plain toxic. And inefficient (whereas you should be looking for a way to improve the situation/morale in some way, short term, and long term).

So you give them the space to explore the situation, their feelings, and you support them to find their solutions. That's how you lead by example. Not by jumping to conclusion "oh... looks like someone's not fit for the role".

You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep your team's individual challenges in mind. The same way that a developer might need to manage server resources, or consider the impact of a new feature on future maintenance, a manager needs to solve the problem, except the resources available to solve the problem happen to be human.

If a teammate has a sick parent, everyone on the team may choose to empathize. For the manager, every challenge that comes up, the parent sickness is one of your constraints to be dealt with. You need to compartmentalize sufficiently that you can think about this without stopping your work to solve the problem, but not so much that you treat the worker as a non-human resource. It can get a little tough.

> then it's emotionally just as taxing whether you're an IC or a manager

Speaking from experience, at least for me that's not true. For me the largest emotional toll is knowing that I'm responsible for dealing with whatever is happening. Sure, I might wind up taking the exact same actions as an IC. But as an IC I don't *have* to. And that helps, even if just enough.

I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with. Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though. ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs. As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.

> I don't see anything narcissistic about being a normal human being with natural empathy for the people they work with.

I agree but that's not what I said. What I said was it's "unhelpful, or even narcissistic", for a manager to think that being empathetic as a manager is more emotionally taxing than an IC.

> Managing people does require emotional stability and self control, though.

It does. That's just being professional though. Being a good coworker in general requires emotional stability and self control. I'm not sure if you're trying to argue that a manager has to have much greater ability to do those than an IC since you seem to avoid saying that directly.

> ICs tend to automatically defer to their managers. Sometimes, this leads the ICs to misinterpret tiny reactions from their managers in completely unintended ways. I find that negative, emotionally charged reactions from managers are especially likely to lead to unintended reactions from their ICs.

Uh, the reverse sounds just about as true? I'm honestly not sure what the argument there is.

> As an IC you try to not bring your personal life ups and does to the job. This is even more important as a manager.

It's unclear from what you said why it's more important as a manager -- that's just what every professional should do at a workplace. Can you please elaborate?

As a manager, you are always implicitly communicating from a position of power. That changes what you can and cannot say. It's not very hard to understand once you experience it from a manager's perspective, but I don't think that I would have truly understood this exclusively from an IC's perspective, though.

It's truly frightening for people who don't understand that well to be given the opportunity to mange people.

As yobbo said it much better than me, "the part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you."

It's impossible to have a conversation with people who only make reasonable-sounding statements that are irrelevant to the actual conversation. I'm out.

> narcissistic

Maybe you mean something else? Narcissism is the condition of a very vulnerable ego, and insisting that nothing around you can threaten your ego - everyone has to be 'perfect'.

The part that is narcissistic is believing your empathy is uniquely taking a toll on you.

> These are not things that would affect you from being a good manager. That's just part of the job of being a manager. It's a different kind of problem, it's not necessarily heavier problems.

The crux of the issue is here I think. You, as a manager, a report, anything, have no say as to what anyone feels and how, and how it affects them. That’s purely on them. You may only be there for them.

You may think for yourself, that these are not heavier problems than other ones. Others may think differently, and feel differently. That’s not more, or less professional (whatever that word has ever meant).

Being a good manager is how one does manage their team, in the end and what the outcomes are. Not how one feels/struggles to do it internally or within the confidentiality that you have with your own manager. Manager to whom you should be able to openly share how you struggle yourself internally. Which requires trust.

If, ever, your manager did retort « you’re showing you’re not fit for this » or came to moral judgement for just expressing your thoughts to them, this becomes a Whiplash situation you better get out of, because that manager will not have your back, ever.

(of course, if the personal issues of the manager/report turn into problematic actions or omissions, that’s another topic)

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