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Comment by otikik | Hacker News Reader

I had a boss like that.

One time he told me "In a bacon and eggs dish, the hen contributes but the pig really gets involved. I want all my team to be pigs".

I internally thought "yeah, but you are neither the hen or the pig, you are the guy eating the dish". I left as soon as I could.

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I had a [founder] boss who would say to his team "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!" He and his family owned 100% of the equity.

> "I want everyone on the team to act as though they owned the business!"

"Ok, then I'll make a decision about..." "NOT LIKE THAT"

"We're like a family here!"

So we can look forward to being asked for many unpaid favors, and a spate of domestic violence around the holidays.

In reality, that boss probably was just repeating something that he heard - hoping that his boss would like how it sounds. I recall similar parables in early 00's agile. It is a lot easier to say things like this than come up with an actual strategy.

Folksy management sayings inevitably compel me to innocently ask inconvenient questions.

Because either (a) the person using them really knows their shit and will have a response or (b) they're just full of shit.

Usually the response is either to just double down "this is the most important thing that we do" (with no further explanation), or anger: "Idiot! How can you not possibly know what I mean to be committed like the pig in my story".

The context I have heard the ham and eggs analogy was for certain scrum rituals that were supposed to be for ham people only (ie, excluding people without a stake in the outcome). Someone probably told this boss to butt out of a meeting.

It is all dumb stuff, imo. 00's agile got away with a lot of stupid things - usually with the implicit aim of increasing the number of billable devs (or to sell conference tickets or books. It was almost like, the more absurd, the better. There are still remnants of that but, thankfully, it has mostly disappeared.

He used a metaphor in which he slaughters his entire team? Sheesh, talk about making the subtext text.

The metaphor also breaks down because if you're trying to make a bacon and eggs dish without any hens then you end up eating bacon with bacon instead.

I dont think the metaphor breaks down at all I just think it is saying things that while very true are not meant to be communicated to the pigs and hens.

A bacon and eggs dish without eggs isn't a bacon and eggs dish, so in the metaphor the business fails to achieve its stated aim.

Cannibalistic metaphors were not on my red flag list but they are now.

Weird metaphor. Your boss wanted to make bacon and eggs without any eggs.

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