Why Don't Our Leaders Care About How We Work?

cutlefish.substack.com

4 points·kiyanwang··3 comments

Interesting article and seems to shine a light on my experience of recurring bad leadership at tech companies. I suspected this was the case:

> Realistically, some chiefs of staff, program managers, and product operations managers aren't great at OS design. The key issue is that many people in these roles haven't actually done IC work up through middle to middle-upper management work.

I've always wondered what the hell are managers doing. It's just talking to people and pretending to solve things but in reality you're just good at delegating and negotiating consensus. It's no wonder large companies create huge bureaucracies and have so much politics. If I could design an "OS" I would make every person in the product dept. a form of contributor. They all have to be contributing to their teams in some capacity if they want to have any say on how it operates.

I only had one good manager once in my life. He was our cheerleader when we were late developing features (not our fault), he was handling everything unrelated to coding and all we had to do was work, and he was protecting us from the upper levels with their useless concerns and demands.

All the other managers I ever had were toxic assholes who would have cheerfully took Hitler's job if it meant a salary raise for them.

It’s already established by research that power makes people less empathetic. Then come the incentives to do nothing.

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