How to be a leader when the vibes are off
chaoticgood.management
chaoticgood.management
wow. real!
It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
What concrete differences in behaviour would you expect to see?
For me the main difference between a good and a bad manager is that the good manager is interested in delivering good work in a sustainable way that improves the team, while bad managers are interested primarily in looking good while burning resources and bridges for fast victories.
If you think what it takes to for example write a legendarily good piece of software, while building a team that is top class among other comparable teams, the surest way to not reach that is to cower in front of superiors and play both sides. If anything it requires a lot of resilience, patience, diplomacy, persistence and the backbone to defend ones ideals, projects and subordinates.
The writer did a very poor job of explaining how to do this. I question how much experience they have writing. But actual diplomacy is necessary in systems like this.
Even a CEO can't bend physics for example. If they want you to make you transmit information between two sites faster then the limit is still light speed no matter who asks or how great your team is. Other situations are often a bit more flexible, e.g. how long a team will take to do a thing, but also not infinitely flexible. If you know at the best time it took your team 5 days to do a thing, but usually it takes 8, then promising your CEO to do it 2 is both ridiculous and a lie. Telling them that the best you ever did when all the stars aligned was 5 days, and then telling them how the company could help to make the stars align even better is probably the better route.
You've put forward a false dichotomy between punching my manager in the face and nodding along silently to everything I'm told. Frankly, both will get me fired pretty quickly.
Business don't work on managers fighting to the death on every decision we think is right. They work on managers pushing back where we think something isn't correct. If my manager disagrees, it's his job to override me and say "I hear your concerns. Do it anyway." That can happen for many reasons, some good and some bad. At that point, however, my role as a manager is to disagree, accept the decision and do my best. Or look for another job.
No I did not. I characterized a certain type of person by how they would act at the extremes. Naturally most day to day decisions are not taking part at those extremes. Also these being a false dichotomy would mean you can somehow both nod along and tell them they are wrong at the same time. Nodding along implies you are not telling them they are wrong, which means they are mutally exclusive types of behavior, or: a dichtomy.
If I read you favourably you probably thought I meant people literally just have those two extreme options, while obviously there are many shades inbetween. But I did not claim there were no such shades.
Why did you turn what I said into "punch them in the face"? Because my original statement wasn't that easy to attack?
> It's his job to override me and say "I hear your concerns. Do it anyway."
Contrary to your perception everything I said is in perfect alignment with this statement. I didn't even talk about outcomes, only about behaviors and only behaviours by the manager.
If a superior asks a manager if a thing can be done in two days although the manager knows their team can at best do it in six, assuming your superior wants to know the truth and telling them: "the fastest we ever did this was six days and that was already problematic" isn't what you called punching them in the face it is simply a statement of fact. If the manager is good they then add a: "We can try to do it in 5, if Greg and Linda from Design are 100% on the project and my team is lifted from all other day to day responsibilities for that duration. Afterwards they probably need a day off."
The superior obviously has many options to go forward, but this is offering a realistic step towards their direction, states what is needed to make it possible and gives a realistic feeling about how possible it is. But what if the manager had not said the truth but (trying to please the superior) promised impossible things? That way the superiors choice suddenly involves more risk than they might be aware of. And bad managers consistently choose the latter as they are more concerned with their appearance than with the result of the work.
> I characterized a certain type of person by how they would act at the extremes.
This is literally a false dichotomy.
> Why did you turn what I said into "punch them in the face"?
It's called dramatic effect, I don't literally think that you said it but my comment stands even if you take your literal argument.
> But what if the manager had not said the truth but (trying to please the superior) promised impossible things?
Neither I nor the article argue you should do this, so you threw a strawman on top of your false dichotomy. I don't see how we can have a fruitful discussion when the positions you claim are being taken are positions that exist only in your head.
If a manager isn't able to function in this environment then, frankly, I'm not sure that person is cut out to be a leader or manager...
This part. You seem under the impression that it’s impossible to do a good job unless you’re in total agreement with your management chain. That simply can’t happen 100% of the time, even in a job where you generally enjoy the work.
> It is good for your well-being, your self-respect
You seem to think one loses their self respect when they pick their battles and focus their energy on what they can control. I say that it’s better for your well being to not scream your life away into the void.
Look, there comes a time in every job where you need to move on because it’s not giving you what you want or need any more. I don’t judge that.
But part of management is knowing when you gotta suck it up, put on your big boy pants, and tell the team something you don’t agree with and that you need to make it work somehow. If you can’t handle that part of the job, then you’re really not cut out for management or leadership.
I already mentioned that running your mouth isn’t an option. Upward management is part of the job and “shut up and fall in line” isn’t upward management. Plenty of leaders manage to shield their teams from incompetent management and it is usually what is in the best interests of the company.
And there’s nothing wrong with looking out for yourself as a manager when you have responsibilities, but characterizing it as “best practices when navigating a difficult time” doesn’t sit well with me.
You're "part of the system" the moment you sign the employment contract for a manager position, this is literally your job to fall in line with upper management. As middle manager you can and should raise concerns to higher management, but once they take a decision, you have to apply it. Being empathetic is not playing both sides, manager's job is to apply upper management decision even if you don't fully agree. And you don't have to pretend in private to agree on everything, no one will buy that.
That is not at all true. The manager’s job is to manage employees in a way that is in the best interests of the company. I’ve met plenty of leaders through my career who are successfully able to shield their employees from an incompetent management. That is part of the job.
if something ever came along where I was surprised and not informed ahead of time, I'd not loudly disagree publicly until I had more info and I'd tell my people as much. but that would be an exceptional circumstance and I'd probably feel I'm on the chopping block anyway since I was out of the loop.
so I don't play both sides but if you choose to stay employed at a place you're choosing to buy into the vision of leadership. if I wasn't bought in, I'd leave. if someone under me wasn't bought in, I'd support them and keep it between us but recommend they leave. because life is short and you'll regret working for people you detest. I get there's practical considerations because a job is a life decision but that's always why I'm careful about where I commit to work at and don't just aim for best salary or TC.
One of the things that I've done multiple times over my career is, to be completely open and clarify expectations on the other side / higher ups. One of the ways this manifests is that I never put my signature on something I don't believe in; I can sign up to get as far as possible, but will be explicit on not guaranteeing a destination that I'm not empowered to reach. Another is to make it clear that my execution decisions are aimed not at doing what you ask me, but doing what future you will be happy I did.
Naturally, things like that limit quite a lot the range of responsibilities that I could potentially reach, but also prevent me from going to places where I will not want to be.
Then I ask what budget they are prepared to allocate to meet said expectations. If the answer is "none", I ask them which other expectation shall be lowered. This may seem confrontational, but it isn't really. If you want me to do more stuff without giving me the means and time to do it, something will suffer, and that needs to be made explicit by me, because I am the person facing the consequences when this something else can't be done adequately.
I was once asked to become the responsible electrical engineer for my institution. For them this was just a position they had to fill for legal reasons (otherwise they are liable in case of damages) and I have the qualifications, so they asked me. Then I explained to them that legally my role is only seen as valid if I am given the time and the means (equipment, room, powers to stop failings, etc) to do the job properly. Otherwise they would still be liable. I then asked them if they were prepared to dedicate that amount of my work time and an extra budget to that role. Surprise, they were not. So I declined. As of now I am still not sure where that liability went.
Too often management wants to have their cake and eat it too, and pointing that out isn't rude. It is one thing to ask someone who is idling have the time to take on tasks that are close to their job. But it is a totally different thing to ask someone who is already at 110% capacity and doing the job of three people to take on yet another job.
This is bad management. It is flattering that I am apparently good enough at my job to be constantly offered new responsibilities and asked advice at projects, but that is how you lose people like me.
If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?
I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."
More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.
But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...
For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.
(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)
You can acknowledge the problems more directly: "I get it, we don't have enough chairs so Wednesday is likely to be a challenge." or "I know mandatory 9-5 is going to disrupt your commute."
A bonus of the more precise approach is you can follow up with "do you have other issues with the new policy that I may not know?"
Would you say it's probably a pretty different cultural environment than the established company and tech startup environments that most of HN works in?
Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.
The author is right, the correct stance is... > “Yeah, <s>this new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.”
Then critically thirdly,
> "Lets work together to demonstrate why the new policy is a risk to the customer."
Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
To get what you want the compelling argument is to the customer.
Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but this is the level of support we can provide customers. This customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be accommodated to provide the same thing on time, I've done an estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
It won't happen but even if it did the people above you understand the role & predicament of a middle manager...
(Example: CEO says we're doing this thing because bold leadership. Manager tells their people is dumb or wrong. ICs openly grumble about CEO being a big jerky doody-head. CEO hears that and says WTF is this manager undermining bold leadership.)
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.
I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.
... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.
This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.
The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams expect it more so they buy-in less.
Take this advice with a grain of salt. If bad decisions can lead to very bad things and you know it you must push back even if that means getting fired. This is particularly important when the life and wellbeing of others are at stake. Just look at Boeing to see how prioritizing a job over ethics can actually kill people and destroy companies.
The key point is: workers need to organize together for themselves. Nobody else is going to stand up for you, certainly not your boss(es).
You can speak up it meetings with your team but be careful of the tone. You need to come off as overall having the companies back but this one thing you can't support. Or maybe things will change again. There are lots of options.
There have been recessions before. There will be a recovery. Leave when things get better (or you retire) and cite working conditions in the bad times in your exit interview.
unions can work, but they can force you into situation you don't want to be in.
That’s why military is a dictatorship.
That’s why “design by committee” has such a bad rep.
The only problem with dictatorships is that you can’t change them. Also countries shouldn’t fail, so an orderly “change of power” process is needed.
But you can change companies, and companies can fail.
"The enemy's forces are shelling us. Do we want to attack back? Who votes for/against?"
In fact, this idea is so amazing, we should create a new political philosophy around it!
How should we call it? Share-ism? Freedom-ism? Or, maybe just Capital-ism?
Communism is not theft (that only computes if you have a neoliberal viewpoint of taxes = theft) and the second point is just a polemic (also: capitalism is directly and indirectly the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths, all the US led color revolutions, anti-communist killings like in Jakarta or Vietnam etc., all the shock doctrine countries that still are not sprawling hubs of capitalist paradise).
The battlefield is not a democracy, nor a top down dictatorship. In proper combined arms maneuver warfare its more akin to a network of syndicates working towards a common goal.
Have you ever worked in the military? I have and I don't think I have never seen a less efficient projects.
They do have very good reasons to do it that way. But my life is not in the hands of my coworkers, using the same tactics has no point.
Pressure is being exerted from above, you bend (lax enforcement) and bounce back (suggest to higher ups better policies) when the time is appropriate.
The American model of hierarchical with input which combines the top down structure of many societies with the flatter get input until agreement model of others has been pretty effective all in all.
I think shareholders get a say (in private companies that's the owner), you get a salary and benefits (maybe some shares giving you some say) (and hopefully some workers protections and unionization opportunities) and the issue right now is that the wealthy control a staggering number of the shares giving them huge, outsized impacts on regular people's lives.
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
Yeah, navigating disability leave can be a little rough
Not as rough as being PIPed out though, which was probably the other most likely path in front of your friend
The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.
They are actually advocating being two-faced as a form of leadership.
If you are actually against the policy and suspect a lot of people are too, then don't silence your employees by keeping their feedback isolated to 1:1s which you admit are ineffective.
Executives need clear feedback to avoid making major mistakes.
In all cases they have eventually just told me to shut up, no matter how diplomatic I try to be, and in some cases it has led to me being terminated
Feedback is just taken as a sign that you aren't aligned with their vision, so you have to go
I have approached management with stats, hard facts and level headed, calm discussions many times. It doesn't make a difference. Execs do not give a shit, unless you're also an exec, and they will pretty much always ignore anything you have to say. If you don't align with whatever idea they have at that moment, you're "not being a team player"
i'm asking because (in my experience) executives get hundreds of pieces of feedback and advice. they can't follow all of it, and so they have to prioritize, and their priorities might not overlap completely with those of ICs.
You need to have good reasons
> their priorities might not overlap completely with those of ICs
Then their ICs are fully reasonable to be pissed off
If a company's desires doesn't align with the desires of the workers, then there is a big problem imo
2. If you are a dead-eyed shill for the company your employees won't trust you and you'll be an ineffective manager.
Calling this work dynamic being two faced puts the wrong tone on the behavior. It's more akin to leading a resistance cell in under an authoritarian regime. When the people above you demand unwavering unquestioning loyalty it's the best you can do.
It becomes two-faced if you actually agree with the higher ups but pretend you don't to your employees. Everyone, including your employees, understands the need to "we love Great Leader, so intelligent and wise" in public and won't judge you for it.
I have someone in my family heavily affected by this mentality. 25y of treatment and it was never enough to bring him fully back to himself
PMs always manage to end their day on time with "I'm heading out for a bit, I'll be back online later tonight for a quick check in on progress so send me a link when the ticket is complete" and I'll be able to finally say without guilt or shame "I'm heading out too and I'll continue working on your ticket tomorrow from 9am."
that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general has been tight created a perfect storm of bias that these policies are working or could be beneficial. in better times, a company with good funding and a healthy customer base would come through and eat everyone's lunch if their competitors were treating their devs like that. but because of the temporary complete collapse in competition as we've known it, especially amongst startups, this has gone on far longer than it typically would.
it'll get better soon but we've lost an entire generation of technical leadership now (due to burnout and other factors) so it'll be a slow and turbulent recovery.
I really wish I had your optimism about that.
I'm starting to worry that nothing will ever be better again
We're only just beginning the AI-sourcing workslop era, that's going to be a few years of confusing chaos.
More like everything except salaries.
I suspect a nontrival % of RTO-obsessed businesses have conflicting real estate investments like this.
This sums up so much of modern society. And in the resulting migration to low trust, a lot of opportunities for mutual benefit are going to go away, in order to enable a few people to engage in looting.
This I wish more leaders did. It can be really demoralizing to the point of leaving a role when you hear company stuff that's blatantly false, in bad faith, or whatever - and your leader, who you know damn well is smart enough to see it as well, looks you dead in the eye and repeats the company line.
In other words, "don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." I'd rather be told you're screwing me than being screwed and gaslit about it. No matter what, in the end I'm going to remember I was screwed and how you approached that.
Middle managers will say that it is only raining and I will nod along even if we both know that they are pissing on my shoes.
I might start looking for another job, but as long as I’m there, I will smile and play along if I know that my resistance will not change the decision. Even in my exit interview, I’ll say everything was great.
This is probably not what I would have done at the beginning of my career but now I have a family so I don’t mind pretending.
This is really understandable. Don't burn bridges and such
I can't help but wonder if we're just screwed though. We can't hope to course correct without this sort of honest feedback but we're conditioning ourselves never to give it or receive it by ... Never giving it or receiving it
Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific, though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is someone who has cut 10 roles.
>Let them know you’re still on their side
You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your company.
>This too shall pass
That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such as privacy, enabled by AI.
The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms, we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life and nobody is stopping them.
Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and parcel of this mentality.
From a employee's perspective. I think you get a good idea, when working for a company, if your leader's vibes are off.
If they have a ego or can have a adult conversation or like to avoid it. Since life is not a 'silver lining'
You will meet some behaviours (which you can call toxic or not ) But times are changing, and people are less patient.
Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.
Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.
I sometimes wonder what it feels like to work at a place like this. On the one hand, you're still employed, and that's saying a lot in the tech industry right now. But on the other hand, you must, deep down, know that your management are either (a) incompetent or (b) beholden to majority investors that are using the company as a pawn to prop up commercial real estate valuations. If you don't believe that the higher-ups have the company's best interest in mind, why bother working hard? In the words of Office Space, "you know Bob, that'll just make someone work just hard enough to not get fired".
If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.
If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.
The new guy also comes with an inflated sense of self-importance; he’s there to fix things which the old guy messed up.
Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally at risk of losing vs openAI.
I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.
Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page right now and addresses similar issues -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604
> Things will eventually settle down into a new normal
While I accept the former as a wise axiom, I don't think we can derive the latter in regards to the tech industry. Things have been accelerating, and I'm concerned that we're now fully in "Present Shock" territory and it'll keep being hectic with no ground to stand on until eventually there is no more tech industry as we know it.
this is not chaotic good, this is lawful neutral. and really bad leadership.
if c suite is demanding people RTO to a toxic work environment, I'm not going to require my team to meet the exact requirements - wanna use your lunch break to drive to the office, tap your badge, then drive back home? sounds good to me. I'd also be asking for data to substantiate claims made regarding productivity gains or morale improvements.
or if newly appointed partisan hacks start programs for employees to snitch on LGBTQ+ people, you should channel chaotic good and not fulfill their request, and actively work against others fulfilling it, too. I know of at least one government organization in which this has taken place.
good leadership is about doing the right thing, and getting the job done. the right thing means leading by example with a high degree of proficiency, teaching others to be competent and confident, and growing yourself as an individual and as part of a larger community.
committing yourself to always carrying out the orders of leadership is a hella slipppery slope dude - especially when the "vibes are off".
maybe my examples are a bit pessimistic, but I just feel the author really missed the mark and left me (and others) scratching my head. maybe I'll give it another read later and try to steel man some of the positions. good and fair questions, by the way :)
I think one of the most important things this write up is maybe missing (though I am not super clear on how this has changed recently) is when middle management are acknowledging to their reports that the C suite are a bunch of cunts, is that they also need to be saying the same thing to the C suite themselves. "Going out to bat" literally means feeding back to upper management that what they're doing isn't going to work. This should be a fight that is ongoing. Again, privately, one to one, but you do actually need to be doing it. If you can back it up with numbers, even better.
yep. that's leadership.
Jason, if you read this - the form to subscribe doesn't work on Android (in Firefox or Chrome). I can't input my address or press the Subscribe button.
When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.
That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.
Local can still be better than global while still allowing people to work from home and convene in meat space as needed
You can be even if a multinational company moves their employees back to the office.
If you chop off your limbs, not everyone can compete at that game, but why play it in the first place?
It's good for American real estate owners, who end up with more money as a result of this, both from offices and from staff who have to live in nearby high COL areas.
I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.
Funny how most people only use this when they don't like how things are going.
Who ever saw a blog post about, "This too shall pass" during remote-ZIRP-brain era?
A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the exception
No, not for a staff engineer. You keep your mouth shut in the #general channel when something crazy is said, or you ask a single question in a thread when you don't understand at all.
The sound of a dozen people not clapping is the perfect rebuke to management mistakes.
Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you have to be prepared to leave as well.
People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor until you get on the list of "major holders".
Apply it smartly, and evaluate if forcibly changing your context isn't the right move for you. Blindly sticking to the anti-jingoist approach is as bad as blindly applying it.
We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.
And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.
How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?
Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...
This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.
We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/
While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.
I just feels bad to phone it in. illogical i guess.
AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.
AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.
The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.
Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.
There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why.
The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowering upfront costs infrastructure and colocation by paying someone else to use their own infrastructure and managed services, c) be able to scale up instantly to meet demand, even internationally.
The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale and can afford to have on the payroll a dedicated infrastructure team to manage and administrate your compute infrastructure. We are talking yearly payroll expenses that are in the six or even seven figure range.
How big does your operation need to be to amortize that volume of expenses by migrating out of the cloud?
I think you should pause for a second and think really hard on why the whole world opts to pay cloud providers instead of going bare metal. If your conclusion is that all cloud engineers are oblivious to cost control, you should go to square one and try again.
> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale
What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.
You don’t always need a server, you could also just go serverless, get charged 10x while you make your architecture a distributed, slow, hard to debug mess.
In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...
The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.
It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.
It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.
If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.
When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.
For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.
It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.
Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.
It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.
What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.
These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.
So true.
Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.
It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.
I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences by not being zealous about the new order.
This person is not on the side of the team. This person is simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new other, just in a sane way.
Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are on the "side of the team".
This is the key. If they don't do it, it's not their job anymore. The team won't just revolt in unison, but the lead will be replaced with someone more complacent. The only option is to comply, but let the team know in private that you don't like the new vibes.
I have no sympathy for tech workers griping about these changes. Before I transitioned to I.T. I worked in the some of the most demanding call centers in the BPO world.
There was no remote work, every single minute of your day was monitored and you felt like you were in a fish bowl where every word and kpi was being analyzed by management. If you didn’t meet all 10-15 metrics you basically had one foot on a banana peel.
Put your big boy pants on tech bro. Winter is coming!
If everyone felt and acted morally then the place would be forced to improve. Or at minimum, to fire all of you, but they should be forced to actually do that, morally, and suffer the political and economic consequences of doing so. But for that to happen people have to be systematically standing up to them in the first place, saying "do better, or else".
(Of course, an organization where your only way of getting listened to is threatening to quit is already unimaginably toxic. A healthy organization has a moral code of its own: you should be listened to because you were mistreated, not because you had to threaten something to be heard. But this seems to be increasingly untrue in modern tech companies where everyone seems amoral and just does their job and tries not to rock the boat so they can get to their next stock grant.)
But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.
Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something that a whole generation of software developers have been sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not purely a result of greedy management. I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.
I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.
The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 87.60%.
In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note that income tax increases as you increase in income in absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less net of taxes).
If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and again, tax makes it worse).
For reference, I earned $26k at my first full time programming job.
You call it grandstanding, I call it just being a good person and supporting your coworkers. Maybe a little 'grandstanding' is all that is needed to break a handful of beaten-down people out of their rut to stand up a little more and demand some attention. Shining light on these entrenched issues is the only way to get them to change. Shame works wonders. I agree with the parent post that more and more standing up is the only way to change. Someone just has to have the courage to do it first, job be damned. That grandstanding can go so much further if someone with the CTO title were to push things.
Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning, and you have the entire body of experience and knowledge held by your people at your disposal upon which to draw. But that goes against the line of the C-suite knowing best and having some hidden knowledge.
> leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down
Because "leadership" are being cowards. Because they kept their teams at arm's length, not wanting anyone to get an up-close glimpse of how bad they're fumbling.
I don't know what ZIRP has to do with anything. If anything, we're in this mess because managers fell asleep at the wheel because they knew they didn't need to do jack diddly, the investments will always keep coming, no worries, no need to actually do their jobs, valuations will always rise, don't ya know!
Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a fantasy world.
There is supposed to be a baseline amount of respect in an organization that dissolves most of the need for bitterness and power struggles. Tech companies I have worked at and heard about mostly do not have this. The more hypermodern the company, the less they have it. It's the principal reason why modern tech is so dystopian: because whatever happens to you, you are just expected to take it, and you're paid a lot so shut the fuck up. I've worked at several famous tech companies and I have very little respect for any of the management there because of the amount of "shut up and take the money" attitude there is. The organization rots, culturally, and everyone's life is devoid of meaning, and success is proportional to how much you can cope with a life that's devoid of meaning or just bask in the money, but the whole thing is hopeless and at some level doomed. Also, a leaderless organization has no morality, which is why every big tech company just gets progressively more evil, because who would stop them?
It's a horrible equilibrium, and the incentives (public stocks, short-termism, a taboo against conflict). Now I don't think any old person is going to stand up and fight it off singlehandedly. But the first step of doing something about it is normalizing the understanding that people should be doing something. You may not be able to stand up yourself, or maybe not yet, but you should at least agree in principle with doing so.
My feeling is that at an organization where people and leadership don't have mutual respect, everyone lives a hollow and soulless and unfulfilled existence. Maybe that is good for certain psychopaths, I don't know, but everyone would be happier if it was not this way. And almost certainly the company would be more stable and healthy and less short-termist, as well. It is astounding how bad the decision making that comes out an unaccountable organization is. Thing is, money in tech has been so free that even an organization run by inhuman idiots can still be profitable. It shouldn't be; competition should be destroying anything that is done with such mediocrity... but it is, because the whole system is broken as hell right now.
The fish rots from the head. You don't start a revolution within a corporate structure, because you effectively have zero power in any sufficiently large organization with sufficiently bad leadership.
good lord people on this site need to develop what used to be called class consciousness. It's only an employer's market because everyone just takes all the punches without reacting. which is easy because they're paid a lot but still--wouldn't it be better to not have to take them?