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Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

Across the clients I've worked with over the years it's often bureaucratic disempowerment that drives good engineers away.

When they cannot affect change or encumbered with toil - be that from painful change management processes, restricted or privacy invading operating system controls, or a work from office policy.

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That and/or a single bad direct line manager.

One of the best managers I worked under when I was young used to say "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" and he was right.

This is the second best advice I ever got in my career.

The best one was still "Listen to reports when they come to you, even if you're focused on your own task."

I wish there was this kind of advice for dealing with unreasonable CTOs and VPEs. I got lucky in my last job, but it took years.

Less punchy but close to the truth: people leave for a lot of reasons. I can’t think of a time I’ve quit over a bad boss. Bosses come and go, even bad ones. If you only ever have bad bosses, that’s an executive problem, not a manager problem.

I have quit because of bad management, but never because of one bad boss. (Or it may have been one bad boss, but it was high enough up the management chain that I didn't know specifically who it was.)

I guess the point is that a lot of those other reasons are caused by managers.

Gotta put up fights with other teams to do your job? Manager should be unblocking you.

Got no tools, bad computer? Manager should be putting up a fight.

Low salary? Manager should be negotiating on your behalf.

But on the other hand, maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Today, in the world of micromanagement, line-managers aren't expected to be much more than cannon-fodder to be blamed by C-levels when developers are unhappy.

> Today, in the world of micromanagement, line-managers aren't expected to be much more than cannon-fodder to be blamed by C-levels when developers are unhappy.

Exactly. Line managers take the heat from above and below. In a dysfunctional organization, they can make your life worse but they have very limited ability to make it better. That’s why I object to the “people quit bad managers” quote. It’s just not true to my experience, and it absolves poor executive leadership from responsibility.

Maybe people quit bad management, instead of bad managers, then?

Yep. That actually makes more sense in modern micromanagey companies, especially tech companies.

That makes sense. Funny enough, the person who told me that was a C-Level who was blocking salary increases that were long overdue. I ended up leaving, ha.

One of the biggest reasons I left a company was because the CTO and his toady, both coming from company X, made a unilateral decision to switch to X's proprietary and expensive framework above senior developers' objections because, in his words, if people leave the company, we can always go back to company X to support the application written in X's proprietary framework. Um, yup. Never mind that framework was totally inappropriate for the application, or that the UI looked like a refugee from 2000. Oh, and never mind that the biggest customer had nothing but trouble in another application written in said expensive proprietary framework.

That mindset plus a dash of RTO equaled me out the door.

Edit: spelling

"painful change management processes"

God the PTSD!

The best thing is, no one cares about those except for the ones who have to suffer through it.

I recall from the Lost Connections book that this was one of known causes of depression. People doing the same job, but with a sense of empowerment and ownership, were quite protected from such a negative outcome.

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