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Comment by pkorzeniewski | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

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> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after

This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.

I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.

"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin

I was even the “lead” at a SaaS in daily firefighting mode and pushing new features out quickly on a team of three engineers and one half-time one. I was 99% sure they’d go down the next day I left but somehow they kept on trucking. We’re all replaceable whether we like to think it or not

The cemetery is filled with irreplaceable people.

At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.

Managers are human (at least so far). As humans they care about other people they know.

Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.

This is like some sort of twilight zone shit. I have not had this experience in general.

My wife cares about me and won’t say “because Bob said I had to divorce you, you have to go”.

Any manager will let me go if their manager tells them to.

I’ve been part of organizational discussions. Every manager ive worked with has actively fought, and fought hard, to keep, promote, or get pay raises for their employees. They don’t just bend over and say “okay boss” if asked to cut people.

If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

Well in my 30 year career across 10 jobs - everything from startups to BigTech and now working full time at a consulting company, I’ve found line level managers to be absolutely useless - not soulless.

When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.

Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.

You've had bad luck. I get it. But good managers like myself exist.

It’s not “bad managers” - it’s “powerless managers”. If you are a line level manager, you don’t control budgets, company wide re-org decisions, or really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor” and “do I need to come into an office?”. Those are all decisions above your head

I don't expect them to move the world for me. But I don't equate "powerless managers" with "useless managers". If they feel like they do what they can within their means, I'd say that's a good manager.

>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”

That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.

People! They’re the worst!

Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.

If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.

On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.

I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.

Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.

I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.

I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.

Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".

Well, the manager who railroaded me into a PIP at AWS also kept checking my LinkedIn profile. While my pre-PIP (“focus”) was 70% my fault. I was objectively railroaded toward my PIP. I kept meeting all of my goals and they kept adding more.

Not that I gave a shit. I was 46-50 and on my 8th job and knew what I was getting myself into from day one. I came in with a plan and had a job and multiple offers within 10 days

> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.

A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?

Does anyone notice all the users who can afford the product now? No.

They'll just keep selling and profit gaining anyway possible. Give me a product where they legitimately care.

Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then.

A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.

Careful there. You are not wrong, but you are not really correct either. Credit is a tool. Many people are using credit wrong and getting away with it because it is too easy. However that doesn't mean credit is a bad tool, just that it isn't used correctly.

Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front.

Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit.

You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.

I think confused.

I gave a lot of shit about my employees the first time I was a manager. It burned me out, but it made for an amazing team.

Was it worth it?

I always found it was. Because I cared more what my employees thought about me than my managers. I wouldn't change that, ever.

I'm on a break after getting run down in my last role at the EM / Director level, but I certainly gave a shit, and some of my directs (10-15%?) gave a shit that I gave a shit, and they're now better leaders. Most of this is from their hard work, but I gave them one possible template: genuinely care about your people. My hope is that what I spent of myself was more than made up with what they added. When you're a naive pessimist, leverage is the key multiplier of effective leadership.

one who expects the worst, yet is continually surprised when they get it. Sometimes secretly an embarrassed optimist.

Yeah. I think most orgs have no idea what they are missing.

Did you fight for raises? If your manager told you choose 30% to cut would you have? Of course you would, your “caring” meant nothing. Your first loyalty is to the people who decide your paycheck

I spent my entire life making absolutely sure that the last people I am going to be loyal to is those who decide my paycheck. it is a good life…

Yes I fought for raises. I fought for better ratings and promotions too. If they asked me to cut I would fight to not doing that.

My first loyalty is to my team, and it's been clear to me why I have not rising as high.

Don't assume everyone is like the worst person in your head.

And as a line level manager I don’t believe you are a “bad person”. Line level managers are “powerless”. You don’t control head count, budgets, company wide decisions to reduce staff etc

I think this is too harsh. Generally yes, but there are good people like myself who do care. Yes we are rare but we do exist and more than 'nobody'.

This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.

That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.

And AI is coming or has already arrived, so everybody better have a plan B.

That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?

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