Viewing profile — berg117

I've been a manager. Managers burn out all the time. They're just not allowed to show it. They get some degree of exemption from the petty humiliations (time tracking, on-call duty…

Your boss probably had to seem to love his job. Indeed, that's part of the job, as a middle manager. What's amazing about corporate is that, when you get together years later and t…

This times 100. Being a middle manager sucks even more, because you have no real ability to protect people. When the people under you are happy and doing well, you spend no real ti…

To the people who run tech companies, and the corporate system as a whole, burnout is a feature, not a bug. The people in charge are not very smart and they can't recognize talent,…

PM is a negative contribution role, so what does "performance" even mean? Getting programmers to accept Jirafication?

I'm sure they are. Most SWEs hired at Google are pretty good at programming and don't need to be tucked away in PM.

Google's preferred method to "fire" a lousy programmer is to make him a PM.

In big tech companies, who gets fired has very low correlation to performance. Instead, it usually comes down to: (1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go. (2) nex…

Probably just managers encouraged to increase the % of people who go on PIPs. That's how tech companies usually do layoffs. Rather than admit they overexpanded and have to cut peop…

Record earnings aren't entirely fake news (people are spending more time online post-pandemic, and that's not going to roll back even if things go fully "back to normal" [1]) but t…

There's a 95% chance that this is a disguised RIF. People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance…

I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of pe…

I get a bit annoyed hearing about the 2 hour a day folks. They are probably forcing their peers or managers to take on more work than is their fair share. Maybe not. In the corpora…