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Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

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Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#81

Post by vinceguidry »

vladgiverts wrote: post #61
vinceguidry wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In absence of leadership, the tool firms use to solve coordination problems is management. A leader from this perspective is simply a better manager. Better at all the tasks of coordinating human activity, reading when people are feeling down, better at inspiring them, better at breaking apart complex tasks into routine ones that the ICs can more easily understand. But leaders are practically impossible to reliably h…

I agree that leadership isn’t “teachable” in the same sense that a skill or piece of knowledge is. But it can be supported and cultivated. It’s what I do for a living as a leadership coach. I don’t actually instruct anyone how to lead, but rather give them them the opportunity to discover it for themselves. I’ve seen pretty meaningful shifts for people on the timescale of 3-6 months.

Support and cultivation are orthogonal to the goal of maintaining a competitive edge. Ultimately, it means you're running a different kind of enterprise.

Which would be great and all, but there's less money in those sorts of things so the market can't support as many of them.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#82

Post by mmt »

Retric wrote: post #48
CM30 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never left a job because you wanted more money than they were willing/able to offer?

Compensation is really two things. A) The work you do is valuable but your poorly compensated because of management issues. B) You’re compensated well for the work you do, but you’re capable of doing more valuable work elsewhere. Moving due to B is only needed in small companies, large ones generally have room for people to grow.

Although I agree that there exist (at least) these two compensation situations, I disagree with the subsequent assertion:

> Moving due to B is only needed in small companies, large ones generally have room for people to grow.

I have personally found, as have, I'm sure, many other people with an affinity for startups, that large companies can be quite limiting to growth, especially for certain careers/specialties.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#84

Post by mmt »

ganoushoreilly wrote: post #67
bittcto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they hire those “lunatics” because it’s believed that engineers can’t understand business. As an engineer that has started businesses this is BS. It’s really easy to learn business skills, sales and marketing are not difficult, finance is laughably easy. But so long as the companies are being formed to sell equity to VCs you will see them led by frat boys who the VC frat boys recognize... and they will abus…

I half agree, the reality is sales is a tradecraft honed over time. If it were as easy as implied, many more of the Tech founders here on HN would have had their businesses succeed. The truth of the matter is, the us vs them mentality is just as damaging as one side being arrogant. The only way for a good team to work is for each to recognize strengths and weaknesses and for leadership to keep things level headed.

I agree, and I see this same effect of dismissing an entire specialty based primarily on experience as "easy" even within tech, such as what some programmers (Devs) think of sysadmins (Ops). I also agree that us-vs-them is harmful, and, in the context of my example, it's what DevOps (the original cultural movement, not the current job title) was primarily fighting against.

However, I do think there's some validity to the complaint, hidden in nuance, and dismissing it outright with even the implication that everyone has equal(ish) value, serves to foster hidden resentment.

The allegation seems to be that any accomplished programmer could become accomplished in sales, merely with effort, because the skill/difficulty required by the latter is much less than the former, while the reverse isn't true.

Even if that allegation holds, a question that remains generally undiscussed is, would that programmer-turned-salesperson still be a competent programmer at the end of such a process? Perhaps more importantly, would such a person be a more valuable as salesperson than as a programmer? The question of if such a salesperson is more valuable than a salesperson-from-the-getgo seems to be implicitly answered "yes" in these discussions, but that kind of diversity of experience bringing additional value tends to be uncontroversial.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#85

Post by bittcto »

kabdib wrote: post #72
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I half agree, the reality is sales is a tradecraft honed over time. If it were as easy as implied, many more of the Tech founders here on HN would have had their businesses succeed. The truth of the matter is, the us vs them mentality is just as damaging as one side being arrogant. The only way for a good team to work is for each to recognize strengths and weaknesses and for leadership to keep things level headed.

I remember being at a startup full of engineers, and us trying to hire a salesperson. Years at big companies taught me contempt for marketing and sales. But there's nothing like finding good marketing and good sales when you're six months to financial destruction . . .

Yes, and early in my career I was a technical sales person for a product I built... paired with a pure sales person.

I don’t mean to say there was no value to his skills— but I am saying that it was not hard for me to understand enough about sales to hire a good sales person.

They would of course be a better sales person than me.

The problem is people think your CEO should be a sales person and that’s s mistake.

Sales is a process that’s easy to replicate.

Creating a novel software application isn’t.

Ate hnicwl CEO can hire a great chief sales guy. A non-technical CEO can’t hire a CTO and often ends up undermining the product.

I would have no problem being hands off with the sales department.

I have yet to meet a Non technical CEO who doesn’t think he knows how to design products.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#86

Post by bittcto »

seanf wrote: post #64
bittcto wrote: post #60

The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence. No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars. But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engine…

Amazon is getting close to a $1T market cap which makes this look more like an argument for hiring non-technical managers. You didn't provide any examples of poor management by the prison guard or DMV manager, other than some jealously about salary. Other than the bad feelings, did they get results? When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? If not, did it really negativ…

I think selling drugs on campus to employees is a pretty bad result. He also drove off %80 of the talented team before I left. The DMV person was a dumpster fire and all the incompetence they showed us what you would expect— so cliche it would be boring to give examples.

Amazon is way over valued relative to its actual business... that shows that effective PR is good for the stock price (and amazon as a company is pretty much a pathological liar when it comes to PR. Like claiming AWS was what Amazon.com ran in at launch.)

No, waiting two months and working in less critical stuff was not the right choice on Bezos fault.

Bezos is a bozo.

Which makes me think that their competition must really suck... or like the fact they were able to use political pull to to tie Apples hands on ebooks it may all be government powered rent seeking.

I wonder how much of a deal they are getting from USPS and how much government IT has been outsourced to AWS.

But ask anyone- Amazon is well known to be incompetently managed.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#87

Post by bittcto »

blindwatchmaker wrote: post #70
smhinsey wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think there is a certain mindset for whom "going ballistic" seems like a smart power move that you can use to get results, but in day to day reality, I see it as the ultimate failure to maintain control over the situation. Guys like Bezos can get away with it, but that doesn't make it smart.

It's not even the going ballistic part that gets me, but the sequence of events. Management refused to allocate the time to fix tech debt/bugs, this decision comes back to bite them in the ass, GP takes the typical tack that tries to deflect blame away from shitty management decisions. "Could you, the devs, have fixed this bug under severe time pressure just before a critical sales period instead of when you first id…

The fix was a hacknand as for “on time”, no we were already three Sadat’s into the heavyvsakes week, literally hours before thanksgiving when Bezos decided to cancel everyone’s thanksgiving because of his own incompetence.

I call it incompetence because prioritizing a new feature over a bug fix is almost always wrong. And Bezos surrounds himself with yes men so if he under estimated the bugs impact because a yesman was saving face that’s still on Bezos.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#88

Post by pascalxus »

bittcto wrote: post #60

The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence. No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars. But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engine…

I worked at a company where the CEO was an engineer, and most of the managers and VC in the engineering dept were engineers, but things weren't necessarily any better.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#89

Post by shanghaiaway »

bittcto wrote: post #85
kabdib wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being at a startup full of engineers, and us trying to hire a salesperson. Years at big companies taught me contempt for marketing and sales. But there's nothing like finding good marketing and good sales when you're six months to financial destruction . . .

Yes, and early in my career I was a technical sales person for a product I built... paired with a pure sales person. I don’t mean to say there was no value to his skills— but I am saying that it was not hard for me to understand enough about sales to hire a good sales person. They would of course be a better sales person than me. The problem is people think your CEO should be a sales person and that’s s mistake. Sale…

Have yet to meet a technical CEO who does not think they know sales, marketing, design, etc.

Re: Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout

#90

Post by opportune »

0xJRS wrote: post #73
lovich wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is with companies denying remote work but then bringing in some level of management that works remotely? I've seen happen it in a few places and it feels like animal farm half the time

Worked a job at a startup once that had a 40hr "butt-in-seat" policy. The PM would be the one to record the exact time you sat down, the exact length of your lunch, and the exact time you left. This also included breaks. There would be a report to management every Friday and then a 1 on 1 with the manager if he didn't "like" what he saw.

Why would you even work at a place like this?
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