161–170 of 461 posts
While we're on this topic, managers don't invite your direct reports for one-on-one meeting out of the blue with no agenda. I've heard multiple people tell me they assume they're about to be fired.
This is another example of the trend in the 21st Century, people being so easily offended.
This is another example of the trend in the 21st Century, people commenting with a putdown to try and make a status grab at being superior.
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If you're a manager, your job is to do things that make you uncomfortable. Yep, one thing I noticed when I moved into a management role, was that the things that would make you move along as an employee, are the things it's now your job to fix or deal with. Maybe this is obvious, but there's kind of a visceral shift in perception that goes along with it.
Jup, I'm not empowered to do anything myself, so I have to rely on you. If you as my manager are not able to do anything either, we're part of a sick organization, and the only thing to do is leave.
Often, it takes both employees and managers to really make the shifts, over many many years. By the time it happens, the individual contributions are mostly forgotten or employee left long ago.
This was from my first year of managing when I had one screw-up that led people who overheard the interaction to report it. The joke was something like, "Oh hey, the start time for our meeting has already passed, and here we are still working. Why do you hate meeting with me?" In hindsight, it's now obvious to me that when there's a power differential, the other person can easily be left wondering, "Does my boss really think I don't like him? Oh my god, I can't ever be late to another meeting with him again!"
I'm now years down the road from that, and I cringe at some of the things I said when I was new to the role. I'm glad I've had time to learn some lessons in communication as a manager before COVID-19, because now that interactions have been scoped down to text chats, emails, and occasional video calls, people have to make inferences from a much smaller set of signals. I'm having to work twice as hard to be very direct and clear about what I want people to understand, and I have to go out of my way to deliberately ensure that interactions, both one-on-one and as a group, happen as frequently as is necessary to maintain the health of the individuals and of the team.
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There are a lot of tech blog posts to the effect of "Here is the obviously common sense business thing we learned" as a way of building a personal brand. I blame it on the fact that the tech culture starts in HS or College and then takes a worker straight into the industry; HS coder -> University -> jr coder role -> startup, but without the exposure to other contexts/jobs/roles/experiences. But yeah, it's basic profe…
> I blame it on the fact that the tech culture starts in HS or College and then takes a worker straight into the industry; HS coder -> University -> jr coder role -> startup As a counter to this, I have seen multiple managers make jokes like this and they all came from nontechnical backgrounds and had 20+ years of experience. I literally had a (nontechnical) manager say in a supposedly joking manner once about going…
It's probably both that and how financially secure they are in general, whether that be via grunt work, inheritance, safety net, whatever.
I spent the first 5 years of my career spending the equivalent of minimum wage or less. Now I don't need to give a fuck. Realistically, on a starter dev salary, you can save >50% if that's your target.
As a result, it's a manual process for me to empathise with people who actually _need_ their job.
Don't get me wrong - I understand their predicament - it's just not an automatic impulse, because for me, work is like a side quest I do to keep myself ticking over in the long term, a bit like regular exercise or a good diet, it's never present constantly in my mind like I imagine it must be for a wage slave.
Similarly, marriage protip: Don't joke about divorces. Even if you think your partner can handle it. Mine can and we still don't do it, as policy. It's a known policy, too; we mentioned it to each other before (briefly, a long time ago, not as some big event). This is certainly far from "the one key to a happy marriage!", but it's a brick in the house. It generally fits into the larger social IQ element of thinking a…
You mean not to joke about it in front of other people? I agree of course. But between you two? seriously... A married couple should be able to talk freely, including about things they don't like. No need to create policies in advance like it's a work relationship between employee/manager. I would worry if my married life looked like a work relationship.
My wife and I decided, before we got married, that divorce was off the table for us. Understanding that it is not even an option for me (and trusting/believing my spouse that it's not an option for her) gives us so much stability to launch into uncomfortable topics and conversations with each other. If we got into a habit of treating that topic lightly, I could easily see many instances over the past decade where life has gotten hard, we would be in the middle of a stressful situation, and we would have doubted each other's commitment.
There's a broad range of experience out there in marriages, so it's likely possible to have that same stability while regularly joking about divorce, it just seems like a foolish thing to risk so huge a downside (actual divorce) for so little an upside (getting to joke about divorce).
Bringing this back to the article, that's the same idea at play. For the manager to restrain themselves from a few key topics which are inappropriate for them to joke about, they avoid a huge minefield of stressful issues for them and their direct reports.
I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly - It’s easy for technical people promoted to a people management role not to realize that their words now have a significantly greater affect on morale. The author did a good job expanding on situations that are now not funny, but here’s another one that I see all the time: Butts in seats. As a manager, anything you say about the clock, the vacancy ratio of an employees chair…
Yep. And it only gets worse as your scope grows. There comes a point where you'll say something like "Huh, that looks interesting, I wonder what would happen if X", just because you still have some engineering thinking left in you, and three weeks later you'll get word that somebody spun up a working group to investigate X. If you ever wondered why manager emails to a large team always look super-formal? We've touche…
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This goes for HR too. HR at an old job invited me and a colleague to a meeting with a nondescript title. I thought my colleague must have some issue with me. But no, they wanted us to draw our vision for the company with colorful markers.
Haha, reading this made my day.
Then HR rep shows up with a box of markers, paper, and are like, "we're doing drawings!" and I'm just like, "we're what now".
After talking to her, my colleague also thought she was in trouble somehow.