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Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

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Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#211

Post by groby_b »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #138
groby_b wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is somewhat avoidable. You can communicate this to your team. You can make it clear you invite feedback and corrections, and demonstrati…

Yes, you can avoid this to some extent. But as team size grows, the scope for misunderstanding grows. And so your communication has to become as clear as you can possibly make it.

Which means musings, mumblings, funny remarks, sarcasm, and snarkiness are right out. All of those require shared context, and the bigger the audience, the less shared context there is.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#213

Post by squeaky-clean »

jasonlotito wrote: post #140
mc32 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were manager I would not even imply that I’m time aware either way, unless there is an ongoing issue (someone staying too late often), (or someone who is not putting in an effort). Otherwise why even bring up your consciousness of time? It signals you’re tracking it one way or another. Edit: for addressing burnout, overwork, etc., for me personally I would start with bringing up the issue in team meetings. Do we…

I'm a manager. Why bring this up? To watch for people working too much and potential burn out. If people are working excessively, that's not good for them or the company. I want to be able to rely on people. That means knowing how much they can do. This means if they are putting in extra hours now, I come to expect that level of output from them. This is not fair to them, and not fair for the company. I don't want th…

As a non-manager I'd like to add it also normalizes healthy work hours to all the employees. I've worked places where one or two devs outpaced everyone else by a fair margin because of the hours they put in. They're usually very skilled developers, but they're also putting in double the hours of anyone else. Management of course always praises their output and calls them "rockstars" or something, while ignoring the fact that they were in the office until 9pm every day this week and have dozens of commits in the past month that occured on Saturdays from Noon to 3AM.

Ignoring my personal feelings of how unhealthy I think this is for them in the long run, I just simply don't want to feel like I'm competing with them. And yeah not all workplaces feel like a competition, but in my experience the places where you constantly hear "I was up until 10 fixing that bug, but I finally solved it." "Nice work, rockstar!" do feel very competitive internally.

Also as someone with lots of anxiety (which I feel is somewhat common among developers) it really helps to hear that taking reasonable hours or a vacation is not only allowed, but encouraged. I worked at a place that switched to "unlimited vacation", but the process for getting it approved was so stressful that the majority of the developers didn't take a vacation that year.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#214

Post by munchbunny »

pmarreck wrote: post #131
_gfrc wrote: post #14

This is along the lines of "Ha, taking half the day off, are we?" when somebody leaves a little bit earlier than usual. It sounds like (just) a bad joke, but it has severe consequences for your working relationship. I get that it's tempting to make jokes when you start managing for your old team members. Just accept the fact that you've switched positions and that your relationship will change. It will only make it m…

This is why, if I ever manage, my focus will be on timely deliverables and not on time-at-desk. Give me a day when you think you can deliver something, update me as soon as you realize you can't ("manage expectations"), and do whatever you want with the rest of your time...

I think this is only half of the picture. Here's a formal framework that talks about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task-oriented_and_relationship...

As an example, when you are deciding whether to promote someone, you can't do it on tasks completed alone, because some of that decision has to be about (1) how well the person works with teammates, and (2) whether the person's peers believe this person is competent enough for their promotion. If you don't get those two considerations right, you compromise people's trust in your competence and the fairness of the promotion system. They're fundamentally relationship and skill development issues and not deliverables.

If you want to be a good manager, you have be fluent in both approaches, and you have to learn when to use a task oriented approach vs. a relationship oriented approach.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#215

Post by renewiltord »

This feels like the sort of idiot behaviour that makes sense where you don't need to bother correcting it because it's just an indicator that you're also going to get a cluster of other associated behaviours.

It's better they just do this and you take the red flag and go somewhere else.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#216

Post by P-ala-din »

throwaway3563 wrote: post #202
TheBlight wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a citation for this phenomenon you claim wrt higher level performers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome "... five subgroups this syndrome often falls into. - The perfectionist - The superwoman/man - The natural genius - The soloist - The expert"

"While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally."

"The researchers concluded that the women who participated in this study experienced impostor phenomenon more so than the men who participated."

am I misparsing this sentence? how can both be true?

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#217

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #137
gowld wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A US President once gave a speech joking about assassinating the Jonas Brothers with a predator drone to protect his daughter from dating them. https://abcnews.go.com/WN/president-obama-tells-joke-jonas-b... (Not singling out that President, but the incident was shocking.)

Obama: 1 bad joke 45: Infinity bad jokes Interesting who we choose which to focus on.

This whole "It's really interesting that ..." rhetoric that's been somehow on the rise needs to die. State your point. Since you didn't state it, I have to guess. It seems like you're suggesting that HN is overly forgiving of Trump and overly critical of Obama, which is laughable given how HN treats the current administration. But of course you didn't actually make a point, so nobody else can really address it.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#218

Post by dragonwriter »

P-ala-din wrote: post #216
throwaway3563 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome "... five subgroups this syndrome often falls into. - The perfectionist - The superwoman/man - The natural genius - The soloist - The expert"

"While early research focused on the prevalence among high-achieving women, impostor syndrome has been recognized to affect both men and women equally." "The researchers concluded that the women who participated in this study experienced impostor phenomenon more so than the men who participated." am I misparsing this sentence? how can both be true?

The first is characterizing a broad collection of research findings since the early identification of the phenomenon, the other the particular survey.

Re: Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

#219

Post by akamia »

I would add that anyone who is planning on moving into management should also avoid joking like this.

I once worked with an engineer who had a lead that would joke all the time about firing him. As a lead he had no authority to fire anyone but it was well known that he wanted to transition into a management position. Within two weeks of the lead actually becoming a manager, the engineer left the company for another job.

I remember speaking with the engineer about it after he left and he told me that he knew it was a joke but it still made him slightly uneasy. He wondered whether there was some grain of truth in the jokes. He wanted to make sure that he was leaving on his terms.

The take away that I took from that was if you're going to go down the management path, consider everyone a potential direct report and communicate accordingly. The joke that you're making as peers can take on a different meaning the day you become their manager.

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