231–240 of 461 posts
Seems like it would be obvious, but for many shitty people, the above two things are seen as perks of being a manager. Even more of a problem is people hiring managers sometimes look for those traits on purpose.
There are so many shitty managers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me and my wife joke about getting divorced all the time, and we've been happily married for 15 years. Maybe that joke wouldn't be appropriate for your marriage, but I'm not really into people giving absolute truths about other peoples lives and pretending like they're gospel. Every relationship is different, and there will be different relationship norms for everyone. It's one thing to tell people that you should act…
"Maybe that joke wouldn't be appropriate for your marriage" It would probably be fine. Of course, it's all a threshold game; if you're strong in other places you can get away with things that are technically a net negative, but you've got the buffer to deal with it. Every marriage if not every relationship does that since none are perfect. But why blow the buffer on something so trivially stupid? It also isn't really…
I don't think that I need to hack my psyche to ensure I don't accidentally trick myself into wanting divorce.
But my initial point stands. If you don't want to joke about divorce with your wife, then don't. My issue is with stating it as fact that other people shouldn't either.
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…
Twitter had to scrap their entire rewrite that took one year, because the dev manager told the team HOW to do it, triggering a death march project.
Bottom line: if you don't trust the people who are down in the trenches to make technical decisions, be a manager at Chipotle. But probably goes for Chipotle as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Long time ago I had a manager, who was using his firing history as a motivational tool. He would walk somewhere behind you and tell someone else a story that was supposed to partially mirror a story about you. Very subtle. He also loved bad jokes, but he was smart enough not to joke about firing people.
There's nothing subtle about that kind of behavior. Contemptible, yes, but not subtle.
An experienced CEO joined a mid-sized company that I worked at a few years. His opening line, in his first all hands was a joke about firing the people who were a few minutes late to the call. It was obviously a joke, but you really can't make a worse impression and he was gone within a year.
I thought these people are paid multiple millions because they're supposed to be "top talent"?
Oh haha, memories. We had a co-founder who pulled an "April 2nd" joke about 1/3 of the team being let go because of a non-poaching agreement between their old publisher and the studio. Kept it going for about 15 minutes until he finally let on that it was a joke. They got him back pretty good, stuck an annoy-a-tron in his office for ~6 months. We'd all deny hearing it when it chirped in meetings or during standup.
An experienced CEO joined a mid-sized company that I worked at a few years. His opening line, in his first all hands was a joke about firing the people who were a few minutes late to the call. It was obviously a joke, but you really can't make a worse impression and he was gone within a year.
I thought these people are paid multiple millions because they're supposed to be "top talent"?
And it's really, really hard to learn from your mistakes unless someone calls you out on your shit, which almost never happens to these people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought these people are paid multiple millions because they're supposed to be "top talent"?
They are paid millions because once you win the birth lottery, and if you are tall and loud enough, failing upwards becomes the default that is very hard to beat, even if you try. And it's really, really hard to learn from your mistakes unless someone calls you out on your shit, which almost never happens to these people.
I am really surprised one has to write a blog post about this. I am not a manager, but here is a question for managers, have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone? In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.
So to your first point, I think the managerial relationship is complicated enough that it warrants thinking about it, anyway.