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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

#271

Post by danenania »

majormajor wrote: post #252
pmarreck wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That sounds lovely in theory but gets tricky quick with employees who give you estimates that seem too high, and then don't even meet those. And then you have to figure out if they need help, if they're over their head, if they're being lazy, if they're getting interrupted by stuff that's not on your radar, or WTF is really going on, and if (a) they're not telling you and (b) you have no visibility into their day (sa…

"estimates that seem too high, and then don't even meet those"

This is pretty much the definition of an estimate in software.

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

#272

Post by abnercoimbre »

MetallicCloud wrote: post #232
jerf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 prefer not to try and push everything down and bury it. I've definitely thought about what life would be like if I got divorced, just like I've daydreamed about what my life would be like if I didn't have kids. That doesn't mean I'm going to 'go out for some cigarettes'. 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…

This aligns with my experience. We haven't picked the date for our marriage yet (covid), but we've learned if a modicum of pretty dark humor isn't present, something is in fact wrong and we worry about the other party.

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

#273

Post by BuckRogers »

wpietri wrote: post #244
dudul wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have significant amount of control? Maybe I've been lucky to be part of mostly healthy organizations, but even managers have to justify/explain decisions. Either be for termination, compensation adjustment, reassigning to a different team, etc. I always had to document and explain why I thought an employee deserved a raise, or should not get a bonus, etc. Even as a director with ~20 reports I don't have unlimi…

You must work at a pretty healthy company. Because those checks also exist at unhealthy companies, but there managers just know how to work the system. E.g., I know somebody whose manager was pushed out for political reasons. Their first meeting with their new boss, the one who did the pushing, was a 90-minute series of accusations and critiques. In the second meeting, they were presented with a letter documenting th…

And that is why I want a union or professional organization. That level of nonsense needs a mechanism to resist with. How many lives and marriages, families suffered for political moves mostly for nothing by some lunatic.

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

#274

Post by MagnumOpus »

mywittyname wrote: post #205
brmgb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking but not because it's punching down on the Jonas brothers. The part making people ill at ease is not Obama as a father talking about murdering famous boys trying to date his daughters. The actually shocking part is that the president views drone stricks, which is to say extrajudicial murders in foreign countries, so casually he thinks it's appropriate to make jokes about them.

I'm pretty sure Obama's administration pioneered the double-tap, where a drone strike is followed up several minutes later by another one, which is intended to kill those who are providing aid to the fallen. This is considered to be a war crime. He caught flak contemporaneously for this issue, and not just by Fox News, et al. I'm generally a strong Obama supporter, but this is one area that I feel like his actions we…

> I'm pretty sure Obama's administration pioneered the double-tap

I am pretty sure it is not a new technique - it was famously featured in the 2010 children's book Mockingjay, and I am sure Suzanne Collins didn't make it up either.

Double-tap bombing are a staple of the asymmetric warfare arsenals of spec-ops forces/guerilla/terrorists since at least the second world war, probably much longer.

(Also, it is rather unlikely that Obama ordered the airforce to start double-tapping, or even that he knew ahead of the fact, given the amount of extrajudicial killing/assassination the US forces do every month...)

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

#275

Post by groby_b »

papito wrote: post #233
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…

Hit and run management. Suggest to your engineers how to do things and then disengage, leaving them to follow your directive, while knowing that you are dead wrong. 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 m…

This is a beautiful illustration of the misunderstandings I mean. Nobody was talking about "making suggestions". This is typical engineering musings aloud. ("I wonder what would happen if...")

I've made it clear in the previous post that there's no intent to direct the team anywhere, and yet your ideas about management led you to interpret it as somehow ordering the team to do things. As not trusting them to make technical decisions. As triggering a death march project, for crying out loud. (fwiw, the project got stopped the moment I realized what had happened, with apologies on my part. We're not all monsters :)

I don't fault you for it. Your past experience shapes you, and heaven knows we have enough bad managers in this industry to trigger severe PTSD in many of us.

But that's the reason to word things extremely carefully, depending on audience. There's a good contingent of people who give management words a lot of weight, and so we need to be very cautious what we say when it affects a wide audience, especially if it includes people we haven't built deep trust with.

And while I don't know about Chipotle, I can confirm that all my managers in food places had a tendency to micromanage ;)

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

#276

Post by cmonnow »

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #256
zeroxfe wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This disregards the power imbalance -- lots of employees (especially junior ones) are not comfortable being so firm with their managers.

Part of life is tactfully dealing with people who have power over you. It’s not very comfortable for anyone.

Wisdom is realizing no one really has power over you.

You are voluntarily & temporarily handing over that power to someone else in exchange for money.

The moment you renounce your desire for money from that company, you get back that power you handed over.

And that was, is, and will, always be your decision. Thus, the power never left your hands.

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

#277

Post by john4532452 »

Another thing every Manager should know about perceived power vs actual power. Considerable managers i have encountered think they are the loyal employees where as programmers are sellout's who switch when the get better offer. This is true to some degree but that does not give more power to the managers.

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

#278

Post by Ensorceled »

CapriciousCptl wrote: post #201
Non24Throw wrote: post #143

Early in my career, a manager once had me repeat to him that I would be terminated if I failed to do X, like I was a 5-year-old. X was referring to a technical implementation detail that he had zero understanding of. He read something in a blog post I guess. My reaction was to act like it was a fun joke or something. But inside, I absolutely loathed him every second of every day until I quit, and now I take great sat…

How about saying, “please don’t joke about firing me?” Feedback is a 2-way street and people aren’t mind readers.

It's not the employee's job to try to make their manager a better human being or a better manager.

Also, many people would be terrible managers and avoid that career path, so it's kind of weird to expect them to "manage up".

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

#279

Post by Robin_Message »

Manager Tools has a great bit of advice from this vein, where they tell new managers to imagine that, when interacting with former peers, they have a post-it note on their foreheads with the words "I can fire you". Gimmicky, but makes the point that the power dynamic has shifted, and it's there even if you try not to recognise it.

No affiliation and it is a bit dogmatic, but it's a great podcast: https://www.manager-tools.com/

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