411–420 of 461 posts
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You could call it transparency. It's vastly better to have someone make you aware of what's up than blindside you or gaslight you by giving contradictory information/demands.
> You could call it transparency Nope. 100% passive aggressive, toxic behavior.
If someone is reliable and trustworthy in their communication, then calling them "toxic" because you don't like the style is just wrong.
Conversely, someone can tell you all day every day how honest and straightforward they are, but if they aren't consistent or trustworthy, then their communication style is irrelevant.
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.
Ok that sounds like a really funny company to work at
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
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You could call it transparency. It's vastly better to have someone make you aware of what's up than blindside you or gaslight you by giving contradictory information/demands.
It's still gaslighting if you are threatening to fire people but not actually firing anyone.
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Or you know, have a meeting where your manager directly discusses the issue with you like an adult.
Yeah, exactly. It's pretty wild to see "transparency" invoked in the context of literally talking behind someone's back.
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It is more or less universally recognized that jokes are only funny if they are punching upwards. Someone in a position of power making jokes about using that power against someone with less power is more akin to bullying.
Your manager is not your enemy. Your manager making a joke is not kicking you down, he's trying to breed camaraderie.
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Part of life is tactfully dealing with people who have power over you. It’s not very comfortable for anyone.
A lot of life is determined by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have, one way or the other.
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"?
I mean, it's the exact same with engineers. They get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars because they're "top talent", but experience and resume does not necessarily a good engineer make. You interview and make a guess, but it's not like the best engineers always get paid the most and the worst get paid the least. They all get paid roughly the same.
The only difference is that bad engineers generally don't get fired at the rate that bad CEOs do. But I guess that's because the scale of impact is a lot less, and they're not so easy to identify and blame.
Also, don't even speculate about pay. There are only the hard finalized numbers, and that's it. Anything you suggest will be interpreted as finalized, and they will be very angry when you break this "promise" that you made to them.
This is sound advice. You have a significant amount of control over people's lives as a manager, and that should be treated with a level of respect. You have no idea how people feel, and it is quite possible that someone you manage doesn't know where they stand with you. At times that is more than enough to cause them stress and even convince them to look elsewhere. Work is stressful enough, and you don't need to add…
I had a manager do this to me once. In a situation where I knew for sure he was joking. I was top of the department, and it wasn't even in the context of having done anything wrong. He had just been given some new responsibilities, and I asked him what he was planning to change, and he said, totally jokingly, 'well, today is your last day.' And I knew 100% it was a joke, and I still felt a horrible sinking feeling fo…
We had to lay off a new hire and reduce hours across the board due to Covid-19, and once again they did a great job at reassuring us they had every intention of keeping (the rest of) us employed as much as possible.