101–110 of 278 posts
I trend more for the joking line of "hey once you move onward and upward be sure to send me your consulting rate cause we'll still need you"
I feel that it's sad this even needs to be advice. I'd think it should be obvious, but we miss "obvious" things, every day. Management is, way too often, treated as a "privilege," and a "reward." I was a manager for 25 years. I never felt "privileged," and I considered it a "curse." I hated every damn minute of it, but I kept doing it, because I am a control freak, and couldn't trust anyone else to do a better job. I…
It's the same thing that manager might have said the day before as a peer as a sort of grim humor, but is now suddenly off limits. Hell, there is the possibility the relationship is good enough that it is still funny.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a person who started joking about leaving if they gave him a pile of money and showed him the door. He was super valuable to the company and very senior. New CEO and VPs come in and start demanding cuts. A couple of months later, guess who was given a pile of money and shown the door?
Always strange that 'cuts' often involve spending more money. I guess the size of the pile is relevant, and I get that it's offset against potential future cost/commitment. Person X at $100k is given ... $40k to quit now, because it will save company perhaps $260k in the next 2 years. But.. that $40k is coming from somewhere now, no? Maybe some is coming from other folks cut immediately without the big pile of cash?
Most large companies set aside money for layoffs in their financial filings under one-time expenses. They will usually explain what impact the layoffs will be expected to have on profitability.
> When people get promoted to manager their former peers become direct reports. It’s awkward. Don't do this. Promote and put them over another team.
Ok, that's nice. I'm sure some people do it carelessly but lets at least be honest and acknowledge that many also do it deliberately. It's an easy and cowardly way to assert your dominance. If you get called out on it, and you won't, you'll just say you were joking. When you're not called out on it it's a easy way of reminding people that you can do it. Maybe not now but maybe in the future when you're not feeling so…
Backstory:
Our company is fully remote. One of the clause on the contract of each employee is no moonlighting. They are not allowed to work on anything else professionally. They can work on personal software project if they notify me in advance. This is because in a fully remote companies there are not office hours and it's very hard to define what's work and what's not.
Employee Alice worked for us 3 months. She was not very responsive but her work was a 7/10. One day I found Alice was actually part of an agency and she was actually a Project Manager delegating all her work to other people. I noticed this because she had a MacBook but screenshots of her work were on Windows. When confronted she straight out denied the whole thing. After finding many more evidence she finally admitted she had delegated work to some "friend". I fired her with her pleading it was all a big misurderstanding. It was terrible, I felt so bad because even though I had found a lot of physical proof of her deception she was still playing the card of "please no really it's a misunderstanding". I doubted myself a lot fearing I had indeed fired an innocent person just being paranoid.
Now when I hire new employees I underline the NO MOONLIGHT policy and tell them I had to fire an employee in the past. It was ugly and I wish to not have to redo that.
I'm a single founder software engineer growing a team and having to deal with management for the first time. I'm unsure of most of my decisions. If you have some advice that you can give me in a kind fashion without making me feel even more inadequate that I already do it might help me become a better manager.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a person who started joking about leaving if they gave him a pile of money and showed him the door. He was super valuable to the company and very senior. New CEO and VPs come in and start demanding cuts. A couple of months later, guess who was given a pile of money and shown the door?
Always strange that 'cuts' often involve spending more money. I guess the size of the pile is relevant, and I get that it's offset against potential future cost/commitment. Person X at $100k is given ... $40k to quit now, because it will save company perhaps $260k in the next 2 years. But.. that $40k is coming from somewhere now, no? Maybe some is coming from other folks cut immediately without the big pile of cash?
I frequently see short-term decisions to get funding triumph over long-term planning when private investors are involved. And it might even be the right choice - grow and get all the funds, then clean up tech debt in future years. It can be frustrating, but is a valid business play.
I think you should be able to joke about literally anything. Context matters though so you should not be doing it all the time or to everyone. But for me personally, almost no joke is too far.
That's great for you, but it gives you no excuse to make other people uncomfortable just because you don't think a joke is too far. And no, saying "it's just a joke" isn't an apology.
As a more general advice - person in position of power should not joke about causing harm. Whether is is manager joking about firing employee, stronger person joking about beating up weaker one or parent joking about throwing child out of house when they misbehave. This kind of humor works only when it is coming from weaker position and even then only in certain situations.
Now, think about your position of power in a historical context. Are you a member of a group that has traditionally held power? A gender that has traditionally been considered “superior” or “acceptable”? Same thing applies there too.
Wait...
My advice for new programmers: Don't use expletives in any log message, debugging alert, or even code comments. The chance of this coming back to haunt you is not worth the momentary satisfaction it gives you.
You ever grep the linux codebase for expletives? Give it a shot some time. I wouldn't make it at a company that frowns upon a 'God Damnit' in a log message.