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How to be a leader when the vibes are off

chaoticgood.management

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Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#51

Post by neilv »

> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...]

If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?

I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".

Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.

Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#52

Post by rglynn »

boston_clone wrote: post #11

> part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment this is not chaotic good, this is lawful neutral. and really bad leadership.

Out of genuine curiosity, what about this do you think is bad leadership? And, if I may, what would good look like?

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#53

Post by jdefr89 »

neilv wrote: post #51

> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...] If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there? I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things,…

Your employees won’t rat you out… Just don’t say “sucky” to those above you. If I have a cool ass manager who looks out for me and is real (I’m lucky enough to be at a MIT lab where everyone is cool as hell), I will always have their back…

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#54

Post by ratelimitsteve »

checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see if there's money inside."

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#56

Post by dylan604 »

Retric wrote: post #43
motorest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed. There's some ignorance in this comment, which turns your comment into a pointless jab at pet peeves. I'll explain you why. The value proposition of cloud providers for business perspectives is a) turning capex into open, b) lowe…

Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies. > The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a ce…

Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the holidays where all 40 are open. During the remaining 10 months, they are stuck with unused square footage. That's what lease gear in your colo looks like to the bottom line.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#57

Post by Retric »

dylan604 wrote: post #56
Retric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies. > The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a ce…

Cloud did bring with it the ability to quickly terminate an instance and no longer be billed for it. Renting equipment meant that equipment was your expense whether it was being used or not. So many people focus on cloud allowing one to scale up quickly, but to me being allowed to scale down just as quickly was the changer. Think of your local Target with 40 lanes of check out but with only 4 lanes open until the hol…

Paying 2x as much per server means you need to drop well below half just to break even. But you always need a server or you can’t handle new requests. So at small scale there’s zero benefit from dynamic loads.

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#58

Post by Poomba »

I feel like OP has either never worked outside of tech startups/Silicon Valley or never worked pre-2012 (dont wanna assume tho and this is not meant in a disparaging manner)

A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the exception

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#59

Post by watwut »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #12
dogleash wrote: post #3

[flagged]

> Lie through your teeth, but not so much people quit? I didn't get this message from the blog post at all. Let me summarize for you: In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight (and most likely you suffer from the bad leadership as well). Protect the team from bad consequences by not be…

> In public toe the company line, if you don't, you will be fired. In private, be honest about your opinions so your team knows you are on their side and understand their plight

This person is not on the side of the team. This person is simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new other, just in a sane way.

Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are on the "side of the team".

Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off

#60

Post by tschellenbach »

There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency. Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation collapse or go under.
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