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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

#81

Post by pinkmuffinere »

jdefr89 wrote: post #53
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…

I think this is true 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time is really risky. The high stakes of the bad case make it wise (imo) to avoid saying your company's policy "sucks"

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

#82

Post by citizenpaul »

This headline reminds me of a headline a while back that was something like how to do founder mode when you are not the founder. It all goes back to some Orwellian newspeak vibes. The words for what we are doing sound horrible. Can we just change word meanings so it sounds good?

If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.

If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.

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

#83

Post by mattmanser »

motorest wrote: post #32
apercu wrote: post #17

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass. 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. AI wil…

> 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…

Before the cloud you bought a VM for $5 p/m. You installed apache, MySql, php or whatever and you ran your app.

It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.

If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.

When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.

For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.

It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.

Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.

It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.

What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.

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

#84

Post by airspresso »

itsnowandnever wrote: post #64

This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't see…

Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy. Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team forward.

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

#85

Post by dabockster »

stronglikedan wrote: post #74
apercu wrote: post #17

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass. 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. AI wil…

[flagged]

If not racism, then a real life Mean Girls at a very least. But in this case, Regina George is your boss.

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

#86

Post by gitremote »

vkou wrote: post #75
stronglikedan wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Racism didn't end in 1964, but people sure have gotten better at dog whistling about it. (Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot. Because no matter how much a black person will ever achieve in this country, some mouth breather who hasn't done a day of honest work in their lives will insist that…

> Just earlier this year, the first words out of the mouth of the political right about a fatal aircraft crash was to... Question the credentials of its black pilot.

> All that judgement was made before any of the facts besides the pilot's skin color were out.

It's worse than that. The pilot was actually white.

Trump thought the pilot must have been black just because they crashed. When asked why he thought DEI caused the crash, he said, "Because I have common sense." He claimed without any source that the Obama administration "actually came out with a directive, too white" on aviation agency standards.

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

#87

Post by nitwit005 »

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,…

If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but intended to deflect.

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

#88

Post by dwaltrip »

airspresso wrote: post #84
itsnowandnever wrote: post #64

This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't see…

Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy. Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team forward.

Take care of yourself. Your oxygen mask goes on first.

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

#89

Post by gtowey »

apercu wrote: post #17

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass. 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. AI wil…

> The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid.

So true.

Notice how everything got really expensive after COVID? All the companies cited "supply chain" or cost of labor increases but then were reporting record profits which means they were lying.

It was all to punish us for having the audacity to ask for living wages and better work conditions.

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

#90

Post by data_ders »

itsnowandnever wrote: post #64

This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't see…

> the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations

wow. real!

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