Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to be a leader when the vibes are off

chaoticgood.management

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 206 posts

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

#101

Post by vanviegen »

mattmanser wrote: post #83
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…

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…

> But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine

These are things you still need to think about and setup in the cloud as well. I wouldn't even say it's less work compared to just maintaining your own one or two servers. Except for the backups, that's the only solid convenience win for the cloud in my experience.

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

#102

Post by arandr0x »

I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins" looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this value context.

I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.

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

#103

Post by drivebyhooting »

bob1029 wrote: post #68

> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven The last point is what I've been experiencing the most. I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org char…

[flagged]

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

#104

Post by neilv »

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…

If you're a manager, consider not saying that up the org chart is "sucky". Almost certainly no one on your team will go tattle, but it can leak out accidentally, such as when someone is flustered over a problem.

More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.

But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...

For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)

A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.

(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)

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

#106

Post by stevage »

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…

I saw a definition of burnout as the accumulation of thousands of tiny disappointments and it stuck me. If you're always failing to achieve anything despite effort going in, you burn out.

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

#107

Post by bluefirebrand »

itsnowandnever wrote: post #69
tschellenbach wrote: post #60

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 efficienc…

well, and let's be honest - most CEOs and boards get the same advice from the same advisors and peers. and the advice since Elon took over Twitter (not that I can say he "started it" but it was around that time I started hearing C-suites say he was right to let everyone go) has been to implement more draconic policies at your software companies. that interest rates have been higher and liquidity in general has been t…

> it'll get better soon

I really wish I had your optimism about that.

I'm starting to worry that nothing will ever be better again

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

#108

Post by darth_avocado »

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…

I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting the blog, but this feels like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I’ve always despised managers who’d be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but always be “part of the system” when it mattered the most. Yes it’s always good to not get into public arguments with the upper management, but this gives off a lot of “play both sides” kind of a vibe that’s not actual good management.

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

#109

Post by wavemode »

bob1029 wrote: post #68

> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven The last point is what I've been experiencing the most. I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org char…

It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase profitability at the expense of all else.

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

#110

Post by drivebyhooting »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #103
bob1029 wrote: post #68

> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven The last point is what I've been experiencing the most. I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org char…

[flagged]

[flagged]
Post reply on HN