> 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.
How to be a leader when the vibes are off
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Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#12[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 being zealous about the new order.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#13Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message…
When the higher-ups make a bad decision, sure, push back on it. Push back on it with reckless disregard for your job, even. But when pushing back fails, your people either have to accept it or leave, and not all of them want to (or can) leave. Your job then is to help them accept the decision. If you can't or won't do that, your only moral option left is to leave yourself.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#14"How to suck up in public but bad mouth in private" is I suppose some good advice if one doesn't mind hypocrisy or lying or having integrity. But if you're middle-management in a company being described here, you've long since lost any revulsion to hypocrisy. If my manager was saying one thing to one person/group and another to me, I don't think that's good leadership at all, mainly shitty humanity.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#15Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message…
What are you going to do after the revolution? I'm going to lead poetry readings and design upcycled fashion
That's not the kind of revolution the author was implying.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#16[deleted]
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#17The 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 will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.
The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.
Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#18Even as a jaded person I’m surprised how many people read this and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn’t always let you be a crusader. It’s called choosing your battles and it’s something that most of us have to do almost every day.
Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.
Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#19Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message…
This is an easy reaction to have in an internet forum, and of course it will get a lot of support because it resonates with the rank and file, so you'll naturally get a lot of internet points at places like HN and LinkedIn.
But as you rise in the org chart things get more nuanced and complicated. First, you have to pick your battles. You can stand up for precisely as much as your reputation allows, and in a large corporation that is always pretty small when it comes to ingrained culture or explicit leadership mandates.
Second, business realities and the end of ZIRP are something that a whole generation of software developers have been sheltered from, but is nevertheless a real thing that is not purely a result of greedy management. I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school.
I am thankful for that time though, because being in a small company truly flattens and aligns things so every single person understands the business stakes because it's an open book. At scale, leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down, and middle managements job is to satisfice between them as much as possible while still recognizing what pays the bills. Ultimately as an employee of a large company you have to see past the cognitive dissonance and corporate speak, and make a call on whether you believe in the leadership or not. If you don't, then your best bet is to move on, grandstanding for the sake of reputation with the burnt out and the jaded doesn't actually benefit anyone.
Re: How to be a leader when the vibes are off
#20> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.
Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you have to be prepared to leave as well.
People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor until you get on the list of "major holders".