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Things I want to say to my boss

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Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#161

Post by whatamidoingyo »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #38

My 'boss' was an absolute pyschopath who was a direct cause in my, let's just say, poor mental health over a period of years. I'd rather say not say anything to them ever again, but horrible interactions with them replay in my mind constantly. Imagine spending thousands of hours doing your best to make someone happy just to be treated like the worst piece of garbage who ever existed. That's what my 'boss' was like.

I've experienced this too. Luckily, I switched roles, so I don't have to engage with him so much anymore, but I still get his aggressive attitude every once in awhile.

He's made woman employees cry. He's randomly shouted at others for thinking they were being "smart". He's also made me and another coworker contemplate quitting on multiple occasions. Dude has two moods: 1. Unreasonably happy. 2. Explosive anger.

When I had to work with him full-time, my mental health was getting absolutely destroyed. Imagine a whole 8 hours of someone indirectly/directly calling you stupid, shouting profanity, and just being super passive aggressive. Oh, and not forgetting the threats of being fired. He made it seem like the CTO was discussing it, but I think it was him trying to get me fired.

I felt like shouting at him the most hurtful words I could think of and quitting every single day.

I've just been working on side projects hoping one of them eventually replaces my salary (trying to find a different job in this economy is really unlikely). I don't want to work with people like this.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#162

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

arevno wrote: post #55
marcinzm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it. So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#163

Post by roarcher »

parliament32 wrote: post #65
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat things quite so often.

I doubt a human would use it repetitively, even if it is common. This was most likely written paragraph-by-paragraph by AI, causing the repetition, if I had to guess. I can't wait for the EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.

> EU AI Act to require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content.

No thanks. How would you find violators, with AI detectors? Might as well go back to throwing people into lakes to see if they float.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#164

Post by cons0le »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #51

Just more evidence that eng managers (not product managers) and the myriad layers of executives are a waste of time and money. Engineers don't need babysitting. They don't need titles and they don't need someone running interference if people just leave them the fuck alone. Give them a product goal and they will accomplish it. Tell them what you want to track and they'll figure out how to track it. Tell them what you…

We can't even agree to let people WFH and stop burning capital on useless leases / real estate

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#165

Post by Aurornis »

reallymental wrote: post #3

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards. Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "…

> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.

These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.

They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.

The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.

The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.

So any extreme is bad.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#166

Post by Aurornis »

firefoxd wrote: post #30

I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it. I've built viable products where I poured my soul into it just for it to be tossed aside [0]. I've optimized processes that went from 12 hours job to 17 minutes, I was fired shortly after [1]. I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I…

> but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best

How did we get to the point where "deliver work and perform my best" is equivalent to not caring?

Delivering work with reasonably good effort and quality is the baseline expectation. If your version of not caring too much is "perform my best" then I think this is a problem of miscalibrated expectations of the workplace.

The majority of people in the world go into their jobs, try to get their work done with reasonable quality, and go home.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#167

Post by cons0le »

pdimitar wrote: post #89

To the author: You have thought about your boss likely 100x more than he ever thought about you. Don't do him this favor. You are giving him too much power that way. And be sure that he forgot about you, like COMPLETELY, maximum 72 hours after you were let go. Do the same. Take your lessons, internalize them, and forget the source. Be like an LLM: have the right conclusion inside your brain after the source material…

> The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me

Every team I've been on has had one rockstar. I've seen the rockstar get fired 3 different times. Maybe they were making too much, or rising too fast, I'm not sure. But I do know that being the "most productive" doesn't guarantee employment

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#168

Post by dogleash »

quesera wrote: post #154
exasperaited wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when…

This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"? Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important. Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees. Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category. Would you be less bother…

>Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.

For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."

The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#169

Post by supjeff »

If a good leader is somebody who consistently sets a good example, and is willing to sacrifice personally for their team, I don't think there are very many out there. The problem is that companies still need "leaders" the same way TV stations need programming.

If an company decides to invest some money in the pursuit of an opportunity, some managers might get hired or promoted, and the company isn't going to scour the earth for genuinely good leaders. They'll post a job, take a few interviews then promote the person who was going to get it anyway, or hire somebody who looks the part. Generally, one shouldn't take middle-managers seriously.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#170

Post by Aurornis »

everdrive wrote: post #39
firefoxd wrote: post #30

I know this will sound a bit cynical, but I've stopped putting too much care into my employer's product. I'll deliver work and perform my best, but I'm not killing myself over it. I've built viable products where I poured my soul into it just for it to be tossed aside [0]. I've optimized processes that went from 12 hours job to 17 minutes, I was fired shortly after [1]. I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I…

>I even wrote on HN to get advice when I felt I cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized. In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives. If you really don't care y…

> In a lot of cases, "caring too much" is itself seen as a problem because the boss explicitly just wants you to implement the thing that benefits him. He doesn't really want to hear that its not going to work well and there are better alternatives.

I've been the manager on the other side of a lot of situations that could be described like this. In many cases, it was hard to explain to the person that there were dozens and dozens of inputs that go into my decision making, including a lot of invisible factors and relationships that I was juggling.

It's hard to communicate to someone who sees a very thin slice of the company and wants to disagree and do something different to appeal to their perspective. A lot of the time I knew very clearly that we weren't picking the "best" alternative, but after hearing everyone out and weighing the tradeoffs a decision was made.

> Remember, he ultimately doesn't care if the product works. He cares if he can claim success. You're not helping him claim success, so you're a problem.

HN comments are wildly cynical. People who consume a lot of this cynicism think they're getting a leg up on the workplace by seeing the world for how it really is, but in my experience becoming the uber-cynic who believes all bosses are intentionally destroying the product with bad decisions to claim success (how does that even work?) is the kind of thinking that leads people into self-sabotaging hatred of all bosses. You need to watch out for yourself, but adopting this level of cynicism doesn't lead to good outcomes. Treat it case by case and be open to the idea that you might not have all the information.

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