I'm 23. I don't want to 'manage' anybody. I want to be in a team where I'm a facilitator and advocate. If people need to be 'managed' that is a red flag to me, and it isn't worth the slightly better paycheck.
Conscious unbossing
71–80 of 125 posts
Re: Conscious unbossing
#72Who can blame them after the previous generation gave them a perfect preview of life as a middle manager via Office and Office Space.
That was the generation before that. Everyone in Office Space and the managers in The Office are all (at least) two generations ahead of Gen Z.
Time flies!
Re: Conscious unbossing
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I get the feeling the best practices you're complaining about are TPS reports, I’m talking about the actual term “best practices”, and not the actual practices themselves. The term is an ineffective way to communicate something. Managers and engineers alike should be able to explain what they do in terms that can be connected with concrete actions / concerns and understandable business goals. Terms like “best pract…
> “Best practices” also implies some kind of independence of situation which is fictitious. If you, say, have 30 teams whose projects come together into a product with a 99.9% SLA, you can’t have each team make completely independent judgments of what practices are best for their situation. You can try to, and many growing companies do. What you inevitably find is that the aggregate set of problems is too large, even…
Sure, you can invent a scenario where the term “best practices” is a half-decent term. I’m not speaking in some kind of absolute. I still think it’s not a very good term here. It’s not really describing best practices, is it? It’s just describing the practices that the teams are choosing to follow.
I would name the document something like “development standards” or something like that. I’ve this called “meeting the bar” or “engineering excellence”. I like “meeting the bar” because the implication is that you haven’t succeeded if you don’t do what’s described. I like “engineering excellence” because it implies that you’ve gone beyond the minimum. I don’t like “best practices”.
I also wouldn’t insist that everyone must follow it. You have minimum standards (everyone must follow) and a set of expectations which are higher than that (everyone should follow). I think it is a kind of common error to make long lists of standards that everyone must follow. It’s better to prioritize. The minimum standards should be short and connected to the most critical concerns like security, privacy, or legal liability.
IMO, 99.9% SLA is not really that hard anyway, but I get what you mean. That’s like 2 whole hours of downtime per quarter.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that all corporate positions above rank and file — and especially the C-levels — live in a meat grinder where the only viabile strat is "figure out how to kill competition on the corporate chaos/ladder before it kills you". Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within…
Then again, these people always fail upward. They may have the sword hanging over them, but when the sword falls and they leave, they do so with a fist full of millions of dollars in Golden Parachute, and then float over to Level+1 at the next company.
Yeah, over my career I've seen multiple c-suite bounce from company to company getting gently pushed out each time but still collecting massive packages (with the vacation houses and yachts to prove it).
Once you reach a certain level, you get treated with kid gloves. Even with the sword hanging over you, they don't out right fire you, they work out a deal where you "wanted to spend more time with family".
Re: Conscious unbossing
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, huh, good catch. More of their quotes are just theaurus-substitution rephrasings: > Lucy concludes: “It’s clear mid-level management remains a lynchpin of any organisation, and to keep these roles filled employers need to innovate their strategies to make them more attractive ... > Martin concludes: “It’s clear that mid-level management is a cornerstone of any organization. To fill these roles, employers will nee…
This is kind of a dirty semi-secret of corporate PR. When a press release or other company-authored article includes "[Person's Name] says [Thing]," there is not necessarily a Person with that name, and even if there is, that Person didn't literally say the Thing. "Thing" is the narrative that the company wants to push, and they attribute "Thing" to some name and publish it as if it's a news article with a quote. I w…
There's also the bizarre story of Greg Packer, a highway maintenance worker who has been quoted hundreds of times as a "man in the street" in the New York Times and other papers. He apparently just likes being first in line for events and ends up talking to the media.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#76Phrasing of these headlines matter: 48% of GenZ professionals want to be middle managers.
Or "less than 49% of GenZ professionals want to be middle managers" and "some of GenZ professionals are ambivalent about it".
Re: Conscious unbossing
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then again, these people always fail upward. They may have the sword hanging over them, but when the sword falls and they leave, they do so with a fist full of millions of dollars in Golden Parachute, and then float over to Level+1 at the next company.
Yeah, over my career I've seen multiple c-suite bounce from company to company getting gently pushed out each time but still collecting massive packages (with the vacation houses and yachts to prove it). Once you reach a certain level, you get treated with kid gloves. Even with the sword hanging over you, they don't out right fire you, they work out a deal where you "wanted to spend more time with family".
It's because at a certain level you have valuable relationships people want to protect, enough wealth to make decisions without it personally affecting you in a real way (i.e. homelessness, loss of medical care, etc), and information about how the company "really works" that could be valuable to the competition or a tell-all story for the media.
Basically, if you're rich, you're a "real person" and if you're not you're an ant.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#78Phrasing of these headlines matter: 48% of GenZ professionals want to be middle managers.
GenZ boss and a mini. GenZ boss and a mini.
Re: Conscious unbossing
#79That's fine, just have to become better than being middle managers.`
Re: Conscious unbossing
#80In my 15 years in small and mid-sized tech, I've found the most useless managers are senior managers. Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers. Senior management never faces any…
Depends on the problem the group face. Simple problem with known solutions Accountability makes a diff.
But we know there are hard problems, where the group itself doesn't have a solution or agree on the same solution. Keeping groups together is a hard problem.