One of the issues I've had that isn't mentioned here is the value of mutual trust. Communication and trust are the two cornerstones of a really solid manager <-> managee relationship in my experience. Whether that lack of trust manifests itself as micro-management, constant check-ins, or a constant threat of surveillance it can easily turn an above average performer into an apathetic and demoralized employee.
I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.
I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.
Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!
IME this kind of experience comes when you have a manager who has no fundamental understanding of what it is that they are managing and has no particular reason to trust you.
A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9am rather than 9:05am"?
Managers should form a very deep understanding of whom to trust and why or understand on a very deep level what it is that they are managing.
Managers who cannot do either of those things should be terminated with prejudice.
>You have performance metrics for a reason!
As far as developing software goes, every single performance metric is terrible.
But also for teams to be successful, employees have to be able to trust their managers. I just quit a job after a month because, within that short time, my manager twice misrepresented the scope of a task so he could either leave early or have the day off.
I knew after those incidents that there was no point in continuing. It would be foolish to trust someone in any larger way who would casually treat a new employee in that fashion.
I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.
If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.
In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).
As manager in the middle you often feel helpless. You want to help your people but you have nothing to offer. Can't give raises, no place to promote people, top management doesn't support your initiatives. It's a difficult place to be in.
Middle management people are the graphite control rods of a nuclear reactor, they slow down the process enough to be useful and act as sacrificial elements in the power plant.
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)
> I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.
You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.
Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.
On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.
I am this exact situation. I love my manager, simply one of the best i've ever worked with. But he is simply is messenger for poor decisions that are made by couple of incompetent people above him.
I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.
The article is based on data that includes, among other points, that the individual manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and that 50% of Americans had left their job because of the individual manager. If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points. (I am personally about to leave a job because of my individual manager, so I'm inclined to believe the article and study pretty easily).
I came here to make this exact point. I would further state that in tech businesses, tools shift, interests shift, and markets shift. Smart employees respond to that regardless of how amazing their manager might be.
It's probably easier for managers to overrate their skills and performance because the problems they cause are often not overt; if parts of their team are underperforming, the knee-jerk assessment is that "there's something wrong with Joe" rather than "there's something wrong with our process" or "there's something wrong with what I'm doing."
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).
The trust and minimal involvement are really key here, the best managers I've ever worked with have been enablers rather than taskmasters. Managers that remove roadblocks, provide you with exactly the tools you need, insulate you from unnecessary cross-chatter, and just let you kill it with as few distractions as possible.
Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.
You often have micromanagement and abandonment at the same time. They are so busy micromanagement their people while they neglect making the decisions that they need to make. If somebody steps up, they push back. Everybody avoids moving and are just waiting until the micromanager has time.
> The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?
I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.
I have been managing large teams (Anywhere from 100 to 300 people) and in my experience I would phrase it differently.
1. In a going concern, which has found traction, a manager is often the _reason_ for people to leave the company.
2. In a company that is not finding traction, or the larger view of its direction is obfuscated, managers are the reason people _stay_ back to work.
This manager being the end-all of association comes from military knowledge that you fight because of allegiance to your battalion, cause and the country - in that order.
In an knowledge enterprise, these constructs exist, but with almost equal weightage.
The best manager cannot make an employee stay back if the company is not going anywhere, or if the cause is not evident.
The worst manager will lose employees even if the company is going bonkers.
Totally agree. If the company has enough traction and I have a decent shares/options package with a clear exit strategy in sight then I'd stay even if my boss was a wild baboon and my job mostly involved shoveling monkey shit.
If you're a manager in a high traction company and you're losing employees regularly, you should seriously consider finding another career.
This is a really insightful comment. I came here to say I'm the counter-example to the article, in that I left a pretty good manager at a company that was clearly failing.
This article feels like one of these things where someone's trying to fit something messy and human into a simple, clean narrative.
At my previous job, I left due to the company, not the management.
My direct supervisor was great. He was a good manager on most levels.
I left because the company had no future, they weren't going bankrupt, but they weren't growing either. I never got a pay rise, probably never would. My benefits actually shrunk as time went on, staff social functions were cut (e.g. team lunches), use of networking funds became more restricted, and my work environment became less flexible.
In fact, the only reason I considered staying was my manager and coworkers.
People leave poor working environments, whether it's a company or a manager causing that poor environment.
Yea, its too easy to say people leave managers, but it was never in my case. I think it varies between industry. With the software companies, the churn is mostly due to folks looking out for better opportunities..
Me personally almost always looked outside due to availability of better opportunities. The argument that people leave managers makes sense only if you are in the best possible job/company you can get with your skill set (which is a very small %) and you somehow got a rift with the manager big enough to leave.
But it could be different in other domains/industries where people stick with the same company till their retirement..
As somberi commented awhile ago, people leave due to managers -> company -> cause, in roughly that order. So even good managers will lose people if the company has traction issues or the cause is unclear or there is no future. So it absolutely can happen and it is fair to say that a single manager's performance, in isolation, is not the only reason for retention.
You don't just leave a bad manager. You escape! Emotionally it is deflating, defeating, a real grind that affects your whole life if your work situation sucks.
No, people leave companies too. Using my throwaway account because I don't want my name attached to this.
I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.
Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.
I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.
So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.
Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.
I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify …
I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO.
The goal was to hopefully try and generate some more self-awareness and introspection and thus make life a little fairer, more pleasant, more growth-oriented and hopefully more successful for all concerned.
I wasn't trying to deny or downplay that people also leave their jobs for all of the other reasons highlighted by folks here.
#1. People get hired for what they are good, their skills and then get promoted (to management) for same technical/IC skills not for the MGMT skills. No MGMT ramp-up. No MGMT tools. No MGMT framework. You are now tasked to lead a team. it's surely will fail.
#2. Next the mindset. Typical mindset when you move from technical (or any IC) role to MGMT and the higher you go in MGMT should completely change.... unfortunately its not so easy to give up the control. MGMT is about making others successful... giving up your control to others is very frightening and often causes identity issues... moving from do it all (as an IC) to ask_and_inspire is not easy...
#3. Assuming you overcome these two... typical problem of MGMT/leadership is they try to find, "What's the matter?" where as the focus should always be on "What matters to you (an individual/ICs in team)"
Likewise, there probably isn't such a thing as a 10X developer, but I totally believe 10X managers exist (they provide cover, they have empathy, they are able to lead people who otherwise aren't very manageable). I've only met very few of them in my career, most managers are 1X or even negative.
I really don't like the concept of a 10X developer - it implies linear scaling.
If you keep writing very similar implementations of very similar things (without actively damaging the code-base) you may very well be an O(n) developer. You keep working at the same pace regardless.
If you are a developer of some calibar, the work that you've already done will feed back into the work that you're doing - making you an O(log(n)) developer, until the work levels out and you slip back toward o(n).
Then there's the other end of the stick, the idiot who has no business writing code, but who management keeps around because he's cheap in the short term.
Everything he touches turn to shit, each change corrupts the code base just a little more, and each change to the corrupted code takes an amount of time proportional to the level of corruption.
This is the O(k^n) developer, and he needs to be stopped.
I agree with you that 10X managers exist, but it's utter nonsense to claim that 10X developers don't exist. I've met people who are possibly at the 100X level; it's worth remembering that some tasks cannot be done by an average developer with any amount of time.
I imagine that there are probably tasks that don't allow the 10X or 100X to show through; anything basic and repetitive enough (or so heavily specified that the developer's job is essentially "typing").
Agreed completely. I've had a manager who was able to really leverage persons to create whole new verticals (that were actually profitable), but they hinged on single person's continued interest and commitment. He was borderline psychopathic (in the sense of being extremely manipulative on a personal level), though, and while the work I've done has been the most interesting in my career, the atmosphere was emotionally draining on a very personal level for most of us who worked for him.
However, I'm not sure that there exist 10x managers that are not manipulators / psychological exploiters.
That's because management is one of those fields that most people think they're qualified for. If you got arms, legs and are literate, many think they're cut out for it.
Same goes for teaching or education in general. So many wannabe educators writing or producing programming lessons that clearly have never studied education theory. A notorious one or two out there as well. Art or professional grade creative endeavors are probably the same way for the vast majority.
Unless you're some sort of savant, no one gets away with shortcutting the learning involved with anything. It's just kind of blissful ignorance.
You don't know what you don't know and it becomes a strength since most are too unmotivated to ever do things the right way, in a well-informed, disciplined manner regardless. To those who are in those fields though, it's painfully obvious.
I have only ever left good managers. I've had bad managers, but it was only under good managers that I was fully enabled to do my best work - work that would give me the confidence (and the resume fodder) to pitch myself to a new company for better pay.
That may seem disloyal to those good managers, but I never left on a whim. It was always an agonizing process. But it was also always necessary. My former managers have never held it against me, and I now have connections with a number of great managers who would hire me without question if I was ever looking again (and they know I would work for them in a heartbeat).
What always happened was that it became evident that my interests and my company's interest had diverged, whether it was a lack of opportunity for advancement, the company was going under, the product was a non-starter, or upper-management was bent on self-sabotage.
There's often a third possibility; leaving groups. At a small enough startup they're effectively the same, but I've seen distinct groups form in companies as small as 20. While it's true that a manager can affect the quality of the entire group, they're only one factor. High-performing fun group with a ho-hum manager? I'll probably stay. Dysfunctional bunch of ho-hum peers with a really good manager? That was my last job, and it's not my current job for exactly that reason.
Especially at a larger company, managers might be constrained wrt hiring and firing, reviews and raises, pushing back against misguided product-management decisions, etc. Even a good manager might not be able to deal with these issues quickly enough to prevent attrition. I've seen some really good managers, people I'd worked with before and who have been superstars at other companies, burn out trying. That's sort of leaving the company that hobbled the manager, but other managers and other groups within the same company were doing fine so I'd call it leaving the group.
Tellingly, when I interviewed with Intercom their "culture fit" manager was extremely rude and condescending, and constantly interrupted. Everyone else was polite, but if this is the person who gets to decide "yeah, they'd fit in here" that's a pretty huge problem.
People turn you down because of managers, not companies, too.
I've definitely left companies and not managers before. To be fair it's usually because my manager's manager's manager was an asshole who thought 1% and an attaboy would be enough to keep people when our rent had gone up 7% and neighboring companies we're offering 50% more. Also to be fair, my managers were good enough that I stayed 6 months longer than I would have with even a neutral manager
Last company I left went bankrupt and got bought by a VC who replaced the whole management.
The new managers were running around telling people how to do things because of the "company spirit".
A few people, including me, were in the company for over 7 years and we knew the company spirit, because well, we lived and formed it.
Now some newly hired MBAs try to tell me that I'm wrong?
The bankruptcy lead many people to leave. The rest left because of the new management. Now the company has the old name and product, but noone of the people that created or formed it remained.
There is an important distinction that hasn't been discussed much:
- The reason people decide to resign.
- The reason people begin to consider resigning.
In my experience, bad management is what usually kicks off the whole thought process, but other factors are what cement the decision (like an offer with higher pay, better title, higher prestige company etc.)
I work on a team that lost about 66% of its members in the last year and a half. Every single one of them liked our manager, but the way the organization works at a higher level was making everyone's life miserable. People absolutely leave companies because of the company.
I've also had toxic managers at other organizations, so I agree a manager CAN drive an employee away, but that's not always or even usually the case.
I think that too is on the company. A good one-level-up manager will check up on their underlings, the managers in question, and figure out who's good and bad and resolve the situation.
I can't help feeling that sometimes saying "People leave managers, not companies" is something senior company management tell themselves to absolve themselves of blame for staff turnover.
I could be managed by the best manager in the world, but if I'm paid 20% below market rate I'm going to leave for a better paid job.
People leave the environment, not just the manager, though the manager is a big piece of the puzzle.
I quit my last employer because the manager was an abusive bully with severe trust issues who would constantly threaten, abuse and demoralize people, but HR was also to blame since they did not lift a finger to address the issue even though this manager's behavior was widely known throughout the company for decades.
I've also left a great manager in the past since the business was going nowhere. I've left a good manager and good team because I was very underpaid in another company.
Funny, I just left a job where new management was installed and promptly lost ~12/30 people in the span of 9 months. Not only was life markedly worse on day 1, it got worse every time another quality coworker or line manager left.
You'd think this would send a signal to someone that a mistake had been made. Nope!
[+] [-] Greed|8 years ago|reply
I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.
I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.
Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!
[+] [-] crdoconnor|8 years ago|reply
A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9am rather than 9:05am"?
Managers should form a very deep understanding of whom to trust and why or understand on a very deep level what it is that they are managing.
Managers who cannot do either of those things should be terminated with prejudice.
>You have performance metrics for a reason!
As far as developing software goes, every single performance metric is terrible.
[+] [-] larschdk|8 years ago|reply
https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-syndrome
https://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?di...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166701
[+] [-] alphonsegaston|8 years ago|reply
I knew after those incidents that there was no point in continuing. It would be foolish to trust someone in any larger way who would casually treat a new employee in that fashion.
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.
In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|8 years ago|reply
The Gervais Principle is a great lens with which to look at company hierarchies and all people in any large organization should know about it: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)
[+] [-] speby|8 years ago|reply
You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.
Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.
On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.
[+] [-] dominotw|8 years ago|reply
I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binaryanomaly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aezell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|8 years ago|reply
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).
[+] [-] Greed|8 years ago|reply
Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.
[+] [-] corpMaverick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lars512|8 years ago|reply
In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?
[+] [-] pqh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somberi|8 years ago|reply
1. In a going concern, which has found traction, a manager is often the _reason_ for people to leave the company.
2. In a company that is not finding traction, or the larger view of its direction is obfuscated, managers are the reason people _stay_ back to work.
This manager being the end-all of association comes from military knowledge that you fight because of allegiance to your battalion, cause and the country - in that order.
In an knowledge enterprise, these constructs exist, but with almost equal weightage.
The best manager cannot make an employee stay back if the company is not going anywhere, or if the cause is not evident.
The worst manager will lose employees even if the company is going bonkers.
[+] [-] jondubois|8 years ago|reply
If you're a manager in a high traction company and you're losing employees regularly, you should seriously consider finding another career.
[+] [-] eldavido|8 years ago|reply
This article feels like one of these things where someone's trying to fit something messy and human into a simple, clean narrative.
[+] [-] xerophyte12932|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|8 years ago|reply
My direct supervisor was great. He was a good manager on most levels.
I left because the company had no future, they weren't going bankrupt, but they weren't growing either. I never got a pay rise, probably never would. My benefits actually shrunk as time went on, staff social functions were cut (e.g. team lunches), use of networking funds became more restricted, and my work environment became less flexible.
In fact, the only reason I considered staying was my manager and coworkers.
People leave poor working environments, whether it's a company or a manager causing that poor environment.
[+] [-] murukesh_s|8 years ago|reply
Me personally almost always looked outside due to availability of better opportunities. The argument that people leave managers makes sense only if you are in the best possible job/company you can get with your skill set (which is a very small %) and you somehow got a rift with the manager big enough to leave.
But it could be different in other domains/industries where people stick with the same company till their retirement..
[+] [-] speby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdsknene|8 years ago|reply
I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.
Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.
I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.
So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.
Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.
[+] [-] rich_archbold|8 years ago|reply
I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify …
I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO.
The goal was to hopefully try and generate some more self-awareness and introspection and thus make life a little fairer, more pleasant, more growth-oriented and hopefully more successful for all concerned.
I wasn't trying to deny or downplay that people also leave their jobs for all of the other reasons highlighted by folks here.
Thanks, Rich.
[+] [-] nishantvyas|8 years ago|reply
#1. People get hired for what they are good, their skills and then get promoted (to management) for same technical/IC skills not for the MGMT skills. No MGMT ramp-up. No MGMT tools. No MGMT framework. You are now tasked to lead a team. it's surely will fail.
#2. Next the mindset. Typical mindset when you move from technical (or any IC) role to MGMT and the higher you go in MGMT should completely change.... unfortunately its not so easy to give up the control. MGMT is about making others successful... giving up your control to others is very frightening and often causes identity issues... moving from do it all (as an IC) to ask_and_inspire is not easy...
#3. Assuming you overcome these two... typical problem of MGMT/leadership is they try to find, "What's the matter?" where as the focus should always be on "What matters to you (an individual/ICs in team)"
[+] [-] brlewis|8 years ago|reply
I enjoyed the article and IMHO it did well in encouraging self-awareness and introspection. I hope it goes far.
[+] [-] jumpkickhit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarg|8 years ago|reply
If you keep writing very similar implementations of very similar things (without actively damaging the code-base) you may very well be an O(n) developer. You keep working at the same pace regardless.
If you are a developer of some calibar, the work that you've already done will feed back into the work that you're doing - making you an O(log(n)) developer, until the work levels out and you slip back toward o(n).
Then there's the other end of the stick, the idiot who has no business writing code, but who management keeps around because he's cheap in the short term. Everything he touches turn to shit, each change corrupts the code base just a little more, and each change to the corrupted code takes an amount of time proportional to the level of corruption. This is the O(k^n) developer, and he needs to be stopped.
[+] [-] glangdale|8 years ago|reply
I imagine that there are probably tasks that don't allow the 10X or 100X to show through; anything basic and repetitive enough (or so heavily specified that the developer's job is essentially "typing").
[+] [-] jclarkcom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|8 years ago|reply
However, I'm not sure that there exist 10x managers that are not manipulators / psychological exploiters.
[+] [-] BuckRogers|8 years ago|reply
Same goes for teaching or education in general. So many wannabe educators writing or producing programming lessons that clearly have never studied education theory. A notorious one or two out there as well. Art or professional grade creative endeavors are probably the same way for the vast majority.
Unless you're some sort of savant, no one gets away with shortcutting the learning involved with anything. It's just kind of blissful ignorance.
You don't know what you don't know and it becomes a strength since most are too unmotivated to ever do things the right way, in a well-informed, disciplined manner regardless. To those who are in those fields though, it's painfully obvious.
[+] [-] lliamander|8 years ago|reply
That may seem disloyal to those good managers, but I never left on a whim. It was always an agonizing process. But it was also always necessary. My former managers have never held it against me, and I now have connections with a number of great managers who would hire me without question if I was ever looking again (and they know I would work for them in a heartbeat).
What always happened was that it became evident that my interests and my company's interest had diverged, whether it was a lack of opportunity for advancement, the company was going under, the product was a non-starter, or upper-management was bent on self-sabotage.
EDIT: Added missing words
[+] [-] notacoward|8 years ago|reply
Especially at a larger company, managers might be constrained wrt hiring and firing, reviews and raises, pushing back against misguided product-management decisions, etc. Even a good manager might not be able to deal with these issues quickly enough to prevent attrition. I've seen some really good managers, people I'd worked with before and who have been superstars at other companies, burn out trying. That's sort of leaving the company that hobbled the manager, but other managers and other groups within the same company were doing fine so I'd call it leaving the group.
[+] [-] CalRobert|8 years ago|reply
People turn you down because of managers, not companies, too.
[+] [-] sloxy|8 years ago|reply
Interviewed by a precocious child who didn't have interview skills.
[+] [-] lovich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|8 years ago|reply
Last company I left went bankrupt and got bought by a VC who replaced the whole management.
The new managers were running around telling people how to do things because of the "company spirit".
A few people, including me, were in the company for over 7 years and we knew the company spirit, because well, we lived and formed it.
Now some newly hired MBAs try to tell me that I'm wrong?
The bankruptcy lead many people to leave. The rest left because of the new management. Now the company has the old name and product, but noone of the people that created or formed it remained.
[+] [-] mychael|8 years ago|reply
- The reason people decide to resign.
- The reason people begin to consider resigning.
In my experience, bad management is what usually kicks off the whole thought process, but other factors are what cement the decision (like an offer with higher pay, better title, higher prestige company etc.)
[+] [-] phaus|8 years ago|reply
I've also had toxic managers at other organizations, so I agree a manager CAN drive an employee away, but that's not always or even usually the case.
[+] [-] cgore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crescentfresh|8 years ago|reply
Isn't this attributing the cause of leaving to management as well, just not direct managers?
[+] [-] gadders|8 years ago|reply
I could be managed by the best manager in the world, but if I'm paid 20% below market rate I'm going to leave for a better paid job.
[+] [-] korginator|8 years ago|reply
I quit my last employer because the manager was an abusive bully with severe trust issues who would constantly threaten, abuse and demoralize people, but HR was also to blame since they did not lift a finger to address the issue even though this manager's behavior was widely known throughout the company for decades.
I've also left a great manager in the past since the business was going nowhere. I've left a good manager and good team because I was very underpaid in another company.
[+] [-] rconti|8 years ago|reply
You'd think this would send a signal to someone that a mistake had been made. Nope!
[+] [-] pan69|8 years ago|reply