Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
> When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened.
First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good character!
I think you are right that good character is the core of being a good manager. It’s the core of being a good person. Virtue and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to “happiness” (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it’s been the heart of western philosophy.
I feel like the solution is ultimately going to be some kind of trust-less or low-trust system that ultimately incentivizes every individual to do the right thing, no matter where they might be in the hierarchy. We can't rely on top-down leadership spontaneously getting it right, let alone bottom-up leadership. This is why we need an external system that can incentivize people effectively, while being fully observable, trustable, reproducible, etc.
Thanks for the vulnerability and full marks for self awareness.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened
Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
I think your definition of character is useful, and I tend to agree with Drucker that it's the most important thing, because otherwise a manager will subject to whatever political winds are blowing higher up without any grounding or point of view on what should be pushed back on. On the other hand though, "do[ing] the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself" is easily stated, but in practice is not effective without influence—if you are constantly saying no, you'll quickly be replaced.
The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large scale software development because ground-level expertise really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human communication inherently has limits. I would say most people, and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge they would quickly realize that when they describe that a hundred person org they would get a hundred different interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described 30+ years ago.
I’m certainly not an expert, but just based on my personal experiences, I think “character” is the distillation of a lot of different aspects of self, some of which are binary haves/don’t haves (“people listen when you speak”) and others that are more of a spectrum (a “willingness to speak up” is easier when the consequences are low).
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
> "It’s the performance of ‘care’ from leadership. Saying one thing loudly and proudly, yet doing another quietly, repeatedly."
It's the employee engagement survey where you want people to say that the company cares about you, and first line managers get in trouble from the results but executive leadership does not. It's the cognitive dissonance that you expect us to just deal with.
It's the lack of communication when people are fired. There's no good way to fire people, but there sure are bad ways and you've found them.
It's the times that I've told my boss about issues I'm dealing with and those issues show up in my end of year review instead of working on them together.
I used to work in a fairly secure government data center. I was a facility electrician, but also sat on lower-level hire boards (i.e. blue collars). My RFID would grant me access anywhere across multiple facilities.
>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.
Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).
Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).
Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).
Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
In my experience (as limited as it might be), burnout is a very person thing, usually driven internally by the employee with an out of kilter sense of balance between self-commitment and job performance. Common drivers are broken, centralized processes (e.g. stack ranking) rather than individual managers. Staffing doesn't really help, it just raises the bar, because this is a matter of competition.
In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers could never hope to achieve.
In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up on your side (worst case).
This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and work ethics) from the US.
As a side point, some people here seem to think this post specifically came from 24 contributors. The text at the bottom seems to indicate this and I initially got the same feeling.
However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
> In the end, good leadership is never proven by what you say about yourself. It’s proven by what people say when you’re not in the room.
> And trust me, they’re talking.
Some of the people I’ve had to railroad into things say stuff like, “well this is the first I’ve heard about it.” That’s a You Problem.
The fact that nobody is discussing this with you should tell you that you’ve been cut out of the loop for being impossible to negotiate with. It’s absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
> I hope you learn that if you focus on making money instead of the team lining your pockets, you will end up with a broken team and no money.
Very much this. If you don't actually care about us, don't expect us to care about you or your company or the work. You're going to be left with automatons rather than creative, energetic people (even if the bodies haven't changed).
And the fact is that automatons don't make the line go up nearly as well as people who care. So the really ironic thing is, if all you care about is money, then you better care about the team. And not just care with lip service, but really care.
My current job has problems, but I'll give them this: When I wound up in the ER the weekend before a business trip, nobody was worrying about the effect on the trip.
You know, watching Mad Men, it seems to be that work culture hasn't changed since the 50s. The same fake smiles, the same small talk, the same boss's favorite getting the credit. What's really changed since then?
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
I’m sure you’re right, at least to some extent, but let’s not forget that Mad Men is fictional, and from the 21st century, and might not accurately reflect the 1950’s.
Or more recently Train Dreams. It's a real shame we had to spend time to bury those three men who were hit by a falling tree, but the company can't afford for us to take a day off. So back to work.
The gap between performative care and actual leadership seems to be getting wider, and companies still act shocked when turnover spikes or teams quietly disengage. What the author describes isn't some dramatic abuse, it's the slow erosion of trust
This year I started to have the background ideas popping up in my mind about a future where societies put care as the main goal.
More precisely "la société du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit different as in french the term as a very large semantic network. Sure care is the closest general translation.
Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on technological side than on relevant careful social organisation, human inter-help, environmental and moral sides.
Technology is easier to track continuously with proxy metrics which regularly move up some scale. In many other areas, tracking can be more an hindrance, an inhibitor or even a cause of total extinction.
This is a very good thing to want and if you are serious about that, I would implore you to look into socialism. That’s what people who take that idea seriously have written voluminously about how to make it happen.
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", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?
This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):
`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`
So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.
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.
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.
> 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.
But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't
Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.
The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.
Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.
Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.
If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?
I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.
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 cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
So when I work with a boss that doesn't care and is mostly performative, unless we are building a product that makes the world a better place, I don't put too much heart into it. I make sure they pay me for my time, and I look for a better job.
>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 you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for. If you do care "too much," then you might just be a thorn in your boss' side. 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.
I agree with you, but lately, given the state of my industry and my personal situation I've started to fear that my company is just going to burn if we don't succeed and I need to do as much as possible to prevent that as finding a similar role is going to be pretty damn hard, I also don't have the leverage I used to have a few years ago to just change jobs. All of that has lead me to break my back and confront my boss which is extremely uncomfortable and pushing me closer to burnout. Unsure what my point is other than I wish I had the space to not care
> 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.
Let's face it. Working for other people sucks. They set the agenda. They make the decisions. Often those decisions and agendas will not be what you think is best. It maybe the case that you are correct. Go start your own thing and run it how you see fit.
Now if you want to see what a really "caring boss" is like watch this video of former employees of Musk. The real interesting thing is some of them seem to like the humiliation, lack of boundaries and over work. Similar to what groups of soldiers feel after serving in a war together and returning with PTSD. Hope the money was worth it. Personally I would avoid it but to each his own.
> 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.
To say (yes, with some moderation because it’s hyperbole) that you won’t kill yourself of your boss making a buck needs to be preempted with a “watch out, cynical-sounding opinion” incoming.
Oh wait. I forgot what this website is behind all the quirky/nerdy/hacker submissions.
It's insane to me that this even needs to be written – showing you care is just not that hard! And it absolutely doesn't have to come at the expense of business goals.
I've had some amount of success running a startup, and honestly the only thing that reliably paid off was hiring great (i.e., smart, thoughtful, kind) people and treating them like family.
Caring and showing you care can be independent. Some people care and don't show it. Some people don't care but pretend to. If you don't care, showing you care is harder, and your acts might betray your true feelings
I’m just glad to see more folks realizing the same things I’ve suffered through for much of my career. If anything, I wish my own bosses would read these words (and many more) to understand why I’m so withdrawn, so angry, so tired.
Being a leader means a constant confrontation with choosing political or organizational consequences to a decision. If all you’re doing is operating politically, your reward will always be burned out, tired, and frustrated workers who, for once, want you to do what’s in the best interests of your own organization rather than your personal political advantage. At least until a better political player than you outmaneuvers your ass, because you gave them room for growth in an organization that rewarded such behaviors.
Workers just want to do good work, make good things, get paid good money, and go home. If your decision-making as a boss regularly imperils or impairs those things, you suck as a boss.
> You can’t fake care. People feel it. In small moments, in the gaps between your words, in the way you prioritise your business over their wellbeing
This resonates with me. I've seen way too much of this "performative" care. It's pretty grating when they start sounding like therapists: "tell me how you're feeling, this must be pretty upsetting, huh?". Or, "do you need any help?" and I'd be honest and say something like - "yeah, sure, someone could assist with x, y, z", -"oh, unfortunately, we don't have anyone available". They know there is nobody there to help yet they feel like they've ticked their check-mark of showing "care".
This is one of those "you're fly is open". People can see and smell the fakeness a mile a way. There are certainly worse qualities and maybe some people enjoy this "therapeutic" approach but it's certainly not a universally better thing and shouldn't become the default. If the care is just not there I'd rather it be just plain and simple without the extra fake fluff.
Its amazing that working is so inhumane and unnatural that people break down like this. There is is nothing you can do except suck it up and create mental barriers to protect your self while participating this weird game of white collar work.
People have been writing about it for years. This is why we have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't need those things
Anonymous whining reads like slander and lack of accountability. What's amazing about that?
> working is so inhumane and unnatural
What is work supposed to be? You either keep yourself alive, or if you can't, you cooperate with others to do so.
Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard? What are you protecting yourself from except your own fragility.
My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company.
I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is often.
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.
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.
Managers are what they are, independently from their position on the ladder.
You can have a shitty or wonderful VP, same for the n+5 manager of 2 people down the pyramid. Position rarely defines leadership or setting or not good example.
I don't need my boss to care about me. I need them to care about the team succeeding, and the mission I signed up to.
I need them to show some very baseline decency and honesty so that I can somewhat trust what they say. I need them to not drive their own career at the expense of the company or team.
If the company needs to do layoffs, I want them to pick the right people to stay, to have a good shot at still doing a good job, not pick emotionally.
You don't have to care about people to understand it's better to not burn them out. Staff turnover is expensive and bad for the team performance. Quality and innovation starts suffering long before people implode.
For the care issue, I don't know how I would scale it.
For my direct reports, I care, because I have yet to have take the MBA course where they remove my empathy. Its easy to know how they feel because I have the context.
However, should I be good enough, or lucky enough to climb up the greasy pole and have reports with reports, I don't know how I would be able to scale the attention required to provide valid pastoral care to those reportees.
Large forums only really allow the extrovert, confident, brave or stupid to over supply their opinions. So its not like a group monthly meeting will allow those grumbles to be surfaced before a crisis.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on — because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Burnout and disagreeing with leadership are something we all deal with. But don't quit your job folks. It's a real rookie move. Unless you have something rock solid lined up, you will become radioactive to any potential employers, and idealism doesn't pay the mortgage.
There is a cost-benefit analysis that you need to make here.
Its not a hard and fast rule (unless you're on a visa, or tied to active healthcare), but you don't owe your employer, so killing your sense of joy for them seems unwise. The flip side is that long bits of unemployment is a redflag.
These are all true but, to phrase it in SV-speak: having good, sincere management does not scale. We would all be better off with better managers, but if we are really serious about treating workers with respect at scale, unions are the only proven solution.
As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what are you going to do about it?"
If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change.
And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness.
Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation could improve.
What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best.
Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad attitude, and communicate it to others.
Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed, eventually, in terms of their bottom lines.
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 your long term vision is and they'll set you up for it.
Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what. This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless people.
But they don't care. And I don't care. What I care about is my coworkers and boss doing their jobs with talent and integrity so we don't go out of business and I can afford to keep my home and don't have to go through the disgusting job search hoops that are required in my profession.
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 is long gone and thrown out.
Move on.
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I am in my 40s and just now I am beginning to start understanding only a part of the dynamics involved in companies. But the TL;DR is that executives want to shine and look better, always. They only care about an ever-increasing compensation _and_ bonuses. They care not about the company's long-term success.
If you are in the way of that -- with your pesky technical stability and less resource usage, being one example -- then you are an inconvenience and will be removed. They want people who help them look better to their upper echelons.
That's just one example.
From here on my playbook will be to attend more executive meetings when I start a job, and get a feel of who does what and what are their goals -- and make sure I at least don't stand in the line of the fire when sh1t hits the fan. And will always have something else lined up even if I love my current team to bits. Simply because the said said team has exactly zero say if I get to stay or get booted out simply because somebody two levels above wants a promotion and my salary is making it look like they spend too much.
(I remember how much I regretted losing one job some three years ago. I loved everyone there but I had a terrible health condition and couldn't perform. But you know what? The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me. Reason? Product is done and delivered, we don't need you anymore, nevermind that we get feature requests and the occasional bug reports all the time.)
"Nothing personal. Just business."
Well, two can play at that game. Wish me luck. I want my heart to harden. I want to stop caring. I want to learn to preserve my caring for the things that truly excite me about technology.
I might fail. But I am very quickly learning the game and I will adapt.
You're just at a different place in the curve of rationalizing other humans' behaviors and motivations and how they affect you. Your response is not invalid, but it makes me sad, because you think it's the best response for you. Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
> 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
Something I _should_ have said to my boss, and their boss the CEO:
"Shut up for 5 minutes and listen:
You have been repeating the same things for a full year, yet nothing is different or better. This is because while the message has been consistent, if vacuous, your weekly changes in direction prevent any initiatives from being successful. We won't become a "Billion Dollar Company" running like squirrels on a highway. Pick a plan, and stick with it. Grow 10% each fiscal year instead of hoping to grow 10X in a single leap.
Abject narcissism is rewarded time and time again. I think this is, at its core the problem in and of itself.
I truly believe that capitalism is the best possible system of financial discourse for the most people. I also believe that anti-trust and regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure competition at a very core level. I don't think govt should be picking winners and losers and in fact, I feel we should expressly format any govt contracts such that there are multiple suppliers. This should go towards all essential infrastructure, bar none.
I also feel that govt should act in terms of a somewhat protectionist front in favor of its own peoples. I think it comes down to real negotiation to keep it that way, but that trying to be fair is only a recipe for long term failure.
Given the inflation of the past couple years, the push to stagnate wages for white-collar work is a bit repugnant at best. The push to stagnate blue collar work is worse still. This can and will only lead to more unionization. One can only hope for a combination of local-focus and worker-lead efforts to stabilize (rebalance) the economy. I say this not in support of socialist efforts, but to keep them at bay, lest we succumb to communism in the longer term, which at a global level will stagnate society as a whole.
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 had the same reaction. The disclaimer at the bottom doesn't mention AI, but I have a feeling this was generated from a prompt to consolidate the 24 human submissions into a single essay.
Tangentially, I really look forward to the day "Not X but Y" stops being so overused by LLMs. It's a valid and useful construction in a vacuum, one which we should be able to use, but its overuse has gone past semantic satiety into something like semantic emesis.
lcuff|2 months ago
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
lll-o-lll|2 months ago
First of all, thank you for the honesty. It shows good character!
I think you are right that good character is the core of being a good manager. It’s the core of being a good person. Virtue and duty. Unfashionable words, but the secret to “happiness” (the good life). The ancient greeks understood this, and it’s been the heart of western philosophy.
We are all works in progress.
fouc|2 months ago
russelldjimmy|2 months ago
> I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this.
This makes at least the two of us. Of late, I’ve been observing how frightened my inner child becomes when it perceives not being liked. I’m straddling the line between the temptation to feel relieved by being liked and the survival-level fear when faced with disapproval. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
kakacik|2 months ago
Many such people, dare I say most similar don't ever end up realizing this during their entire lives. They just live in mode which is subpar for them and their surroundings without ever having chance to understand. So bravo for that!
Even if it may not allow you to fully conquer it, unknown monster became known, described, and this can bring some inner peace which is also source of further strength in other areas.
dasil003|2 months ago
The uncomfortable truth is that "the right thing" depends a lot on the point of view and narrative at hand. In large organizations political capital is inherently limited, even in very senior positions. It's especially challenging in large scale software development because ground-level expertise really is needed to determine "the right thing", but human communication inherently has limits. I would say most people, and especially most software engineers, have strong opinions about how things "should" be, but if they were put in charge they would quickly realize that when they describe that a hundred person org they would get a hundred different interpretations. It's hard to grok the difficulty of alignment of smart, independent thinkers at scale. When goals and roles are clear (like Apollo), that's easy mode for organizational politics. When you're building arbitrary software for humans each with their own needs and perspective, it's infinitely harder. That's what leads to saccharine corporate comms, tone deaf leaders, and the "moral mazes" Robert Jackall described 30+ years ago.
exsomet|2 months ago
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.
csours|2 months ago
It's the employee engagement survey where you want people to say that the company cares about you, and first line managers get in trouble from the results but executive leadership does not. It's the cognitive dissonance that you expect us to just deal with.
It's the lack of communication when people are fired. There's no good way to fire people, but there sure are bad ways and you've found them.
It's the times that I've told my boss about issues I'm dealing with and those issues show up in my end of year review instead of working on them together.
ProllyInfamous|2 months ago
>It's the lack of communication when people are fired.
Arriving to work, I observed the long-time janitor, whom I'd helped hire and knew very well, stuck at the entryway. He was extremely helpful albeit not too bright — I had no reason to suspect his badge had been deactivated (==fired) so I badged him in (our offices adjoined).
Janny went to work, a typical Monday, following others to clean construction-related debris (he just thought his badge broke).
Not until he tried to return from lunch, was he informed that his employment had been terminated. When I asked the facility manager "WTF, dude?!" he made some snide remark about "ooops I forgot to tell him — don't worry they're able to land on their feet anywhere" (janny was a non-white citizen).
Started looking for a new jobsite immediately after this. Ignorance and hatred are odd bed-fellows.
repeekad|2 months ago
Exactly, if you need more bandwidth hire more people, otherwise you’re burning the candle at both ends and everything suffers for it
elicash|2 months ago
I agree with the original quote, though.
slashdave|2 months ago
In the software world, the sheer focus on compensation is not helpful, especially when some of the larger tech firms promote levels of compensation that nearly all "ordinary" developers could never hope to achieve.
BrandoElFollito|2 months ago
In France burnout is not seen by the company as commitment. It is seen as either a health accident (best case) or as a fuck up on your side (worst case).
This comes from a fundamentally different approch to work (and work ethics) from the US.
eleveriven|2 months ago
yakkomajuri|2 months ago
However, that's actually a description of the site itself, not the post. There are 24 essays, one per contributor.
hitekker|2 months ago
pavel_lishin|2 months ago
hinkley|2 months ago
> And trust me, they’re talking.
Some of the people I’ve had to railroad into things say stuff like, “well this is the first I’ve heard about it.” That’s a You Problem.
The fact that nobody is discussing this with you should tell you that you’ve been cut out of the loop for being impossible to negotiate with. It’s absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
AnimalMuppet|2 months ago
Very much this. If you don't actually care about us, don't expect us to care about you or your company or the work. You're going to be left with automatons rather than creative, energetic people (even if the bodies haven't changed).
And the fact is that automatons don't make the line go up nearly as well as people who care. So the really ironic thing is, if all you care about is money, then you better care about the team. And not just care with lip service, but really care.
My current job has problems, but I'll give them this: When I wound up in the ER the weekend before a business trip, nobody was worrying about the effect on the trip.
glitchc|2 months ago
Let's not assume bygone days ever were what we think they were.
agenticfish|2 months ago
ostacke|2 months ago
_vqpz|2 months ago
georgeecollins|2 months ago
venturecruelty|2 months ago
Everything has gotten about a million times more expensive.
drivebyhooting|2 months ago
eleveriven|2 months ago
psychoslave|2 months ago
More precisely "la société du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit different as in french the term as a very large semantic network. Sure care is the closest general translation.
Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on technological side than on relevant careful social organisation, human inter-help, environmental and moral sides.
Technology is easier to track continuously with proxy metrics which regularly move up some scale. In many other areas, tracking can be more an hindrance, an inhibitor or even a cause of total extinction.
tehjoker|2 months ago
reallymental|2 months ago
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", "leadership" and all those heavy words.
It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?
This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):
`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`
So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.
marcinzm|2 months ago
the_snooze|2 months ago
forbiddenvoid|2 months ago
Aurornis|2 months ago
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.
eleveriven|2 months ago
exasperaited|2 months ago
The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.
Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.
Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
didibus|2 months ago
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
pwillia7|2 months ago
If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?
I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
css_apologist|2 months ago
ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s
firefoxd|2 months ago
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 cared more about my work and colleagues [2]. Instead, my boss was promoted and I was scrutinized.
So when I work with a boss that doesn't care and is mostly performative, unless we are building a product that makes the world a better place, I don't put too much heart into it. I make sure they pay me for my time, and I look for a better job.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806948
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456429
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21766903
everdrive|2 months ago
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 you might voice a quiet objection and then just implement the garbage your boss asked for. If you do care "too much," then you might just be a thorn in your boss' side. 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.
lentil_soup|2 months ago
Aurornis|2 months ago
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.
strangattractor|2 months ago
Now if you want to see what a really "caring boss" is like watch this video of former employees of Musk. The real interesting thing is some of them seem to like the humiliation, lack of boundaries and over work. Similar to what groups of soldiers feel after serving in a war together and returning with PTSD. Hope the money was worth it. Personally I would avoid it but to each his own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvDt0lByxJA
keybored|2 months ago
To say (yes, with some moderation because it’s hyperbole) that you won’t kill yourself of your boss making a buck needs to be preempted with a “watch out, cynical-sounding opinion” incoming.
Oh wait. I forgot what this website is behind all the quirky/nerdy/hacker submissions.
fisherjeff|2 months ago
I've had some amount of success running a startup, and honestly the only thing that reliably paid off was hiring great (i.e., smart, thoughtful, kind) people and treating them like family.
procaryote|2 months ago
stego-tech|2 months ago
Being a leader means a constant confrontation with choosing political or organizational consequences to a decision. If all you’re doing is operating politically, your reward will always be burned out, tired, and frustrated workers who, for once, want you to do what’s in the best interests of your own organization rather than your personal political advantage. At least until a better political player than you outmaneuvers your ass, because you gave them room for growth in an organization that rewarded such behaviors.
Workers just want to do good work, make good things, get paid good money, and go home. If your decision-making as a boss regularly imperils or impairs those things, you suck as a boss.
eleveriven|2 months ago
rdtsc|2 months ago
This resonates with me. I've seen way too much of this "performative" care. It's pretty grating when they start sounding like therapists: "tell me how you're feeling, this must be pretty upsetting, huh?". Or, "do you need any help?" and I'd be honest and say something like - "yeah, sure, someone could assist with x, y, z", -"oh, unfortunately, we don't have anyone available". They know there is nobody there to help yet they feel like they've ticked their check-mark of showing "care".
This is one of those "you're fly is open". People can see and smell the fakeness a mile a way. There are certainly worse qualities and maybe some people enjoy this "therapeutic" approach but it's certainly not a universally better thing and shouldn't become the default. If the care is just not there I'd rather it be just plain and simple without the extra fake fluff.
FatherOfCurses|2 months ago
tayo42|2 months ago
ctkhn|2 months ago
venturecruelty|2 months ago
nh23423fefe|2 months ago
> working is so inhumane and unnatural
What is work supposed to be? You either keep yourself alive, or if you can't, you cooperate with others to do so.
Why are you pretending like going to an office and speaking to coworkers to solve problems for customers is hard? What are you protecting yourself from except your own fragility.
orzig|2 months ago
My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company.
I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is often.
cons0le|2 months ago
jcalvinowens|2 months ago
WhyOhWhyQ|2 months ago
eleveriven|2 months ago
whatamidoingyo|2 months ago
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.
macintux|2 months ago
ls-a|2 months ago
VoodooJuJu|2 months ago
[deleted]
thewileyone|2 months ago
The Whatsapp corollary is if your team has a separate chat group without you in it, you should look at your leadership style.
supjeff|2 months ago
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.
BrandoElFollito|2 months ago
You can have a shitty or wonderful VP, same for the n+5 manager of 2 people down the pyramid. Position rarely defines leadership or setting or not good example.
procaryote|2 months ago
I need them to show some very baseline decency and honesty so that I can somewhat trust what they say. I need them to not drive their own career at the expense of the company or team.
If the company needs to do layoffs, I want them to pick the right people to stay, to have a good shot at still doing a good job, not pick emotionally.
You don't have to care about people to understand it's better to not burn them out. Staff turnover is expensive and bad for the team performance. Quality and innovation starts suffering long before people implode.
KaiserPro|2 months ago
For the care issue, I don't know how I would scale it.
For my direct reports, I care, because I have yet to have take the MBA course where they remove my empathy. Its easy to know how they feel because I have the context.
However, should I be good enough, or lucky enough to climb up the greasy pole and have reports with reports, I don't know how I would be able to scale the attention required to provide valid pastoral care to those reportees.
Large forums only really allow the extrovert, confident, brave or stupid to over supply their opinions. So its not like a group monthly meeting will allow those grumbles to be surfaced before a crisis.
mordae|2 months ago
truth_seeker|2 months ago
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on — because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
― Noam Chomsky
ramesh31|2 months ago
KaiserPro|2 months ago
Its not a hard and fast rule (unless you're on a visa, or tied to active healthcare), but you don't owe your employer, so killing your sense of joy for them seems unwise. The flip side is that long bits of unemployment is a redflag.
ElevenLathe|2 months ago
ArcHound|2 months ago
If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change.
And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness.
Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation could improve.
AnimalMuppet|2 months ago
Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad attitude, and communicate it to others.
Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed, eventually, in terms of their bottom lines.
tehjoker|2 months ago
ProllyInfamous|2 months ago
>If you hire your own prodigal child, I'm quitting effective immediately.
May we both suceed in our future untogetherness.
CaptWillard|2 months ago
I've been very lucky to work for some great people, even/especially when the situation above them is borked.
dclowd9901|2 months ago
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 your long term vision is and they'll set you up for it.
Let us do our work and we'll do it well. Stop micromanaging engineers and stop telling us how, and instead, tell us what. This is software: it doesn't take a ton of people to make a product that's profitable. Stop burning capital on useless people.
cons0le|2 months ago
dwoldrich|2 months ago
squeefers|2 months ago
hnlurker22|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
hnlurker22|2 months ago
lukashahnart|2 months ago
grimgrin|2 months ago
in desktop firefox I ctrl-shift-m to compact the left/right'isms of the design
295fge|2 months ago
pdimitar|2 months ago
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 is long gone and thrown out.
Move on.
---
I am in my 40s and just now I am beginning to start understanding only a part of the dynamics involved in companies. But the TL;DR is that executives want to shine and look better, always. They only care about an ever-increasing compensation _and_ bonuses. They care not about the company's long-term success.
If you are in the way of that -- with your pesky technical stability and less resource usage, being one example -- then you are an inconvenience and will be removed. They want people who help them look better to their upper echelons.
That's just one example.
From here on my playbook will be to attend more executive meetings when I start a job, and get a feel of who does what and what are their goals -- and make sure I at least don't stand in the line of the fire when sh1t hits the fan. And will always have something else lined up even if I love my current team to bits. Simply because the said said team has exactly zero say if I get to stay or get booted out simply because somebody two levels above wants a promotion and my salary is making it look like they spend too much.
(I remember how much I regretted losing one job some three years ago. I loved everyone there but I had a terrible health condition and couldn't perform. But you know what? The guy who was practically doing 80% of everything there, all the time, got fired a year and half after me. Reason? Product is done and delivered, we don't need you anymore, nevermind that we get feature requests and the occasional bug reports all the time.)
"Nothing personal. Just business."
Well, two can play at that game. Wish me luck. I want my heart to harden. I want to stop caring. I want to learn to preserve my caring for the things that truly excite me about technology.
I might fail. But I am very quickly learning the game and I will adapt.
I wish OP does the same.
rhyperior|2 months ago
You're just at a different place in the curve of rationalizing other humans' behaviors and motivations and how they affect you. Your response is not invalid, but it makes me sad, because you think it's the best response for you. Why wouldn't you instead hold on to your empathy and make it your super power?
cons0le|2 months ago
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
kermatt|2 months ago
"Shut up for 5 minutes and listen:
You have been repeating the same things for a full year, yet nothing is different or better. This is because while the message has been consistent, if vacuous, your weekly changes in direction prevent any initiatives from being successful. We won't become a "Billion Dollar Company" running like squirrels on a highway. Pick a plan, and stick with it. Grow 10% each fiscal year instead of hoping to grow 10X in a single leap.
In other words, grow up."
tracker1|2 months ago
I truly believe that capitalism is the best possible system of financial discourse for the most people. I also believe that anti-trust and regulatory bodies have a responsibility to ensure competition at a very core level. I don't think govt should be picking winners and losers and in fact, I feel we should expressly format any govt contracts such that there are multiple suppliers. This should go towards all essential infrastructure, bar none.
I also feel that govt should act in terms of a somewhat protectionist front in favor of its own peoples. I think it comes down to real negotiation to keep it that way, but that trying to be fair is only a recipe for long term failure.
Given the inflation of the past couple years, the push to stagnate wages for white-collar work is a bit repugnant at best. The push to stagnate blue collar work is worse still. This can and will only lead to more unionization. One can only hope for a combination of local-focus and worker-lead efforts to stabilize (rebalance) the economy. I say this not in support of socialist efforts, but to keep them at bay, lest we succumb to communism in the longer term, which at a global level will stagnate society as a whole.
jadenconelly6|2 months ago
[deleted]
anders35|2 months ago
[deleted]
beeboop0|2 months ago
[deleted]
ivanovm|2 months ago
forbiddenvoid|2 months ago
jnovek|2 months ago
grimgrin|2 months ago
perhaps they blur their poetry
did they use an LLM in 2020: https://www.ithoughtaboutthatalot.com/2020/how-much-the-worl...
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
gryfft|2 months ago
Tangentially, I really look forward to the day "Not X but Y" stops being so overused by LLMs. It's a valid and useful construction in a vacuum, one which we should be able to use, but its overuse has gone past semantic satiety into something like semantic emesis.
BoredPositron|2 months ago
linhns|2 months ago