The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom.
Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.
The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.
The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.
At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.
Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.
So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.
Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.
On a related note, some of the more effective companies I've worked for have had strong "up or out" cultures. Now, I know that this sounds harsh and draconian at first. And it conjures up images of political intrigue, heated power struggles, and corporate backstabbing. But truth be told, I've actually found those evils to be more prevalent in companies that don't cull their dead weight.
What happens is that these firms accumulate a vast, stagnant layer of middle and upper management types who have no incentive to work any harder, take new risks, or develop talented employees. Instead, they're simply cashing in on a safe paycheck, riding a pretty cushy high horse, and fiercely fending off anyone they perceive to be competition for their sweet gigs.
Compounding this problem is the fact that mobility slows to a crawl, because the queue is full. This breeds dissatisfaction with the young, ambitious types, while simultaneously breeding resentment among the older, entrenched types who adopt the grumbly "kids these days..." defensive mentality.
Now, there are plenty of ways to screw up the up-or-out system: bad KPIs and standards, inept evaluation processes, etc. But no system is perfect, and at least a system that forces honest dialogue with managers about their future advancement prospects is better than a system wherein lousy managers can overstay their welcome.
The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place.
My company does this all the time. Didn't do well enough at the job interview or you're a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They'll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don't care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies).
It's a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.
"At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects."
That assumes the Hogwarts Hat of random allocation doesn't land you with a stinker from the get-go. And I speak from personal experience that it occasionally does. If I had been able to change projects to something more relevant to my skills, I would still be there.
There have been far too many stories of arbitrary google managers both here and elsewhere to keep putting forth the story that if one goes to google, one can simply change projects if one doesn't like what they're doing.
"For the most part, Google is held together by duct tape. Management quality is clearly below what's required for a company of this size. In a lot of cases managers are simply too junior and lack people skills."
Your prodigious propagandization of your paymaster is praiseworthy, but you don't need to take michaelochurch seriously to perceive this isn't a perfect picture of paradise.
>The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.
Exactly.
It doesn't just hurt the employees, but the company (kingdom) as a whole. The managers (lords) concern themselves primarily with expanding their departments (fiefdoms), typically at the expense of other managers, rather than working to grow the company or improve the quality of life within it.
This leads to a mentality of collecting more rather than better staff, ass covering rather than innovating and all sorts of other bullshit.
That is the theory at Google. And then there is the practice. Which varies across the organization, and can be influenced by the manager in a lot of ways.
Let's just say, I've heard rumor that my manager was asked to leave not too long after I was. And the circumstances of my leaving were not entirely unconnected.
Here we are still mucking about in the echoes of the late 19th century trying to make these outmoded models work, in education, in politics, in the workplace. There is too much inertia due to power dynamics and due to government control, things won't change until people start proving there are better ways.
>Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.
I guess it depends on your definition of slavery. Most serfs had some degree of autonomy and self-determination even if they were forced to pay tribute unfairly.
So that incites us to ask, how is it any different today, when we are also forced to pay a [quite hefty] tribute to the government simply for collecting money? We all have some form of autonomy, but the government has demonstration that only exists so long as we pay tribute and sacrifice the fruits of our labors. Same story as a serf, who would be granted a parcel and expected to pay a tribute to his lord or suffer serious infractions of basic rights to self-determination.
This is a great post, but my experience with Google is that it doesn't empower individual engineers until they reach the Sr. SWE or Staff SWE levels. There's a Real Googler Line, which seems to be somewhere in the Senior SWE tier. If you're above it, you have independent credibility and you can change projects and as long as you're not a total flake about it, you get enough opportunities that you can find a place where you shine. If you're below the RGL, you get locked out by headcount limitations and your best hope is, after 18 months, to transfer to a slightly less bad project.
What you're discussing is the Credibility Drought. Companies define credibility so that only managers have it, in order to create an artificial scarcity that makes employees easier to control. That's what enables the managerial extortion that forces employees to serve local goals (the manager's own career) rather than the benefit of the company (or the growth of the individual).
Very few companies formally allow a manager to unilaterally fire. That's way too much of an HR/lawsuit risk. Instead, these closed-allocation dinosaur companies define credibility in such a limited way that managers can either support or not support the employee, and then if the person is not supported, that person's credibility is zero and the manager isn't firing that person. "The company" does it, after "careful review" of "objective" performance statistics. On top of this, they set tight headcount limits so that for anyone to get a good project requires a special favor, allowing the company to say "no" and appear consistent on the matter.
Google is aware enough of this problem to allow engineers at above a certain level to acquire independent credibility.
At Staff, you can pull a Yegge (quit your project in public) and be OK. If you're a SWE 3 and you try that, you're fucked.
So Google may be different from the full-on closed-allocation nightmare corporation, but you only if you either (a) start at a senior level, or (b) get on visible, desirable projects when you start, so you can get promotions quickly. The only time it isn't difficult to transfer to something better is immediately after a promotion (and there are some managers who withhold promotions to keep people captive; Google, to its credit, has a system that occasionally overrides managerial objections to promo).
The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%. It's still pretty awful for a large percentage of people who work there, and the fact that it's so much better than most of what else is out there is a damnation of Corporate America, not an endorsement of Google.
I am considering leaving my job for this precise reason. I feel if I worked under anyone else I would enjoy what I am doing but currently it is impossible.
The problem is the guy has no managerial skills. Employee moral across the company is rock bottom. We get tasks day-to-day because he cannot plan ahead. We often drop projects to work on something else, only to drop them and work on what we was originally. Manager never sends final designs or when he does they later change anyway. (These are not tweaks, tweaks are understandable. This is the entire page layout) I could go on...
Why haven't I quit already? I am currently indispensable to the company I work for. I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate. The short term plan is to continue being miserable.
NOTE: I would go around my manager if I could. Unfortunately it is a team of 7 and its this guys company.
>I am currently indispensable to the company I work for.
That was me a few years ago.
I ended up putting up with it for an incredibly stressful 18 months and leaving anyway.
If I could do it all over again, I would have made a stand leveraging my indispensability. Either I succeed and effect change or fail and leave anyway.
>I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate.
Obviously, you'll want to find a new job before you quit, not the other way around. Less obviously, consider the impact of your "rock bottom" morale and apparently dead-end job on your family.
>The short term plan is to continue being miserable.
Short term plans have a way of becoming regrets without a long term plan.
I think you've outlined just how undervalued managerial skills actually are. I have seen many that have claimed that they can take up a manager's position yet can barely manage relationships with their friends.
I think that relationship skills are key to being a manager, in addition to all the other planning etc.
I'm not sure how approachable your manager is but it sounds like he needs help from you to bring moral up. A leader does not necessarily have to be a manager but of course, with everything, do at your own discretion.
Sounds like the situation I found myself in. I stuck around because I felt I was indispensable and I felt a sense of loyalty. In the end, I got fired because the boss wanted to "change things up" since he wasn't getting things done as quickly as he wanted (mostly his fault for changing requirements). It took me less than 2 weeks to find a new job. There is no reason that you can't start looking for a new job while still working for your current company.
Well I was going to ask if you couldn't go over the manager, but by the time i clicked reply you'd added:
> its this guys company.
well… can't you try to find an other job for that? While working for the company? If he's the owner, I don't see why you'd care for being indispensable, it's not a case of an asshole manager in a great company it's a broken company.
While I am not sure of your locale, here in New York the job market is booming with a great pick of companies to work for. Even then, you can always look without quitting beforehand. If a company is interested in you, they will be happy to interview you on off hours.
Anecdotally, I spent 2 years at Microsoft (MSN division). I loved my manager to death, and telling him I was leaving felt kind of like breaking up with a long-term girlfriend. But MSN was a supremely depressing place to work because there was a palpable sense that nothing we did mattered, and Microsoft was simply running out the clock on those [hundreds of millions] of people who haven't figured out how to change their browser homepage away from msn.com. I left the company, not the person.
So while the lesson of this post -- that managing is important and a good manager can greatly increase employee retention -- is well taken, the headline is certainly overstated.
I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.
I think regularly scheduled (annual? bi-annual?) skip-level meetings would be a good approach to this. A skip-level meeting is one where the employee meets with his boss's boss.
BTW, the skip-level concept is something I gleaned from the Manager Tools podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning how to manage better (or even, just, understand organizational behavior).
Semco in Brazil does (or used to) performance reviews of management by peers and subordinates. I found the book wrote by the company's "CEO"/owner fascinating: "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace", not sure why I don't see it mentioned often in HN/startup sites.
I like the concept of putting managers on some sort of performance track. That is an interesting idea. I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.
How would you handle employee review in such a case? Managers could no longer review employees, it would cause too much gaming the system in either retaliatory or you scratch my back I'll scratch yours sort of rigging. Not that I disagree with you.
I've left two organisations (BBC and Sony) and neither time did I have any problem with my direct manager in fact in both cases I liked them although I did have a lack of faith the top management and the direction of at least my area of the organisation.
In the BBC case (amongst other issues) my department was earmarked to be moved to Manchester (about 200 miles away) in about 4 years. I was clear (for family reasons) that I wouldn't be moving so staying would have felt like a personal dead end to me (although later the BBC's plan changed and much of the department moved into London instead which might have been OK but the lack of thought through initial decision was a really bad sign about the senior management).
At Sony it was a general lack of faith that the management had enough capability that Sony could become a profitable, viable, mass market electronics company again. That made me happy to leave to see what I could do on my own and be home to take and collect my son from school.
Odd... I've never even worked at any one company for 2 years, so... making work plans based on what someone decides will probably happen in 4 years is simply incomprehensible to me.
The few companies I've worked at have taught me that for the most part, companies can't do much real planning beyond 6 mos to a year at most - the stuff we considered important in 2006 was often irrelevant by 2007 because of changes in the market conditions, competition, etc. Planning out moves that far ahead is probably necessary in some situations, but I've seen enough of those 'long term plans' have to change anyway that I don't actually believe many of them.
First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway.
Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit.
Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt...
I agree. I've left sometimes for bad managers, sometimes for bad company. Oh, and once it was both. Honestly, it was so sweet when the guy asked what they could do to keep me and I answered "don't bother" with a giant smile.
When my dad left one of his previous jobs, in which he was a manager of about 10-15 people; 3 of his team quit within the week. One of them told him that he was the best manager he'd ever worked under, and that he couldn't face working in that company with anyone else.
If I ever end up in a management position, that's the sort of manager I want to be.
This article unfortunately resonates on a personal level. This is why I believe I enjoy consulting so much. On a short term basis I can put up with ignorance, credit taking, silent treatment etc (All the qualities respondents mentioned in the survey). For a long term career I'm not sure I could last.
I'm curious if anyone has any stories of how they overcame a Manager that was not their Champion? I have been thinking about this a lot. In my short time at large corporations it seems you really need someone on your side to move up the ladder a bit.
In other words, I could be working for the most awesome, charismatic manager in the world but if I'm being paid significantly below Market Rate, I'd still leave.
I offer a corollary, "Employees follow leaders, not managers."
At one time I considered leaving a company I believed strongly in, due to an immediate manager with which I didn't work well. However, I looked higher in the organization to the leader(ship) I believed in and decided to stay. I'm glad I did, because the management problem rectified itself soon enough and now I follow good leaders and learn from a great mentor.
I think there is a tidal change in software at the moment - imagine the Venn diagram of remote working technologies, continuous integration technologies and a willingness to shed middle manager white collar jobs like never before.
As we can enable people to work from home, because we can see the code they wrote today up and working on the CI server, we can do away with needing a boss to telll them what to do and watch if they do it - in fact we can pass the autonomy many bosses have down the line - and I hope see a world where the developer says - I have done this cool thing and it has improved our bottom line because I measured this change.
A culture of Continuous Integration, testing changes for business KPIs allows us to let go of the middle rank of supervision, and allows us to change the working conditions now the supervision is unnecessary
For me the best solution is to stay small - keep the organisation under the dunbar number. That way a competant CEO can manage the politics personally, and guide the culture effectively.
But if you are going to grow, you need one of these proxy solutions.
To me there are two outstanding solutions:
1. Free Labour Market
2. "add or out"
1. Google-like - have projects and allow engineers to move around to join different projects, and adjust via funding. THis is trying to create an internal job market, and may or may not be effective but its a response to Dunbars number problem.
2. "add or out" - add measurable value, or the worst performing 10% leave. This forces a culture of testing and measuring value, and whilst it is subject to being gamed, it might be workable.
Best way to handle this? Get rid of management. Flat hierarchy. Just to make sure to hire really smart engineers. Code it, test it, ship it.
If two forces opposite each other, put it in a hackathon and gain votes.
If the manager does not provide direction, ask for it. If they still do not provide direction, set your own. The grass always looks greener on the other side. Sometimes, you are the problem, not the manager.
Reminds me of the story about the traveler and the new city. He left because he thought the people there were horrible. Upon arriving at the gate of the new city, he asked a man sitting by the gate, "How are the people here in this city?" To which the sitting man replied, "How were they in the city you came from?" "Oh... they were horrible, mean people."
On the day I put in my notice for my last job I found out that my immediate manager had put in his notice as well the day before, much for the same reasons I did. I liked working for the guy so quitting felt bad. Basically choices made by upper management made the working environment not so good and we had decided to move on. Turns out we weren't the only ones, within three weeks five out of six of the web team left and gutted the department.
Nice to see this discussion on HN. Back in early 2000, when I worked at Walmart's home office in Bentonville, we had a speaker come and talk to ISD about this exact topic. That was the main line that stuck with me, "Employees leave managers, not companies". It's probably not the case 100% of the time for causing the loss of an employee, but having a good manager makes all the world of a difference in an employee's happiness.
I had an MBA roommate once and frequently read her books on management culture. I've never actually seen what was used in those books put into practice, but my experience is relatively small (once a manager).
The books talked about the Organizational Cultural Assessment Index (OCAI) and a manager capabilities assessment test (cannot remember the name). Anyone out there used these?
These seemed like reasonable, standard approaches to improving the workplace.
I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.
This issue stems, in my experience, from the top of an individual department or location (if it's a franchise). The top level management in large companies couldn't possibly supervise all their department managers at the same time. So things fly by under the radar that shouldn't because they don't have stringent enough criteria for employee satisfaction and manager competency.
I recall this happening when I used to work at P.F. Chang's (the restaurant chain).
We had a general manager who was absolutely loathsome to work with. We frequently ran out of the kinds of food you'd be embarrassed to lack at a Chinese restaurant (read: white and brown rice, lettuce, etc). However, he had a stellar reputation and history with "corporate" and had even won awards within the company.
The reasons this happened were twofold: 1. he was the general manager, and in the eyes of corporate he was just saving money (they never saw the restaurant descend into chaos and dysfunction due to lack of ingredients), and 2. he was honestly kind of a dick. Unless you were above him on the pay scale he would respond to suggestions with, "I'll take that under advisement."
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.
The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.
The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.
At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.
Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.
So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.
Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|13 years ago|reply
What happens is that these firms accumulate a vast, stagnant layer of middle and upper management types who have no incentive to work any harder, take new risks, or develop talented employees. Instead, they're simply cashing in on a safe paycheck, riding a pretty cushy high horse, and fiercely fending off anyone they perceive to be competition for their sweet gigs.
Compounding this problem is the fact that mobility slows to a crawl, because the queue is full. This breeds dissatisfaction with the young, ambitious types, while simultaneously breeding resentment among the older, entrenched types who adopt the grumbly "kids these days..." defensive mentality.
Now, there are plenty of ways to screw up the up-or-out system: bad KPIs and standards, inept evaluation processes, etc. But no system is perfect, and at least a system that forces honest dialogue with managers about their future advancement prospects is better than a system wherein lousy managers can overstay their welcome.
[+] [-] VexXtreme|13 years ago|reply
My company does this all the time. Didn't do well enough at the job interview or you're a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They'll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don't care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies).
It's a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.
[+] [-] varelse|13 years ago|reply
That assumes the Hogwarts Hat of random allocation doesn't land you with a stinker from the get-go. And I speak from personal experience that it occasionally does. If I had been able to change projects to something more relevant to my skills, I would still be there.
There have been far too many stories of arbitrary google managers both here and elsewhere to keep putting forth the story that if one goes to google, one can simply change projects if one doesn't like what they're doing.
Just one example from http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Google-Reviews-E9079.htm
"For the most part, Google is held together by duct tape. Management quality is clearly below what's required for a company of this size. In a lot of cases managers are simply too junior and lack people skills."
[+] [-] codewright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incision|13 years ago|reply
Exactly.
It doesn't just hurt the employees, but the company (kingdom) as a whole. The managers (lords) concern themselves primarily with expanding their departments (fiefdoms), typically at the expense of other managers, rather than working to grow the company or improve the quality of life within it.
This leads to a mentality of collecting more rather than better staff, ass covering rather than innovating and all sorts of other bullshit.
[+] [-] DufusM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
Let's just say, I've heard rumor that my manager was asked to leave not too long after I was. And the circumstances of my leaving were not entirely unconnected.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|13 years ago|reply
The most important point making it like slavery was the fact that serfs couldn't leave their fiefdom.
That's where the analogy to a modern corporation breaks down - employees can quit whenever they want.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|13 years ago|reply
I guess it depends on your definition of slavery. Most serfs had some degree of autonomy and self-determination even if they were forced to pay tribute unfairly.
So that incites us to ask, how is it any different today, when we are also forced to pay a [quite hefty] tribute to the government simply for collecting money? We all have some form of autonomy, but the government has demonstration that only exists so long as we pay tribute and sacrifice the fruits of our labors. Same story as a serf, who would be granted a parcel and expected to pay a tribute to his lord or suffer serious infractions of basic rights to self-determination.
[+] [-] yuhong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|13 years ago|reply
Add in the ability to occasionally submit votes that are statistically irrelevant and you've got modern Western democracy.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
What you're discussing is the Credibility Drought. Companies define credibility so that only managers have it, in order to create an artificial scarcity that makes employees easier to control. That's what enables the managerial extortion that forces employees to serve local goals (the manager's own career) rather than the benefit of the company (or the growth of the individual).
Very few companies formally allow a manager to unilaterally fire. That's way too much of an HR/lawsuit risk. Instead, these closed-allocation dinosaur companies define credibility in such a limited way that managers can either support or not support the employee, and then if the person is not supported, that person's credibility is zero and the manager isn't firing that person. "The company" does it, after "careful review" of "objective" performance statistics. On top of this, they set tight headcount limits so that for anyone to get a good project requires a special favor, allowing the company to say "no" and appear consistent on the matter.
Google is aware enough of this problem to allow engineers at above a certain level to acquire independent credibility.
At Staff, you can pull a Yegge (quit your project in public) and be OK. If you're a SWE 3 and you try that, you're fucked.
So Google may be different from the full-on closed-allocation nightmare corporation, but you only if you either (a) start at a senior level, or (b) get on visible, desirable projects when you start, so you can get promotions quickly. The only time it isn't difficult to transfer to something better is immediately after a promotion (and there are some managers who withhold promotions to keep people captive; Google, to its credit, has a system that occasionally overrides managerial objections to promo).
The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%. It's still pretty awful for a large percentage of people who work there, and the fact that it's so much better than most of what else is out there is a damnation of Corporate America, not an endorsement of Google.
[+] [-] bobsy|13 years ago|reply
The problem is the guy has no managerial skills. Employee moral across the company is rock bottom. We get tasks day-to-day because he cannot plan ahead. We often drop projects to work on something else, only to drop them and work on what we was originally. Manager never sends final designs or when he does they later change anyway. (These are not tweaks, tweaks are understandable. This is the entire page layout) I could go on...
Why haven't I quit already? I am currently indispensable to the company I work for. I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate. The short term plan is to continue being miserable.
NOTE: I would go around my manager if I could. Unfortunately it is a team of 7 and its this guys company.
[+] [-] incision|13 years ago|reply
That was me a few years ago.
I ended up putting up with it for an incredibly stressful 18 months and leaving anyway.
If I could do it all over again, I would have made a stand leveraging my indispensability. Either I succeed and effect change or fail and leave anyway.
>I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate.
Obviously, you'll want to find a new job before you quit, not the other way around. Less obviously, consider the impact of your "rock bottom" morale and apparently dead-end job on your family.
>The short term plan is to continue being miserable.
Short term plans have a way of becoming regrets without a long term plan.
[+] [-] jtreminio|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gawker|13 years ago|reply
I think that relationship skills are key to being a manager, in addition to all the other planning etc.
I'm not sure how approachable your manager is but it sounds like he needs help from you to bring moral up. A leader does not necessarily have to be a manager but of course, with everything, do at your own discretion.
[+] [-] blktiger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|13 years ago|reply
> its this guys company.
well… can't you try to find an other job for that? While working for the company? If he's the owner, I don't see why you'd care for being indispensable, it's not a case of an asshole manager in a great company it's a broken company.
Also, you probably aren't indispensable.
[+] [-] elliottcarlson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acslater00|13 years ago|reply
So while the lesson of this post -- that managing is important and a good manager can greatly increase employee retention -- is well taken, the headline is certainly overstated.
[+] [-] binarymax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Notre1|13 years ago|reply
BTW, the skip-level concept is something I gleaned from the Manager Tools podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning how to manage better (or even, just, understand organizational behavior).
http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/04/skip-levels
[+] [-] fduran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirkus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonemetal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arctangent|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback
[+] [-] adventureloop|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephlord|13 years ago|reply
In the BBC case (amongst other issues) my department was earmarked to be moved to Manchester (about 200 miles away) in about 4 years. I was clear (for family reasons) that I wouldn't be moving so staying would have felt like a personal dead end to me (although later the BBC's plan changed and much of the department moved into London instead which might have been OK but the lack of thought through initial decision was a really bad sign about the senior management).
At Sony it was a general lack of faith that the management had enough capability that Sony could become a profitable, viable, mass market electronics company again. That made me happy to leave to see what I could do on my own and be home to take and collect my son from school.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|13 years ago|reply
The few companies I've worked at have taught me that for the most part, companies can't do much real planning beyond 6 mos to a year at most - the stuff we considered important in 2006 was often irrelevant by 2007 because of changes in the market conditions, competition, etc. Planning out moves that far ahead is probably necessary in some situations, but I've seen enough of those 'long term plans' have to change anyway that I don't actually believe many of them.
[+] [-] speeder|13 years ago|reply
But I disagree that people don't leave companies.
First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway.
Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit.
Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt...
So no, sometimes the fault is of the company.
But sometimes.
Asshat managers can make people go away too.
[+] [-] narag|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotmay|13 years ago|reply
If I ever end up in a management position, that's the sort of manager I want to be.
[+] [-] kirkus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikj54|13 years ago|reply
I'm curious if anyone has any stories of how they overcame a Manager that was not their Champion? I have been thinking about this a lot. In my short time at large corporations it seems you really need someone on your side to move up the ladder a bit.
[+] [-] gadders|13 years ago|reply
In other words, I could be working for the most awesome, charismatic manager in the world but if I'm being paid significantly below Market Rate, I'd still leave.
[+] [-] darkspaten|13 years ago|reply
At one time I considered leaving a company I believed strongly in, due to an immediate manager with which I didn't work well. However, I looked higher in the organization to the leader(ship) I believed in and decided to stay. I'm glad I did, because the management problem rectified itself soon enough and now I follow good leaders and learn from a great mentor.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|13 years ago|reply
As we can enable people to work from home, because we can see the code they wrote today up and working on the CI server, we can do away with needing a boss to telll them what to do and watch if they do it - in fact we can pass the autonomy many bosses have down the line - and I hope see a world where the developer says - I have done this cool thing and it has improved our bottom line because I measured this change.
A culture of Continuous Integration, testing changes for business KPIs allows us to let go of the middle rank of supervision, and allows us to change the working conditions now the supervision is unnecessary
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|13 years ago|reply
But if you are going to grow, you need one of these proxy solutions.
To me there are two outstanding solutions:
1. Free Labour Market 2. "add or out"
1. Google-like - have projects and allow engineers to move around to join different projects, and adjust via funding. THis is trying to create an internal job market, and may or may not be effective but its a response to Dunbars number problem.
2. "add or out" - add measurable value, or the worst performing 10% leave. This forces a culture of testing and measuring value, and whilst it is subject to being gamed, it might be workable.
[+] [-] PonyGumbo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirkus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seivan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 16s|13 years ago|reply
Reminds me of the story about the traveler and the new city. He left because he thought the people there were horrible. Upon arriving at the gate of the new city, he asked a man sitting by the gate, "How are the people here in this city?" To which the sitting man replied, "How were they in the city you came from?" "Oh... they were horrible, mean people."
"You'll find them the same here."
[+] [-] talmand|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkeel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breckenedge|13 years ago|reply
The books talked about the Organizational Cultural Assessment Index (OCAI) and a manager capabilities assessment test (cannot remember the name). Anyone out there used these?
These seemed like reasonable, standard approaches to improving the workplace.
[+] [-] stoodder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylangs1030|13 years ago|reply
I recall this happening when I used to work at P.F. Chang's (the restaurant chain).
We had a general manager who was absolutely loathsome to work with. We frequently ran out of the kinds of food you'd be embarrassed to lack at a Chinese restaurant (read: white and brown rice, lettuce, etc). However, he had a stellar reputation and history with "corporate" and had even won awards within the company.
The reasons this happened were twofold: 1. he was the general manager, and in the eyes of corporate he was just saving money (they never saw the restaurant descend into chaos and dysfunction due to lack of ingredients), and 2. he was honestly kind of a dick. Unless you were above him on the pay scale he would respond to suggestions with, "I'll take that under advisement."