I really don't enjoy the tone here. The derision with which it speaks about managers, like they are either evil or incompetent, is unfair in my experience.
(my) Managers are just people. They have a task, they do their best to get that task done. Sometimes they decisions that seem bad to me. Often that is because I misunderstand their goals. Sometimes, it is because I know something they don't, and something they couldn't verify if I told them. And other times, they just made a mistake, or weren't told the relevant information by me or others.
Indeed, sometimes their goals are somewhat self serving. But often it just has to do with wider business goals than what I am working at. I am grateful for them keeping an eye on those. Leaving me to worry less about the biggest of pictures. That however, doesn't mean I should just bog down on the small picture of my work, and deem everything that seems bad in that context as stupid.
Your experience is atypical: most people will encounter bad managers in their careers, and more so in this industry, which deifies youth (twentysomethings managing people is a poor idea, period, as are teams comprising only twentysomethings).
Things are further exacerbated by the reality that SV has above-average people in the technical sphere, but way below average people in the people-management sphere. Management in SV is all about people-management, and managers' decisions affect people much more than in other industries. Another factor that contributes to this state of affairs is the high growth rate of companies: people become managers by default, and high growth is difficult to navigate without prior experience. Even when managers have prior experience, when the inevitable fall from high growth occurs, is is very difficult to manage people who turn disillusioned and demotivated. In all this, HR usually are a team that plays only for themselves: they prevent rapid hiring and firing of people who do not perform, causing problems, and they also prevent rank-and-file grievances from being heard by squashing them at the earliest opportunity. This is common in many industries, not just technology. HR is mostly staffed by underachievers with a mean streak --- high-achievers usually opt for engineering and finance, if they have spent time acquiring the specific skills that are needed for these functions, or sales if they have the personality and the drive to persuade customers. The rotten apples end up with HR (marketing comes a close second, but since sales performance directly affects marketing budgets, HR is the best place for these types to last).
The article ends with "reasonable exchanges are only possible with reasonable people". If you have an unreasonable manager or are dependent upon unreasonable people, there is no amount of meditation upon unaligned goals or rationalisation that will change the situation. Expecting everyone to act rationally in the best interests of a shared goal is an exercise in frustration and a fast track to burnout.
I think the article casts to many people ("All managers") as unreasonable. That seems significantly wrong to me, and feels like it would be counter productive.
This is a very cynical take that applies wildly general negative sentiment and statements to a huge group of people. It's not just about workplace dynamics. I couldn't keep reading after the ~5th paragraph where the (not so subtle) point is: how can _these people_ live with themselves?
I'll copy the relevant paragraph below:
> Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers?
Sorry, but this is insane. You're generalizing millions of people here. Imagine this type of statement made towards a cultural subgroup rather than a profession. What would we call it?
edit: removed quotes in the first paragraph to reduce confusion around attribution, as per post below. I don't have time to reply in-depth right now but I appreciate the rebuttal and I'll give it a shot later.
* Executive ethics focus on maximizing shareholder value, while individual incentives, on personal returns. If I can pollute a lake for an extra buck to my stock price, I'm expected to do this.
* HR ethics focus on protecting the company. If they can lie to you as an employee to minimize legal risk, that's what's gonna happen.
* Legal ethics focusing on protecting your client (no matter how evil), while practice focuses on maximizing billable hours.
... and so on. It's not good or bad. It just is. As a programmer, you'll be off-putting to people from those groups for reasons just as valid or invalid.
And generalizations are often accurate. If you don't show a certain modesty and humility in gift-receiving in China, you'll be an outcast. If you don't show a certain opulence and over-the-top gratitude in some parts of the Middle East and show the same, you'll be an outcast just as much.
Guess what happens when the two cultures come together?
People are viewed as jerks.
A little cross-cultural training goes a long ways to avoid that. I'm sorry you don't like the tone, but I viewed this as a fair guide for programmers managing corporate settings running into those barriers. This article appears to do a fine job explaining HR's role to people coming from e.g. CS undergrad degrees which will prevent them from getting hurt. It's no better or worse than a guide for e.g. American women as to what to expect if they marry someone from Saudi culture.
As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines. That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here.
> A little cross-cultural training goes a long ways to avoid that. I'm sorry you don't like the tone, but I viewed this as a fair guide for programmers managing corporate settings running into those barriers. T
> his article appears to do a fine job explaining HR's role to people coming from e.g. CS undergrad degrees which will prevent them from getting hurt. It's no better or worse than a guide for e.g. American women as to what to expect if they marry someone from Saudi culture.
I agree that cross cultural training is important, and indeed what is needed here. But I don't think this article is framed properly to be seen as cross cultural training. Instead this article portrays one culture only as seen from the other. It lacks the opposite view, failing to consider how the management culture might perceive the coders. The article neither suggests that the actions by management might be a reasonable response from their culture, nor does it suggest ways to better interact.
> If you don't show a certain modesty and humility in gift-receiving in China, you'll be an outcast. If you don't show a certain opulence and over-the-top gratitude in some parts of the Middle East and show the same, you'll be an outcast just as much.
In the context of this analogy, this article would be much like a Chinese rant on "how all Middle Easteners are Jerks for displaying their opulence, and therefore cannot be trusted". That is not an article that helps in cross-cultural training.
Point well taken about culture and great examples. I completely agree with your premise.
However, tone is an extremely important part of cross-cultural training, and the tone of this article takes its premise from: _you may have a conflict of interest with group B_ to something between _group B is out to get you_ and _group B is evil_. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this.
> As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines.
The original post has always had the exact paragraph that I derived my subtext from in it. Emphatic quotes are a bad habit of mine, so I removed those, but c'mon -- this is a pretty common grammar mistake and the sentence preceding it pretty clearly "implies" (emphatic quotes) that it's only my interpretation :)
> That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here.
Can you please explain how you would otherwise interpret the exact paragraph that I quoted? I'm usually pretty good at seeing the other side, but I genuinely can't see this one. Maybe it's because I've been in management too long (or maybe I'm too Canadian). Either way, I'm genuinely curious.
I'll quote the paragraph again directly from the article for you:
> Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers?
The only other interpretation I can think of is the author was referring to the people in the previous example. However, she switches from singular ("person A" / "person B") tense in the example to plural ("gaslighters" / "abusers") tense in this paragraph, so it's either an uncharacteristic grammar mistake or a generalization applied to a broader group.
The generalization is that HR people are "gaslighters" and managers are "abusers".
With that in mind, how would you interpret this sentence? "What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs."
I can only see: _how can these people live with themselves_. How is that subtext not correct here?
I think a lot of your criticism here is valid. A two-sided approach would be better. Still, I've seen far more people hurt thinking HR was their friend than by not empathizing enough with HR.
> How is that subtext not correct here?
The grammar is a little bit hard to parse in the original article, and I don't know the cultural context, so I don't so much have AN interpretation as a probabilistic cloud of possible interpretations.
The thing I would remember when reading anything like this is how much language means different things in different cultures:
1) Words like "racism," "white supremacy," "gaslighting," and "abuse" get tossed around a lot in younger, ultra-liberal circles. If I call someone conservative in their fifties a white supremacist, I won't be welcome back ever again. If I'm talking to a liberal 20-something, we're both expected to accept our white supremacy.
2) Positive / negative language varies between cultures. If an Eastern European says something is mediocre, they mean it's typical. If an American says the same, they mean it's bad. Some cultures use language in ways which are hyper-positive, and others, in ways which are hyper-negative. Acceptable degree of exaggeration varies too.
I recently had a "friendly" lawyer for an adversarial party provide me with some "friendly" legal advice (which was specifically that I had no case, and would be out both sides' legal fees if I went to court, and so on). They were lying. I knew that, and they knew that. This was an attorney for a megacorp, where I filed an arbitration complaint as a typical consumer (so they probably didn't know that I knew that they were lying).
With filters for how the author might be using language -- well within the norms of some cultures I've interacted with -- I didn't see this as going far beyond "If an opposing counsel tells you that you have no legal case, they might be lying to you."
I enjoy the tone because it seems genuine. As with almost everything, I view it as their opinion, not fact. It might not apply to you or many others, but their experience likely explains their perspective.
I came in to my current (first) job with this kind of cynicism. Had I held on to that I would be a lot worse off right now. I hope to prevent others from making that mistake.
Especially if management is slightly worse than at my current job. It would be easy but wrong to write them of as incompetent based on articles like this. This would be quite costly for anyone making that mistake.
It’s not a mistake if she feels
that her personal cost that she needs to invest are too high.
You still have a very valid point, the question of where you draw the line between “these guys are incompetent and I can’t deal with this” vs “I decide to put up with it to make things work” is very individual.
You should be careful generalizing the former decision as a mistake.
I agree that there are good or even bad managers who have 'wider business goals' that I just didn't see.
But in my experience working for various large corporations, I've found that the sentiment expressed is very accurate. Managers were the bane of our existence.
While we as developers and other areas involved did our best, the managers were with few exceptions absolutely terrible. I was often amazed that anything got done at all.
In smaller companies or startups I definitely learned to respect the concerns that managers had to deal with that I didn't, sure. But in BigCo's it was generally a shit show of, basically, royalty running the show badly: ass-kissers, psychopaths, etc.
The writer summed up my experience with large corporations’ management. Salesmen, liars, and delusional liars. Your job is not only to protect the company. But to get actual work done. If your cronies are incompetent, no amount of selling is going to change the fact the emperor has no clothes.
This, the article comes off as very cynical and bitter to me. Yes, there are some managers and executives who are just jerks. And there are a few perverse incentives around that are worth keeping in mind. But if you go into a job with this level of bitterness, you're likely to just create the same situation that you were complaining about.
If you assume starting out that all managers are corrupt fools who only care about promoting themselves and their executive golf buddies, that comes through in every interaction you have with them. They're certainly not more likely to be your partner in advancing your own career and growing the business through delivering genuine value to customers when you're carrying that big of a chip on your shoulder.
There are good ones, there are bad ones. But my experience so far was that "loudest in the room" was very often becoming a manager, not necessarily doing the best job before, but being loud about it. And it helps, because are all biased, and very often fall for that.
Luckily in the current company we have a pretty much flat structure and it's way better.
> But often it just has to do with wider business goals than what I am working at.
I think the problem comes when you work at a business whose wider business goals are unethical, or simply don't include respecting the needs and rights of their workers. This definitely isn't everywhere, but from the stories I've heard this seems to be some companies.
Totally agree that managers aren't a bad thing in general though.
Your experience is different from most. The problem is that most managers have no clue how to be a good manager and/or they turn into little Nazis once promoted.
(my) Managers are just people. They have a task, they do their best to get that task done. Sometimes they decisions that seem bad to me. Often that is because I misunderstand their goals. Sometimes, it is because I know something they don't, and something they couldn't verify if I told them. And other times, they just made a mistake, or weren't told the relevant information by me or others.
Indeed, sometimes their goals are somewhat self serving. But often it just has to do with wider business goals than what I am working at. I am grateful for them keeping an eye on those. Leaving me to worry less about the biggest of pictures. That however, doesn't mean I should just bog down on the small picture of my work, and deem everything that seems bad in that context as stupid.