I understand the story is one sided, but if I take it as truth, the immediate red flag is how the manager failed to manage. In the first examples gave me all the things I would have needed to know to bail on that team.
When technical decisions come up with no obvious correct answer, the manager saying it's up to the team while also disagreeing is just bad. The team provides input and offers their view on best direction but it's up to the manager and product manager to be technical enough to understand the team and then balance business needs (which may be unknowns to the team) and make a final decision. The team then should accept it.
The push back of using a parallel kanban board is just dumb on the managers part too. Management and teams often need different tracking and reporting styles to get work done. Your direct manager should be familiar with both. If they are not or refuse to be, just run.
Managers enable teams by empowering, deciding and then getting out of the way. Bully managers use passive aggressive non-sense like you had to deal with.
For Spotify to not recognize and isolate this person is a problem all the way up there chain.... And again, assuming your version is correct.
If you are petty enough to make a website about how you made passive aggressive Jira tickets to show the manager who’s the boss I bet he is not one of the good people you want as employees.
My view is that if this story is 100% true, the author is in the wrong, and the manager is in the wrong, and Spotify as an employer is in the wrong.
Write a formal letter and pass it up the chain appropriately (without this petty retaliation baked in), transfer teams, find a new job, etc... Fighting the manager directly and consistently does not provide any business value, social value or goodwill. It's simply the wrong play.
In an ideal world, pushing for what you think is correct is noble and moral, however it is not an ideal world. Rallying against (minor) wrongs is not always valuable or appropriate. Business magnifies that, and pushing back against (minor) wrongs becomes ever more subtly complex.
Business environments require tact and that is absent here.
Now we can take it a step further and assume that the author is making themselves appear less complicit than they are (we all do this to some level when writing about ourselves). The chance of that pushes this story from "innocent but socially immature dev against big bad manager" to a whole variety of stories where it's a troublesome developer and a manager trying their best (even if moderately poorly) to manage it.
>Keep the hiring manager happy. Better work environment, completed work - that is only possible when the manager is cooperating. What is the point of improving the workplace if the cost is being ejected from that place?
Some would take this as being very manipulative, but I find it to be great advice when working at large companies. I recommend reading "The 48 Laws of Power" for similar "immoral" advice if you can stomach the implications and use them only in self-defense.
They don't. The majority of managers I've had in my career have been fine to great. I've probably only had one genuinely bad manager. However stories about about perfectly competent managers who simply manage their teams to successfully completing projects make very boring blog and forum posts.
As ever, your role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions. Yes, you and your manager had very different styles, but we are in a very fortunate position that if you dislike your employer you can just leave.
What you shouldn't do, is tell your obviously unstable manager to go read a book on managing, created sarcastic backlog items to mock his micro-managing and directly went against his orders publicly?
Your manager was bad, but you should have done your job and politely swapped teams. Instead you're portraying yourself as a poor contractor who only slightly mocked his manager, then blasted the company on a custom built blog.
Yeah, it's really dangerous to be sarcastic when you cannot see the other party face to face. If you can't read the situation, even light-hearted jokes can be taken the wrong way and sour the relationship.
If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved. Ever been told to do something by a developer and you firmly disagree? I'm not going to give in and do what he says, I'm going to make an argument and hope it changes things for the better. If I just put up with the shit then it's me who has to deal with it in the future when it all falls apart.
Giving in to shit management will just reinforce it. Changing teams isn't a solution if your enjoy the team. Standing up for yourself and the team is.
Could he have gone about things better? Probably. But your job isn't just to follow directions, especially as a senior engineer.
> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved.
That's a naïve way to look at it. As a contractor he should have STFU and done his job. His job is to do the work he's told to do. Now, if the manager hadn't been an asshole, none of this would have been an issue. But when you're dealing with an asshole (in a position of power over you), the last thing you want to do is continue to piss him off.
I've been there, done that and when I there was mutual respect and trust between the manager and I, I would push back on things that could be done better. When the manager was an asshole, I just stayed in my lane. My job wasn't to fix the org's problems, my job was to build software and (from my perspective) my primary concern was staying employed.
If he wanted to stay at Spotify he just should have kept quiet and switched teams.
> As a contractor he should have STFU and done his job. His job is to do the work he's told to do.
or, told another way: dance monkey, dance.
If companies or managers just want to do the infinite monkeys typing shakespeare approach with 0 critical thought, don't hire / contract senior people.
Someone who doesn't push back on giving an estimate for something they have never seen is useless in a senior role. Sure, the kanban stuff might be a little out there, but if a manager is doing a shit job of blocking tasks mid sprint, again it is better they try and suggest something to help their co workers.
except when you hire a senior engineer as a contractor it is a different relationship to a code monkey contractor.
If you want them to do sprint planning / estimations / train interns it is a lot closer to a traditional employee than a "we pay $XXX a day for 7.5hrs of coding" contractor
I think this is really context dependent. It sounded like the author was a senior engineer deeply embedded in the team and a part of standup, sprint planning, retros etc. Which is different to farming out a specific component to a specialist to work on in isolation.
> If companies or managers just want to do the infinite monkeys typing shakespeare approach with 0 critical thought, don't hire / contract senior people.
Senior people should know how to read the situation and either A) figure out how to persuade management to their way of thinking and failing that (repeatedly) B) STFU and do as your told.
I'm not opposed to making suggestions/recommendations, but some people don't want to hear it, for whatever reason. As a contractor I'm not going to upset if you don't take my recommendations and it takes longer (after all, contractors are usually hourly...more money, more money). If you're unable to "STFU and do as you're told", bide your time and find another position on your own terms.
That's the lesson this person needs to take away from this.
So what you're saying is it's fine for a power tripping asshole manager to be a power tripping asshole manager because the victim is a contractor and therefore deserves to be treated worse than a regular employee?
The manager was affecting his ability to do his job.
I don't think it's fair for anyone to have to put up with shitty managers just because they're contractors. The thoughts and feelings of a contractor are just as valid. It shouldn't just be "put up or shut up". It should be Spotify ensuring their managers aren't assholes.
When you are going over the line when dealing with an asshole, the company ends up with two assholes. You are not making the situation better.
This blog post IMHO makes the author unemployable, they publicly demonstrated they are a high-friction person and even tacked their name on it. Being able to handle social conflict gracefully without escalation is a virtue and they don't have it.
> So what you're saying is it's fine for a power tripping asshole manager to be a power tripping asshole manager because…
Nobody is saying that. You’ve been misconstruing people’s responses throughout this thread.
The bottom line is that both people can be in the wrong in a situation like this. The employee is not entitled to behave poorly because they have a bad manager and the manager is not entitled to behave badly simply because they’re a manager. However, the fact that neither party could do anything other than escalate the situation and even continue fighting battles after being fired is unprofessional behavior.
If your "asshole" is a psychopath, find others that have been under his or her path before, collect evidence.
If your "asshole" is unable to cope with stress, ask peers how they are doing, ask for advice on specific occurrences of issues in a non-confrontational way.
If your "asshole" is just a mean bad-manager, just says "Yes Yes" and move on before he blows something important up.
> Ever been told to do something by a developer and you firmly disagree? I'm not going to give in and do what he says
How do you go about doing this? A direct confrontation? Or by asking for documentation for their request (like a JIRA ticket), and then replying in the ticket with your suggestion? etc
Most of the IT workplaces in Sweden (Spotify included) aren't unionised even though many are part of unions. In those cases what the unions can do is provide legal support to you if you needed.
Which is why the professional thing to do is leave. Why continue to work for shit, as you allude to? This whole argument sounds like a strawman. Especially given the fact he is a contractor and not just an employee. You make your own bed as a contractor, and you will lay in it.
> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved
That’s not what anyone is saying. The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams, not going to war with his own manager.
As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation.
However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. Some times (like this story), both parties can be in the wrong. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve.
One person behaving badly doesn’t give a free license for the other person in the conflict to also behave badly. “But he started it first” isn’t even a valid excuse in elementary school and it’s not valid in the workplace either.
“Sucking it up” means dealing with your situation and not trying to change anything.
If you want to change something, you have to demonstrate that you’re acting in good faith and trying to work with the system rather than against it. Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it.
People who work with the system and behave professionally are going to improve the overall health of a company. People who escalate every battle and want to fight every conflict until one party loses (in this case this backfired on the OP and they became the loser) generally only make the system worse.
The thing to keep in mind is that the company doesn’t have to choose which person is “right”. A manager and employee blowing up conflicts can both be wrong and can both be removed.
> Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it.
False dichotomy. Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. "escalating the battle at every opportunity" isn't an accurate summary of OPs actions.
>Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem.
So? Not every battle needs to be your battle--especially those where common sense says you're going to lose. You're under no obligation to try to work things out at a given job.
It might be "being complacent" if you switch teams. It's still better than what this person did. He probably chose the worst path forward that he could have taken amongst many different paths he could have chosen.
He could have tried to talk with the managers manager, talked with HR, or done anything except behaving as a passive aggressive child...
Is the problem that the company you’re working for has bad managers? Is your goal to ensure that there are absolutely no bad managers in a company the size of Spotify? Because that sounds like a Sisyphean task on a good day.
If that isn’t the goal then why is switching managers not a perfectly adequate solution?
And about making it someone else’s problem, potentially that person may get on better with the manager and they may both be more effective. Alternatively, when there is a second person who also chooses to change, that would lead to either the manager reconsidering their approach or the manager’s manager wondering why no one sticks under them.
If the company has a decent HR policy they will allow for anonymous feedback on the manager and when it gets similar feedback from multiple people they can work on improving the managers training and/or get rid of them.
I wasn’t responding to the OP but the idea that somehow changing managers is complacent and/or punting the problem to someone else.
Employees have 0 responsibility or incentive to improve their managers (the converse is not true). In fact, it’s a terrible idea to do so, because there’s probably only single digit % of managers who would take that positively, if even.
Especially if it isn’t the manager taking the initiative to ask for improvement ideas.
> Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem.
Sort of, but the person whose problem it becomes is the person who can and should deal with it.
A manager’s manager should notice if the manager’s team has a bunch of attrition. Certainly the best path is to work with your manager but if your manager is not amenable to that then changing teams is a signal to the rest of the org that the manager has issues.
> Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem.
It always was someone else's problem. If your manager wants the benefit of your insight and perspective, it is their responsibility to create a team culture which enables you to share it.
You have to approach it as interpersonal conflict? What, does the international federation of manager of managers take away your manager of managers license for not following the manager of managers code to the letter?
Managers are expected to be held up to a higher standard because they were presumed to be better at interpersonal relationships as a reason for moving into the role.
Yes, it's certainly not great when an IC is unprofessional but they're expected to be maturing over time and the range of issues that could provoke an IC to be unprofessional is vast and could conceivably never reoccur. Managers have less excuse, they're the ones placing the people on their team and they're the ones responsible for dealing with issues within their team.
Your role as a manager of managers is just to do what works. By pretending there's some external force that binds you from reaching the right decision is a way of externalizing responsibility so you can enact a decision you secretly want to but are unwilling to morally admit to yourself.
The person you're responding to said they'd approach it as an interpersonal conflict if the IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn."
Everyone has to be mature and professional at work. Yes, management might be held to slightly higher standards, but being combative and fighting with your manager at every turn is below the standard for anyone.
a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line
and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster?
The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place.
An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.
>a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line
I mean, you made up international federations of managers "out of thin air" too. That's how conversations work, people introduce things, if you have issue with a particular point you can discuss that.
>and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure.
It's possible some people are just combative and unprofessional, and should never have been hired in the first place (or changed over time). I agree that a manager has more responsibility for a relationship with their reports than vice versa. But, I also think it's entirely possible for an employee/contractor to just be too combative and hostile, and it not necessarily reflect on the manager too.
>A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
I'm seeing the view that everyone always remain professional at work - even if other people are not. I don't think that means you "have to" disregard someone's opinion. But it means if you're not professional there can be consequences. If someone is insubordinate at work (disobeying a manager, creating sarcastic/mocking backlog issues) its common grounds for termination and blacklisting. I'm not saying this to support the status quo, I'm saying this as advice for people reading these threads and trying to navigate professional waters. It would be bad advice to suggest otherwise.
Ultimately, businesses generally function by paying you for your time. If they pay for your time, but you're not doing what they want with it, they're going to stop paying you for your time. If you have a bad manager, you need to frame it in terms of how it's detrimental to the whole business.
I disagree this has anything to do with police brutality or that those parallels are helpful. I have no requirement to be professional to the police (although, for better or worse, it's often unwise to be an asshole to cops, it is legal). Whereas I do have a requirement to be professional at work. I see the point you're trying to make, how often people who suffer police brutality are maligned due to unrelated crimes they may have commited. And that's fair, that's just personality assassination. But I would say the issues have to be taken separately - the police abuse is clearly heinous and should be stopped, but also the crimes should be treated in isolation (as they likely had been in the past). Returning to our manager/IC discussion, I'd say the unprofessional behaviour of both parties would lead to both parties getting terminated. But in reality, companies will protect management more readily than IC contractors, so I'd advise anyone in the IC's waters to tread carefully.
> An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
> But it means if you're not professional there can be consequences. If someone is insubordinate at work (disobeying a manager, creating sarcastic/mocking backlog issues) its common grounds for termination and blacklisting. I'm not saying this to support the status quo, I'm saying this as advice for people reading these threads and trying to navigate professional waters. It would be bad advice to suggest otherwise.
But this is the exact same depersonalization rhetoric. It's some nebulous "world" that is enforcing all of these oh so unfair rules that I certainly don't agree with but have no choice but to follow also because we all agreed ahead of time what is "professional" and "unprofessional" and if you are "unprofessional", I "have to" punish you according to a formula rather than listen to your actual human complaint.
But it's all bullshit, there is no "have to" in this equation, nothing bad happens to you if you do the actual right thing. Let's call it for what it is, you want to treat it as an interpersonal conflict rather than a management failure because that absolves you from confronting structural failings in the system. But you also know that admitting such things, to yourself or others, would make you a moral hypocrite, so you invent a hypothetical other that makes you "have to" do it that way because the system has been good to you so far out of good fortune and you are afraid of what will happen if the same flawed system is now flawed against you.
That's why people do the perfect victim blaming. They want to be convinced that if the system ever came for them, a just outcome would arise because they, of course, would be totally justified and above reproach as a victim while the manifest failures of the system against other people are a result of individual exceptionalism that causes those instances not to count because they had it coming.
I'm simply asking people be honest and admit that this is what this is rather than hiding behind cowardly "professionalism" as a bunch of made up nonsense that is simply there to protect the system.
While I think OP was in the wrong (or that at least there are many red flags), I think that the approach you describes enables bad managers. It is a system that has literally zero accountability for them.
> As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation.
This means that situation was very bad and escalated for months. This means that the team is well beyond the "own team doesn’t like them" situation. This is why it is impossible to change or fix bad managers before the team is decomposed and people suffered. If your only feedback about leadership quality and attitudes is "multiple people are escaping", then it means you are not checking on leadership quality at all.
> However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve.
This enables bully managers big time. This could be unclear competences, this could be professional disagreement, this could be manager picking on employee, mismatch of ideas about roles and it could be employee being entirely in the wrong. You start assuming interpersonal conflict, which means that if there actual causes for issues wont ever get fixed.
> if the situation as written is accurate and honest
Gotta love this assumption given that especially middle management selects for people who are neither accurate nor honest. Now, engineers are not better people in principle, but when engineers lie, it is faster to find out. Meanwhile, your rules have no "check whether the manager is telling the truth" moment.
> As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation.
Doing a good job of identifying teams who don't like their manager means discovering it before you have multiple people trying to transfer away from that team. By the time you've reached that point you've already failed in your job as the manager's manager.
There are plenty of situations where, after making reasonable attempts to push back on things and/or develop a better working relationship with a manager, you have basically two choices: put your head down and collect your pay check or go somewhere else (whether internally or externally).
Trust me, I've been there. At one point, I ended up going to my manager's manager--who I knew well--and basically said transfer me somewhere else or I quit. Which he did and I did some legacy work for a while and it was fine.
I'm not going to give in and do what he says, I'm going to make an argument and hope it changes things for the better.
Absolutely, I hope most people would. And if that was all he did then that would have been great. However once you switch from "making an argument" to mocking and bullying and passive aggressive bullshit you have obviously crossed a line and lost the high ground.
Also part of being an employee or contractor is accepting that often you don't have the final decision. Once you have presented all your arguments as best you can to all the relevant people you have to prepared that they will turn around and say "I've heard your arguments and taken them into consideration, however we are still going to do it my way". And once you have reached that point you have to either accept their decision or say that as a professional you cannot accept that decision and feel you have to step away from the project.
If you want to be the one making the final call, apply for the job as the person who gets to make the final call.
> Part of being an employee or contractor is accepting that often you don't have the final decision. Once you have presented all your arguments as best you can to all the relevant people you have to be prepared that they will turn around and say "I've heard your arguments and taken them into consideration, however we are still going to do it my way".
I wish someone had explained this to me when I began my career. It would have saved 5 years of my professional life, a lot of frustration, and losing out on a really good job other than disagreements with my manager.
I had the misfortune to completely misinterpret my manager once. Turns out our relationship wasn't equal (go figure) - when I challenged my managers decision it backfired to the point of nuclear-escalation from management. Even though it happened in the right forum and from a professional viewpoint. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong, everything was perceived in ill faith.
Department management wanted to talk to me in a meeting. They did not want to disclose the agenda.
Fortunately, I was in a union. So when I asked for them to include my union representative in the meeting they backtracked HARD. After having discussed the case with my union representative we came to the conclusion that I hadn't done anything wrong, and that they were most likely abusing their powers - and that there was a prior history of this in this particular department.
With my union representative present, management moderated themselves immensely. They had started something without thinking that I would include my my union.
In the meeting, we ended up exchanging pleasantries. Some action items were made, applicable for all involved parties to avoid - so that we could avoid these kind of misunderstanding in the future.
The meeting ended with me having the moral high ground, but I knew that my days in the company was coming to an end. I felt like a marked employee.
I spent a couple of months rebuilding my image. Just conforming to everything they told me to do. After a while, I turned in my resignation and am now working elsewhere.
Doing the same, but less work for much higher pay and for a company that cares a little more about their employees well-being.
If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved.
You aren't there to solve their problems. You're there to make them happy. While related (and sometimes intersecting), these a fundamentally (vastly) different things.
And at the end of the day, "making them happy" is what takes precedence. Even if it means holding your nose while you wade through that big giant mess of legacy code that could have been made into a much smaller mess by the time you got around, "if only, if only". And learning, finally, to STFU until it's time to GTFO. Rather than waste your breath (figuratively or literally) telling them things they don't want to hear, and wouldn't be able to grasp the import of anyway.
It took me forever and a day, and then some, to figure this out.
> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved
Fight Twice. On Record; push back against something you disagree with (Be it Style or design decision) Twice. If the other side (especially if they are above you in the food chain) still persists - Suck it up and do the work.
If you can't live with that situation - look into moving on (while sucking it up). Continuing to push a beleaguered point (even if you're "Right") will inevitably lead to nothing good.
> As ever, your role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions.
That hasn't been true in many companies for a while now - especially if someone is in as a senior equivalent
> then blasted the company on a custom built blog.
I mean, the company blasted him with no right of reply on an internal system, not sure what the "custom built blog" has to do with anything
This reads like either a: the OPs manager who was in waaayy over his head, and lashed out or b: another manager who is in over their head and just want the smelly developers to do what they are told, and act like mindless cogs for them.
I mean, sure, but they are not paid more because they are code monkeys, they are paid more because they have less stable employments, and in europe at least have a lot overhead costs they are responsible for that the employer would normally pay.
From the sound of it, Spotify was treating them like employees - most places would definitely not have contractors do hack time, or put code monkey contractors in the path of major feature estimations
Well, they get paid to be terminated much more easily. Typically at companies where that's "harder" for employees.
But the entire idea of contract + senior/architect is somewhat bizarre, given how much of the latter's jobs are consensus, relationship-based, and political.
Agreed. I'd never really thought about it that way. I have been contract architect... and while it was a better position, I would say the work suffered for my personal lack of intra-company relationships.
Going forward I would probably avoid contract work with those responsibilities.
On the other hand, call me a consultant, hire me from a higher level sponsor, and at least I have a clear remit.
Eh, I don’t know this persons position, but typically they’re not really paid more than ftes. The hyper expert high paid consultant does exist, but most contractors are just compensation wise a lower tier or at parity. But there are advantages in other ways. I liked thinking in the short term (just doing this for a year, then maybe change up career path a bit), and I went from interview to work in about a week, consulting companies move fast on getting you working.
Honest question. Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.
I would say yes, and that the author failed to do that here. I would also say the manager was clearly very weak, and that Spotify's bureaucracy may be producing suboptimal outcomes.
I would say definitely - the OP did fail to manage up properly.
I think it is less of a part of the role for a senior engineer - Principal and over it is pretty much a core of your role - but it is something you should be doing.
The groundwork for doing it effectively comes from both sides however, and everyone sucks here for that.
> Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.
I don't think we should expect miracles. But, based on this article, it seems to me that author was nowhere near that line. The mocking jira ticked seems like open hostility. You can be immature in reactions and still better then that.
Well yes, obviously if you always shut up you can never get in such trouble. That's a truism, no? I thought the issue in this discussion is whether it's worth going through such trouble or not, from various points of view. I think the answer is yes and no - it depends. If somebody thinks it's part of how they see themselves in life, how can I argue against it? As long as it's not about violence or heavily negatively involving other people who did not ask for it I see it within their right. Even with a blog post, and even if we had a response from the other side, we still can only listen, such situations are highly... situational. I don't mind it becoming public, if people don't think they can't get anything out of it they don't need to read. Humans just love talking about this kind of stuff, so there should be some evolutionary benefit overall, even if we can't assign one to any one concrete discussion. I think we as reader could relax a bit as well, for us it's more of a brain game, since we are not involved and only have the very limited public information. Meaning, most of our points will be based on our own imagination, interpretation and life experience.
I'm a senior engineer in a leadership role and don't agree, so what?
Contractors are there to provide value for the company, not to please some managers personal feelings. Their benefit to both, meaning to them and the company, is that they do not need to play politics, and a relevant part of their value stems from this (= being an third party opinion that can say things that employees may not want to due to aforementioned politics).
It naturally isn't a black and white thing, but IMO their job shouldn't always be to dance as told from a manager, whom often don't even know how to give that close "dance directions" to pull that puppeteering off.
The writer had already done a successful contract at the company and produced tooling still in use by multiple teams there, and still got called out after this whole affair, so I think we can see it as established that they can be useful and provide value to the company and that the teams they worked with weren't exactly unhappy with the personality and/or work ethic, otherwise getting the second contract quite probably wouldn't have happened in the first place. On the other hand there's a new manager and a black hole of higher ups, one doesn't get much info here about any reasoning of their behavior, but if we can trust in at least a basic level of objectivity (i.e., the rough edges of the story are as told) it's hard to see the full blame at the contractor.
Don't get me wrong companies can certainly do this and this is just describing the smaller safety net contractors have, weighting against their bigger flexibility, bigger pay, but no guarantee in stability of that. That said, it still feels a bit odd for the company to react this way, certainly off-putting, albeit that's not meaning much as I never planned to work there, nor in other such "big-HR" places, as contractor nor as developer anytime soon for completely unrelated reasons. The creating an extra side to this story has IMO a bit of oddity too, but domains are cheap and in the end it's not much practical difference compared to hosting it at an existing site.
I cannot agree. The post makes it clear that the author was hired as a senior engineer ("…He expected more from a senior engineer…"). Senior engineers are expected to present the needs of the team beyond immediate work items, and so it was the author's duty to raise these issues.
Suggesting to their leader that they read a chapter about managing not just to one manager, but to two managers, wow! That tells me so much about this person’s personality: Immature, self-important, a problematic personality and likely difficult to be around. I suspect at that moment this contractor sealed his eventual fate. I know if I was his manager I would have probably chosen to not renew his contract at that moment and would be counting the days before I could get rid of him.
Then I read this:
> Also, “Legendary Software Developer” is his title on LinkedIn.
And know I would have never hired him in the first place so problem would have been solved before it occurred.
> Suggesting to their leader that they read a chapter ... I know if I was his manager I would have probably chosen to not renew his contract at that moment and would be counting the days before I could get rid of him.
I'm genuinely surprised that people like you and OP's manager exist. You'd want to get rid of someone because they gave a book recommendation that you disliked? Jesus. I get how the book recommendation was a bad move, but holy crap, it's nowhere near bad enough to "choose to not to renew his contract".
I'm genuinely surprised that people like you and OP's manager exist
Maybe you’re having difficulty imagining someone else’s perspective?
Are you a software engineer? Imagine you demonstrated your new code to the team, it didn’t go well and afterward your manager took you aside and recommended you read Chapter 6 of “Coding for Dummies”?
I’ve been in software engineering for decades and I can tell you a rounding error of 100% of every software engineer I’ve ever worked with would spend the rest of their day looking for alternative employment after that.
I think maybe the other thing you’re doing is skipping over all the other immature and unprofessional things the OP said he did. Did you read where he created a user story explicitly for the purposes of mocking his manager to the team? There’s a lot to unpack in this train wreck.
> Are you a software engineer? Imagine you demonstrated your new code to the team, it didn’t go well and afterward your manager took you aside and recommended you read Chapter 6 of “Coding for Dummies”?
I've been in that situation more than once, and none of those situations made me want to fire anyone. For example, last fall I was in a project where I implemented some frontend features without considering accessibility. A designer in the project told me what I did wrong, and recommended to me that I should take an "introduction to accessibility on the web" course. I thought it was a good idea. I took the course, I learned a lot of things, wrote down notes, and still refer to those notes every now and then. At no point did I feel like I need to fire someone for recommending I take a course on something that - frankly - I was supposed to know how to do in the first place.
> I’ve been in software engineering for decades and I can tell you a rounding error of 100% of every software engineer I’ve ever worked with would spend the rest of their day looking for alternative employment after that.
Ok, well after this discussion you will hopefully adjust that percentage down a few points from 100%.
> I think maybe the other thing you’re doing is skipping over all the other immature and unprofessional things the OP said he did. Did you read where he created a user story explicitly for the purposes of mocking his manager to the team? There’s a lot to unpack in this train wreck.
No I didn't skip over those. I read OP. But I wasn't commeting on OP here. I was responding to a comment made by kcplate. According to his comment, just the book recommendation alone was sufficient grounds to not renew the contract. That's the comment I was arguing against. Not the totality of OP.
I suspect you don’t have much experience with how much chaos an immature and overly arrogant person can cause a project. Those people can be poison to morale, to productivity, to the organization’s culture, and ultimately to the organization itself that employ them.
Been there, done that, and it’s just not worth it. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.
One organization I worked for about 15 years ago, us leaders and managers had the flexibility by the owner to immediately remove any person we deemed as poison or problematic: employee or contractor. We would deal with any legal fallout after because it was understood that removing the poison was ultimately better and less costly for the organization than any legal fallout related to a termination.
Your suspicion is correct: I don't have experience like that.
That said, if I ever were in the same project with you, I would walk on egg shells the entire time. You're willing to fire people on the spot for badly delivered book recommendations. Who's willing to present any sort of criticism in an environment like that? You'll end up with a team full of yes-men.
> You're willing to fire people on the spot for badly delivered book recommendations?
Actually, I said I would likely choose to not renew the contract because it was an arrogant dick move (and was intentionally made as a dick move) and I find in my experience those people are a bad fit for most teams.
I’d fire someone on the spot if it was apparent they were poisoning the environment. I have never let anyone go for constructive criticism.
It's one thing to raise issues. However once you've done so, even multiple times, and been told "no" or "forget about it," it's time to either get on with the job or move on. Intel at least used to have a term "disagree and commit" (or, by implication, leave) and that's probably a pretty good maxim generally.
The manager failed to properly manage a difficult person. Both of them seem to be quite hard to work with.
I would put most of the responsibility on the manager - he is supposed to handle these situations, and get the most of people, including difficult contractors.
But the contractor should have been smarter about the reality of being a contractor. You can’t afford to be this annoying if you don’t have job stability.
Everyone seems to be in the wrong here. Hopefully both sides learned and grew from this.
I agree, reading it, and as it's the best possible interpretation being the OPs point of view, everything just screamed of 'senior developer in name only'.
The manager clearly wasn't the best, but none of the scenarios were unworkable or unreasonable. If anything it's your fault for being unreasonably focused on churning code when the business needed an experienced head to help guide things. Refusing interns because it's be a distraction, refusing to properly estimate, basically refusing anything but focused coding time has is place in some job roles but clearly they're not senior ones.
OP said an intern couldn't be handled in parallel to the existing work, which could be postponed. OP refused to waste the intern's time by not having the time to help them.
OP said they aren't in a position to be able to deliver an estimate, yet. That never happens to you? And the PM needing the feature was okay with that, why is it a problem for you and the shit manager?
OP was unhappy wasting time with repeated meaningless updates, which was also unproductive. They didn't refuse to provide them nonetheless.
> our role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions.
Not really. Your job is to advance the business of your employer/client. While staying professional, of course. Moreso, because by being a duche it's pretty hard to convince anyone, so it's a prerequisit for doing your job of advancing the business. (Unless you're so good/so much in demand that they will manage around it.)
But in general caring about the business interest of whoever pays you, means the exact opposite of following orders. Now, if you're not unfortunate it doesn't mean fighting around management styles, but something more related to your direct area of expertise.
Your job as a hired contractor is to advise the client of ways to advance their business. If they don't listen, or do listen but don't like your advice it's a tough pill to swallow.
I had a client once who listened but declined every single suggestion to improve things - including the most basic "Perhaps stop sharing the same root password to all servers and each developer has their unique login?"
It's rare but some businesses just don't want to change if their current legacy processes have made them so wealthy.
Advising is one method for advancing the (or helping the client to advance their) business. Unless you are hired specifically for an advisor role, it's not your job per se but a tool. Though I agree, it's a very important one. Something I keep trying to convince basically everyone around me to use whether they are contractors/entrepreneurs or employees. (And not just developers.)
Yes, sometimes clients don't listen. That may even be the default for a new relationship. But as a first attempt you should, I think, try to convince them. I'm definitely against the "I told them, they didn't listen, but after all, it's their decision/their problem" approach. But sometimes even that doesn't work. In those cases I think one should lay out the options (including the one the client wants to go with), enumerate all the pros and cons of each, make a suggestion again ("based on this I would go with....") but then let the client make the final call. Just be sure that they really understand the compromises and then evaluate the consequences when it's time. That can work wonders.
After being "right" a few times ("well, it turns out that you were right and we should have done this instead of that") they will listen by default. Better yet, pick up and learn the thought process. Now I quoted right, because it's not even necessarily true: just because their approach failed (or seems to have failed) doesn't mean that yours would have worked better ;). But, of course, since you are the professional, it's more likely and the lesson really is just that.
I agree, but mostly only because they were a consultant. Imho - the consultant's job is to 1) get things done, 2) be the blame magnet for shitty decisions and 3) get paid well to do 1 and 2. It's not to integrate or change the company.
If they were an employee, that's a very different story! Though all this is from a US perspective, so take that with a grain of salt.
My Swedish perspective is that contractors are generally treated like an employee that doesn't get invited to company parties. I guess it's different at bigger companies like Spotify.
Wtf no it isn't. People should stick up for themselves. Don't be part of a shitty system. Better to have it blow up on you because you said the wrong thing than keep quiet and let it stay shit.
>Better to have it blow up on you because you said the wrong thing than keep quiet and let it stay shit.
Unfortunately, the way this guy went about it, airing dirty laundry for the world to see (and potential employers) basically made him unemployable. There are plenty of good people out there that don't bring that kind of baggage.
No it doesn't make you unemployable. Any reasonable person will not care that you did this, or even will take it as a sign that you're a good person.
What is up with all these whipped people in this comment section who don't understand that quality people respect others for sticking up to bullies? This attitude is enabling abuse by defending keeping it private.
>No it doesn't make you unemployable. Any reasonable person will not care that you did this, or even will take it as a sign that you're a good person.
Nobody who knew about this episode would ever hire that guy. Too much baggage, too high maintenance. He'd never make it through a simple HR screening if that popped up. I mean I'm sure someone would eventually hire him for something, but he's definitely on people's radar now I suspect. Most people want to get work done and not deal with this type of bullshit, plain and simple.
>What is up with all these whipped people in this comment section who don't understand that quality people respect others for sticking up to bullies? This attitude is enabling abuse by defending keeping it private.
Both seemed like bullies to me. Corporations hire people to solve problems and save money. They don't care about personal crusades.
In my observation they don't care either way. They're not gonna jump up to help and defend you, but they also just don't care very much and if they want engineers, they're gonna take em.
The manager was bad, but the OPs approach was just as bad. I think too often people get caught up in trying to dunk on other people (creating fake tickets is passive aggressive bs), and not focused on whatever real goal they want to accomplish.
I'm curious if you're actually a programmer or working in programming in any capacity? One thing here to understand is that you won't really be able to see OP's perspective if you haven't worked in this for at least a few years.
Though I agree that there could've been a better way to handle it (OP states it), your tone sounds almost like you’re that bad manager. As a manager you’re as much a cog as anyone else, and you need to be accountable downwards and upwards. A good company understands that.
Ideally it should’ve been that OP just quietly switched teams or found another job.
But I’m glad that this got posted. I don’t want to work at a company that I don’t have an opportunity to criticize their internal structures with valid rational reasoning. Being fired is ok, but being marked as bad cultural fit is clearly a retaliatory move, which is not just bitter from the company but also from the HR department at Spotify, especially that no one asked OP’s colleagues.
This seems like a thing in Swedish medium/big tech companies, at least from what we read about Klarna last month.
It used to be very easy to link my profile to my LinkedIn but it does seem that links broken, but yes, I am a quite senior dev having worked in both startup & corporate as an employee & as a contractor.
Maybe I should have beeen more obvious, but the way I phrased OP's actions was to show how the Manager saw it, and sold it to HR. The crux of this is that the dev was enjoying the benefits of being a contractor but wanted the perks of being an employee. A contractor is meant to be a simple resource for a company (although it's is absolutely Spotify's fault for abusing the contractor position with things like teaching Interns as a contractor (which I think is illegal in some countries?)).
To be more clear, my stance is that the employee would make a great employee, but is a bad contractor which is why Spotify blacklisted them (although it'd be interesting to know if they could apply as an employee now).
> created sarcastic backlog items to mock his micro-managing and directly went against his orders publicly?
FTA: "I made another mistake in creating a parody ticket to the ones he created. I think I called it something like "Scalability", without any description, like his tickets. He sent me a private message asking about it. I realized I had gone too far and explained that I wanted to illustrate the vagueness but that I had done it in an unhelpful way. I apologized to him. "Apology accepted" he replied."
That doesn't seem great but also isn't particularly harsh.
I agree. If you can't rely somewhat on previous experiences to guestimate roughly how long a task will take, you're not a senior eng.
I mean, to illustrate the point, if you call any general contractor in your area and ask how long a new kitchen cabinet build takes, you'll probably get a price range and a time range, depending on several factors. They probably won't say "I literally cannot even fathom an answer to your question until I inspect the condition of the dry wall, wood prices and availability, etc.". This is because the people who want the thing built will use time and price etc as an input to decide if ironing out the little details is worth it.
I mean, he did, at some point give out the general estimate: ‘months’, which seems reasonable ballpark’ish, and then the manager got upset anyway (presumably because it wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear).
The request was "I need the time anyway. Provide it in a spreadsheet by end of day."
And in following dialog manager shows surprise, but then ends up with "just put something in". To which op responds "I cannot stand for an estimate of something I don't know. Can't you then just put something in".
I have to disagree that suggesting ways to improve (via reading a book) are necessarily egregious signs of horrible misbehavior. Creating sarcastic backlog items, if done once, can be seen as a joke, even if a bit tone-deaf. There obviously might be more to this story than what's being portrayed, but if we are to take the blog post at face value, this isn't a fireable offense in my opinion. They could be reprimanded, but I don't understand the fierce blaming directed at the origin author.
> As ever, your role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions
The company is your employer, not the manager. If you see that the orders you get are harmful, it's your responsibility to raise an alarm.
And I don't see the things the manager says as directions. He's trying to make his wishes sound as if the team and the post author decided to do it themselves. Total coward.
EDIT: The employee can't be responsible for disobeying orders if he got no orders.
I agree with you that OP did make some mistakes, some of which he rightfully admitted.
But at the end of the day the "mature" person in the interaction ought to have been the manager. This looks much worse for Spotify than it does for OP.
Ultimately yes, but a manager who takes decisions without considering the input of their subordinates is shortsighted and oblivious to their challenges.
Saying that it's a "team decision" while no one else in the team was even aware of that decision and the process behind it is dishonest at best.
In my opinion, that shows that the manager was doing a poor communication job with his subordinates and ensure that the decision process was understood, and that led to frustration on both sides.
Nope. Sometimes you have to put the manager on blast. Make tf sure that everyone knows what happened. Then leave or get sacked all guns blazing to the promised land.
The only question is whether you get sacked or leave in time. The clock's ticking.
Otherwise this lame manager continues uninterrupted.
I also want whatever you are smoking. The manager didn’t realise that he was being a burden, refused to listen to his team and his team members. And then, instead of resolving things peacefully, slandered his report to others, so OP’s contract can be terminated.
Only thing OP could have done was recognise the toxic nature of manager and leave first. But that is a lesson usually learned the hard way
You are absolutely right that my actions escalated the situation, and that I shouldn't have done them. One of the lessons from this painful situation is to leave sooner.
I've realised my comment sounds rough and very blunt, but my summary comes from how the Manager (who does sound very stressful) might have perceived what happened, and explained it to cover their behind.
I'm sorry you went through all that stress, and I agree it's a smart move to remove your last name from the blog so it's not the first thing future hiring-manager's find.
Managers need people that can tell them the truth no matter how upsetting the truth is. Companies fail when bad managers expect their employees to just smile and say yes sir while the ship is sinking. It's not until their ankles start to get wet they wonder why no one told them about all the holes in the ship.
Sorry to read this story. It can be really dangerous to have a manager who purports to be a technical expert to their peers/boss when they are not. They will have accidentally or deliberately developed the survival skills to protect that claim. Their career rests on this fiction being perpetuated.
Seriously though, Spotify can jump in a lake. Maybe they started out with some sort of "musicians should get paid more" thing (how's that working out for you on Spotify, musicians?), but more recently their model is "podcasts shouldn't be free". I have never installed that app, and never will. I'll listen to Rogan again when they fire him and his RSS feed comes back to life.
Between the one-sided story, some red flags from the employee himself ("go read that book about how to manage people", etc.) and the absolute over-reaction of creating a website dedicated to being fired from a contract, I'm gonna say that the manager was probably not the one mostly at fault.
If I were the OP I would take this site down, and re-think. Any prospective company that is looking to hire you in the future is going to google & see this. It does not reflect well.
Agreed. OP didn't like the characterization of being a "bad culture fit", but to me, spending multiple hours to build a site, purchasing a domain name, and promoting it all over the internet is exactly the kind of pettiness and poor judgement which _would_ make a bad culture fit. I would never want to work with someone who would be willing to write up public manifestos about petty coworker drama.
OP was definitely mistreated, but the mature and correct thing to do is to move on and find other work. Use it as a story for the "conflict at work" question in an interview, but otherwise, put it behind you.
It's also been more than a year since these events and OP just registered the domain three days ago. Reading quoted chats in addition to the OPs statement "At this point these conversations felt so weird that I started screenshotting the strangest ones" makes me think they are still holding onto these screenshots. I think it's time to move on.
I don't really see how this looks bad for OP. If anything he(?) looks like a very capable engineer with strong technical skills. (I hope your username trollied isn't in bad faith.)
> a)both the Product Manager and team were surprised,
Which doesn't mean much. I try to avoid privately siding against anyone in my company, too. It's entirely possible that his colleagues did the same and he interpreted it as siding with him. They might also haven't known the full details of the conflict.
> b)another person from another team reached out pretty soon to try to take OP on their team (having worked with op in the past)
Who most likely did not know about the conflict, either.
> c) recruiters who kept reaching out, AND op kept passing interviews till the HR part
Passing interviews is a skill not necessarily related to job performance, as discussed here quite often.
On the other hand, we know for a fact that he clearly did not handle this conflict well, and that Spotify decided not to hire him again (which might be unfair or might be due to their side of the story being different - we don't know). We also only have his impression of the impression of his colleagues for work performance and the fact that he choose to publicly post this & name the company, despite clearly not being perfectly in the right.
Not an ideal candidate in my view, but, as they say, you need to fit to the company culture - so feel free to hire him :)
Most companies will run a mile from someone who buys a domain and attempts to bring negative publicity out of revenge. While claiming it to be therapy! Maybe their story is accurate, maybe it isn't - either way, that sort of behaviour is an unnecessary risk for the employer.
He should at least remove his from the bottom of the site (so it won't be attached to googling his name). It can still act as bad press for spotify and as a vehicle for getting a new job if his name isn't there (it can just be pseudo anonymous by only revealing his name if a company is interested).
In summary, a contractor had an issue working with their client and instead of firing their client or trying to resolve it through the appropriate channels decided passive aggressive JIRA tickets and undermining the manager was the way to go?
Unless I'm misreading this blog and its tone then this blog serves as a red flag for working with this person.
Agree. You're contracting, you've probably signed a contract with your client that includes an NDA. Client engagements are supposed to be professional.
Last thing on the list that I, as a developer providing contract services, should do: Create a website to specifically bad mouth my customer, and make myself look bad in the process
I have the same personality with the OP and maybe a far similar experience way back. I just quit the company and find another, how ever it may be painful to leave a job you really liked, it is so much better just not to post stuffs like this and just move on.
There are always 2 sides of the story. I'm sure reading the other side would paint a different picture.
Having said that, based on this description: yes, the manager seems weak, but as the OP themselves state, these were annoyances. Couple of pointless chat messages, badly run meetings. Annoying, but it doesn't sound like such a big deal. Esp. in a fully remote setting, where you don't have to sit next to an annoying person all day..
Also, towards the end it turns out the manager was new at the company (first 6 months), so they were probably figuring out whatever upward reporting culture Spotify has, and maybe that's why they were asking seemingly pointless estimation questions?
In any case, openly challenging the other person in a group setting and making fun of them [with a ticket], which is what happened here, is not the right thing to do (whether a peer or a manager).
Good options are: (i) have a separate 1v1 where you talk it over with the person (ii) put up with it for a while and/or (iii) switch teams (iv) switch companies, if it's that annoying.
On the flipside, firing a person for what is described in the OP seems like an overreaction. But, judging based on one side of the story is not a good idea.
Overall, I personally cannot draw any conclusions about Spotify based on this, nor do I want do :)
Also, I'm questioning whether it's a good idea to write a blog post like this. I assume the contract had NDA / other clauses that prohibit this. In many cases, those clauses are a good idea. Eg. imagine if now Spotify, with all its marketing power, were to reply to this person's claims and represent their side of the story. That would probably suck for the author here. Fortunately that will not happen.
>so they were probably figuring out whatever upward reporting culture Spotify has, and maybe that's why they were asking seemingly pointless estimation questions
Even not-so-new managers often want to be able to answer questions about what their team has been working on and what's coming next and when.
> "Can you tell me how long X, Y and Z will take?"
> "We're almost finished with X, so only days left there. Y will take a few weeks, but I cannot estimate Z. It's something we have never done before and without exploration time I don't even know the scope of the work."
> "I need the time anyway. Provide it in a spreadsheet by end of day."
I feel your pain man, that's one I've had a few times before. Just failure by the manager to take the point on board, followed by a demand to just do it. That's a total morale and productivity killer.
Meh ... give people what they want. "I cannot estimate Z" is a refusal and I would suggest an ego-driven one. I would just say "between 1 and 12 months", or something like that. If they were then not happy with that I would go into why that is the best I can manage given the circumstances.
"failure by the manager to take the point on board" is not relevant really when you think of the manager's perspective. From their perspective they have a contractor refusing to do what they are asked.
I've not found vague estimates to work very well at all in this scenario. Managers will just continually ask for something more specific, they want a particular date they can remember/write down/enter into some project management software.
Usually I'll just go with "by date X we can give a reasonable estimate", which tends to work well enough with their mental model that they leave us alone until X.
"How long until the other team has the API? Will it be bug free or will I have to go back and forth with them?"
"When will I get the example data?"
"When will the features be fully defined?"
"Is this the full list of features, there will be no additions?"
I don't really have issues estimating well defined work that I personally will complete, but often you are on the hook for the rest of the organizations progess. The manager is there to manage that complexity, don't do it for them. Then after you get answers for everyone else's work, give a estimate contingent on those responses being correct (in my experience they never are).
> "I cannot estimate Z" is a refusal and I would suggest an ego-driven one.
This might come down to a cultural difference or difference in communication styles. As an IC, I'd consider it to be much more honest on my part to be upfront about unknown timelines instead of providing a (quite frankly, useless) estimate just because it's what my manager wants to hear.
At the end of the day, the work will take as long as it takes (managerial interference aside), and I believe in underpromising and overdelivering, precisely to avoid situations where someone's on the hook for an estimate that didn't pan out.
If I wanted my business to be making accurate projections, I'd have been a quant.
Often followed in my experience by some kind of complaint later on that "we were promised Z by this time why is the estimate bad".
It's something I've struggled to find any good solution for too, particularly if you're looking at work that might take weeks or months because then you're often estimating based off an 'aspirational' and ever-changing specification
An estimate for something with a lot of unknowns can be a range. In this case OP could have said 4-16 weeks since his manager was pushing for an estimate, and moved on. Instead he made it a hill to die on.
Think it will potentially be months? Write that. Write the longest amount of time you think it could be.
"Six months! How could it take that long?"
"It's a low quality estimate as I explained, personally I wouldn't rely on it for anything, it isn't any better than a guess. I don't have any data to base it off of."
The thing is, when I'm in this situation it's not that I cannot possibly ever estimate it. Taking the original example of three projects X, Y and Z (and a couple of others to add context) the issue with estimating Z can be a combination of:
- I am in the middle of developing X right now
- I am also handling some bug requests related to unmentioned, previously delivered projects A and B
- I am in the planning stage for project Y, and working with client and analysts to pull some requirements together
- I'm vaguely aware of how project Z roughly works, but there are a few big unknowns with the project that need to be cleared up which could be the difference between re-using much of project W or writing everything from scratch.
I can give a vague t-shirt sized estimate, or I can maybe say "4-8 weeks" but that doesn't satisfy the request because I'm actually being asked for a number that gets plugged into a field that accepts discrete time durations not fuzzy English descriptions or ranges. And I won't have time to investigate the unknowns in Z until I've mostly delivered X, it's nearing production release and I've resolved the bug reports for A and B.
That doesn't happen often, but when it does it can be hard to convince someone even if you're saying very directly "I will need to take time and effort away from priority tasks to analyse the project, eliminate some unknowns so that I can provide an estimate other than the vague 4-8 weeks". If you're suggesting "just give the upper estimate" then fine ... now you're going to be asked to break down exactly why you think it's as high as 8 weeks, "wait, why isn't it about the same as project W which we already completed...?" and you're back at explaining that you to dedicate time to the task before providing a breakdown.
Basically - if someone demands an estimate when you're not ready for it, in some environments it can be quite stressful. I actually believe the author was correct in going above the manager to establish whether a very vague finger-in-the-air estimate was sufficient, rather than throwing out a known-inaccurate number.
The parts of the job you can't estimate are actually your managers job to estimate. To illustrate that:
> I am in the middle of developing X right now
That one you can estimate likely. It is a task that you can complete on your own without the rest of the organization. As a individual contributor you should be able to give a time frame for a task like this.
> I am also handling some bug requests related to unmentioned, previously delivered projects A and B
Software is going to have bugs, but I've never worked at a org that labeled bugs correctly. In my experience about half the time a so called bug is a specification miss or a feature request (a management problem), the other half need to be prioritized (again, management problem). If they want you to work on a bug over a project, deadlines are going to slip, and that is a management problem to solve. Your estimate of two weeks doesn't include washing the CEO's car or whatever other random task they want to pull you off to do, two weeks is two weeks and they gave you less than two weeks so of course it isn't done.
> I am in the planning stage for project Y, and working with client and analysts to pull some requirements together
So far you have been responsible for resource management to a large degree. You have to know in advance how many defects your software is going to have, how long it's going to take for a pull request to get reviewed, when the other team is going to get you what you need to complete the work, how often you will get pulled off to work on other tasks, etc. Now you are writing the requirements? What exactly is the management team doing if it isn't managing the product or the people building the product?
What I was trying to say was that there are very valid reasons that mean I cannot and should not turn my attention to a distant project while I have my hands full right now. It doesn't mean I'll never do it, but it does mean that "I don't know right now, I need to complete some work before I can turn my attention to this properly" is not only a reasonable response but ultimately the correct one, rather than throwing out a number that you'll possibly be held to at a future date.
"It's going to take me a couple days to put together a project plan, given that the project itself has yet to be fully defined. Shall I put project X on hold until I get that done?"
Resourcing isn't a individual contributors problem, if it will take you a couple days to get a estimate, and they choose to prioritize that. Fine. If they don't want to give you the time, refuse to speculate, if they keep pushing, tell them it will take a year or some other large number that you could do it 2 - 3 times over in. If they say it won't take that long, ask them how they know since the project isn't defined.
Ah yeah those are some good strategies and they're usually how I approach this when it comes up so I think we are on the same page :) It's just tiresome to have to do, and I feel like in doing so despite being polite and calm I think I'm being thought of as obstinate or a troublemaker. Which is a shame because in fact I'm trying to reduce the uncertainty and chaos and make everyone's lives a bit nicer :) Oh well, like I said it doesn't come up often enough to cause me great stress and I'm experienced enough to sort of handle myself when it does. Just ... I wish it didn't :D
The contractor was a senior engineer who had been working on and off with Spotify for years. Overall they've been in the field since 2009. That's quite a while. They must have some gut instinct on timelines by now.
I've had my fair share of curve ball estimates over the years, if push came to shove I'd just give a ballpark estimate. Example: 3-6 months. If pushed for a specific time I'd go with the longer one - 6 months. If the manager wanted a shorter timeframe then just tell them what they want to hear. End of the day a bad estimate shouldn't get you in trouble with the company - if it does then that's not the sort of company I'd want to work with.
> End of the day a bad estimate shouldn't get you in trouble with the company
I don’t know what companies you have worked for, but I’ve never worked for any where the ‘vague estimate that we are absolutely not going to hold you to’, is not seen as the word of god.
It’s not that you get fired if you fail to live up to it, but the constant “why isn’t this done yet” gets fairly annoying really quickly.
Yeah flat out some companies insist on "estimates" from engineers to get them to commit to date and will hold them to it. The other fun one is "that's too long an estimate, let's break it down" then you are forced to try and design and analyze some vague feature in long meetings with project managers while you are busy with other work.
Yes that can happen, I wouldn’t want to work somewhere like that either.
“Why isn’t this done yet?”
Answer: It was a ballpark estimate. Now we know more information we can revise the schedule.
That’s all you can do as a non-manager. If the company culture makes your employment unenjoyable I would start looking for a better workplace, or find a coping mechanism to deal with the resulting poor management.
Somewhere between "Let's ignore it for now" (i.e. zero which is a very exact number as a professor of mine used to say), a few days, and "I'm not even sure we can do what's being asked for here" are a whole lot of other numbers which may be useful even if they're off by a factor of two or more.
I've absolutely had management insist on putting overly optimistic stretch goals into schedules but, at the end of the day, they haven't been totally outside the envelope of reality.
Once you've established that you've given a best-effort answer, and you're being pressed for a different hallucination of a bright future, what is the point? What is the point of giving any answer if the manager can just pull the handle and roll for a better one? If the manager in question wanted to prioritize a specific thing, there can be a discussion about that. Pressing the same button hoping for a different answer just strikes me as a behavior that necessitates record levels of cynicism (which in my experience disqualifies people from managerial positions) or room temperature levels of cognition.
That's my whole point, yet people come here to talk about what kind of strategy they use to deal with such nonesense without acknowledging the Sisyphean task of appeasing such managers, which in turn implies validation of such practices.
The other alternative is you start dropping requirements/features to meet their timeline, ideally leaning towards those they probably consider less important, creating the altered project for them. I’ve found doing so to be crucial especially for non-technical communications and when you jump a level (talking to a boss 2+ levels superior)
Otherwise if they won’t budge on time and features and resources, all you can do is put it in writing that you expect x-y time, and optimistically z might be possible.
Ultimately half the manager’s job is to account for that uncertainty with buffers, and they’ll probably double it anyways before presenting it upwards/outwards. If they don’t add their own buffer… they’ll probably run into trouble anyways
Same. This ended causing me to quit my start-up. I was the tech lead and kept getting asked to estimate features that were completely new to us. I had a completely junior team due to budget constraints. After playing this game time and time again I threw in the towel.
The correct answer from the manager’s perspective here is: Ok, how much exploration time do you need? Can you give me a reasonable estimate after an hour, a day, a week?
Right! It's not that the contractor was incapable of estimating it, but they needed to allocate some of their time to analysing the project. And given that there are many tasks a developer might have to complete, there'd have to be a priority call over whether analysis on Z was more important than development on X and Y. And when the contractor had the meeting where the product owner was present, it sounds like they implicitly understood this and were happy with the more general estimate.
In one project that i worked to we constantly got on planning what we can estimate and what not and if that's the second, we could mark something as dependent on some other task, or create "analysis" version of this task and estimate how much time we need to spend to be able to break down it do manageable chunks and investigate all the unknowns and then we planned it as any other task.
we had some vague plannings, but those where in tshirt sizes or we just assigned numbers relative to other unknown tasks, so in long run management could roughly estimate project in months and manage risks
At that point I'd just point out how coming up with an estimate would first require putting in a lot of exploration and research, so it would take X amount of times and obviously delay other work in the meantime. Then ask again if, that being the case, the manager still wants their estimate.
Now it's on them to do their job and evaluate priorities instead of sneakily offloading this to the developer.
> "I need the time anyway. Provide it in a spreadsheet by end of day."
I'd offer a time that's 4-5x as long as a reasonable ballpark. If they take that time, it gives you some slack. If they balk at it, you can explain that the estimate takes into account all of the unknown variables, and that if they'd like to shorten the time, they'll need to invest a little bit of time into discovery to get a breakdown of the timeline. Once managers start being faced with the real costs of their decisions, they start to be reasonable. But you have to do this in a calm and reasonable manner, not passive aggressively. If you do it just to get back at a manager, it will backfire on you.
Contracting provides an immense amount of flexibility that FTE's don't have - from the amount I can put in tax advantaged retirements, the amount I can bill, my ability to maintain multiple client loads and the ability to fire my clients - it'd be hard pressed to be FTE somewhere looking for 9-5 ever again.
On call? Bill. Useless meetings? Bill. Travel time? Bill. Overtime? Bill. Waiting for the IT department to get something done? Bill. Don't have enough work but you booked for a 40 hour week? Bill and work on another clients stuff. Clients infrastructure is a mess and they refuse to take advise? Some combination of bill for the time, fire the client, or suggest additional time to focus on their issues. Don't feel like working today? Don't bill, go walk the dog.
I'm able to estimate my value on the market in near real-time, get cash instead of theoretical optional value, select clients on any metric I choose, and being able to live (virtually) anywhere I want in the world while maintaining a client base wherever I want - it's a pretty awesome gig. If I want to take a summer off? I just offboard clients and turn off inbounds until I'm ready to take on more.
Why do you still FTE? Surely you should be able to fill a book of clients at this point :)
sounds like the manager really needed that estimate (!)
that part of the story was really a microcosm of the gap that exists between individual contributor vs manager; the former 'does the work' whilst the latter needs to report the progress of that work 'upstairs', an archaic yet persistent organisation of labour
Engineering team will always have items that are very hard to estimate without doing background work.
A good manager would have said "what do we need to do to figure out times?" and then "Can we timebox that research to a sprint / two sprints / etc?" are reported the horizon one timescale up.
The best solution would have been to escalate these problems to the managers line manager.
It’s clear they were having problems which were impacting the team.
Where I work we don’t have “engineering managers” our line managers are other engineers in different squads as I think it is great!
In a previous company we did have an over zealous manager and the team feedback through the correct channels and the issues where resolved. This was also a team made up mostly of contractors who all had strong opinions.
I thinks it’s important to remember that it was a really tough time for a lot of people during the lockdowns so maybe that factored into these issues.
That's a difficult story. There have been mistakes made at both sides.
But I really get the author, some managers are just impossible to work with. And their strategy to protect themselves is to blame their employees. They have the ability to present the slightest mistakes as enormous problems to higher ups. They are just tricking and blinding their higher ups and stay in business for years. And everybody below them is just suffering.
Unfortunately even with great companies where the "floor" of technical ability/intelligence/whatever is of course higher than the general population; there exists the same percentage ratio of competent people to non-competent people. A somewhat non-competent manager is actually fine in my experience, if they trust their team to know more about technical topics and try to stay pleasant.
This case obviously wasn't one and I'm sad to hear it. However, as a young and aspiring start-up founder, these stories are a great help and inspiration on how to structure my own company to avoid, or rather, minimise such clashes. Thanks for sharing!
The manager’s described behavior is bad, but the author’s reactions and responses are also bad. This reads like a meeting of two flawed personalities, neither of whom is willing or capable of adapting to difficult interpersonal situations.
The appropriate response to the (obviously) unhealthy manager in the situations described is to tactfully de-escalate while beginning the process of switching teams. Instead, the author seems fixated on “winning” every disagreement. If you think you can undermine your manager and backseat drive their processes, however flawed they may be, you are not going to produce positive outcomes for yourself or the team as described in the article.
A common misunderstanding of less mature employees is that only one person can be in the wrong in an interaction. The author writes as if the manager’s wrongdoings are a free pass for them to respond however they felt like, but the described responses come off as petty and unprofessional. Both parties can be in the wrong in interpersonal conflict situations, and these writings are a good example of what that looks like.
Going so far as to create a website publicly defending one’s behavior while seemingly oblivious to the fact that the described behavior is not a good look is an immature move. If I found this person’s resume in our application queue I would be extremely hesitant to hire them anywhere except maybe under the close guidance of a very strong manager who could mentor them closely and who wouldn’t hesitate to remove them from the company if they started demonstrating signs of combativeness or being a disgruntled employee. Advertising your “disgruntled fired employee” status online is not a good look, especially when you describe your own unprofessional behaviors in the process.
It seems like a genuine story at least, flaws are full front. Its not like some story I read where the employee was perfect and the manager was totally awful (from employee pov). This manager sucked something fierce, probably contributed very little to the company and through their inadequacy took it out on their employees. Dude here awkwardly plowed through it and was willing to make it work, he never really undermined his manager in ways that the manager did not already set himself up for failure. Why should a manager/manager's manager leave such a lasting impression on the hiring at Spotify vs dude here who worked longer than both on Spotify product? As far as hiring him, you know what you will get, he will probably have good instincts for dumb assholes.
> while seemingly oblivious to the fact that the described behavior is not a good look
I’m under the impression they’re writing that the actions they took weren’t great either.
I find it really interesting that the perspective on HN seem to be so split. There seems to be a group of people trying to defend the author, and a group of people that seem to come down on him for being unprofessional.
> I’m under the impression they’re writing that the actions they took weren’t great either.
But then why post the company name publicly and not conclude with summary of what went wrong? The way it's written and ended, it felt more like a bash at Spotify with minor introspection instead of a honest story of a bad situation.
Yes, you are totally right about the unhelpful urge to "win" and my actions being wrong. Also, exactly as you say, in the end the outcome is negative both for myself and the team.
Being viewed unfavorably by potential workplaces because of telling this story is a great fear, I admit.
> This reads like a meeting of two flawed personalities
They weren't equals organizationally. The manager was failing at his job, and the contractor was calling attention to it. While it can be argued this is unprofessional, the question is what is best for the company? Professionalism in this case would amount to coddling an incompetent manager, and creating more damage down the line.
The actions of the manager shows someone incompetent with a fragile ego feeling threatened and lashing out. The actions of the contractor shows someone guarding himself, searching for higher ground, and some teasing.
They are both failing in professionalism but there is a significant difference in magnitude of their failures.
Even in this completely one-sided story, out of which I'm sure many parts are missing or are presented as favorable to the employee, the employee sounds horrible. I wouldn't want to work with someone like that neither. Was the manager great? Absolutely not. Does the employee come off as someone that's a good culture fit in pretty much any work environment? Absolutely not.
I've been in the same boat, twice. It's unfair and frustrating, especially when you feel you contributed a lot to the company and everyone else except these few managers showed appreciation towards you and your work.
I also felt the urge to denounce their unprofessional behavior online, hoping that someone else would not end up in the same position as me, or make their customers aware of how bad their behavior is towards employees. But the truth is, it would not change anything and just paint me in a bad light.
After reflecting on my experiences, I found that we were just not a fit. Their way of working was not aligned with mine. Instead of changing myself to fit in or them to accommodate me, we clashed and it ended badly. Both are at fault, I take the loss and move on to the next gig.
Found my happy workplace now and I'm using these experiences to spot potential red flags early.
Weird to dedicate a domain to the story of how you got fired. Oh well.
Without hearing the other side of the conflict, this whole thing could mean multiple things. It's possible that the manager himself was a bad culture fit, for example. If the manager wasn't actually a bad culture fit and his managing clashed with the author of this blog, then the author is actually a bad culture fit for Spotify.
This is exactly the sort of problem I can easily see brewing with remote-only development. Conflicts escalating in DMs, opinions stewing on both sides because if limited interaction, and no good way to get body language across that might help add understanding to the situation.
Telling your manager to go read a book on managing seems like a terrible idea. I don't know in what mindset this is acceptable. Using sarcasm and mocking someone remotely is also a terrible way to get your point across.
Then there's the Kanban board thing. It's great that you communicated the problems you've been having in the sprint system. It's great that you came up with a working solution. What's not great is implementing this behind the manager's back. You can't go "oh yeah we changed the way we do this" to your manager and get defensive even if the team agrees with you, you should've taken his opinion into consideration before you even came up with a solution.
Questions like "how long do you expect x to take" seem pretty normal to me. As a developer it's obvious that there's no real answer to this that will satisfy everyone, but companies need long term strategies and predictions to shift resources around. Dealing with this uncertainty is a manager's problem but asking for an estimate is hardly the unacceptable crime against dev teams that this blog makes it out to be.
Reading through the emotional descriptions of what happened, it seems to me like both parties were heavily affected by covid, lockdowns, and forced remote work, but neither side seemed to get much of an understanding from the other.
I think it's unfair to blame either party for this. I don't think there's anything wrong with publishing your experience per se, but come on, put it up on a blog somewhere, don't dedicate an entire website to the story of how you got fired. That just seems petty.
> I think it's unfair to blame either party for this.
For the firing / termination of contract? Sure, everyone sucked.
For termination tagged with a reason that meant that the OP was blacklisted, and interfering with them being hired by another team? HR and the manager definitely are to blame, and should be called out for it.
> Telling your manager to go read a book on managing seems like a terrible idea. I don't know in what mindset this is acceptable.
If I sent you a reference to appropriate data structures for trees and graphs would you get mad?
Or would it be context dependent? One thing to smart off about it and another thing to suggest a source of information.
Peopleware is a fantastic resource for managing and most people probabably wouldnt take offense to a suggestion to check it out.
But if the author was rude about it or their relationship had already deteriorated to the point the manager was defensive about any feedback then it was a lost cause anyway.
But to think someone would / should be offended by the suggestion to review a valid source of good information... no that is not healthy.
I haven’t seen a more obvious case of someone pulling the tail on the cat and then being surprised when it scratches them. Then blogging about in a way where you try to put others on the hot seat.
Whenever you think about creating a public post like this on a company, consider first if you have grounds for suing them. In some countries, instead of suing you may instead look up if the situation has grounds to report them to the relevant regulatory entity (health or labor violations for example).
If you don't, it is likely that the temporary satisfaction of publicly shaming the company will be less than the nagging feeling of forever doubting if you didn't get a job because someone read your previous post and thought you'd be "difficult" to work with.
After reading comments here I thought after reading this I would largely agree. It's true that sarcastic tickets don't help but they're not a fireable offense. It should be noted that this is one person's account of what happened.
It's not clear to me where this contractor was. Sweden? Even as a contractor, knowing what I do about how large companies work, a manager can't typically just fire somebody. There is an HR process that needs to be followed.
For people saying he should leave and/or put his head down and do his work, that seems to be part of the problem: the constant interruptions. I've had this situation before. In some cases I've had some success with "you've just asked me to do Y when I'm doing X. What do you want me to do: X or Y?" For decent to good managers they understand this is a prioritization issue.
But for other managers this is viewed as insubordination.
Managers have to be held to a higher standard by the company because a bad manager can do an awful lot of damage to the career of their reports. Unjustifiably low ratings, subpar ratings that may make team transfers impossible, even PIPs for really no good reason.
Companies should be hypersensitive to bad managers but so often they just aren't.
Bad managers will shift blame for their own failings and it can be extremely hard not to be collateral damage before you realize what's going on.
As for Spotify not hiring this person back, that's just standard HR policy BS. There's probably not much you can do about that.
Sheesh. I had my fair share of bad interactions with management but in the end my contract termination landed me a much better job. And even much better afterwards.
Huge corps with a lot of middlemen tend to become authoritarian, competent people who kickstarted the whole affair are being replaced with yes men^Wpersons all the time because at larger company sizes loyalty is much more preferable than hard skills (I'm not implying that I was competent, that's for others to decide, but I wasn't only one who got the pointy end of the boot though).
I deeply sympathise with the guy, but there's time to enjoy and there's time to move on. Holding grudges against some kronenbergian bureaucratic machine ain't good for your mental health.
In my place the manager and the product manager make decisions about the design and architecture with the excuse that they have worked with related projects in the past. They constantly go against the suggestions of the lead dev and ask about estimations (sometimes twice a day) even before the requirements and the specs are clear.
I think if devs were more desciplined we wouldn't need mediocre managers to tell us how to do our jobs.
> I think if devs were more desciplined we wouldn't need mediocre managers to tell us how to do our jobs
I’m kind of aware I need someone to bring me back down to earth once in a while. It’s still annoying when it happens, but necessary. Fortunately right now I have a manager I’m actually quite happy with (like, I feel like we can have a dialogue).
Without seeing the other sides it's impossible to really know where the relationship broke down. That said, the thing that surprises me most here is about how much the author and employer seem to be treating the authors role as an employee. In my experience contractors will often leave some sort of a longer term impact on a team they're there to perform the work as requested and get paid. The relationship here seems like it flicks back and forth between contractor and employee which feels confusing at best.
Sometimes contracts don't work out, you fire them or they fire you, and you all move on. If this was authored by an employee then I'd get it and say maybe it sits somewhere around unfair dismissal, but as a contractor this is kind the gig - right? You work to keep a professional relationship where they pay you and you deliver the work and that's it. You get the benefits that come along with all the tax efficiencies and not having to participate in the corporate games as much, and they get a flexible worker who they can get rid of if things aren't working out.
Not saying it would solve ALL the problems described in the blog post, but keeping these conversations to shared channels would be the first thing I'd do. I my experience, the chance of professionalism goes way up and the risk of miscommunication goes way down when anyone can read the messages.
It’s okay to contradict your boss and even get into a heated discussion. That can be respected. But at the end of the day, after those discussions, you have to do what you are told. This reads as insolent behavior.
Were there no retros? A lot of this stuff could have been addressed in retros. That being said I would not want to work with the person that wrote this blog. If you have issues address them separately with the manager not undermine the manager publicly repeatedly.
>Well, the people I worked well with are still there, but their opinions don't seem to count.
Have the people you worked with approached HR along with the hiring manager? A note which simply says "bad cultural fit" doesn't strike me as an insurmountable barrier if you've got people prepared to vouch for you.
The lack of empathy in the comments here is worrisome. The manager was clearly failing to manage effectively. Blaming the engineer for not managing up with a manager who didn’t want to listen doesn’t make sense.
This scenario is my biggest fear as a people leader - that ICs are being mismanaged and I won’t be able to see it or intervene before it is too late.
> I didn't understand why he was getting into implementation details. At some point he said "think of me as a developer" as an explanation for his involvement. However he wasn't going to code or maintain the solution. Evidently he didn't feel like he needed to present an argument for a technical decision, as I would expect from another developer.
This is actually a pretty common pattern. I call it the "wannabe engineer syndrome". It is usually some C-level guy or some kind of architect, but it can also be a middle manager.
These people are usually former engineers. The more powerful this wannabe engineer is, the more they'll force their subordinates to write untested, crappy code.
From an engineer's point of view the best thing to do is to switch jobs. In the current market there really is no reason to put up with it.
There's lots of people pointing out that the developer in this case wasn't perfect.
But the underlying problem here is an organization that's supposed to give autonomy to developers, with a manager that is actively working against that. The manager, by looking at their actions, seems to want the team to take responsibility for their work, yet wants also to command and control the team. Often hiding behind indirect threats and "guidance".
Sure, if a manager is bullying you like this, eventually anyone will buckle under the pressure at some point. Now, if you come from an organization that is built for command and control, then also as a developer you are able to shift the responsibility to your manager and never do anything unless the manager explicitly tells you to do so. However, here the manager tries to have their cake and eat it too. They want you to do as told, yet take the blame if something goes south. This is extremely common: pretend that developers have autonomy, but still use control in subtle ways. If problems arise, you can blame the developers and the manager can wash their hands, because "it's the teams decision".
It's a recipe for disaster, and when this eventually blows up, it's very nitpicky to blame the developer for making mistakes in such an environment that's set up for failure.
Also, see the difference between the manager and the developer when they make mistakes. The developer promptly realizes going too far and apologizes. Meanwhile the manager shifts blame, denies their subtle control and keeps gaslighting the developers into thinking its all their fault.
I feel like the author might benefit from reading a blog post that was posted on HN a while back[0][1], specifically the "two and done rule" and the "do it anyway principal". Yes your manager is wrong, but the way you handled it is very immature. There are "shit" managers everywhere, if you get one, suck it up and start planning your escape. If you really want, you can go higher up the chain and raise your concerns. If your concerns are dismissed, just drop it, there is nothing to gain by fighting.
I also think that you made mountains out of mole hills in some situations. The time estimation "catastrophe" wouldn't even phase me. I'd just say some very high number (3-4 months) and if they weren't happy, I'd just reply "when we start working on it we'll do our best to pull it in". Yes it sucks that you have to do that, but you should really learn to play the game, at least a little bit.
>your manager is wrong, but the way you handled it is very immature. There are "shit" managers everywhere, if you get one, suck it up and start planning your escape.
They don't even sound that shitty to me. Managers like everyone else in the world have to work within the constraints of the system in place. Like Scrum vs Kanban. Maybe the manager couldn't care less but their director is the biggest Scrum cheerleader ever. And maybe they're getting hounded for the estimate and just need a number. And maybe skipping the internship program looks bad for the manager. And so on.
Even if it's all the Manager's fault there's far worse sins in the world than dictating a methodology or asking for an estimate.
The manager went with Kanban, but expressed disappointment and looked "visibly annoyed". While the event does describes disagreement and sort of conflict between op and manager, I don't see anyone acting badly there.
Its only significance seem to be that this might be one of reason why manager did not liked op, which yes, can happen with some personalities. But, op does not provide any part of story that would show that.
>I'd just say some very high number (3-4 months) and if they weren't happy, I'd just reply "when we start working on it we'll do our best to pull it in".
Yeah. If it's something I have some familiarity with, I can usually throw out an upper bound. And do as you suggest and/or say "If you want me to spend next week digging into the details a bit more deeply I can, but it means I won't be spending much time on my current project. Your call." (And perhaps the estimate is important because of a product launch etc. Or maybe it's just a number on someone's status report.)
Best advice in this situation always give an upper bound estimate and fatten it up a little more. All they want is a number there is a damn good chance that it really doesn’t matter.
The reality—if you give me an estimate, I am probably going to fatten it up even further when I pass it up the chain, not because I don’t trust your estimate, but because something always happens outside of your and my control.
Wow, thanks a lot! I agree that I handled the situation very badly. The articles you refer to are exactly the guidance I had needed to learn the lesson less harshly. Sometimes I got advice from senior folk about how to navigate a workplace, other times I played by the ear.
When I was working in an office environment, not from home, I often could ask around for advice, get a hint about approaches to different people. It was more of a challenge when remote only.
I'm sorry this happened. I sympathize with this guy! But a lengthy screed against a former employer is not going to open any doors, no matter how accurate it might be. Ideally, every nuanced interpersonal conflict could be handled by dialogue, but the typical hiring process doesn't allow for that. Personally, I wouldn't take the chance of ruining my own reputation by hiring a candidate with a site like this.
How is this not abuse of employee laws by Spotify? If you're a single contractor hired to work as a normal full-time employee, you should have the same protections and rights as a normal employee.
Sorry, but this is an incredibly immature response from @cspike.
You lost a job, just deal with it. Take whatever life lessons you can from it and move on.
Creating a custom domain and setting up a one-off, one-sided story doesn't serve them or anyone else.
Are you expecting this to somehow get you your job back? Or just to make yourself feel better by getting proverbial pats on the back?
What you're actually doing is shooting yourself in the foot for future potential jobs. If you ever want to mention in your CV that you created and maintained a chat integration app for them, then anyone who ever read this thing will immediately connect it with you.
You need to both take down your pity blog and delete this post on HN. Its not going to do you any good in the long run except to hurt your prospects.
This title and the linked website is strange. Regardless of the story and who is at fault, I wouldn't expect a company to hire again someone it had fired previously and I understand an HR department acting in a cautious manner. I also dismissed candidates that seemed ok on paper but had that huge red flag in their history.
hi Stanislav, thanks for sharing your story! Your manager was wrong and you were right. The only mistake you did was tolerating that behaviour for a long time and taking it personally, imho.
If you feel you're in a team managed inefficiently, raise the flag, talk to the manager (once), if that does not work, resign on your own and let the manager's manager know why you take that decision.
The employee was wrong and weasel worded their responses:
> “ Do you want to own product X?"
> "It is a low maintenance system so it takes very little of our time. It's not expensive to own it."
> The manager was displeased.
Of course the manager was. They asked a straightforward question and didn’t receive a straightforward response. Multiple times.
Once again:
> Do you really think product X aligns with our team's mission?"
> "Historically I can see why we own it. It sounds to me that maybe you don't want us to own it?"
The response, again, does not answer what the manager asked.
Employee goes on to write parody tickets.
Employee goes on to grandstand in front of other manager, instead of taking it “offline”.
Employee goes on to demand witnesses to simple meeting.
Manager has had enough of employee’s nonsense, terminated.
I don’t see how anyone could say it so authoritatively that the manager was wrong and employee was right. Unless you are just trying to coddle them, which if so, carry on.
> "The ultimatum to produce an estimate ruined my entire weekend."
I think my work-related superpower is that stupid things that happen in the work doesn't bother me at all. I would just give an estimate at the same conversation when the manager insisted. Sure, I would phrase it in a way to explain how weak was that estimate. Something like "It's new to me, I have yet to study the scope, it's subject to change in scope until then, and other tasks getting prioritized. That said, I would guess two months". And then I wouldn't think about that at all once the conversation was over.
If those "two months" is used against me later on, I would explain the reasons why the initial estimation was off again. If I am still blamed for a delay, I would probably start looking for another place to work.
Also, I would never try to "trap" my manager into a conversation with the Product Manager just to show them how right I was and how silly they were to ask a precise estimate.
EDIT: I wrote a long reply to someone who has now deleted their comment asking how one can learn to not care. I took some time thinking about it, so to not waste that time, I will add my reply to the deleted comment here.
Ha! There is a reason I framed it as "superpower". Seriously though, I had that conversation with my wife a few times. I just don't care about a lot of stuff, but she does. My advice to her "not care" is useless. Worse, harmful depending on the tone I use. But I do have some reasoning about how I developed that. No idea if it works as advice for other people though.
First, I am 42 years old. I always kind of didn't care for a lot of stuff, but getting older makes it even easier. I think this usually happens to everyone. This is what I would call "wisdow". Learn about what not to care (and what to care more about, like community, time with good friends and family).
Second point, check your ego. You feel offended if something hurts your ego. If you make knowledge about good software development practices a point of pride, your self-identity, your self-value, it will be hard to let it go if someone just don't get it. Or go actively against what you believe to be true. For example, I doubt that if the manager instead insisted in the author giving a precise number for tomorrow's temperature, that they would be that bothered. That it would have "ruined their weekend". They would just think that their manager is silly, that they don't understand how weather works, take look at weather.com and tell them whatever number showed up there. And that's it.
Third point, understand that people take time to learn new things. Don't fight with all your forces against someone's opinion at the moment you learn about them. Learn to accept that you can voice your disagreement, explain your reasons, and they will remain thinking exactly the same at that moment. But if you are really right, with time, they might see it. In this case, give the estimate they wanted. Then, make a note to, when you get to that task, you will be studying the scope better and update the manager about a new estimate. Then, while you are working on that, make a point to make it clear that some urgent tasks or a bug, delayed the work, and pass the new estimate. Hopefully, when the task is done, they will understand better how that initial estimate was imprecise. And proabably didn't help anyone at all by having being created. OR... be open to learn that the manager, for some reason you didn't understand at the time, actually needed a number.
I think that leads to my last point. Remember that you could always be wrong. Consider that there is a chance (even if you put that chance at 0.0001%) that the thing is not actually stupid. It just look stupid to you. It might be odd, or stupid but not that stupid, or stupid but for a reason, or not stupid at all and you were being stupid thinking it was stupid. If you always consider that there is a chance you are wrong, stupid things bother less.
It's very understandable that the manager wanted an estimate. And given that Z was probably neither developing nuclear fusion, nor some complex task involving dozens of teams and complex machinery with unpredictable lead times, a back of the envelope rough cut doesn't seem unreasonable. And if the manager didn't like the answer, you just repeat that it's your best estimate absent scoping the project out in more detail.
I've been there for probably more complex non-software projects. And also had my estimate cut (and had it come in pretty much just where I said it would be in the first place).
> I think my work-related superpower is that stupid things that happen in the work doesn't bother me at all.
Being able to separate work and personal life isn’t even a superpower. It’s table stakes for having a healthy personal life.
It’s natural to take pride in your work and to be upset when things don’t go your way, but we all need to be able to let it go and get on with our lives.
The author of this article has done the opposite: These events appear to have happened some time ago, but the author has become so obsessed with what happened that he’s reliving and re-narrating the battle long after his adversary (the manager he fought with) was later removed from the company.
When I was younger, I was really put off by the idea of having to provide estimates for tasks that I'd never done before. Now I realize that the manager really just needs to put a number into their schedule so they have something to take back to the bean counters, and a number coming from me is going to be at least slightly more accurate than one they pull completely out of the air by themselves.
His manager was definitely a power-move playing prick (although probably this way because he himself was insecure within the organization) and, unfortunately, they are exactly the sorts of people who turn estimates into deadlines. Decent managers don't say "I need this by end of day" unless the project really is company-existential.
If the manager was asking in good faith, he'd have explained why he was asking for the estimate and what decisions would be made based on it, and give the employee allowances to give timeframes that no one would he held to... but it doesn't seem like he was that kind of person.
Yes, I've also developed the ability to just not take home work. When I leave the "office" (Not literal, I'm WFH currently) then any issues are parked until I'm logged back on.
If problems like this start to develop then it can be scary, and you may need to defend yourself. But as you say, the way to do that isn't by trapping people.
My advice for people who fear they are about to be embroiled in interpersonal work issues:
1. Keep a work diary. Keep a journal of what you've done, what the other person has done (try to keep this part matter of fact) and also how you perceive any issues and how they affect the team.
2. Raise concerns with your line manager. If they are the person you're having issues with, gently escalate to their line manager or someone else who has the authority to actually do something. Make sure you get agreement from someone that you are having issues and that those issues need resolving. If you can't get someone to agree that there is even an issue then that is a major red flag about the company culture more widely. (Or it's a major red flag that they think you are the sole problem, but if that is the case then stick even harder to matter of fact and prepare to leave.)
3. Try to document and predictions you have on the effects of decisions you don't agree with. You will either have good evidence that disagreements are causing issues or you may be surprised that decisions are less impactful than you think and can grow to learn to accept them.
4. Try to picture what an end goal / resolution looks like that isn't just "X is fired and replaced by a better co-worker".
Interpersonal conflict at work is scary, and bad relationships can doom projects or even make it untenable for both parties to continue working somewhere. Which is why it's important to iron out any issues before they get to that point.
> Do you want to own product X? It's the team's decision.
> Maybe the intern can learn the ropes
This is what I hate about work environments that pretend to be all caring and non-hierarchical. Like the author, I worked in Sweden and I've seen examples of it. They avoid specifying clear rules for where one's responsibilities end, and who gives orders to whom, because that would be oppressive — and oh, we're too nice for that and we don't want people to feel bad. But the hierarchies and oppression don't go away if you pretend they don't exist. They're still there, they just take a new, less explicit form and give freedom for abusers to play around the grey areas.
What I see the manager doing here is trying to push for some decisions without making it explicit and taking responsibility for it. I find it cowardly and harmful. People who are not interested or are unable to play with this niceness game are the ones who will lose in it.
In a healthy system, a manager could just say, “we use product X, that's my decision” or “no, I decided we're not spending money on that” — optionally, motivating the decision. And later be held accountable for it. In a system too focused on being nice and not making people feel bad, a manager does not want to look oppressive and will have to make it look like this was everyone's idea, or choose a phrasing that will not directly say what the quotes say, but kind of imply that (“What do you think? Should we use product X? It's team's decision”. “Maybe we can go without spending money on that”).
> it is also the Spotify convention of the right way to do things
Another thing people of this sort do is insisting on their opinion by saying things with a tone of a convincing argument but with words that don't really address the point (“Didn't we agree on this already?”). If the other side is less experienced in fiddling with politeness, they may feel like they are being too persistent and mean objecting for 5th time. Telling this sort of abusive manager they are talking nonsense would sound mean (sometimes this would be the right thing to say though), and playing on their level is doomed to lose.
Direct confrontation is normal, giving orders is normal, telling people they are/were wrong is normal. These should be acknowledged and regulated, not ignored.
I think these HR systems also use "bad culture fit" to encode red flags they can't legally record: health issues, political disagreements. This already dubious mechanism can get further abused by badmouthing.
these HR systems also use "bad culture fit" to encode red flags they can't legally record: health issues, political disagreements.
This is absolutely the case.
That said, you're probably not going to get fired over your politics unless you're either (a) seen as a union supporter (or, worse, organizer), or (b) so far right you've already been cancelled and are now a PR liability. If you're in the middle, they usually don't really care who you vote for, at least not enough to punish you for it.
GDPR. You have a right to know all information they have about you on file. You have a right to get the information rectified. You have "the right to be forgotten".
This is atrocious and in a better world there would be physical consequences for people who pull things like what was pulled against OP, but ultimately, this is not unpredictable or surprising.
The truth of the corporate world (we say "corporate America" in the US, but we've exported this disease all over the world) is that, as a subordinate, you exist for one reason: support your manager's career and reputation. Do that, and you can be sub-mediocre and you'll still get promoted. Miss that objective, and it doesn't matter what good you do for the company--you'll only piss people off more if they figure out what you're capable of. Bosses fire first the people who make them look bad and second the people they perceive as costing them time; competence is only a third- or fourth-order tie-breaker.
The story starts off as a typical tale of a shitty manager who knows he can't motivate shit to stink and uses abusive practices ("end of the day" requests for things that aren't actually urgent, insistence on hard estimates that will turn into deadlines) because he thinks it's the only way to get work done. Where it gets disgusting (although, sadly, not surprising) and reaches the point where, in a better world, people would be held physically accountable, is where the disagreement with one manager leads to him being blacklisted within the entire organization. It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately it is.
I don't see a fix for this problem. A union could guarantee your job, but it'd probably be no more than a severance period insofar as the incentives on other hiring managers to circle the wagons (that is, ghost you upon realizing some other manager had a problem with you) are strong. The union would make it harder to fire you, but you'd never be seen as anything more than a problem by management. I know someone who was able to prove his boss was playing favorites--he got his performance review fixed, and his boss fired--and he still wasn't able to last longer than six months, because of his internal reputation as a "boss killer".
The thing to understand is that corporations would rather be wrong and consistent than risk inconsistency, and they would rather put up a unified front of wrongness than allow anyone at the bottom to divide people higher-up against each other. Managers protect their own, always, even the ones they know are shitty--this is the same problem that exists, in the US, on police forces--and those who aren't willing protect the class get thrown aside. The OP had to be blacklisted in service to corporate consistency; to do otherwise would embarrass his manager and, ultimately, the company decided (as it always will, since to render any decision contrary to preexisting rank would be inconsistent by definition) the manager was more important than he was.
That's so true. I was in similar situation as OP, I was always very rude and hardcore to my manager, and it was all fine - up until the point where I publiclly embarass her. That's when I got fired.
A corporation's culture is what it allows to happen and doesn't fix.
My major takeaways from this:
* Spotify doesn't have good oversight of their managers
* Spotify doesn't value their individual contributors enough to provide them with a clear problem resolution path for this situation
* Spotify has an HR shadowban procedure
* The author doesn't have (or didn't have) great coping skills when presented with a corporate political problem outside of the usual context
Not sure about Sweden (where I assume this situation took place), but it’s common in the US to have “Ineligible for rehire” flags that can be placed place on a terminated employee’s file that effectively blacklists the employee from working for the company again.
I can envision a situation where a person is terminated, another manager sought to hire the termed employee and HR stops the process because they employee doesn’t have rehire eligibility.
Prospective future employers of the employee can contact the other companies the employee worked for and most HR departments will confirm employment, confirm salary, confirm hire/end dates, and will confirm rehire eligibility status.
It’s why it’s really important to try and avoid getting termed for cause in the US…while it’s not a “blacklist”, it certainly can follow you.
1. Was at a startup in the 2k bubble. I was apparently unofficially made lead of a project. I was in way over my head. The company was about 50 people, most from other countries like Russia and Romania.
I didn't even know what my role really meant and I struggled to learn C++ and now I was supposed to code on my own. The CTO wanted a flowchart, which I created together with the project manager, some older but nice guy from Iran.
The CTO said it was ok but too detailed.
There was a female intern doing flash. Well being an intern she couldn't pull that intro movie off and asked me for help. I had never done anything with flash and had no clue. I suggested she experimented and asked around on forums dedicated to flash movies.
One of the Russian developers was a cocky bastard. He was experienced and had created a prototype in like 2 weeks.
I felt useless, because that's what I was.
Why was I made lead for this project? Because I said that we'd get it done, despite other devs, country native, said it was hard. But I thought being optimistic was good, you can't start something and believing it won't ever get done.
Well I had an issue with my title and the Russian guy delivering and snoozing with the project manager. I felt left out, the Russian didn't respect my position and I started yelling at the morning and noon breaks.
I got mental and called in sick. A few weeks later I got fired. It was my 1st job in the IT industry, early 2000 bubble.
The company was a disaster. Open bureau with 4 people sitting on round tables 4 PCs. Wifi, computer electrosmog, no privacy, some young guy listening to loud music irritating everyone.
The "ship" had three upper etage, owner, the middle, crew, and the underground, admin hell.
All admins ever did was say no to requests for hardware and play games and chat all day.
It was funded by a prominent TV moderator's brother. In the end they spent too much on booking Reamon so they couldn't pay the bills anymore.
Funny thing when it all went downhill the "sail" outside went loose and the rats (employees like me) were leaving the sinking ship.
The investors got the hardware, the boss and his wife fled to a nearby country and sold the product to a prominent telco cashing in big time.
We sued because we didn't get our pay. We got nothing and were forced to drop the charges or else pay a big sum for the justice system.
Anyhow I was really mad at that cocky Russian guy, so that was my "manager" part in this story.
The other story is I was a contractor fixing some database import script in PHP.
In PHP warnings aren't errors.
I fixed the script but when ran it returned a warning, however doing its job.
I sent in the script and got yelled at by some guy 10 years younger than me. WTF!
Ok I did a file pointer check and did add a @ to suppress the warning. Sent in the script and never worked for this house again.
I don't need to take abuse and that's where I draw the line. Sure he was right to criticize the warning but he stepped over the line by yelling and being rude.
I didn't respond in the same way he did, but I was close to, because I don't take shit from anyone however I'm professional enough to remain civil.
The way I read this case is you both did wrong but you're a contractor and it's the way it is, you have "no rights", even if you do. You get paid way more than the employees and you're free to go if you don't like it.
You're not part of the family, you're an external asset.
It's not your job to fight or change structure. Yes, you're the Russian from my story, more talented. But just do your job and if you can't, quit or talk to the manager you have a problem with. If that leads to no result go higher but do your job. You got cocky while being in a weaker position. And you paid the price.
I've gotten fired, I've also gotten dumped. I can't hate on women for dumping me, they don't owe me anything, just accept the dump and move on. Sometimes it's better not to question it much, second-guessing the woman, it's over that's it, next. Well there's times not, like if the employer created the expectation of long-term employment, that's a debt. If he enters debt, that's a debt. If he cheats you of wages, that's a debt. Gotta collect. I have taken them to court, that's the whole point of a contract, enforcing contracts. Some people said that's violent but in fact it's the exact contrary, the only anti-violent resolution.
If he just says, hey this isn't working out, in good faith, like doesn't extend a contract, fine.
What needs to happen is it be more viable to do your own thing, be an entrepreneur. That was the case in the 19th century in America, after the Civil War, men just went and did their own shit. A farmer is an entrepreneur. Panning for gold is entrepreneurship (open even to slaves in the case of Brasil, you could earn your freedom in less time than the voyage). Bitcoin mining is entrepreneurship. And of course all the businesses in the Long Depression (which was not a modern-style depression like the current depression, but rather an industrialization process where everything kept getting cheaper, deflation through industry).
Bad managers exist. If you'd previously managed to be in the industry for years without ever meeting one, well, you were lucky. You're clearly an enterprising and autonomous fellow, so chances are this won't be the last time you clash with "the man"; hopefully next time you'll be a bit more careful when picking your battles.
But: this shit should stay offline, man... recalling an anecdote or two is one thing; buying a domain just to go on for several pages, with detailed descriptions of months of interaction with somebody who could be deanonymized fairly easily, is borderline libel. This won't get you back a job at Spotify, that ship has sailed. Put this effort into finding new clients - a task that won't be helped by having googleable proof that you can be "hard to work with", which is what this is.
It's interesting, how much this question is controversial. I also have had similar problem. It was a bit different, but similar. Much time passed, but I still can't understand who was right. But I also can't understand, why I was fired, and the manager stayed. Was it me who is wrong, or the manager?
I think it would be good to reach some kind of consensus. Is it okay for the manager to be rude and not listening to needs of developer?
The problem is that, according to OPs Linkedin, landing at Spotify was a huge career goal. I think that he really thought high of himself + really wanted to stay. Maybe he even did not realize that he is "just a contractor".
But isn't it one of the manager role goals to keep the developers churn down? I wonder, how is this balanced, when it's more important to have the correct subordination, or keeping the churn down.
This is yet another great example of how HR only works in the interest of the company and never for the employees.
I have never trusted HR, managers and alike.
I would have simply left, no worth it discussing with a manager that clearly was no fit for that role.
Also, the role of an engineering manager is simple: facilitate their reports work, support them, care for their career growth, clear any roadblock. The priority number one for them should be their team.
After reading this story, I am not sure I will ever consider working at Spotify.
It's very sad to see the amount of people here blaming an employee. I think under these conditions they didn't do anything more aggressive than the manager.
Calling out a manager for bad behaviour shouldn't be vilified like this, especially when they are doing the same up the ladder to you. I think HN is just soaked in "fellow kids" types who are trying to stay hip and trendy and get their startup seen.
This isn't a site for tech junkies, it's a site for managers and they hate hate hate that this describes many of them.
Sounds almost like a Booking.com manager. You could have switched teams, but normally such a manager is fired first, and the conflicts resolve itself automatically.
In this case your ex-colleagues will leave sooner and later, and middle-management will notice when it's too late.
This makes Spotify look like Agile hell. Agile for the sake of Agile. Agile in name only.
Looks like OP learned a lot from this, that's good to see. I had a similar snarky, snidely-playful, and unfiltered attitude and approach early in my career and it did me no favors. I made a lot of adversaries, had pay raises blocked, had promotions blocked, and had to bounce around a lot as a result. I landed under a few outstanding mentors that showed me that I didn't have to be that way, without sacrificing who I was, and mostly avoiding politics. That changed the trajectory of my career.
Only big point I want to make is that Spotify may have been a startup, but it's now corporate. Many startup signs may still be there, but when Agile is a religion, you've gone corporate. Corporate environments are always going to be about playing politics in addition to whatever your regular job is supposed to be.
Having been a manager and made the decision to never manage anyone again if I can avoid it.
Nothing is more irritating than having a direct report start bickering nonstop.
And by bickering I mean: Constantly turning every small discussion into an open ended micro argument.
This is not “push back,” or “feedback,” or “input.” This feels like they are deliberately creating friction on every single decision to prevent productivity. It is a sort of strategy to avoid being managed and avoid doing work.
It is also a nonstop questioning of your authority and it erodes your ability to manage them in a really sinister manner.
Reading this story, it felt like the engineer was doing that.
If you have never experienced it yourself, it is hard to stare just how irritating it is.
Example: “ok, can you fill in the spreadsheet. I have to show something on Monday.”
Them: “why are we using spreadsheets and not JIRA. Spreadsheets are not scalable.”
Repeat this process across every single decision and it becomes completely intolerable.
I feel like half the comments here didn’t read the article and are basing their comments on a few top level comments.
After the reading the article in its entirety it is clear the author acknowledges their own faults. In the “passive aggressive ticketing instance” the author clearly mentions that it’s a misstep on their end.
The author also concludes with a possible perspective from the manager’s side.
The article is not a rant. Its tone is balanced. It does not bash on Spotify. The author does not portray themselves as gloriously right. Of course it’s a biased article, but that’s to be expected. It reads like someone’s personal blog.
Would love to see/read the story of the manager and the manager's manager who have also left Spotify provide their take. Clearly, with the person identified, the managers were painted in a negative light that similarly, this could be detrimental to their future aspirations.
Lots of Spotify folks here could also attest to the story and perhaps provide their own take. Would clear any doubts and set the record straight.
Sorry to be blunt, but for a contractor to publicise their internal affairs with one of their named clients is extremely unprofessional behaviour, and I am wondering if they can be sued for damages. Even if they had been an employee this would have been questionable at best.
If this website is for self-healing purposes, then that's fine, but should not and does not need to name the parties involved. (Do I see it clearly that the author even remains anonymous?)
As a contractor myself I can't begin to fathom why someone would:
A) Object so strongly to work allocated to them, especially given the nature of contracting - hired to execute a particular "thing". There are ways to handle this professionally whilst keeping the client happy.
B) Completely disregard any NDA signed - demonstrating lack of care about future business relationships, and attitude towards laws.
C) Have enough hatred towards their client, they feel the need to create a blog/site and broadcast it over HN (likely Reddit, LI, etc. too)
Stanislav Blokhin [0] is a name I'll remember!
[0] Google Cache still has his full name (at time of writing this) as it looks like his second name was removed from the live page.... likely as a result of this submission!
These situations are best handled by leaving on your own timeline.
Working for a manager who has strong but opaque opinions/thought processes is the worst. It’s like they think they are a grand master of chess moving pieces around the board and don’t want any of the pawns to know the grand strategy.
I worked for a guy that insisted on having the hour++ long sprint retros every 2 weeks in which we’d get the same feedback from devs that he would argue against within the meeting. Sometimes he would complain its the same feedback, other times he would decide to have an argument over it. But always he would insist that the retro is super important to get devs feedback as part of the process so we need to keep having them. We would use physical post-it notes on a white board even though it was out in an open floor plan so other teams could watch/see, and we had 1-2 other offices dialed in via someones cell phone on speaker. It was insane. “Hey so we got some stickies that say x,y,z here.. what do you guys have??”
Some managers I have found are like someone who is incapable of being an author but are very good editors. Unfortunately some of these are also incapable of coaching their feedback in constructive ways to get you to the best edited version of you work. This inevitably turns into repetitive games of “guess the number in my head”.. to which the answer is.. blue!
Sometimes these situations are because your manager is at the end of their own rope politically and on their way out. Also could just be their first real manager gig. Other times its because they have something going in their personal life..
I find the framing of this to be a little disingenuous.. I would expect that after getting fired (or the contractor equivalent) that I wouldn't be eligible for re-hire, even on another team. Regardless of who is to blame (both of them, IMO) I can't imagine a situation where the company would take the risk on this particular person again.
> The interview went well, but then communication fell silent. One of the teams rejected me saying I was marked in an HR system as "bad culture fit".
"bad culture fit" sounds like using how they use the "Do not fly list" against political dissidents. I'm really glad I am providing my services independently, free from control, and not have to deal with Corporate Culture. That culture is a poison to the human value of independent thinking.
i do not see anyone here that thinks that employee in this situation, should report behavior of this manager to HR.
I believe this is one of the purposes of they existence. they should talk more people there this manager works with and then discuss that with both sides.
I'm also surprised that before firing, HR didn't try to discuss with employee about issues that manager was having.
Every business is built by people to deliver some value to other people, so I'd risk to say that technology alone is not enough to get on with people. This is a skill which I personally had to develop and it took me almost 10 years to get it 'sort of' right. I, like author of this post, was mismanaging relationship with people I was expected to report to, many times it was my lack of maturity. I remember the situation when I was first tech hire and had very good relationship with CEO, yet when CEO hired manager (who loved to micromanage) I failed to handle the situation as grown-up, instead I got attached to how much I brought into the company erc etc. Years after I left I got things right with people I worked with, and from perspecrive of time I think it is difficult to be humble and to communicate in such way that people want to listen and to try to understand my point of view.
I think author of the blog could prevented escalation with manager he was reporting to, some words he was choosing when communicating were quite ... edgy. And it seems he is picking up his lessons, good that he sees there is something he could have done better.
The big question is - maybe we should really move away from capitalism, to something like communism, but more like crazy utopic communism, where everyone is CEO? So such kind of problems wouldn't really happen? How do you think, could it help?
You're being downvoted because your idea runs counter to the nature of humanity.
We do not like, and eventually will not tolerate, people who do not contribute a certain amount to the tribe. Members of the tribe that could not, or would not, contribute we banished to exile to die in the wilderness.
This is why Communism in any form cannot and will not work. There has never been, and will never be, a perfectly equal distribution of work amongst the people in a tribe, a village, a town, a city, a state, a nation. You cannot distribute equal resources for unequal effort and expect cohesion.
My idea is about that, I think that every developer, when joins the project, must have an equal share of the whole profit of the company, just like the founders do. Otherwise it's not fair, that the product of their labor doesn't bring them any dividends.
But I agree that it's of course strange, for example, why would the builder of the house get the part of profits of the house after it's built? It's also a bit not fair
all in all, sounds like a new manager being a shitty manager, I would just start looking for a new job at the first few red flags and never ever work again for spotify, because if they support shitty culture, why would you even want to work there...
> I was part of the technical community within Spotify, hanging out in various technical topic channels, helping people out.
It might be a cultural thing, but you're not part of any 'community' or 'family', it's just a job. And like any other employer they'll fuck you over just as soon as they can.
When technical decisions come up with no obvious correct answer, the manager saying it's up to the team while also disagreeing is just bad. The team provides input and offers their view on best direction but it's up to the manager and product manager to be technical enough to understand the team and then balance business needs (which may be unknowns to the team) and make a final decision. The team then should accept it.
The push back of using a parallel kanban board is just dumb on the managers part too. Management and teams often need different tracking and reporting styles to get work done. Your direct manager should be familiar with both. If they are not or refuse to be, just run.
Managers enable teams by empowering, deciding and then getting out of the way. Bully managers use passive aggressive non-sense like you had to deal with.
For Spotify to not recognize and isolate this person is a problem all the way up there chain.... And again, assuming your version is correct.
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