>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.
> It suggests a unique and amusing approach to hiring management: executives should find people who truly value the goals of the executive, hire them as managers, and (perhaps via intentional lack of oversight!) give them leeway to let their subconscious values impact their work, thus making their minds legible to mind-reading employees.
"Hire people who share your values/goals and let them get on with things" is hardly a novel insight. The trouble is that aligning them is hard.
> "Reward people for staying, and I'll know you're serious about valuing people."
this resonates.
what i noticed is that managers often hire people that won't outshine them.
so, soon you end up with a team of idiots being managed by an even bigger idiot.
it's just all so tiresome. in the end quiet-quitting or work-to-rule is the only logical result, especially in a bad job market where your options are limited.
> Managers want workers that will benefit their own career.
+1! This is probably brutal but the most truthful fact not everyone can accept. This is especially true in big organisations. As much as we would like to believe that managers want workers to have a positive impact, that’s usually from the perspective of a manager who has a massive stake in the businesses, for eg, a founder or a small business owner.
Too many “managers” in big organisations are simply employees themselves who care more about their own survival and career, just as with the employees these managerial employees hire.
> what people managers are paid to do. The job is to align a large groups of people on tasks while maintaining coordination with other large groups and keeping morale high.
And if WFH improves output and morale at the cost of more difficult management, isn't that absolutely worth it for managers? Their entire effort is dedicated to enabling contributors, if a policy does just that then they should push for it.
I do mechanical engineering, we design stuff for our manufacturing operators and our customer's operators. Whenever some amount of effort on my side may reduce the operator's burden over the life of the product, it's absolutely worth it. I'm not going to make a subpar design just to save myself an analysis, that's the job.
So if WFH requires more management effort, and results in better output for the team, it should be pushed by management. Managers shouldn't compromise their team's output and morale just to save themselves some remote meetings.
> To be perfectly fair, in any job this is what you're supposed to do -- make your boss look good [...]
I find this sentiment horrifying. When I hire people, I don't want them to spend one second thinking about how to make me look good. I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues.
Admittedly, give that so many companies are dysfunctional feudal empires, it is often good career advice. But I still find it horrifying.
> let’s be honest, at the end of the day the manager is an agent of the company
Employment, like any other business transaction, should not be a zero sum game.
Sure, both sides are in it to gain. But your manager's job is to make the most of your time and help you be as productive as you can. That should align with your goals - the more productive you are, the more valuable you are to the company.
> As I’ve become a more experienced manager, I’ve stopped giving this advice. I still believe it’s the correct advice, and I continue to see managers who fail because they are missing this perspective. However, I’ve also seen some of the best leaders that I’ve worked with burn out by following this advice too loyally.
Most employees, especially in the West, especially in USA, are going to be biased towards their individual interests. Aligning their interests with the collective organizational interest is an extremely hard problem, but an extremely important one. Definitely something that could burn out a manager. But very much worth trying if you want a successful, healthy organization.
> Sorry, that contains a healthy dose of "trust me, all managers are complete idiots who would rather spend a million on hiring new people than spend 10k on retaining their employees".
Empirically this view is valid.
The managers themselves don't even need to be stupid. A bad incentive structure (or even interaction of locally-reasonable ones) might reward bad behavior.
>> I think the reasoning is some sort of unspoken value of “loyalty” – an expectation that there’s an implicit agreement to “stick it out” even if things get bad. This is hot garbage. If you want the people that you hire to stay, do it by building a great workplace and paying people well – not by finding staff who are too timid to leave bad situations.
I liked that part although it seems to me that the unspoken truth of management is that they are overseers of the workforce. In some places, where the workforce is educated and its qualifications rare on the market, it entails "building a great workplace" but in others it totally entails finding staff that are "too timid to leave bad situations". In the end of the day, it making a profit entails miserable work relationships and everyone feeling sad and frustrated... oh well
>In reality, a smart business should be grateful that there’s someone that can get shit done in less than 8 hours, it means that they can do more for you in less time, and if they’re doing non-competitive side work, maybe you should pay them more so they don’t go and do that full-time.
In my view, the biggest crime of a manager is disconnecting my incentives from my work as an IC. If I create more value, it should be a manager's top priority to create the positive feedback loop of incentives. Because why else am I doing more, then? It should seem like common sense, but every manager I've had has not been remotely interested in creating that positive feedback loop. Instead "that salary is too far out of the band for this role and wouldn't be fair to everyone else, and you have to do X,Y,and Z to qualify for this other role, and your last self-review was too honest so I'm going to use it to negotiate against you..." I've even had a manager complain about my salary being too close to his salary, as if there was some requirement for his ego that I make less than him!
Every raise or promotion I've ever had has devolved into some form of "you're giving me this or I'm going to leave", and then 9/10 times they reluctantly fork it over. There is no good faith, only power. And power is getting what you want after calling all the bluffs. Managers are adversarial, and their role is to get you to do as much as possible for as little as possible, while at the same time swallowing their pride when their bluffs are called. I hate that it is like this, because it could be a lot better. But nobody seems to know how to manage.
Don't get me wrong, I get the position that managers are in. The upper management demands they get certain results, and if they don't do it, they get replaced. But it's still a failure of the manager for not communicating effectively how creating positive feedback loops with your top performers will make everybody money. Of course this depends on the upper management to actually pick valuable things to work on...
But I'm assuming this means hiring people without the same transactional mindset? Otherwise, there will just be endless employee churn as they realize there's nothing in it for them.
It's hard for me to get on-board with a management approach that effectively says, "I don't want to do this stuff because I want to get paid but it's okay for you to do it because I don't care whether you get paid or not." Either you think the work is worth doing or you don't, but it's a weak leadership style to say it's only worth doing if someone else is doing it. (That's different that strategically assigning duties to get the most out of the team.)
> I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues.
Don't you think all those things make you look good if you are the hiring manager? Conversely, if the employee you hired fails to perform those duties, you look bad.
Again, "making your boss look good" is NOT supposed to mean "do specific things for your boss that will impress his boss", it's supposed to mean that the employee meets or exceeds the expectations of the job which _in turn_ makes the hiring manager look good because his group is meeting or exceeding their goals, and so on up the line.
> You should optimize so that your goals are your managers goals.
Which was addressed with:
> Your future earnings depend on your skills, on your reputation, and on your relationships with your coworkers, not on your manager, unless you're working at Google and don't plan to leave.
Replace Google with any company.
And:
> It's worth putting up with bad working conditions in exchange for learning opportunities, but not for mere money.
Focusing overly on pleasing your manager reminds me of "penny wise, pound foolish". My experience matches his. If you want to rise within a company, then yes, please your manager. And if your manager is decent enough, your and your parent's approach are aligned. But all too often (and more often at larger companies), what is good for the manager is only good for you in the short term. A lot of managers want you to focus on the immediate needs, and do not value skills development, for example. I've seen managers where the path to promotion was to become really, really good with an in-house tool, and with in-house processes. Those who stuck to that job often tell me now that they have trouble finding any job outside because their experience was not valuable.
> But often it just has to do with wider business goals than what I am working at.
I think the problem comes when you work at a business whose wider business goals are unethical, or simply don't include respecting the needs and rights of their workers. This definitely isn't everywhere, but from the stories I've heard this seems to be some companies.
Totally agree that managers aren't a bad thing in general though.
> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
If you can implement it. Building a large company, or redoing management structure in such, is a very long process requiring buy-in from many people. People, whose personal interests may oppose your goal of eliminating inefficiencies.
My guess is that most "low-hanging fruits" in management styles already got picked, and what remains are the cases where it's actually very hard to build (and maintain) a bullshit-free system.
> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.
Not if some significant chunk of those jobs are bullshit. Just because a job is bullshit, doesn't mean it won't make you - and your employer - money.
> Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go
This sounds nice, and from the perspective of the direct report, sure, this is the mindset that you want your managers to have. That said, your manager isn't necessarily incentivized by the company to optimize for this. What's best for the employee isn't necessarily what's best for the company.
>Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me?
This isn't necessarily true. As a counter example, I've seen team leads who claim they need to hire more engineers in order to keep up with workload. In reality, it's a process issue, but why put in the hard work of streamlining company operations, when they can just request more people underneath them. Not only is it less effort, but they also get to say "I grew the team 2x and now manage y people" which in turn increases their compensation.
It's a case of poorly aligned incentives: managers are supposed to do more with less, but their compensation structure rewards the opposite.
> You follow your gut. The problem is that this approach can be prone to favouritism.
What's wrong with favouritism ? If a person does his job well and helps you (the manager) do your job better AND you get along well - that's the silver bullet right there.
Like it or not, this is how groups of humans tend to coagulate. All the other considerations are secondary.
Promote the ones you personally like (avoid idiots of course). This how you build a 'gang' of friends and you get promoted yourself.
"Moral Mazes" is a great book which explains the nitty gritty details of corporate power structures (warning: I quit my job after I read this book!). It all boils down to personal relationship between people in an organisation. Technical skills and everything else are complementary but not mandatory (except geniuses - maybe in 0.1% of the cases).
"Corporate confidential" is another interesting book, which is more about the HR side of things, but it also gives some pointers about how teams are assembled
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.
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