How to Be a Leader When the Vibes Are Off

This person is not on the side of the team. This person is simply supporting that policy. There is no "protecting the team from consequences" if what you do is enforcing new other, just in a sane way.

Well, ok, it is that persons job, but it is not true they are on the "side of the team".

The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 87.60%.

In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note that income tax increases as you increase in income in absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less net of taxes).

If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and again, tax makes it worse).

You call it grandstanding, I call it just being a good person and supporting your coworkers. Maybe a little 'grandstanding' is all that is needed to break a handful of beaten-down people out of their rut to stand up a little more and demand some attention. Shining light on these entrenched issues is the only way to get them to change. Shame works wonders. I agree with the parent post that more and more standing up is the only way to change. Someone just has to have the courage to do it first, job be damned. That grandstanding can go so much further if someone with the CTO title were to push things.

Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning, and you have the entire body of experience and knowledge held by your people at your disposal upon which to draw. But that goes against the line of the C-suite knowing best and having some hidden knowledge.

> leadership empathy and rank and file business understanding inevitably break down

Because "leadership" are being cowards. Because they kept their teams at arm's length, not wanting anyone to get an up-close glimpse of how bad they're fumbling.

I don't know what ZIRP has to do with anything. If anything, we're in this mess because managers fell asleep at the wheel because they knew they didn't need to do jack diddly, the investments will always keep coming, no worries, no need to actually do their jobs, valuations will always rise, don't ya know!

There is supposed to be a baseline amount of respect in an organization that dissolves most of the need for bitterness and power struggles. Tech companies I have worked at and heard about mostly do not have this. The more hypermodern the company, the less they have it. It's the principal reason why modern tech is so dystopian: because whatever happens to you, you are just expected to take it, and you're paid a lot so shut the fuck up. I've worked at several famous tech companies and I have very little respect for any of the management there because of the amount of "shut up and take the money" attitude there is. The organization rots, culturally, and everyone's life is devoid of meaning, and success is proportional to how much you can cope with a life that's devoid of meaning or just bask in the money, but the whole thing is hopeless and at some level doomed. Also, a leaderless organization has no morality, which is why every big tech company just gets progressively more evil, because who would stop them?

It's a horrible equilibrium, and the incentives (public stocks, short-termism, a taboo against conflict). Now I don't think any old person is going to stand up and fight it off singlehandedly. But the first step of doing something about it is normalizing the understanding that people should be doing something. You may not be able to stand up yourself, or maybe not yet, but you should at least agree in principle with doing so.

My feeling is that at an organization where people and leadership don't have mutual respect, everyone lives a hollow and soulless and unfulfilled existence. Maybe that is good for certain psychopaths, I don't know, but everyone would be happier if it was not this way. And almost certainly the company would be more stable and healthy and less short-termist, as well. It is astounding how bad the decision making that comes out an unaccountable organization is. Thing is, money in tech has been so free that even an organization run by inhuman idiots can still be profitable. It shouldn't be; competition should be destroying anything that is done with such mediocrity... but it is, because the whole system is broken as hell right now.

good lord people on this site need to develop what used to be called class consciousness. It's only an employer's market because everyone just takes all the punches without reacting. which is easy because they're paid a lot but still--wouldn't it be better to not have to take them?

if c suite is demanding people RTO to a toxic work environment, I'm not going to require my team to meet the exact requirements - wanna use your lunch break to drive to the office, tap your badge, then drive back home? sounds good to me. I'd also be asking for data to substantiate claims made regarding productivity gains or morale improvements.

or if newly appointed partisan hacks start programs for employees to snitch on LGBTQ+ people, you should channel chaotic good and not fulfill their request, and actively work against others fulfilling it, too. I know of at least one government organization in which this has taken place.

good leadership is about doing the right thing, and getting the job done. the right thing means leading by example with a high degree of proficiency, teaching others to be competent and confident, and growing yourself as an individual and as part of a larger community.

committing yourself to always carrying out the orders of leadership is a hella slipppery slope dude - especially when the "vibes are off".

maybe my examples are a bit pessimistic, but I just feel the author really missed the mark and left me (and others) scratching my head. maybe I'll give it another read later and try to steel man some of the positions. good and fair questions, by the way :)

> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale

What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.

In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...

The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.

It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.

It took half a day to setup. 1/2 hour if you'd done it a few times before.

If you were being fancy you bought two VMs, one for the webserver and one for SQL.

When you got bigger, you bought a bigger VM. Then dedicated servers. Then a web farm with load balancers.

For most companies, all the cloud did is get rid of the entirely minor hurdle of learning how to setup a server. Which these days in bigger companies the same guys who were the infra team are now just called the DevOps team and do exactly the same job, just inside AWS or Azure.

It's just quite a bit more convenient and easy to use a cloud than do the boring job of setting up your own server.

Every time you use a VM instead of some special cloud doodad thingy bell, you can get it much cheaper doing it yourself. But then you got to setup backups. And updates. And firewalls. And DNS. And install your runtime. And install your dB engine.

It doesn't take long, it's just tedious and worth throwing a couple of hundred $$$ at a cloud to forget about it.

What it is not is anything expensive or complicated.

We are not discussing someone who has any potential or interest to be effective in fighting the problem. The proposed alternative to what you call innefective fighting is complete support of that thing.

And second no, it will not destroy your life. People really love to exaggerate risks management or C-suite or teamleaders take.

This is really understandable. Don't burn bridges and such

I can't help but wonder if we're just screwed though. We can't hope to course correct without this sort of honest feedback but we're conditioning ourselves never to give it or receive it by ... Never giving it or receiving it

The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.

More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.

But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...

For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)

A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.

(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)

You can acknowledge the problems more directly: "I get it, we don't have enough chairs so Wednesday is likely to be a challenge." or "I know mandatory 9-5 is going to disrupt your commute."

A bonus of the more precise approach is you can follow up with "do you have other issues with the new policy that I may not know?"

Would you say it's probably a pretty different cultural environment than the established company and tech startup environments that most of HN works in?

Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.

(Example: CEO says we're doing this thing because bold leadership. Manager tells their people is dumb or wrong. ICs openly grumble about CEO being a big jerky doody-head. CEO hears that and says WTF is this manager undermining bold leadership.)

We're only just beginning the AI-sourcing workslop era, that's going to be a few years of confusing chaos.

I really wish I had your optimism about that.

I'm starting to worry that nothing will ever be better again

What concrete differences in behaviour would you expect to see?

You're "part of the system" the moment you sign the employment contract for a manager position, this is literally your job to fall in line with upper management. As middle manager you can and should raise concerns to higher management, but once they take a decision, you have to apply it. Being empathetic is not playing both sides, manager's job is to apply upper management decision even if you don't fully agree. And you don't have to pretend in private to agree on everything, no one will buy that.

if something ever came along where I was surprised and not informed ahead of time, I'd not loudly disagree publicly until I had more info and I'd tell my people as much. but that would be an exceptional circumstance and I'd probably feel I'm on the chopping block anyway since I was out of the loop.

so I don't play both sides but if you choose to stay employed at a place you're choosing to buy into the vision of leadership. if I wasn't bought in, I'd leave. if someone under me wasn't bought in, I'd support them and keep it between us but recommend they leave. because life is short and you'll regret working for people you detest. I get there's practical considerations because a job is a life decision but that's always why I'm careful about where I commit to work at and don't just aim for best salary or TC.

Then I ask what budget they are prepared to allocate to meet said expectations. If the answer is "none", I ask them which other expectation shall be lowered. This may seem confrontational, but it isn't really. If you want me to do more stuff without giving me the means and time to do it, something will suffer, and that needs to be made explicit by me, because I am the person facing the consequences when this something else can't be done adequately.

I was once asked to become the responsible electrical engineer for my institution. For them this was just a position they had to fill for legal reasons (otherwise they are liable in case of damages) and I have the qualifications, so they asked me. Then I explained to them that legally my role is only seen as valid if I am given the time and the means (equipment, room, powers to stop failings, etc) to do the job properly. Otherwise they would still be liable. I then asked them if they were prepared to dedicate that amount of my work time and an extra budget to that role. Surprise, they were not. So I declined. As of now I am still not sure where that liability went.

Too often management wants to have their cake and eat it too, and pointing that out isn't rude. It is one thing to ask someone who is idling have the time to take on tasks that are close to their job. But it is a totally different thing to ask someone who is already at 110% capacity and doing the job of three people to take on yet another job.

This is bad management. It is flattering that I am apparently good enough at my job to be constantly offered new responsibilities and asked advice at projects, but that is how you lose people like me.

In all cases they have eventually just told me to shut up, no matter how diplomatic I try to be, and in some cases it has led to me being terminated

Feedback is just taken as a sign that you aren't aligned with their vision, so you have to go

You can speak up it meetings with your team but be careful of the tone. You need to come off as overall having the companies back but this one thing you can't support. Or maybe things will change again. There are lots of options.

There have been recessions before. There will be a recovery. Leave when things get better (or you retire) and cite working conditions in the bad times in your exit interview.

unions can work, but they can force you into situation you don't want to be in.

The key point is: workers need to organize together for themselves. Nobody else is going to stand up for you, certainly not your boss(es).