In defence of executives its not that clear cut. Yes you can influence and most large companies have channels to do this but how much they listen to you depends on the support the executive gets from their manager and so on.
For big change to work there has to be the right culture set by the board and this has to feed down.
Heck, maybe in the not so distant futures a DAO like setup will exist that will flip all this on its head.
The older I get, the more I realize that middle managers (and even C-suite executives) are even more limited in what they can achieve than individual contributors. They have no way to do anything themselves and all "initiatives" they start inevitably get stuck in endless meetings and planning sessions with people that are very invested in status quo.
Imagine how much harder the chinese telephone game gets if some people actively sabotage it.
That's been my experience moving from individual contributor to c suite exec. As an individual contributor, I was free to just do what I thought was best for the company and contribute to any project that I thought I could add the most value.
As a c-suite exec, I spend most of my time in meetings that lead to very little change and I look on with a bit of envy on ICs who get to improve things without asking for permission first.
As you go up the ladder, your work inherently involves more impact _across_ the organization. Your area of influence is so large that you must make sure the changes you make support all parts of the company - not just your org.
The IC at the bottom is likely limited to a specific project or feature. They have a lot of space to roam in that box, but they inevitably have a small box.
If you are at the top, you are waiting on everyone else. Being humans with their own thoughts and feelings they need to be won over if you want them to stay aligned with you.
What else can be done differently other than giving up and doing everything yourself? But once you start doing everything yourself you are no longer at the top. You are at the very bottom.
Even a CEO has tons of constraints, they don't have infinite power. Just some examples:
- the labor market dictates how many people you can hire.
- Speaking of budgets: they are not unlimited;
- Often what you can build depends on the levels of tech and organizational debt you have built up. A small startup simply doesn't have the organizational set-up and know-how to become a hospital and vice versa. This limits how far you can take your plans.
- Vested interests in your employee pool; if the company is (say) a dedicated Ruby on Rails shop and you decree a big rewrite in Rust then you can expect a large part of your employees to go looking elsewhere. This limits what you can build.
- Prior commitments; if there is a long-running project going on then you need to keep that staffed to maintain internal knowledge or else it will dissipate. It's not uncommon that 90% of employees is already assigned to something and you can't start new things without dropping old things.
- etc etc etc
It is extremely common for an executive to come in and start off with bold plans to improve things, then slowly discover why things are the way they are.
> It is extremely common for an executive to come in and start off with bold plans to improve things, then slowly discover why things are the way they are.
The same is true of a new IC coming into a new code base.
The things you mention are not great excuses for not being able to make any change. If those things overwhelm an exec, that exec should probably step aside and let someone else try.
Very true. Just a few months ago I realized I couldn't just flat out order dual 4k screens for my team despite being the one that approves expenses. It's not top-down tyranny. Its tyranny of the norm and the molasses that it brings. Being out of the norm is hard and you have to doubly prove yourself at every step because the status quo has an aura of just being the "right thing".
That's not the impression I have from the article. The overwhelming % of execs are pushing for positive change. At the end of the day, it's the "put your own mask on first" principle. Execs are humans just like everyone else, with their own job pressures and stresses, not robots that can automatically compartmentalise and supress their own feelings and emotions.
"Great resignation" is mostly that, a narrative. Workers aren't actually becoming powerful. They're just slightly less powerless, and everyone knows it's transient--barring an overthrow of corporate capitalism, but I think we all know that such things are unpredictable--which is why people are itchy to move now before things go back to how they were and everyone is stuck in place for a while.
It's good for cappie PR to create a narrative of empowered, entitled workers. It's just not true, though. Most of the current worker attrition has to do with COVID-related disability (long COVID), gas prices, and displacements caused by rising rents. It's not that people are suddenly deciding not to work because the Capitalism Fairy is putting seed capital under their pillows--it's that people who had few options now have even fewer.
Boomers are leaving the labor market without as many people replacing them, creating a labor crunch. COVID accelerated that process. It's not much more complicated than that
Early boomers had to push back retirement because of 2008 GFC. They are permanently exiting the market, now. Later boomers are going part-time or being selective. They aren't going back to blue collar and that's where things are completely fucked.
That's a factor too, and I think that as Millennials and Xers realize that the BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review because the boss sees you as a friend rather than an exploitable resource--aren't going to be allocated to them, but written out of existence, we will see an acceleration of the discouragement and "presenteeism" that are already endemic.
The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.
People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.
> BoomerJobs--the jobs in which you actually have some choice in what you work on, where you write your own performance review
Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the modern culture.
Yeah but the reward for "listen to your boss and do what you're told" was often cushy overpaid jobs where you go golfing a couple of times a week with your boss and coworkers because you're all buddies. As long as you brown nosed your boss just enough.
I think it’s now; do what you’re told or I’ll replace you with someone cheaper. Then it will be do what your told or I’ll fire you and you’ll lose your visa and have to go back to your home country. It’s also hard for me to think of it getting any worse than the gig economy where you’re one capricious algorithmically driven decision away from being fired. And don’t get me started on Amazons intentional grinding down of employees. I think the attempt at adopting a culture to placate millennials with some agency is simply a way to replace the older workers with cheaper newer workers. I think the reality is millennials on average have fewer good options and will always have to accept worse conditions.
Is that true for Boomers, or was that mostly true for the Silent Generation (those born 1928 to 1945)?
My experience of Boomers (my parents and their friends are early Boomers) is that most of them were working as two-income families, whereas my granparents' generation (late Greatest and early Silent), it was much more common for there to be only one outside income coming into the household.
I do not agree that the popular message about increasing labor power in the labor market is beneficial for the capital/employer class. A laborer will more easily dabble with unions or with negotiating harder, etc, when they feel the market is good for them. In fact, that's exactly what we have been seeing, an uptick in union activity. Even if the underlying market strength were not real, it could be a self fulfilling prophecy.
If anything the reverse is true, and a general message that it's hard to find a job is much more benefecial for the capital/employer class, who would then find laborers who are happy to accept anything they can get and have no interest in taking the risk necessary to start or join a union
PS: The last time unions started doing well in the US was also a time when labor was in scarce supply just after WWII. Europe had been destroyed and the USA was the China of the day, but even moreso, in that almost the entire surviving industrial capacity of the world was in the USA. A laborer in the USA, able and willing to operate a factory machine, was thus in terrific, just terrific demand. Unionization happens in good for labor times, to prepare for bad for labor times, not the other way around.
You raise a good point, but not necessarily the one you intended. "Looming recession" is not an accurate characterization. "Possible recession" is, and frankly, the probability might not be that high. On the one hand we see stories about the great resignation and blaming the government for overheating the economy and causing inflation. On the other we hear claims, based on limited evidence, that we're obviously heading into a recession.
A recession is defined as a multi-month long period of declining economic performance. (Another common definition is two quarters in a row of negative growth.)
Q1 real GDP growth in the US was negative. It seems quite likely that we're in the start of a recession by either of the definitions above, but we'll know with greater certainty in a little over a month when the advance estimate of the Q2 figure is released.
Given that labor markets remained relatively tight while we had negative GDP in Q1, I think it is likely that labor markets will remain relatively tight even if there is negative GDP for this quarter.
I think the term recession was not being used in the sense of "two quarters of real negative GDP" but in the more colloquial sense.
I'm thinking more in terms of the NBER's definition of a recession. We're definitely seeing evidence of slower growth (which should lessen inflationary pressures) but it's far from clear to me that we're heading into a recession in the NBER sense. Gas prices could drop, supply chain issues could lessen, and we could be back to normal growth by the end of the year.
"The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria—depth, diffusion, and duration—as somewhat interchangeable. That is, while each criterion needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another. For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, the committee concluded that the subsequent drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that, even if it proved to be quite brief, the downturn should be classified as a recession."
There's a lot of ground to cover to get back to high unemployment numbers and lack of jobs (especially tech), but I don't think we're that far off from a norm, so I think the narrative is fragile.
I have been thinking the same thing. I'm just returning to a job that I like after a 3-month parental leave of absence. A lot of co-workers have left our niche boutique consultancy with a decent work-life balance to join... other niche boutique consultancies who advertise a decent work-life balance (with some weirdos going to the big guys... good luck with that).
From my perspective, I'm seeing the last 6-or-so months of the Great Resignation as a zeitgeist of irrational optimism. Money was cheap, "post-COVID repairs" were a goldmine of opportunity, and companies were thriving regardless of their actual performance. If the burnout is catching up to people, it is probably because "returning to normal" no longer seems so palatable. So why not try a new normal in a fresh environment?
If we see a 2001-level decline, I can only hope that a desire for the good old days helps people get their priorities straight and figure out a way to balance happiness, dignity, and success that doesn't involve LinkedIn recruiters.
I wouldn't want my bosses job. I don't think it pays all that much more than mine but it requires a lot of days full of meetings and late nights. I may even do better on a hourly basis. I think some people get wrapped up in the headline salary number (XXX,XXX per year, that's a lot of money!) and never break it down into a hourly number to see if it's actually a better deal.
100%. In big tech, as you get more senior, the job becomes miserable. I wouldn’t want to be a Director, or even a Senior Staff engineer. At a certain point you sacrifice your sanity to be in that many meetings.
My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all. I decided I like making software, I just didn't like the amount of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, politics, and bickering I was experiencing. In my experience, these things grew exponentially at each level, while the salary only grew linearly. So, I'm fine making merely "way more money than I need" while not crying in my car in the garage before work, which is something that actually happened many times at my old job.
I stepped back from a lead to a senior dev this year. I was open about it to recruiters, saying my intent was to get back into being an IC.
No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.
Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear you had to go through all that.
What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.
> My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all
Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?
I'd even say you need a degree of sociopathy to reach upper management. I can't imagine being responsible for 1000 other people and keep them working in sync. At some point those people become a faceless resource in a spreadsheet.
I spent some time in middle management (first as a lead, then as a manager of a small team of devs) and I refuse to do that again. You're 100% right, as you move up, it gets more miserable. As a lead, I was constantly doing adult daycare and counseling for the developers. At the same time, upper management was constantly breathing down my back to improve my teams analytics and performance - regardless of how well the team was doing.
The worst part of the two gigs I had was the director who was in the position above me? Not moving. In both companies. I spent almost six years between two companies trying to find a way out of middle management. I finally realized a lot of companies structure gets flat very quickly because a lot of the upper level executives are not moving, or not getting promoted, so then you have another set of issues you're dealing with.
Its just not worth it unless you can get in and get out of middle management in less than 2 years.
Unless have strong social anxiety and can't habdle being around people, meetings are much better than coding on something that will never work because the meetings people are making terrible decisions.
It's funny how fast and profoundly "perspective" will hit you. When I was a young programmer I always dreamed of that promotion and comp adjustment. Constantly looking for that next step. That's not inherently bad, per se, but once you reach a particular place you come to find out what the commensurate responsibility looks like. Sometimes -- dare I say, often? -- it's just not fun. That's what they pay you for, though, right?
The friends and colleagues in my cohort, the ones NOW with larger financial and familial responsibilities, curse their former selves for not knowing how good they had it.
I guess all that is to say, as cliche as it is, "be careful what you wish for".
After spending a decade in software development, I'm finally staying put where I am. So many times as a developer you hate something about your job. So you go out and interview, build some stuff for show on GitHub, and then finally land that job that's going to take away all your worries and grievances you have with your current employer.
Only to find out all you did was swap one set of problems for another, totally different set of problems which weren't an issue at your former employer.
You either accept this stuff as just something every company has, or you'll go crazy trying to find a perfect company/startup/agency to work at and you'll never get any further in your career.
Is everyone just making lateral moves? New job should mean new money, that's the only reason to move jobs, unless you really want to build your resume in an area in order to... make more money in the long run.
Some of us have motives other than acquiring money. What is that money for? Work takes up a larger share of your time and energy than anything else in your life. If your job makes you unhappy, how much additional money will it take to make up for that?
I try to maximize my earnings during my working hours (M-F, 9-5ish) so I can enjoy things outside my working hours. Most of my work related unhappiness comes from the idea that "I should be making more money." I'm finally at a spot, where if the market rebounds a little, I'm in the top 10-15% of pay for an individual contributor, I think. Full time remote for the last 5 years, low cost of living state, and my annual income is somewhere between $350-$450k depending on how the market does (or much higher if things really turn around). I'm on year 1 at this new gig, so I won't feel that amount until bonus time comes around early next year, but man, it's bringing me a lot of joy, I can tell you that.
The only question is, do I buy a boat, a beach house, or a lake house? I live near a lake and already have a jetski and a friend with a boat, maybe I should just buy a tract of land to drive my jeep and some ATVs. I mean, maybe people get a lot of happiness out of work, I certainly don't. I like to have fun.
Ah, well! Congratulations on finding a life that works for you.
There is nothing I can spend any amount of money on which will make my free time happy enough to make up for the misery of a job I do not care about. It cannot be done. If a better job means I have to take a pay cut, no matter; it's worth it for a happier life. Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway, so I don't see much point in trying to maximize income. Hedonic treadmill, diminishing marginal utility, etc.
> Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway
I mean, we all hope that, but that could change without a moment's notice. For people outside the tech field, the last year's inflation, gas prices, and skyrocketing rents, their lifestyle went from 'enough to live' to 'short about $1k a month.'
If you live in a major western European city, yeah, you don't have to worry too much about money, there's a lot of social services available for you to fall back. Elsewhere, it's much more competitive.
Ah except it doesnt go directly from brown -> (supposed) green in one step :) It is a whole bunch of slightly browner shade transforms. (Missing a few intermediate steps and no dissing on any of the stages) it might be something like:
Homeless -> Volunteer worker -> Govt job -> Non Faang -> Faang -> Enlightened that you missing out on life.
A lack of ability to imagine something shouldn't cause someone to believe it can't happen. There are any number of ways someone can go homeless including under the conditions of having the skills to program. I've been able to program since I was 12 and definitely could've gone homeless any time between now and around 3 years ago (which is nearly 2 decades of time).
I remember when homeless employees working for Google made headlines. People had good paying jobs, couldn't afford housing - or at least didn't desire to put the entirety of their income into housing. Looks like things may be headed back that way again.
You are spot on. The "progression" I gave an example is (mean to be) fully free of any judgement or superiority etc. Any of us can go homeless in an instant (eg FAANG eng buys a crazy expensive house on a H1B, suddenly looses job in a bad market). My point was that when someone is going through those stages, assuming you had never been in a advanced stage etc, a linear path means you are incrementally loosing a part of yourself and you dont realize it until the end. Does that make sense?
I caught this perspective early, and would be very clear in interviews that I didn't ever want to be a manager. I had a lot of interviewers ask, "Don't you have any ambition?"
My answer was always that I did, I got to where I wanted to be, and I intend to stay there. I'm a programmer. I program. Ambition realized.
And with the money that programmers make, it seems even more ridiculous to suggest that I had no ambition while applying for a job as "senior developer" or "lead developer".
Management and engineering require two completely different skillsets and are two completely separate jobs.
Just because someone is a great engineer doesn't mean they'd be a good manager. I'd be scared to work under a manager that doesn't acknowledge and believe this.
That's why I've never gone into management. It's not an honor to be a manager, it's a skill - and that's not a skill I want to develop. Better to work for a company that recognizes technical talent is a skill that's at least as-important as management and will financially compensate accordingly for that skill.
What people don't realize is the job that pays 30% or so more than your current job requires alot more work and a ton more stress, and for me that is not worth the extra money - which by the way most of which goes to taxes anyway. I really feel like it doesn't "pay" to move up in an org mainly due to the extremely high tax hit along with stress the title comes with.
Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)
So in California we were losing about half of our money to taxes, its always fun to make estimated tax payments when you received your quarterly RSUs(~40% of the RSU money goes to taxes when you get them) and then with the rest putting half of that towards a quarterly tax payment, we left the state to avoid the stranglehold of taxes and will probably go to 1 income as two high earners just isn't worth it, but if you like higher taxes move to Europe, you may love it there.
I'm not sure about tech salaries, but based on several surveys, it would appear that effective tax rate for most workers is about the same between european countries and united states. They just spend less on defense, and more on social programs (although some countries have very recently increased defense spending). California taxes are extremely high though, I agree.
Anecdotally, I don't think any of the moves I made with over 20% pay increase really came with an increase of responsibility. Some businesses just have better margin so they can pay more.
To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.
I really think you are narrowly looking at things from near the peak of earning potential and an established career track. That's fine for some and this _is_ a tech oriented site, but still seems rather narrowly focused.
Sample size of 1:
- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress
this is literally what my dad told me (when I asked him why he didn't go for his boss's job). The marginal effort was large compared to the marginal revenue, and that would eat into quality of life for him.
Hourly is meaningless if you can’t choose more hours. If you had a job that paid $1000/hr but you only work 1 hr/week that is not enough for many people to live on.
So if you need a lot of money for your lifestyle the high hours/high pay job might be your only option.
There's always the chance you discover frugality, when you stand back, account for the expenses in time and money, and what you've gotten in exchange.
Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.
I was denied a promotion to a level that had unlimited vacation. I have a set number of days. I’m much happier without the promotion. But I won’t stay forever.
This the work life balance their culture pushed on to workers, it prevented WFH from being adopted long ago. I just have no sympathy.
Their lack of work life balance is why they earn 300x the pay, correct? That's the narrative I am most familiar with as their rationale for the income gap.
I am amused at the article's pin that some of the c-level work life balance changes could trickle down via policy...this thinking is broken.
> Asked if they'd taken any steps to help staffers mellow out, 20% of C-suiters said they'd banned after-hours emailing, and 35% said they make employees take breaks during the day.
Because the boss applying more corporate coercion to subordinates is clinically proven to help them relax.
Every morning I meditate on the peace that only a corporate hierarchy policing my every action can bring.
There was some other comment about how objectively good things are right now and how good the future looks for most of the world(humans, not environment) and it makes me wonder if somehow the better things are the worse things get since wealth is still so unevenly distributed. With all the talk about work-life balance and the great resignation and worker power, I have to imagine that maybe 50 years ago if you were poor you had a better sense that there was no way out, but as your situation improves you get more hope that you become middle class and more frustrated when you don't achieve it.
Which is all to say that if executives are inspired to move to four day work weeks and better work-life balance, will this trickle down to blue collar/minimum wage jobs (i.e. Musk advocating for 9-9-6)
Nothing meaningful will trickle down to blue collar / minimum wage jobs from these types of "changes" because capital gains taxes are much lower than income taxes. If you 80-20 the issue of inequality, this is what you should spend most of the time discussing. The fact that many can afford to let money sit in the bank earning virtually risk-free ~7-8% year (~3% for "true" risk free) and pay ~20% on those gains instead of the fucking 42% of our income some of us pay in places like NYC is where this is really at
Increasing capital gains taxes would have obvious meaningful implications for financial markets, so the debate really should be about what's the lesser of two evils here: reducing inequality or reducing the strength of the US financial market. You decide.
Thank you for saying this so eloquently. It's a sad state where this elephant in the room isn't talked or acknowledged really. Well, ok, it's politically "unfeasable" but still if we don't even acknowledge it, nothing real will change.
The other elephant in the room that no one talks about is that housing shouldn't be that much of a problem in a country where the population is not growing (but it is because it is used as an asset although it should be for living not for wealth growth, thus having 2nd or 3rd homes should be massively discouraged through taxes).
The more senior you are, the more responsibility you have. Responsibility doesn’t keep office hours. The CEO and other senior executives cannot say to shareholders that they had a bad day, were sick, wanted to spend more time with their family and expect that shareholders won’t look for someone who they perceive can work harder for them.
I don’t know what the right balance is, but it is worth noting that institutional investors (incl. pension funds, insurance funds, ETFs, etc.), hold 80% of equity.
So, broadly speaking, if you’re a worker, you very very likely have a stake in companies generally being profitable.
Funny to see this today - my own boss resigned last month and we've been interviewing for his replacement. I haven't decided whether or not to apply for his position; I don't want all of his responsibilities but I do want to keep the autonomy that I've gained since he left.
Same. (Actually I'm in the really weird position of: manager quit, M2 out with covid, M3 paternity. M4 is even on vacation this week). I half wonder if forcing every manager to take a three month vacation each year would lead to an increase in productivity.
The better the managers are in an organization, the less they need to do. Once they've stood up a good team, removed friction, and made a good plan, you run out of things to do. But the best managers also want to keep busy, so they keep trying to intervene, which is counterproductive.
I wonder if we should go back to sending managers to the golf course more regularly.
> my own boss resigned last month and we've been interviewing for his replacement. I haven't decided whether or not to apply for his position; I don't want all of his responsibilities but I do want to keep the autonomy that I've gained since he left
the risk being that the new boss takes the autonomy away from you (and much more)
What instantly becomes glaringly obvious is that the company should comp you better and leave you be, as you quite obviously do not need said boss.
Yet, every single time they will waste money interviewing people, spend more on hiring and onboarding and training, and then this other person is magically in charge of not only you but your comp.
I've hired my own manager several times now (I'm told this is a bad practice) specifically because I wanted to remain a tech lead but needed somebody to advocate for my team and handle the people management time. It has in fact worked spectacularly.
The past 5 recessions saw unemployment between 6.3% - 14.7% with a mean unemployment of roughly 8%. If you're among the many who think we are entering a recession, and I'm with you on that if you are, then strap in for an inversion of the job market and your boss' desire to quit.
There are infinite ways to "spin" inaction as cautious analysis or being conservative. It's much more difficult to spin an intentional decision that you are accountable for that went wrong. The higher up you go, the higher the cost of a bad decision becomes, while the value of a correct decision doesn't really increase that much compared to someone lower down making the same call successfully. Basically, you're expected to make the right call more often than not when you are higher up. Amazon literally has a thing in their leadership principles about how good leaders are just "right" more often than bad leaders. All of these incentives lead to many, many situations where it is not in any one executive's best interest to make a decision to move forward on something. So they all just sit on it.
I don't buy it. Somewhere between the janitor and the head, someone has responsibility. (To make the reference.)
a) Tree communication graphs are known and proven to not provide reliable message transmission against an adversary. As a boss you (should) know and live that but most prefer to hear the flattery and see the grass as green until it's too late.
b) You have stressful knowledge as a boss that you decide to not share with your underlings -- usually because you don't trust them. Some companies have been known for their openness on every topic. We are talking about software engineering here not factory mindless work. If you don't share and bottle things you are doom ing yourself.
c) I am sorry but if as a boss you are unable to downgrade yourself -- tells me either you don't know you can hire another boss to be the CEO/..., you are inept and can't do anything useful in the company besides "bossing," or you live in an illusion.
Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO people stop working for their next meal. And few CEOs care more about employees future than their life's work.
P.S. That said being a middle manager in a growing or cash cow company means making sure the status quo remains. Thinking otherwise is the illusion I think a lot of people becoming middle managers have for too long a time.
My org has seen significant attrition at all levels, including mid+ management. My take is much simpler: just like us IC folks, managers jump ship for better opportunities, promotions, and raises.
I'm not making this up. I've heard leaders comment in private about how their compensation has dipped due to the recent stock market crash. Since the higher you go in the chain, the biggest the share of your comp is in stocks, it's very attractive to change employment during a market dip. Sure it's risky, but the payoff is big.
Yeah my signing bonus is beans now. Fresh college grads are getting equivalent to what my staff offer has become. Maybe that's partially why coinbase rescinded offers, to avoid the senior engineers from comparing their relative signing bonuses and feeling angry about it.
Speaking of bosses and managers; do people think that people management is overrated and not that important as managers and managers’ managers claim?
I really wish middle engineering management had some technical clue and drive some technical initiatives instead.
126 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadFor big change to work there has to be the right culture set by the board and this has to feed down.
Heck, maybe in the not so distant futures a DAO like setup will exist that will flip all this on its head.
I like my job, but the fact that I have to do it or else lose my house makes it less joyful than it might otherwise be.
Not sure what my boss can do about that.
Imagine how much harder the chinese telephone game gets if some people actively sabotage it.
As a c-suite exec, I spend most of my time in meetings that lead to very little change and I look on with a bit of envy on ICs who get to improve things without asking for permission first.
The IC at the bottom is likely limited to a specific project or feature. They have a lot of space to roam in that box, but they inevitably have a small box.
What else can be done differently other than giving up and doing everything yourself? But once you start doing everything yourself you are no longer at the top. You are at the very bottom.
- the labor market dictates how many people you can hire.
- Speaking of budgets: they are not unlimited;
- Often what you can build depends on the levels of tech and organizational debt you have built up. A small startup simply doesn't have the organizational set-up and know-how to become a hospital and vice versa. This limits how far you can take your plans.
- Vested interests in your employee pool; if the company is (say) a dedicated Ruby on Rails shop and you decree a big rewrite in Rust then you can expect a large part of your employees to go looking elsewhere. This limits what you can build.
- Prior commitments; if there is a long-running project going on then you need to keep that staffed to maintain internal knowledge or else it will dissipate. It's not uncommon that 90% of employees is already assigned to something and you can't start new things without dropping old things.
- etc etc etc
It is extremely common for an executive to come in and start off with bold plans to improve things, then slowly discover why things are the way they are.
The same is true of a new IC coming into a new code base.
The things you mention are not great excuses for not being able to make any change. If those things overwhelm an exec, that exec should probably step aside and let someone else try.
Source: Daily experience. :-D
It's good for cappie PR to create a narrative of empowered, entitled workers. It's just not true, though. Most of the current worker attrition has to do with COVID-related disability (long COVID), gas prices, and displacements caused by rising rents. It's not that people are suddenly deciding not to work because the Capitalism Fairy is putting seed capital under their pillows--it's that people who had few options now have even fewer.
https://money.yahoo.com/older-americans-head-back-to-the-wor...
Heaven help us :)
The only reason we haven't seen 85% of society give up all at once is that some people still hold out hope that the BoomerJobs, once vacated, will be given to them. That isn't going to happen, though.
People work "hard" in our society, because they have no other choice, since there is no social safety net and employers can do whatever they want in this country, but no one really cares anymore. This has manifested itself as survivable mediocrity for quite a while, but as soon as our society finds itself in any kind of serious crisis it will collapse. It almost did, during COVID.
Yes, boomers had better pay where a middle class blue collar job could afford you a nice house and kids in the suburbs, but this idea you quote, I'd need much more data on because the entire culture of being a boomer is much more top down, listen to your boss, do what your told then the modern culture.
My experience of Boomers (my parents and their friends are early Boomers) is that most of them were working as two-income families, whereas my granparents' generation (late Greatest and early Silent), it was much more common for there to be only one outside income coming into the household.
If anything the reverse is true, and a general message that it's hard to find a job is much more benefecial for the capital/employer class, who would then find laborers who are happy to accept anything they can get and have no interest in taking the risk necessary to start or join a union
PS: The last time unions started doing well in the US was also a time when labor was in scarce supply just after WWII. Europe had been destroyed and the USA was the China of the day, but even moreso, in that almost the entire surviving industrial capacity of the world was in the USA. A laborer in the USA, able and willing to operate a factory machine, was thus in terrific, just terrific demand. Unionization happens in good for labor times, to prepare for bad for labor times, not the other way around.
Q1 real GDP growth in the US was negative. It seems quite likely that we're in the start of a recession by either of the definitions above, but we'll know with greater certainty in a little over a month when the advance estimate of the Q2 figure is released.
I think the term recession was not being used in the sense of "two quarters of real negative GDP" but in the more colloquial sense.
"The NBER's definition emphasizes that a recession involves a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months. In our interpretation of this definition, we treat the three criteria—depth, diffusion, and duration—as somewhat interchangeable. That is, while each criterion needs to be met individually to some degree, extreme conditions revealed by one criterion may partially offset weaker indications from another. For example, in the case of the February 2020 peak in economic activity, the committee concluded that the subsequent drop in activity had been so great and so widely diffused throughout the economy that, even if it proved to be quite brief, the downturn should be classified as a recession."
https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating
From my perspective, I'm seeing the last 6-or-so months of the Great Resignation as a zeitgeist of irrational optimism. Money was cheap, "post-COVID repairs" were a goldmine of opportunity, and companies were thriving regardless of their actual performance. If the burnout is catching up to people, it is probably because "returning to normal" no longer seems so palatable. So why not try a new normal in a fresh environment?
If we see a 2001-level decline, I can only hope that a desire for the good old days helps people get their priorities straight and figure out a way to balance happiness, dignity, and success that doesn't involve LinkedIn recruiters.
No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.
What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.
What are your goals now around your career?
Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?
True!
Why is that, though?
Like - do the great leaders retire quick?
Or is it that we are just an unlucky bunch who get exposed to bad leadership?
The worst part of the two gigs I had was the director who was in the position above me? Not moving. In both companies. I spent almost six years between two companies trying to find a way out of middle management. I finally realized a lot of companies structure gets flat very quickly because a lot of the upper level executives are not moving, or not getting promoted, so then you have another set of issues you're dealing with.
Its just not worth it unless you can get in and get out of middle management in less than 2 years.
It's funny to say you don't like "constantly doing adult daycare" and conclude that it is better to be the one being adult daycares for instead.
Being senior staff often means $800k+ comp. I’d gladly take that over the $400k senior ranges. Directors are past $1m.
It’s a huge pay bump - not just 20% to go into management and more managerial roles. It pays.
The friends and colleagues in my cohort, the ones NOW with larger financial and familial responsibilities, curse their former selves for not knowing how good they had it.
I guess all that is to say, as cliche as it is, "be careful what you wish for".
Other peoples situations always seem better/easier. We don’t have enough data and are just too poor at objective evaluation.
This is so true.
After spending a decade in software development, I'm finally staying put where I am. So many times as a developer you hate something about your job. So you go out and interview, build some stuff for show on GitHub, and then finally land that job that's going to take away all your worries and grievances you have with your current employer.
Only to find out all you did was swap one set of problems for another, totally different set of problems which weren't an issue at your former employer.
You either accept this stuff as just something every company has, or you'll go crazy trying to find a perfect company/startup/agency to work at and you'll never get any further in your career.
The only question is, do I buy a boat, a beach house, or a lake house? I live near a lake and already have a jetski and a friend with a boat, maybe I should just buy a tract of land to drive my jeep and some ATVs. I mean, maybe people get a lot of happiness out of work, I certainly don't. I like to have fun.
There is nothing I can spend any amount of money on which will make my free time happy enough to make up for the misery of a job I do not care about. It cannot be done. If a better job means I have to take a pay cut, no matter; it's worth it for a happier life. Any job I could possibly take at this point in my career will pay enough to live well, anyway, so I don't see much point in trying to maximize income. Hedonic treadmill, diminishing marginal utility, etc.
I mean, we all hope that, but that could change without a moment's notice. For people outside the tech field, the last year's inflation, gas prices, and skyrocketing rents, their lifestyle went from 'enough to live' to 'short about $1k a month.'
If you live in a major western European city, yeah, you don't have to worry too much about money, there's a lot of social services available for you to fall back. Elsewhere, it's much more competitive.
Homeless -> Volunteer worker -> Govt job -> Non Faang -> Faang -> Enlightened that you missing out on life.
My answer was always that I did, I got to where I wanted to be, and I intend to stay there. I'm a programmer. I program. Ambition realized.
And with the money that programmers make, it seems even more ridiculous to suggest that I had no ambition while applying for a job as "senior developer" or "lead developer".
Just because someone is a great engineer doesn't mean they'd be a good manager. I'd be scared to work under a manager that doesn't acknowledge and believe this.
Partying when you are young isn't something always looked back on fondly. Fun is good now and in future expectation.
Then with less than half left theres countless taxes built into the things you spend on (e.g. sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, import tariffs, etc etc etc etc and oh yeah more etc)
Because the US takes up the slack. Something we need to seriously STOP doing :p
To clarify, I just mean I always moved horizontally between businesses and not diagonally. Although at a business I may have also moved vertically (w/ more responsibility) but that's moot.
Sample size of 1:
- Job 1 -> Job 2: Neither in tech; 80% raise; even in terms of stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Move to a Support group in a tech company; 11% raise; much higher stress / work
- Job 2 -> Job 3: Support to Technical Sales; 70% raise (after 5 raises at job 2); less work / higher peak stress (maybe) but lower average stress
So if you need a lot of money for your lifestyle the high hours/high pay job might be your only option.
Maybe you'll see how that $20k car is twice as expensive to maintain as the $10k car. Or maybe you'll get a taste of life in a city with public transit that is faster than walking. Or maybe you just move to a cabin in the woods with satellite Internet and grow your own food.
Their lack of work life balance is why they earn 300x the pay, correct? That's the narrative I am most familiar with as their rationale for the income gap.
I am amused at the article's pin that some of the c-level work life balance changes could trickle down via policy...this thinking is broken.
Because the boss applying more corporate coercion to subordinates is clinically proven to help them relax.
Every morning I meditate on the peace that only a corporate hierarchy policing my every action can bring.
Which is all to say that if executives are inspired to move to four day work weeks and better work-life balance, will this trickle down to blue collar/minimum wage jobs (i.e. Musk advocating for 9-9-6)
Increasing capital gains taxes would have obvious meaningful implications for financial markets, so the debate really should be about what's the lesser of two evils here: reducing inequality or reducing the strength of the US financial market. You decide.
The other elephant in the room that no one talks about is that housing shouldn't be that much of a problem in a country where the population is not growing (but it is because it is used as an asset although it should be for living not for wealth growth, thus having 2nd or 3rd homes should be massively discouraged through taxes).
Other values need a seat at the table, not just scraps from the shareholders.
So, broadly speaking, if you’re a worker, you very very likely have a stake in companies generally being profitable.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-theory/11/in...
Climate change projections say that we're headed to economic collapse.
I wonder if we should go back to sending managers to the golf course more regularly.
the risk being that the new boss takes the autonomy away from you (and much more)
What instantly becomes glaringly obvious is that the company should comp you better and leave you be, as you quite obviously do not need said boss.
Yet, every single time they will waste money interviewing people, spend more on hiring and onboarding and training, and then this other person is magically in charge of not only you but your comp.
Fuck what businesses have all become.
I literally laughed out loud. This is how it is, this is always how it is. LOL
sure but that's not how leadership works.
Part of leadership is prioritization and ownership.
a) Tree communication graphs are known and proven to not provide reliable message transmission against an adversary. As a boss you (should) know and live that but most prefer to hear the flattery and see the grass as green until it's too late.
b) You have stressful knowledge as a boss that you decide to not share with your underlings -- usually because you don't trust them. Some companies have been known for their openness on every topic. We are talking about software engineering here not factory mindless work. If you don't share and bottle things you are doom ing yourself.
c) I am sorry but if as a boss you are unable to downgrade yourself -- tells me either you don't know you can hire another boss to be the CEO/..., you are inept and can't do anything useful in the company besides "bossing," or you live in an illusion.
Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO people stop working for their next meal. And few CEOs care more about employees future than their life's work.
P.S. That said being a middle manager in a growing or cash cow company means making sure the status quo remains. Thinking otherwise is the illusion I think a lot of people becoming middle managers have for too long a time.
I'm not making this up. I've heard leaders comment in private about how their compensation has dipped due to the recent stock market crash. Since the higher you go in the chain, the biggest the share of your comp is in stocks, it's very attractive to change employment during a market dip. Sure it's risky, but the payoff is big.
Are these the same 81% of executives driving return to office?