Ask HN: My manager is bad. Should I care?

Is the manager chaotic bad or evil bad? I mean do you see indication they're bad on purpose?

Incompetent, autocratic managers (as you describe) will sooner or later cause huge problems. You're already seeing the problems start in the declining team satisfaction ratings. Sooner or later, major problems can happen. Unfortunately, the decline can take years. My advice is to care. Since you (and apparently others) have gone around the manager to the director without any resolution, it's time to start looking for a new job. Assuming you're in the US, your employer owes you next to no loyalty, and uses your emotional attachment to the job or the product to bind you to the situation. Rewrite your resume and quietly start looking.

This is one of those situations where it's not a problem until it is a problem. Aside from the general _management_ problems you'll have, a poor manager isn't going to be able to advocate well for promotions, etc. for his team. So there's a good chance your advancement at the company is stalled as long as you work for this person.

Is this something you can do anything about? Well, "fixing your manager" is a high risk, low reward activity and personally I'd advise against it. My advice would be to try and get an internal transfer while things are still "good" and if that's not an option, look elsewhere.

If it was one layer of poor management, you could get away with not caring because eventually the higher levels of management would notice and act. But once you have 2+ levels of management allowing each other to get away with being poor leaders, you are in a deeply flawed organization and it is absolutely time to care about it.

Caring about it can result in a few different paths:

1) You can care and accept the reality of it (easy, but stagnant)

2) You can care and act to fix things (difficult but rewarding if you succeed)

3) You can care and choose to leave the organization.

It is up to you what actions to take, but I have to recommend caring enough to deliberately choose one of those overall paths. Personally, I have almost universally regretted staying in an org if multiple levels of management are problematic. But everyone's situation is different.

I'm a little unsure about what makes this manager bad, which might help to inform the response. You say they "fail to include" you or the team. Does that mean that they fail to inform you about discussions where you would have useful input?

I don't have a ton of experience, but I think you saying this reflects back on you as well.

Maybe your boss and their boss really are terrible, or maybe you are angling for more power, and want them (even subconsciously) to look bad so you can be a hero in comparison.

There's a lot of space between "I don't like my boss" and "they are ruining this company and need to go and I should replace them"

Can you help your manager get better?

> The manager, however, fails to include me or the team, and this is reflected in declining team satisfaction ratings.

To me it feels like there needs to be more information before we can come to a judgement (excluding bias aside). I don't feel like "failing to include" people is necessarily an indication that a manager is bad... rather it feels like his communication style clashes with your preference. There are plenty of places where information is shared on the "need-to-know" basis. Is the manager not including your team on things that your team should be knowing?

Was the manager also given a fair chance to receive the feedback and take action on it?

> nice

I'm reminded of a book I read once called "No More Mr Nice Guy" where it explains that "nice guys" are actually kind of jerks because they behave certain ways to try to manipulate people and they expect reciprocation.

They live by a sort of unspoken code that they believe exists but which other people may or may not be aware of.

When a "nice guy" doesn't get his way, he can become bitter and resentful.

(I am using the term "guy" to fit the name, but it could be a woman too)

I'm not sure if you intended to describe your manager as "nice" in this way, but niceness has become a huge red flag to me ever since reading that book. I much prefer someone who is good (in competence and/or in behavior) than someone who is nice.

The biggest problem you have is too many layers - and the layers above your manager don't bother to build a mission and a rapport with anyone besides their own direct reports.

When skip levels and skip skip levels and skip skip skip levels exist, it creates more and more distance between what the business wants and what the middle managers end up asking engineers to do. This is dysfunctional but still exists. The only way out of this is for the upper management to build direct rapport with engineers - which means they need to be directly invested in the success of certain projects, and let other projects fall into place on their own. Middle management overhead is a big problem for the top and the bottom.

If you are upset and worrying with the only option to just worry about yourself it is maybe time for the serenity prayer.

No offense, but there's a self-centered tone to your post that makes me think you're not able to take other perspectives, or acknowledge that there may be other priorities for different parts of your organization.

"Failing to include you" is a perception. It may not be a failure. It may be intentional, either because you're technically good at your job but lack the soft skills that are also important. "Clear communication" isn't necessarily compassionate communication. It may also be unintentional, because the manager and director have other priorities, or see you as autonomous.

Bottom line, it's your responsibility to ask for what you need. Manage up.

In my experience, all managers have strengths and weaknesses, and it's very easy as a report to look above you and say "my manager is bad" largely cause you don't understand the balancing act they are constantly doing and the political battles they are constantly fighting.

If you like your work, and you feel like your career is headed in the right direction, and you trust this manager then I'd stay. All your complaints don't sound unusual and just part of working in a large organization, where your satisfaction is not the primary goal of said organization.

First, I think it's always good to detach yourself to some extent. It sounds like there's nothing you can do, so that limits how much you should care. No sense giving yourself heartburn over something you can't affect, after all.

Since this is a problem you can't really fix, the thing I would ask yourself is if it makes your day to day so miserable that you would rather quit your job. That's hard for me to give advice on because it's a personal call. I have had some bad bosses over the years and I just gritted my teeth and put up with it because the job had other redeeming qualities I liked. Maybe that's the case for you, maybe not, but it's worth thinking about.

One of the responsibilities you probably have as a "lead" (this means so many things at different companies) is to have this discussion with your mananger and give that feedback. By you avoiding this, are you not repeating the same mistake as your manager?

You have no control over it.

Part of being a lead or even any kind of role is to be able to deal with people that absolutely suck at their job and in the end, still make people as satisfied as you humanly can with your performance in your role.

Just accept it and treat it as "ambiguity" and don't let this bring you down, otherwise if you keep thinking about it, you'll make the issue much bigger and that will prevent you from doing your main objective, which should be paying your bills and putting that time in, so eventually you move to a different company that you'll have similar issues, but hopefully you'll have a higher salary.

I do struggle with this some as well, but with more experience this has been affecting me less and less, to go up the ladder, you need to get comfortable with people that sucks or things that don't work right.

Just have a look at the top of the ladder, the Elon Musks, Bidens and Trumps... they are terrible at their jobs, being good has never been a pre-requisite, but the connections you have and how lucky you are. You weren't born rich so you'll work in the company of a son of an emerald miner owner, how do you deal with that? That's how you should behave.

Some people here might tell you to read a book or do this or do that, but it won't change the fact that your superior is bad, what you need is to work through those misconceptions like "meritocracy" that wolves teach to sheeps, there's no meritocracy at work, maybe only in the amount of hours you put in and how good you are perceived by your peers, but meritocracy alone won't take you to $200B networth.

Summing up: all companies suck and those hierarchy structures have the natural tendency of creating those issues, you need to remember you do this because you need money and accept that you can't fix everything, and focus on what you can actually make better, otherwise consider going back to IC where you don't need to wrestle with so much ambiguity and people.

I was at a company once where I had a direct line to the CEO, we would meet 1-1 a few times a year, and he consistently encouraged me to "push from the bottom" for change.

Between the CEO and I were an incompetent manager, a very incompetent director, and a very sharp President who preferred the status quo.

In hindsight, that the CEO was encouraging me to basically undermine my manager showed a chaotic and unspoken power dynamic that I wasn't mature enough at the time to understand. What followed was a frustrating 2 years of trying to show a manager who was being managed by his team that our tiny 80 person company wasn't Google scale, didn't need to be Google scale, and that we were wasting 75% of our development efforts gold plating everything for no reason.

What I should have done, almost immediately, was either shut up and collected a paycheck or moved on to brighter and better things (which is what I eventually did).

The org chart is the org chart. You can communicate information upwards, but you can't communicate action upwards.

Have you tried talking to your amanger about how you would like to be included more?

How much job experience do you have? To me, this sounds very idealistic, but unrealistic. It sounds like a new employee aspiring to be a manager. Everywhere has a team or dept like this

Org charts are annoyingly real. And the actions at the top fully dictate the potential for the bottom. I'm comfortably in the middle with no real power, but I have an excellent relationship with my boss who triages between my team and the powers at be. We still perform tasks that I feel are flat out bad decisions that will come back to haunt us — ask me how having a lone devops resource deploy OpenStack instead of doing AWS went.

Going with the flow has its advantages if you feel your position is relatively stable, as I do. Make sure you find purpose outside of your job to help with your mental health

> The manager [...] fails to include me or the team

> The director [...] communicates only through [the manager]

It sounds like this is the intended culture of your management structure, or at least in this local hierarchy you exist within. Only you can really tell how negatively this impacts your happiness this is but fwiw, this isn't generally that uncommon of a setup.

I think the broader problem is a lack of societal realization that the purpose of jobs should ideally be to gain training to ultimately become an entrepreneur rather than to stay just a worker. It may help to look at things from this pov. It's okay if you still remain only a worker as long as you keep this in mind. It may nevertheless help you reframe your situation to gain clarity.

Something isn't adding up. You claim to be a team lead and yet have not seem managers come and go constantly? You have a personality conflict with the manager, but it will only be a couple years. Just live with it.

> I’d get less professional development potentially (verses leaving) but I could kick back more.

I've left a few "imperfect" jobs that I've regretted, because the next job was worse than the one I left.

IMO: Understand that no company is perfect: Unless you have extensive management experience or a multi-decade career, it's hard to build empathy for what your manager's job requires and their day-to-day challenges. In some cases, criticizing your manager is akin to being a backseat driver; or a "monday morning quarterback" who's never played a day of professional football.

Now that's said, if you really believe that it's best to move on to greener pastures, understand that the software engineering field is in a periodic downturn. Now isn't a good time to find a job. Thus, "if you have a good thing going," stick around for another year or two, and get your resume out there when the industry heats up again. Hopefully, you know how to screen potential employers so you find a job you like better.

Finally: Early in our careers, a lot of us need to "take what we can get." As we advance, we can start to smell unhealthy working environments. I think this is partially why some older engineers take longer to find jobs... We walk away from bad situations that only younger naive engineers will accept.

Welcome to the real world. It’s like this at many places. You have to assume that the director and manager go on family picnics together. At these places you get promoted to manager because the guy above you trusts you and for that reason only. Talent can be hired, trust cannot.

Either learn to adapt or leave and join a firm with top tier culture. Do your homework on that.