[whirlingdervish]

(throwaway)

I'm a developer at a fairly small company. I never really wanted to be managing people but after some internal drama a bunch of stuff was moved around and I found myself in charge of the team I had been on while we looked for a permanent manager.

One of the devs who now reported to me decided that this was the best time to demand a raise- not just a cost-of-living increase, which are scheduled, but an amount of money that would have made him the highest-paid person on the team by a lot. (He was on the lower end of both seniority and performance.) He was threatening to leave, and after talking to my superiors I basically just said "sorry, you aren't getting that, I don't want you to leave but if you do I will be happy to give you a good reference."

That didn't go over great and he emailed the whole C-suite trashing me and telling them essentially what a mistake it was that I got tapped to lead the team over him. The CEO just forwarded the email to me and said "deal with this." We'd had a pretty good relationship before, (or at least I thought we did) but all attempts to sit down with him and figure out how we could work together ended with him just making it clear that he was not going to play ball.

He stopped showing up to work for awhile and sent his notice not too long after, and eventually we hired a real manager (which was always the plan) and I went back to writing code. Even though I don't know what I could have done differently I still feel bad and think about it a lot.

[lostcolony]

No, that was the correct response.

If anything, you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head. He isn't looking to work with you or the team, he's actively seeking to undermine you; at that point his presence is a negative, not a positive.

[teddyh]

> you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head

Is escalating an issue a fireable offense?

[lostcolony]

When done in bad faith, yes.

This wasn't "I have an issue, my manager didn't address it", this was "I have an issue with my manager. He's an idiot. You shouldn't have made him manager. You should have made ME manager", etc.

There is nowhere to go with that. There is no way to fix that. There is no way to ignore that. And the employee is going to be killing team morale more and more the longer they stay at that company.

So your options are to leave the person where they are, killing the team's morale and effectiveness, go to management yourself and ask that the employee be listened to (meaning that now someone as problematic and full of themselves is being put in a management position, which will also lead to the team's productivity dropping to nothing), or you let the person go. Only one of these will leave the team intact.

[teddyh]

But suppose that the person made manager really is an idiot. You have now defined the situation such that merely bringing that fact to the attention of the higher-ups is a fireable offense, with no other recourse.

Also, making this a fireable offense only makes the complainer instead stay quiet, but they will still be “killing team morale”. So is that better?

[lostcolony]

If the person made manager is an idiot, you go to upper management with proof, focusing on particular actions, and you do it in a careful way.

"Hey, I wanted to raise up my concerns about X. I mentioned it to (manager), but I'm not entirely certain I communicated it effectively. If we don't do Y, Z will happen". Expect upper management to talk to the manager about it, and expect the manager to try and downplay the concern (or if they're treacherous, express outrage that you didn't talk to them about it; have proof of the conversation if that's a concern). If it doesn't lead to change and blows up, it will be noticed.

Better still - if you have anonymous surveys (most companies do), lambast the manager there (politely), and you place the impetus to change things on upper management there (provided a majority on the team agrees).

The reality is that upper management put the manager there -because they trust them-. They barely even know you. That's the reality. You can still talk to them, but you can't come off as though you're trying to undermine your manager. If upper management's response is to tell your manager "deal with it", you clearly came across as trying to undermine your manager; you're a problem. You just made it so it's your job or your manager's, since you just burned that trust, and in a public way that upper management is now aware of. A good manager will fire you because of the effect you're going to have on team morale. A bad manager will fire you because they feel threatened.

This isn't about what is hypothetically better, this is about what the reality is. The reality is that management is all about trust (really, working in groups is all about trust); upper management has to trust middle management, and middle management has to trust the ICs. Your bypassing your manager is going to look like a breach of trust with your manager (i.e., why didn't you talk to them and work it out with them?). Your claims may be right, but being right doesn't equate to being effective, nor does it excuse being stupid in what you do about it. This guy not only doesn't sound in the right, he also was stupid in how he approached it.

As a slight addendum, too - the reality is that managers that are 'stupid' may still be valuable to higher ups. The business is not evaluating managers the same way ICs are. If the manager makes a decision, overruling the ICs, and the ICs raise their concerns about the decision (NOT the manager), carefully, politely, and the decision leads to a bad outcome, upper management will notice. But I've had decent managers who were technically a bit clueless, but who knew to let the ICs make the decisions themselves; the team succeeded. You can have stupid managers who still run effective teams; if they're actually bad managers, upper management will notice. It may or may not be before you've made plans to leave yourself, but the reality is you can't force a manager to be replaced; you can only work to move yourself (to another team, or to another company), or wait for it to be noticeable and be careful to control the narrative.

[teddyh]

> do it in a careful way.

Sure, that sounds more reasonable. Your initial description could easily be interpreted as “If you go over the head of your immediate manager for any reason whatsoever, you are a liability to the company and deserve to be fired immediately”, which is mostly how I read it. Certainly, an employee must be careful when engaging the company in non-orthodox paths, just as you say, but employers must also be careful in how they communicate the possible options available to an employee; if what employers say comes across like my quote above, an employee can feel trapped and easily become disgruntled in a situation when upper management would actually want to be informed of said situation.

The onus is on upper management to make sure that employees feel safe enough to actually inform upper management of something management would like to be informed about, which includes counteracting middle management, since the incentive of middle management is to try and make sure that employees never ever go over the head of middle managment for any reason at all.

[cutemonster]

In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him.

I wonder how it'd been to be a manager, if he couldn't be fired, and he continued contacting the CEO etc saying you (GGP, whirlingdervish the throwaway) weren't any good at your job.

I guess eventually I'd quit (if I was in GGPs position and couldn't do much about it), and he'd become the manager in my place, if the plan hadn't been to hire another one.

[kubanczyk]

> In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him.

I'm in one of these countries. If they have a cause that cannot be legally used to terminate an employee, they just look long and hard for any other misdemeanors and fire them as fast as they gather any plausible "evidence". Creative types can also actively put an employee into a checkmate, i.e. a position where no move or any move is a fireable offense.

In this case it could be as simple as identifying any part of that email as a defamation.

[cutemonster]

Compare that unfortunate workplace "culture" (until the person eventually leaves / gets fired), with this article about psychological safety:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860743

I wonder if the lawmakers having made it almost impossible to fire someone, then damages the psychological safety in the company, in that the managers have to start looking for mistakes someone did and using it against him/her. I'd guess this sends bad vibes to the whole team.

Makes me wonder if this holds countries like, was is France?, back, when it comes to startups and innovation, hmm

[austinjp]

Having been promoted to managing a team I was previously a part of, I feel your pain.

If it helps, consider that this person might have tried exactly the same ploy with whoever was in your shoes. I'm sure they had some issues going on in their life, and issues with the existing management that you inherited unknowingly.

Management stress is real. Part of it comes with maintaining confidentiality, whereas a disgruntled employee will rant and get things off their chest.

I won't say it's 100% about the role and not the person, since that's dumb - interpersonal relationships are real and significant. Equally, it's not 100% about the individual. FWIW, and taking your description at face value, I think your response was appropriate and theirs was not.

[qazxcvbnmlp]

Sounds like you did the right thing and they needed to go.

[jariel]

The thing to realize: this is normal.

People are weird - all of us.

We get into our own head-space, and we interpret the world differently than others, sometimes objectivity falls by the wayside.

Sometimes someone is truly working is rear off advancing the mission, but but that nobody really noticed, or if they did, that it didn't matter because 'hard work' isn't necessarily the only management requirement. They get upset because they didn't get the promotion.

Lashing out at 'management' is the easiest, most common thing for any worker to do, often there's a basis for concern, but just as often people don't recognize how inherently chaotic it is the higher one treads.

The moment you're in a leadership position, you will constantly be challenged by at least one 'hard case' of some kind or another.

Once simple rule to help differentiate: if they are making a fuss about the product, or something that will help the company/team, then there's probably good faith there. If the fuss is always about themselves or their career, that's not good.