[seneca]

> management has the mindset that we're all cogs until it's too late

I hate reading this. Not because I think people who say it are wrong, but because so many engineers have had experiences that lead them to believe it. During my management career, I risked my own standing in a company more than once to back up people in my org. If a manager isn't willing to risk their own skin to make sure their team is treat with dignity and respect they aren't a leader, they're just a politician.

[victoro]

It's tough to avoid this thinking because examples of employees being treated like cogs are often systemic and very public -- like stack ranking at big companies that everyone (even people that don't work there) either knows about or ends up knowing about. Meanwhile, examples of managers risking their own skin are more likely to be individual and private -- sometimes to the point that the affected employee doesn't even know it happened because it was behind the scenes -- like a manager defending a performance review of an employee in a calibration meeting with other managers.