[cinbun8]

This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them.

It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.

[lijok]

The line of thinking you're showcasing is exactly of the type I've had to deal with in so many companies before, and is the real energy vampire.

Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap.

That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI

[watwut]

They did not asked for platitudes nor euphemisms. They asked to reduce resentment vomit that lowers actual informational value.

If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.

[lijok]

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

[whoknowsidont]

>It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.

Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc.

>This person sounds like an energy vampire.

The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.

As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.

[bowsamic]

> The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.

There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.

[dimask]

> Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.

Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.

[torginus]

Management sucks period. As to why management sucks my friend offered a good insight:

Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want.

These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there.

As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.

[t43562]

That is probably true to a degree but IMO we make brutal decisions about code when we have to and get it wrong and so on. Why when it comes to organising people into some effort would we not have brutal decisions to make and get them wrong? Why expose yourself to blame when you could hide in the group?

It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.

[torginus]

Lol this is all a smokescreen. Let me give you an analogy. There are 3 people in a car, one driver, one navigator, one manager. The manager provides 'oversight' and 'takes responsibility'.

If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over.

In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers.

Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example).

Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success.

To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).

[t43562]

The manager should almost always get the blame. Why didn't they get help from another team, why didn't they supervise that dev more carefully, how did the bug get into the code in the first case and were proper test procedures followed. Has there been a history of mistakes which show a pattern that's not being managed etc etc.

Ultimately the CTO is responsible to the board for why a problem damaged the business (even if it was all the mistake of a developer somehow). And the board to the shareholders for losing money.

In reality people, of course, try as hard as possible to evade blame or lay it elsewhere but in theory a developer who makes a big mistake should not have been in a position to do that damage solo and it's a fault in the system if they were able to - and in the people responsible for the system.

[torginus]

'Agile' has built-in ways of shirking management responsibility. When a developer is asked to solve some eldritch problem, it often goes:

- How long will this take?

- I don't know. This is very complex and I'm not familiar with the code.

- You HAVE to know, we HAVE to plan for it.

- Okay, then 5 days.

- Hey 5 days has passed, why isn't this done yet?

- I underestimated the complexity of the task.

- Ah, so YOU estimated wrong, so it's YOUR fault!

Hard problems exist. They can only be solved by hard-work and expertise and even then solve times are unpredictable and draining to the individual and are thankless endeavors. Management tries to paper over that, but this is a fundamental invariant of life. The fact that management makes solving these problems feel like punishment, only makes people try to avoid these problems more.

[t43562]

I heartily agree that the problems are hard and unpredictable things don't get made predictable by a method.

I think, however, if you're in a company with bastards who don't care they will find out how to screw agile just as they screwed the scheme before that. In the waterfall projects the example you gave is just the same.

In your example "I don't know, it's very complex" should lead to a spike where you have a chance to find out more. Then you'd give a high complexity estimate and everyone would try to think of ways to chip off a bit of the problem at a time.

You're also trying to get your whole team to think about what can be done rather than each developer facing horrible problems alone. But if you're managed by arseholes then even the most positive ideas tend to get turned into nightmares.

[throwaway828]

The car occupants clearly didn't pay Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey to come up with an optimum span of control, as they'd surely been advised a management role wasn't necessary in a 2 person team.

On the other hand, a tank with 5-8 functional roles does have the role of tank commander.

[epups]

If the manager is responsible for hiring and managing the driver and the navigator, then obviously they can also be under stress, and will be held responsible for the outcome.

[robocat]

> This person sounds like an energy vampire...

Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/

[teaearlgraycold]

I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.

[ludicity]

Hah, I've done this with people before! Drop me an email. I can tell from your name that we'd vibe.

[sidcool]

At least it's not AI generated junk

[t0mas88]

Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.

[yard2010]

I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style.

Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"

[dclowd9901]

You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.

[consp]

The Peter principle applies since in a lot of countries engineering is undervalued and the only way to gain anything is to become "management" to the detriment of everybody else.

[gardenhedge]

"energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs