[roenxi]

> I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer.

Yeah, that is a tell that the manager is being unreasonable. What are the odds that every portion of this sits with the developer? Close to 0. That isn't how miscommunications generally happen. But it is a pattern that turns up when borderline abusive people report their interactions on the internet [0]. I don't trust this paraphrase of what Jerry was saying at all. It seems much more likely he led with something reasonable "Bermuda isn't in the Caribbean and we made a decision in the past to exclude Caribbean deals when that sort of search happens" then the manager fumbled the conversation in follow-up and managed to make it weird.

Though it does seem like the developer was making mistakes; I've seen scenes play out that I'd rate as similar. Part of the dev's job is to manage their manager when that manager is struggling. In this case the manager seems to have gotten stuck in the mindset of being a big monkey and the response to that is to let them monkey out peacefully and not make a fuss.

It could have been worse; but this looks like bad-to-average leadership on display.

[0] Big red flags in the "I wasn't sure he was working in good faith" and "Maybe he was feeling lazy" quote with no evidence. We're likely seeing misreported conversation; the manager doesn't understand what is going on conversationally if he got to that mindset in this sort of situation. What else did he get wrong?

[kcplate]

While it’s certainly written from the managers POV and will show that bias, but the behavior and attitude he is describing is not unheard of from SWEs and the personality types that are attracted to that vocation. Frankly it’s frustrating and a challenge that cannot be easily dismissed as “bad-to-average leadership”. It might be bad leadership, but it’s bad behavior from the employee too and that should be acknowledged.

When I managed technical people I used to describe the challenge to management folks outside of tech that in tech management you are managing a group of people where everyone is absolutely convinced that they are smarter than everyone else around them. Often not only just smarter but their other colleagues are bumbling idiots.

So my bias from experience is that this dev was wrong, because I have been through very similar scenarios with similar Jerry’s. I spent 2 decades managing engineers, but haven’t for a decade so I acknowledge that times change and perhaps stroking fragile egos is a management necessity in 2025 where it wasn’t in 2015. I also had the benefit of supportive executive leadership that allowed me to quickly cycle out those personalities like “Jerry” to build a team where even if folks were convinced they were smarter than their peers, they would at least communicate with each and be respectful of the entire team’s contribution that allowed us to minimize source issues like was described in this story.

[roenxi]

I might expect many managers to be in alignment with Mr. respectfulleadership.substack.com on similar logic to the principle that about half of managers are below the median manager in communication skills. Empathy is a rare and difficult ability. But if this manager was adept at it he would be doing a much better job of articulating "Jerry"'s actual concerns and reflecting on why he was failing to communicate with him instead of setting up and gloriously defeating the strawman we see in the article. While failing at communication so hard he felt he had to do the ticket himself; we might note.

There are engineers convinced that they are smarter than everyone else but that isn't what is happening in this vignette at all. Even with my grave concerns about how accurate the reporting is of what he said, half the story is the reportee trying to figure out what he's done wrong and how to stop his manager from beating him with a rhetorical stick. That isn't the action of a man convinced he is the smartest guy in the room. But it is the reporting of a manger who believes beating someone else with a rhetorical stick makes him look good.

I'm not even saying this guy is a bad leader overall; at least he isn't being especially passive aggressive and this doesn't say anything about him at his day-to-day. But if he understood what attitudes and behaviours he was displaying in this story he wouldn't have been so keen to publish it. People who've had to deal with abusive people in power positions are going to have alarm bells going off reading this. It looks like someone lying to themselves and the reader in order to feel good about wielding power. Although, reading charitably, it might just be ignorance and low-grade communication ability.

[kcplate]

> There are engineers convinced that they are smarter than everyone else but that isn't what is happening in this vignette at all.

It’s the underlying cause though. According to what was written, Jerry made an assumption without any real investigation, didn't clarify the problem by engaging in communication to Sonya, argued his “superior” knowledge because of his assumption of her mistake, then apparently was dismissive again after Sonya apparently developed enough detail to escalate the problem to the leader who had to investigate and fix the issue himself.

Remove the Jerry’s arrogance all the way to the point of that rhetorical stick is there even a blog post here? Perhaps frustrated leadership is the effect, but Jerry’s poor attitude, handling, and arrogance is damn sure the cause.

[roenxi]

> It’s the underlying cause though.

There is scant evidence that it is the underlying cause. The manager didn't do his due diligence in figuring out what the cause was; I repeat myself but it looks suspiciously like he's disregarded whatever Jerry actually said, substituted a strawman and dealt with that strawman harshly.

At no point did Jerry assert superior knowledge. He should probably have talked to Sonia... but that isn't something that the manager seems to have picked up on. That is something that manager should have done, in fact, which is prompt the developer and Sonia to talk to each other. That seems like a much more reasonable underlying cause of problems than arrogance; a relatively minor mistake in failing to check what the ticket raiser wanted on a call when the ticket didn't seem plausible. If the manager had suggested that at any point he'd get a free mark for having done some good managing.

> Remove the Jerry’s arrogance all the way to the point of that rhetorical stick is there even a blog post here?

My guess is that is why it ended up being flagged; there isn't really a blog post here that is good to read. The post is basically Jerry mishandles a ticket in a minor way and his manager responds by melting down, mishandling the situation and making Jerry eat the heat for that in a style that looks mildly abusive. But the manager doesn't know what respectful communication actually looks like so he posted it expecting a warm response. Sure, Jerry made mistakes here but it isn't the elephant in the room.

If the manager had good communication skills he could have resolved this by articulating to Jerry some basic & polite actionable feedback instead of the display we actually got in the blog. There wasn't enough legwork done to justify a hard conversation.