[YZF]

To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.

Management cares about what their management cares about. So this boils down to what the CEO cares about. The CEO cares about what the board cares about. The board cares about share prices going up.

I do believe that e.g. retaining engineers is something that helps the business. It's stupid that someone ramps up for 2 years and then goes to a different job just as they start becoming really effective. It costs companies a ton of money which they could instead just use to get people to stay. But I'm not on Google's board. It's only when Google board decides that fostering the right engineering culture is important enough for the business that something is going to change. And so far- they don't (s/Google/BigTech).

Re: Incentives- Obviously(?) the incentives are not right. So when you say "plenty of incentive" what it really means is incentive to ship sloppy code and get promoted. Or the incentive to go from Google to OpenAI and get a pay increase or whatnot.

[pdimitar]

> To be fair to management, it is the results that matter.

To be fair to me, I don't recall ever signing a contract through which I am directly responsible for the company's financial and customer-acquisition / retention efforts. I sign up as an individual contributor who helps advance the customer & product mission forward. I am NOT a cofounder.

So that shows, yet again, how myopic and egocentric managers are. Wise ones -- the all 2-3 I have met throughout a 20+ years of experience -- understand that they must enable you to produce the outcomes they care about.

Unsurprisingly, I worked fantastically well with those managers and we achieved near-miracles in some measly 4-5 months.

But all others? "I never gave you time to optimise cloud spend but now I am angry at you for not doing it in your sleep", more or less. Or "I pushed you to the brink of 12-hour workday regularly and started reaching into your weekends and you rushed that feature I pressured you for and it has one small performance regressions? You are fired!". Deal with it.

/rant.

Not directed at you, obviously. Got triggered a little.

[YZF]

We need to disconnect the question of bad managers from the structural issues though. I try to be a good manager but I still have people jump ship for better comp and where we won't match it. I still need to deal with an incentive structure that doesn't match what I am trying to do with my team.

This same structure is also what helps bad managers. Who is going to get promoted to a director role? The person who stands up for their team and argues with the VP or the person who toes the line? The things that you think are near-miracles are not visible and the people that play politics will make their stuff look more valuable to the company.

/rant I guess ;)

[pdimitar]

Yours and my experience are not mutually exclusive, I think we both see it. I dream of managers like you but I never get hired under them for some reason. (Likely regional culture, experience shows.)

I'm at a stage of life and career where I'd happily take a small pay cut for a year just to establish myself in a place and have stability. Then we'll talk about competitive compensation.

My chief issues are with people that are best described with the proverb "give them an inch and they will take a mile".

Yours seems to be that you deal with people that constantly think that they can do better in terms of how much they take home (let's not sugar-coat it, they're spoiled -- I was too).

Heroics being invisible and people who have their coffee with leadership getting the money and the influence is the wrong system. Always was and apparently always will be.