It can be interesting, but also draining if you’re no careful, to view these companies from the outside.
I work with a client, who have the most toxic environment I’ve ever seen. The company is just a handful of people, including the CEO, and we’ve been in meetings where they are basically yelling at each other, sometimes us, trying to allocate blame. Fixing stuff is less important than identifying who is to blame.
Trying to get a decision about anything is impossible, we have questions that goes unanswered for months. It frequently trivial stuff like: when do you want this script to run? Picking a date, or where is this documented (it’s not but they’ll insist it is, and we’re just to stupid to find it).
It all stems from the leadership within. Their managers all have one or more of the traits in the article, and it seems to trickle down to the employees who act similarly towards people on the outside.
Personally I’ve take the approach that I’m consulant, paid by the hour (because the client refuse to sign an actual contract), so I really don’t care, I’ll make any modification they want, write whatever document they need, redo anything they’re unhappy with, even if the result is worse.
The main things with having these companies as clients is:
* Double check everything you write, before sending it.
* Have them sign of on everything, before starting the work.
* Always get everything in writing.
* Don’t lie, they will catch you and use it to blame you for unrelated stuff.
* Don’t take it personal.
* Bill by the hour.
Yeah I experienced this years ago at an MSP. The client was outright hostile to people who would pick up their tickets. It was extraordinarily hard to please them. They'd also leave bad reviews on the tickets once completed, which would impact our bonus (!)
So the eventual outcome was no one would pick up their requests from the queue, and this made them even more angry and difficult. I flat out refused to do them, directly to my managers, since they wouldn't consider voiding the inevitable bad reviews. Just dumb all around.
Last job, there was a client who fired my employer before I was hired. They went through >12 IT people before crawling back. My coworker got the client and was fired within 3 days. His replacement another coworker lasted about 2 weeks. I then was given the client. I went onsite, was stoic as usual and they loved that. They could be abusive as much as they pleased to me and I never responded to any of it. It worked for many months but I got busy. I was booked weeks in advanced. So they sent a coworker onsite and they flipped their lid. It was about a 45 minute drive there, this coworker billed them for 4 hours of driving. Like as if they wouldn't realize?
They complained so badly but never named my coworker because they never got his name. My boss assumed they were talking about me and he flipped out on my about fraudulent fluffing my numbers and all that. I had no idea what he was talking about and couldn't defend myself. He just tore me a new one for awhile and said they had to 0$ out all their recent bills.
Afterwards I looked it up and after finding out it wasn't me. I was not too pleased.
Tons of people put up with the similar on a daily basis. The pay is often really good in consulting gigs.
I was a consultant for retail/financial megacorps. 75% of the job is managing blame - covering your ass, finding ways to blame others, referencing the statement of work, etc.
PMO is always 5 or 6 members deep because of this - the work of many consultants is to milk money, not solve problems, unfortunately. Obviously there are great consultants out there - but I find for every one good one there are 10 bad.
The sad part is that many who have to deal with this really do want to help and fix issues, but poor management, be it from the client or your employeer can stand in the way and be really costly.
I hate billing customers for stuff they don’t need or aren’t helping them, but if they insist and won’t take free advice I’ll do the work and invoice them.
In my observations, consultants can be very well (mis)used.
Very frequently I've seen the pattern where a consultancy is allowed to go in and do everything at the direction of some project overlord.
And, sometimes? That's a -great- thing. Sometimes that means that in fact you are cutting away from all of the existing BS at a company and are allowed to make a real product.
Other times, however, it winds up being one of those things where you quickly realize you're going from bad to worse.
I found that it’s much easier as a consultant, especially if you have a good boss since you always know that you can be gone tomorrow if things get to bad. And on top, people in the org have no actual way to reprimand you, they need to go via your actual boss.
You blow this off but in being able to handle this kind of client you will be given more and more of these difficult to manage clients. Until you can't take anymore and you break.
Worse yet, when you are breaking you don't realize you should have quit long ago.
In my experience, taking this approach is a short term thing only.
I've always felt the concept of leadership is looked at the wrong way. Whether in the workplace or even in politics.
Leaders are not at the top, they are the foundation of everything. A good leader is the base of the team. The foundation the team is built on. They hold the team together from the bottom. Bearing the weight of responsibility and direction.
A good leader understands, their team's success is their success and their team's failure is their failure.
Anything can only be as strong as the foundation that holds it together. A leader who tries to stand at the top leaves no foundation for the team to work off and instead expects the team to bear their weight.
A leadership role is something that should be taken on with trepidation and the understanding that you're taking on responsibility for the people working with you.
It's up to you to guide things and yes it's you that takes the blame if things don't work.
> A good leader is the base of the team. The foundation the team is built on. They hold the team together from the bottom. Bearing the weight of responsibility and direction.
After doing consulting for the last couple of years, I’m slowly realizing how lucky I was to have stumbled into a small company with a CEO with this approach, right after uni.
He ended up writing a rudimentary, inefficient cms in java, filled with strange lispisms, but goddammit it worked as an amazing stopgap until I was available to make something more useable.
I've worked for both kinds of leaders. The companies with the kind of leader I describe above were by far the better places to work. The businesses always ran more smoothly, employee turnover was low, there was never usually interpersonal issues, and when problems like that did crop up, they were always solved quickly and by the end amicably.
A leader really can make or break a workplace. A good one can make any job feel good to go to, while a bad one can make the best job in the world feel like a living hell.
Maybe even the term "leader" is starting to show its age. Successful decision-making is (has to be) distributed in modern society, where skills are fragmented into so many specialties.
Indeed, and I wonder if we place too much emphasis on leadership when most managers would benefit from just trying to be better managers. I think a really good manager is a joy to behold, even if they don't have a leadership bone in their body.
I think part of the error is that people have a misconception that a leader should have all the answers. The best leaders I've worked for don't come into an interaction feeling this pressure, but rather help coordinate the energies of the team to let the the team reach the best answer. Of course, when there isn't a consensus, there needs to be a unambiguous "decider", but hopefully this is relatively rare and ends up being just small enough of a decision to get enough feedback to get the team to an iterative consensus.
I worked for one such company early in my career. I was the first hire of a batch that made the IT department 2.5x bigger.
Some of the initial red flags were all the empty desks with readily available computers and multiple monitor setups, and the fact the IT manager was a guy who struggled to communicate in English or the local language.
Long story short, one year after I joined all the IT department (including me) had left, with the manager being the only exception. We found out the hard way the company had a long story of hiring batches of developers and struggling to make payroll in the following months, which the CEO "fixed" by having the IT manager create a very toxic environment where people blamed each other for all sorts of things, thus distracting themselves from the elephant in the room (the company was broke and the CEO didn't care, and our manager was little more than a puppet).
My main takeaways were:
- Financially unsound companies are likely to have a toxic work environment.
- You should look for signs of high, recent employee turnover the first time you visit your employer's offices.
My last job, I was only hired because they had recently had 3+ people quit the same day. During the interview they were telling me how they have a large staff and only expect 60-80% billing because anymore leads to burnout and how they have 'work-home balance' meetings to ensure they are good.
Ya that should have been a red-flag. That stuff lasted at most a month until it ended and it went back to 'the beatings will continue until morale improves'
It was super common to work 60 hour weeks, but every hour of overtime you wanted to get paid for... you had to give detailed explanation to justify why you worked so that they could bill overtime/emergency rates to the client.
At my first year performance review I got scathing terrible review because our time/attendance system said I was late >40 times to work. I immediately asked which days I was late for... so my boss looks it up. Every single one of those lates was me logging in on a weekend after 9am because something was down and generally speaking the on-call person called me for help. So not necessarily that I worked 40 weekends, but saturday at 10am login and then next day at sunday at 11am would be 2 lates.
Did my performance review change for the better after realizing that not only was I being awesome and working afterhours and weekends to help my coworkers and the literal only complaint against me was having been late? Nope. Not even a little.
* The first red flag was all the empty, but fully equipped desks. Several floors almost vacant.
* The second red flag was leadership being away 80% of the time "on training", "seminars" and whatever else BS, instead of facilitating work.
* The third red flag was being tasked by a remote PM, to install extra equipment. I later learned it was because VMs were overbooked.
* The fourth red flag was my boss got fired, without hearing any reason.
On and on it went. Since this was tempwork, I just felt pain for those with steady work in such conditions and did what I could. Without support though, there was nothing I could do but leave in the end, with leadership wanting me to stay (I was probably the only one resembling some sanity in that place).
With experience and hard work, such places can be turned around. But not in times when top leadership and owners destroy a place. You'll be seen as an idiot and insane, in a world where leadership has turned everyone against eachother behind their backs.
If you’ve ever been in a company with a toxic leader you can relate. It will literally destroy everything in the company. The toxic leader usually thinks everyone else is the problem, causing them to double down. It’s a vicious cycle that’s destroyed many companies.
I've been at a company 6 years, I was thinking of leaving because I'd achived pretty much all I could in the role. In September a new CEO joined. Having listened to their plans, I was excited, new ideas, a firm direction. I decided to stay
a month later, I resigned. They were a bully who perceived any geniuine question as a challenge. Good people, coming out of meetings trying not to cry. I was coming out of meetings feeling like I was being beaten up.
My last day is next Thursday. People keep telling me how envious they are of me. I'm feeling guilt for leaving them in the lurch.
Feeling sorry for someone and feeling guilt feels the same for me. Maybe OP are mixing them up? Ie. he feels sorry for them as soon as the "we are in this together" is gone?
Guilt (fear) and feeling sorry for someone else (empathy), are two distinct feelings.
The problem is the sociopath behaviour and attitudes, that will project all their bad feelings unto others. The sociopath won't acknowledge their own state, so will blame others, also knowingly and silently for personal gain.
The remedy is radical honesty and working with oneself. Nobody else can do the work for someone, but breaking the patterns can be inspiring.
Don't let authority gain undue power over your lives. Some day you will regret it.
> If there's a board, it may be worth it to let some members know
Scenarios like this never work out well for the person doing the "complaining", whether you're going above your manager to their manager or your CEO to their board.
It's not worth your time, energy, or reputation. Focus your energy elsewhere, it's not your fight anymore.
Toxic leaders are often supported and defended by other leaders. At some point, pushing out a toxic leader is bad enough for the company image that the company would rather just hide the toxicity with NDAs. Childhood friends should never go into business together. Businesses built on a seed of nepotism are much more likely to fail. Imagine a 100-person company where the two founders are best friends since they were kids. If one of the founders repeatedly engages in inappropriate conduct, the other founder is much more likely to hide it.
This hits home. I've worked with leaders on two seperate extremes of the axes presented. In one case literally everyone of the bullet points was true. I wish I could have read this before then.
How much of destructive/toxic leadership can be summed up as "puts self ahead of organization"?
This post identifies 4 feelings that can lead to that. However, when I read the descriptions I picked up only two:
- Arrogance: I know better than my team
- Insecurity: I need to fight for myself b/c otherwise I'll lose my job / they'll realize I'm a fake
Those cause the leader to put themselves ahead of their team / disregard the thoughts of their team.
I suspect this condition is probably only made worse by the way our industry emphasizes the headstrong/autocratic facets of leaders (i.e. see how the media portrays Jobs, early Gates, Zuck, Dorsey, TK, Spiegel, etc.), convincing people to pursue positions of leadership for the wrong reasons: either that they finally will have final say or won't be able to be criticized. That becomes a refuge for the arrogant (wow, I'll finally have final say) and the insecure (wow, I'll finally not be able to be criticized). However, from what I can tell, leadership is more about:
- Integrating other's thoughts: your job is ultimately to integrate thoughts, not necessarily to just choose your own (failing to do so results in the autocratic failure mode)
- Requires vulnerability / sense-of-security: because how you integrate information/think--not just what you think--is a business asset, the business has more of a right to provide feedback there (failing to do so results in the deceptive failure mode)
And something that should only be pursued / gifted once those have been worked through?
In a large organizations, your manager has legit deliverables he/she has to meet. Even if they try to be king shit it’s not going to matter.
You only really need to analyze a startup team that is growing for the sake of growing. That’s really where the autocratic team leads will be a detriment to your mental health because they know why their team is growing, and don’t care for it. That’s where if such a person isn’t cool, you’ll get the decaying morale as a direct side effect of their entitlement, superiority and requisite insecurity.
I’m going to say something ageist, even though I hate ageism. I don’t think most people are emotionally mature enough until their 30s. I think developers could be lagging in emotionally maturity by 5 years, in which case I don’t think your average developer is emotionally mature until 35. Team leads and managers need to be extremely emotionally mature, none of that ego and insecurity is useful. You need to be able to shoot someone down, and come right back and build that person back up. It takes a lot of maturity to do this and not devolve into picking favorites or hiring new people, or turning authoritarian and despotic.
If you ever consider taking a leadership or management role please do yourself plus the people around looking up to you a favor and go to fucking psycotherapy. It's far more important than your technical skills (since you should be pretty senior by then anyway).
In my experience, most of good management is about figuring out why am I not doing the right thing (as a manager). Knowing what needs to be done is much easier than actually doing it.
Example: giving feedback is notoriously hard, even if it's really clear what the issues are. Promotion is also hard (you have to choose who to promote and who to not promote), and most of the time you do know the right choice but you might not be able to call it for personal reasons.
So yes, if you happen to manage people, spend a LOT of effort on self-reflection. Go to a coach, therapist, go to courses where they let you practice and where you get feedback. Whatever works for you, just keep investing. Also, don't worry if the coach, course, therapist is imperfect.
>>> Promotion is also hard (you have to choose who to promote and who to not promote)
Promotion is hard because as a manager you don't have the power to promote. There's HR on top of the organization deciding every year that there's no budget for raises and no slots for promotions.
When you're finally allowed to promote someone for real, after many years of tenure, the 10% raise is pale compared to what they could get by joining a new company.
Promotion is hard even in my small little 10 people org where I’m in a position to just at whim promote someone. Money is always limited, and any promotion (or even non-promotion) is a statement about relative (financial) value. People sometimes confuse that with actual human value and feel mistreated. Even talking about money is hard for many folks - how do we balance wages, how do we distribute profits, invest, save for bad times, ... People are not trained for this, money is often something people don’t talk about.
So some of the promotion dance may be more complicated in larger orgs, but it’s still hard in other orgs since it’s a value judgement on merits earned and as with all value judgements, there’s no absolutely correct and mathematically defensible formula.
Raises/promotions can be easy, you pay what you have to in order to retain the employee... as long as there is the money to do so AND as long as the company wants to retain said employee.
It's 90% about what they could get somewhere else in the city and a bit whether they are willing to leave and capable to (it's actually quite difficult to get a job ^^). You should have a pretty good idea of the what's available in the area after a while.
As you noticed, everybody think they deserve more. Ironically everybody is wrong, because the fact that they work here for this amount is proof that it's enough (for now), if they could get paid more they'd be paid more (whether here or somewhere else).
The key is to ignore people because people are always dissatisfied. Big companies set a fixed pay band and reply to everything with "there's no budget for a raise" because it's the nice easy way to do that.
We distribute 80% of the companies profits among the employees, so by definition we pretty much always pay as much as we can. That still leaves the discussion open of how wages and promotions get balanced among the team. And even if the decision is “everyone gets the same share more”, some people feel like they should be getting more than the rest. And those people sometimes even feel rejected if you tell them that there’s not more money in the pool and if they want or need more, they need to go look elsewhere. Or they stick around and are silently disgruntled until at some point they explode, despite having had a voice and a vote in the matter (and actual agency in raising the profits, hence everyone’s wage).
The most manipulative, ineffective, selfish boss I ever had was a really nice, likeable guy.
Promotion is 'hard' because there are very few spots to be promoted int to, it's a narrow pyramid, and people generally want to 'increase responsibility and salary' when that isn't consistent with the reality of the situation.
Feedback is hard because people tend to take it personally.
The entire piece is misguided in the sense that, although toxic managers do exist, it's generally far more complicated. Different situations, different people, different levels of expectations, differing levels of legitimate authority, emotions vs. outcomes etc.. Some people perceive 'loudness' to be problematic, some people don't care (see: inside of a hockey locker room).
Usually focusing on material things, outcomes etc. matter, the rest is not that important. Personally, I try to have a huge latitude for tolerance of different types and don't care that much otherwise frankly. Truly diabolical patterns of behaviour like back-stabbing, not taking ownership of failure - this kind of stuff is quite bothersome - and those behaviours can come in 'nice happy bosses'.
> Also, don't worry if the coach, course, therapist is imperfect
Why not worry about that?
Because one will still pick up enough useful things, for it to be worthwhile? And if changing to a different therapist or coach, that one will probably also be imperfect?
(Assuming the therapist / coach isn't really bad of course.)
Off the top of my head: No one likes dealing with a boss who lets their emotions overflow into the workplace and takes their personal issues out on their staff. That's just one of many ways therapy can help you be a better manager.
Reminds me! I recently came accross this older YouTube channel, Healthy Software Developer. I found it to be quite a good source of info on everything from leadership to company culture.[1] Quite entertaining too!
[1]: A Tale Of Software Development Culture Change - Gone Wrong! 18 May 2018, Healthy Software Developer https://youtu.be/yKAOMiNv-go
Yep, I had a manager I wasn't thrilled with early in my career, but I liked the work I was doing. Then one day I heard him yelling at someone in his office that I knew to be a good person & good worker. His precise words were "I'm the boss, if I want to shove my thumb up my ass & spin around I can do it and you can't say a thing"
And I thought to myself "Yep, I'm done here". Unfortunately I jumped ship too quickly and found myself in a job I hated, with a manger who (while not as vocally abusive) was just as bad.
Made that mistake once... I learned that no job is perfect, and if you have a good thing going, stick with it.
Now, hindsight is always 20-20. If I had that experience, I'd probably ask my boss about it, in private, if possible. (Good leadership should always be able to handle challenging questions from subordinates.) (But, there are times where leadership should be challenged publicly.)
Perhaps the statement needed some context? I've had to make statements like, "no, I will not do you work for you," and, "now I've never done this before, and hopefully don't need to do it again, but I'm pulling rank here."
So I would have tried to get context from you boss... And maybe realize that good people make mistakes too.
Edit: The point to leave is when there is a pattern of bad behavior.
>And I thought to myself "Yep, I'm done here". Unfortunately I jumped ship too quickly and found myself in a job I hated, with a manger who (while not as vocally abusive) was just as bad.
One time, long back in my career, my then-boss jumped down my throat in a meeting for no valid reason. I clearly remember thinking to myself, "Is this it? Is this the day I tell this asshole to fuck off, and walk out the front door?" I decided not to, but I was in full-on job search mode the moment that meeting ended. It didn't take more than a couple of weeks before I gave notice. The next job was for less money, but it was basically my dream job at the time. It was the best move I ever made.
There's no moral or lesson to this story. I just thought I'd share it.
Is there a way to psychologically assess the positive version? Either a DISC or WAIS subtest score or something similar? (I assume a constructive leader?)
You'll have to provide material scientific evidence for every one of the claims, otherwise, though there's a ton of truthiness in there, it's also a lot of pop psychology.
Many of our greatest leaders exhibit a lot of those traits (though not the existentially negative one's i.e. they are only motivated by their own power etc.).
'Looking down on others as incompetent' is not a negative sign if said individuals are incompetent.
'Interrupting/speaking over others' is in most cases just a sign of possibly poor communication, and frankly in many cases warranted. Just because you are 'speaking' does not give you the right to monopolize someone else's time with your thoughts. Some people, myself in included have difficulty 'getting to the point' and I'm used to leaders interrupting me, it's fine.
'Pontification' 'Telling Stories' - often is at the root of positive charismatic leadership. Plebes want to believe that their jobs have a higher purpose, a 'mission', they generally want the koolaid so long as it's not too out of hand.
'Chaotic Climate' - again, some systems work better when they are in more or less permanent chaos or in an ambiguous state. Not 'panic' obviously, but in entrepreneurism chaos is often the defining quality of the situation, those that can't live with that may want to work elsewhere.
"Appears unsympathetic to others’ concerns" - sorry - again, one person has absolutely no material right to require that some other person is sympathetic to their concerns. Of course a sympathetic leader makes us 'feel better', but most mature, senior workers who have emotional maturity could care less if their bosses are 'empathetic'. If management isn't listening because they are 'wrong' or 'missing something' then that's altogether a different stories.
Politically astute leaders take this one to the bank - appear to be 'empathetic' when really it's just an infantile, placating emotional display that has nothing materially to do with anything. They do this because a lot of emotionally immature people respond to it.
"Disdain for human frailty or weakness of any kind" - this one I think is adding to the list of 'made up' 'unscientific tropes' amended to the list by someone because they think leaders ought not to be this way. I think it's misunderstood. I think most, even 'tough guy' leaders are fine with weakness, it's a matter of how it's displayed. You can cry, but not on Television for god's sakes; it's not the 'crying' that's weak, it's the evocation of sympathy or empathy from others, a form of emotional grovelling that's the issue.
"Moralistic whistleblowing" - like shaming, cancel culture? So yes, it's possibly a sign of something, but possibly not.
I think this is a great article - and all of these things 'can be signs' of bad leadership but are often not. Every point probably needs a counter point, I think a lot of the behaviours of leaders are misunderstood.
I've been very fortunate to have a lot of great and demanding leaders and see many of the supposed 'negative points' in them, so I'm wary of promoting such a list without a whole load of caveats and contextualisations.
Indeed. This is what the people at less wrong mean when they talk about "semantic stop signs". Words to make you stop thinking, and accept the argument as given:
"Some people are dominant destructive bosses because of genetics, m'kay?"
The whole argument falls apart when you realize the author, and nobody really, understands the relationship between your behavior and your genetics enough to conclude anything at all.
Nature vs. Nurture is very much not a settled argument. Although if anything, recent understanding in epigenetics movers the needle a bit more in the "nurture" direction.
The interaction surface between genetics and physiology itself is very complex and not well understood. The interaction surface between physiology and behavior is just as complex and not well understood.
It's not that we will never find any gene that affects behavior. We have, and we will. But to draw any big picture conclusion outside the scope of those specific findings is wild and decades if not centuries early.
The #1 job of any manager (and employee), as far as the company is concerned, is to represent/forward the goals of the corporation.
"forward the goals of the corporation" can mean a lot of things. As any parent knows, it's dangerous to let kids have everything the want. Same with pets. If you let your dog eat all your chocolate chip cookies, I hope you have an animal emergency room nearby. Same with a corporation.
In one or two cases, I deliberately took a risk, and disobeyed orders/policies, because I knew that they would be eating chocolate chip cookies. That's a big risk, because there's usually quite a bit more behind policies and orders than an individual can see, and what I did could have been destructive. I am happy to report that these were not destructive, but it isn't a practice that I can recommend.
But "forward the goals of the corporation" can also be in direct conflict with the goals of the employee, which, if they are healthy, may start with things like "my kids, my spouse, etc." Balance needs to be had, and it's a mistake to look to a corporation to provide that balance.
Usually, the best source of balance is the direct-report manager. They need to be "in tune" with their employees, and be able to negotiate the competing priorities.
In any case, a manager that puts their own, personal goals ahead of those of the corporation, and of their employees is (IMNSHO) negligent in their duties. I was a manager for 25 years. I think I did a decent job of it, and I kept senior-level employees for decades (not an exaggeration -when they finally wound up my team, after 27 years, the employee with the least tenure had ten years).
My experience, is that whenever I have discussed my philosophies and methodology, I'm attacked for either being a "wimp" (other managers), or being "two-faced" (other employees). None of these attacks have come from people that have actually worked with/for me.
When I became a manager, I assumed a different role. I had to make the commitment to put aside my personal aspirations, in favor of those of the corporation, then my employees. My own goals came behind those.
What is the geographic area? How is the pay band of the company compared to local competitors? How are the perks?
I don't expect managers in a tech hub to be able to keep younger employees for many years, when they can jump ship after 1-3 years to get a huge pay raise somewhere else.
Then there's the grade of the company, if you're at a lower grade company (low pay, mediocre projects, no pension, bad health insurance) good luck keeping people around. They will figure out soon enough the grass is greener elsewhere.
The few people I met with 10+ years of tenure were mostly in large companies with benefits and comfortable positions. They've changed roles internally a few times over the years.
It was also important to keep employees for a long time. I worked for a Japanese corporation, and my boss was 7,000 miles away, and didn't speak English.
So, for me, keeping my employees happy, and feeling valued, was important. Since these were fairly senior (C++ programmers that had been coding around 30 years or so), I gave their families and personal space a lot of respect.
This was appreciated, and I was rewarded with personal loyalty.
The risk to the corporation was that it was personal loyalty. I have no doubts, whatsoever, that, if I had left, the entire team would have left quickly behind me.
My management was not as respectful of my personal life, as I was of my employees, but I enjoyed a pretty remarkable level of trust, as I have some fairly well-considered personal Principles.
Ah nice. Used to work in a large corporation with a major office in NYC (I am in London).
Also recruiting C++ developers, had a few folks with 30+ years of experience.
I think the key is to have developers who are good, but not too great that they can pass interviews in other places (tech interviews are getting impossibly difficult nowadays).
Give them decent work-life balance, decent pay/perks, and decent teammates/manager. They will stick around for a while. Not looking too hard and if they look there's a good chance it doesn't conclude (interviews are too time consuming with a family and too difficult).
There's still quite a bit of attrition though. NYC has a lot of strong opportunities (FANG, banks, hedge funds) and C++ developers have niches in demand (finance/high performance).
Top developers will get a better opportunity eventually. I've seen the case where another company decided to take over somebody or a whole team, it's unstoppable.
A couple of them were really sharp, and now work for another heavy-duty (this time, German) engineering corporation.
Not everyone wants to be a CTO. Many of us just want to do what we love, and be respected and supported, while doing it. For many people, that's a dream job.
When I left my job, I could have gone on to management at another company, and be making fairly decent money. Instead, I decided to "retool" myself, and return to my production engineer roots.
It's a field that is dominated by a lot of ruthless, young, hungry people (and a management culture that has adapted to this), and I may never get anyone to pay me to code ever again; even though I have the ability to make others a lot of money.
For some reasons this makes me think of the generational struggle.
The difference between the 50-60 folks who bought a home before the bubble (if not multiple homes) and can be pseudo retired. Still working for another decade but typically not caring too much about salary.
And the 30-40 folks who is facing the housing bubble with a lifelong mortgage and soon university fees for their children. Typically caring quite a bit about compensation because they're struggling to make ends meet. Sadly they really missed the boat if they stayed a decade at a company (with little raise/promotion).
Obviously they're managed quite differently and have very different concerns in life.
The parent specifically mentioned keeping senior level employees. Juniors can easily jump ship for pay raises, but as you get senior, other values start to becomes more important. Your wage level is likely “good enough” and so stuff like stable working hours, a team that you can rely on, stability etc. become more of a deciding factor, especially once you start settling and having a family. 10 years + doesn’t sound implausible, especially if you had 27 years to build the team. The ones that stick around for longer than the initial period tend to stick around long.
Caring about the employees and making the enterprise successful can be one in the same. That’s the point.
Businesses require success and profit to continue to exist. There’s no point in pretending that what the business does isn’t ultimately motivated by profit. I know there’s a trend to pretend that companies are doing things for selfless reasons or purely to do good things for their employees, but that’s usually obscuring a hidden profit motive (increase recruiting, motivate employees to work harder, create goodwill among customers). It’s better when the companies are simply honest about their intentions.
it's like the main goal is to care about employee only to make the entreprise successful.
This is just how business works. It's how market (and many non-market) economies work. It's how much of human society is structured.
Also, sometimes people need external motivation. "You are a jerk and you need to stop being a jerk" is not enough sometimes. This happens in many contexts, not just the workplace.
Countless times I've heard or read this somewhere.
Quite untrue with my experiences. Who exactly is the "manager"? the "company"?
In my experience, most of my reports left because of low pay. I as their "manager" agreed that they receive an raise which is justifiable due to their output and our team's growth.
But the "company" is against it. In particular the CFO. Is the CFO the "manager" then?
In any case, a statement like that is almost always misleading.
The article is Ok though. I just wished that statement was not there.
That being said, if everybody's leaving for money, that's a sign that you might want to look elsewhere too. You could even call up the people who you tried to get raises for when you're ready to hire.
What should someone do if they've started realizing they see some of these qualities in a cofounder? Is it worth addressing it in a corrective or supportive way or are these behaviors that are unlikely to change?
Edit: I should clarify I mean more of a competence/confidence issue leading to destructive behaviour, not malicious intent.
> I mean more of a competence/confidence issue leading to destructive behaviour, not malicious intent.
I should have walked away from a co-founder in a similar situation.
Short answer: Your co-founder is probably a good person. Plenty of people are good people. The qualities of running a successful startup are hard to come by, and the sooner you realize your co-founder can't do it, the sooner you should walk away.
Long answer: I worked with a guy who I really hit it off with; who was a good person. But after a year I realized he was mostly letting his imagination run away, and didn't have the leadership qualities needed to design or run a startup. I should have walked away much earlier when he fundamentally misunderstood certain rules about asking the CTO to build an idea, and I should have walked away when he couldn't articulate a one-page business plan after we locked ourselves away for a week.
When I called it quits, we remained friends and he even helped me meet his wife. But, I think things would have been smoother if I walked away when I suspected problems, instead of assuming things would work out.
I want to add my own advice. You remember that culture fit part of the interview that every company does? It’s never about finding out if your young dumb and ready to fuck. It’s about are you willing to put up with a certain management style. That’s the job offer, you are being offered money to be able to professionally handle their people system. If you are okay with handling it, you can work there.
Things that will help probe in that phase of the interview:
- Ask about deadlines.
- Ask about requirements, how much do they have, how often they change, who makes the final call, how are they scoped initially, how involved are the stakeholders.
- Beyond unit testing, how is QA handled, how is user acceptance testing handled, how does all of this affect timelines.
- Ask for a roadmap, can they tell you what they plan on building in the next year. Some managers don’t share this information with their team in general, so expect a solid ‘not sure, but we have stuff promise’ type response (which gives you an answer on transparency).
- Why do they need one more person on the team? Here you really want to find out their current bottlenecks. Then probe deeper and find out if the bottlenecks are a lack of labor, or systemic issues (see above bullet points). Scary answers include ‘no roadmap, and everything is on time’ - so why do you need me?
- The dance with the manager at a startup could eliminate you as they are still looking for people that will put up with absolutely anything. But, they might also be ready for more process oriented people. Again, you have to signal who you are. If these things don’t matter to you, go with the ‘I eat sleep and code answer’.
If you sufficiently annoyed them at the end of those questions, both you and the company will agree in a non-spoken dance that you won’t be happy in their management style.
If you really really just need a check, don’t ever ask questions like that. Just say, ‘I build stuff on my spare time constantly, and I just love development, so I think this would be a great opportunity to grow’. You are signaling you are desperate and ready to fuck.
Small things to consider, if you ask those questions to a regular dev on their team, you will get feedback that you might not fit (so don’t ask the team these questions). Save it for the manager, and negotiate with the unspoken dance directly.
Best of luck, culture fit is definitely how the manager and you maintain healthiness, what you can put up, and what they can put up with. Even the most toxic manager has some humanity, and it is also exhausting for him/her to deal with unhappy people. Work together in the culture fit part to parse if everyone’s expectation is within reach.
The end goal of all of this is you don’t walk away from the job because you didn’t know what you got yourself into. You’re an adult, go into everything with both eyes open, no crying at the end.
I just saved this list into my phone for future reference. These are some solid questions I've skirted around before but never consistently followed (didn't for my current position, probably should have)
I've been in a position where I had to find my next opportunity. While I was considering options, I asked a ton of questions and got to know the people/tech/processes extensively, and I believe I got a better offer because of it.
One strategy is to ask questions in a more positive/balanced way. e.g.: "Do you unit test?" is a yes/no question, and if the answer is no, it doesn't leave much room to give a positive answer to the question. Compare this with "What is your testing strategy; what do you think you do well, and where could you improve?" gives you at least a set of tradeoffs.
Basically, you want the interviewer to highlight potential problem areas, without speaking about their organization in a way where they can't say anything positive about what they do. You can find these details out without giving a laundry list of explicit red flag type questions.
You can definitely operate a profitable startup/any sort of business if you can find enough college grads/cert drones who are desperate for work, will take $15/hour, are "dumb and ready to fuck" and will put up with a team of unprofessional micromanaging assholes. You just to have to make sure you are their leader!
You have three layers of leadership... elected officials, appointed officials who serve at the pleasure of the appointment authority, and civil servants.
Each category has unusual incentive structures and act out in various ways.
while I get the point of these articles, I think they are little more than self-satisfying regurgitation of past experiences which went poorly. I want to see an article from the perspective of someone who realises they have these problems and what they plan to do to fix them.... identifying is not that helpful when it becomes the end result - all in all seems like clickbait.
TLDR, narcissists are not good to be around and are quite bad leaders.
The hardest aspect of leadership is learning the appropriate techniques and behaviours. It's so often not the focus of your attention when working as an individual contributor then when you take up a leadership role you have to learn fast before you do any serious damage.
My best general advice is honesty with your team, realise when you've screwed up and apologise. Also if you can't honestly develop empathy for your team you should probably get out of leadership roles.
While destructive leaders and psychopaths / sociopaths in the workplace are critical issues, this article is hot garbage in the same way that you can’t quote DSM narcissism disorder traits at people you don’t like and you can’t use Myers Briggs descriptions like horoscopes.
The defining characteristics are all so subjective (what does “extreme” external image mean? who says?) and so vague (what is gossiping vs actually describing real organizational problems? what if a middle manager really is being bullied or unsupported and they have to defend that certain things really aren’t their fault?) as to be useless and dangerous, because you can read into this and see anyone as a “destructive leader” if you are motivated to. There’s no basis in systematic rules or data.
BUT, personality DOES play a large role in determining the effectiveness of someone as a leader.
More to the point, personality and the discernment of its characteristics and consequences is an intrinsically subjective thing. You will not find clearly actionable data nor systematic rules for figuring this stuff out.
That subjectivity doesn't stop people from trying to quantify this stuff, like for example, those insipid HR-driven DISC personality surveys and workshops. Some folks dive into minutia about Myers-Briggs classification. There's grains of truth in all these approaches, but it never works the way it was intended. HR departments and individuals aren't psychometric professionals, and even if they were, what they could actually use this for in a workplace isn't at all clear even in the best case scenario.
IMHO, the way you identify a destructive leadership pattern is by having experienced it before (as well as its opposite), by being mindful of your interactions with others and with organizational politics, and being self-critical of your own reactions to it. None of that is easy, It can't be learned in advance. It takes experience, trial and error.
The real harm of poor quality “checklist psychology” articles like this one is that uninformed HR or aggrieved employees will treat it with too much respect and legitimacy, meanwhile the actual psychopath or destructive leader is going to get out in front of this and start disingenuously saying other people are destructive leaders and cut off their credibility to push back or undermine the psycho’s authority.
For example, if you see a high ranking leader trying to deflect valid criticism of their choices by saying “assume positive intent” you can be sure this is happening.
“Assume positive intent” is a siren call of a destructive leader because the plan is to reframe their challenger’s valid criticisms in an “us vs them” abstract debate about who is or isn’t acting in good faith, completely tabling the merits of the argument out of scope. The genius of it is that “assume positive intent” allows you to sidestep the usual reputation hit you would take for making something “us vs them” - basically “assume positive intent” is HR-permitted code for framing us-vs-them blame to sabotage otherwise legitimate criticisms of leadership - “criticism” itself becomes politically disallowed.
Articles like this one act like legitimizers for that kind of stuff, since it’s all just vague, fluffy pop-psychology statements that could virtually apply to any coworker whether their situation is legitimate or they are being a destructive leader or they are just having a bad week.
Appreciate your perspectives and happy to share the many years of research we have conducted. We have been sharing the positive version of this scientific model based on 12 character strengths for years and have some awesome tech clients who have used it for years. This is the first time we have shared the pathological version during this election. Great leaders choose to take responsibility for their negative impact and commit to growth. We help people choose that every day and have served many great tech leaders startups and companies. Of course there is a LOT of detail not included in this short blog. If you are interested we will post more here about the science and positive version. Pam
Personality is largely genetic but doesn’t limit who we can become thru choice and moral reasoning. We built a personality profile that is based on character science and doesn’t limit people to type. Enjoyed your post. Agree that experiencing a destructive leader is what catalyzed the 30 years of research and devotion of my life's work to creating a scientific framework for identifying positive vs destructive leadership. quickly. I found that having a heuristic helps keep all of us choose to grow and lead more consciously. Myself especially! Pam
I work with a client, who have the most toxic environment I’ve ever seen. The company is just a handful of people, including the CEO, and we’ve been in meetings where they are basically yelling at each other, sometimes us, trying to allocate blame. Fixing stuff is less important than identifying who is to blame.
Trying to get a decision about anything is impossible, we have questions that goes unanswered for months. It frequently trivial stuff like: when do you want this script to run? Picking a date, or where is this documented (it’s not but they’ll insist it is, and we’re just to stupid to find it).
It all stems from the leadership within. Their managers all have one or more of the traits in the article, and it seems to trickle down to the employees who act similarly towards people on the outside.
Personally I’ve take the approach that I’m consulant, paid by the hour (because the client refuse to sign an actual contract), so I really don’t care, I’ll make any modification they want, write whatever document they need, redo anything they’re unhappy with, even if the result is worse.
The main things with having these companies as clients is: