Hacker News Reader

Comment by maria_weber | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this can be the top comment. This is just a string of generalizations without any references, not even anecdotes, or explanations. Someone venting steam, essentially.

Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.

Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

What corporate BS?

View on HN

>I don't understand how this can be the top comment.

Know the audience. Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here. The other 25% are broken into aspiring entrepreneurs, reasonable ICs and Reddit migrants who are still trying to find their feet.

>Do away with most management? And then what? 30,000 employees all steer the ship in the right direction by sheer "individual accountability and focus on results"? Well that gave me a good laugh.

Same crowd will balk at any suggestion around deriving accountability quantitatively. These rugged individualist coder wolves just need to be unleashed to let their genius flow, man.

>Culture is overrated? That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

See above. Why would the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with want a workplace that promotes working with others?

> Think of the most unnecessarily difficult people to work with in a given tech workplace - they make up about 75% of the users here.

Curious, why do you think so? Its hard for me to see any correlation with social/tech news consumption and being difficult to work with.

Not agreeing or disagreeing with the post you are replying to, but the people who comment here are different to the general people who consume here.

Putting aside whether there’s a correlation, forums develop their own unique cultures—a product of the moderation system, unspoken norms, and the specific individuals who comment there. A different forum might be discussing the exact same articles in a very different way.

According to your model, you are part of the audience too. So I assume (using your logic) that you are difficult to work with too or is still trying to find your feet? I (for one) doesn’t fit in your model. And I am also pretty sure I am not the only one. So I recommend perhaps adjusting your model to fit reality better?

Yea, the top comments on this thread read like a bunch of ICs who don’t understand what management does.

Yes, you have more time to be productive from home but since you aren’t sitting with your team all day, your manager has to work harder making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing and they’re all pushing in the same direction. Culture is the norms of how that happens, so it makes sense to hire people who know how to do that well.

A good manager is worth his/her weight in gold. The problem is that 90% of managers I have worked with are not good managers. I was a manager (and ran my own business with employees as well) for 10+ years, have worked 25+ years in the industry, and have more than once helped not-very-good managers get their projects back on track. The #1 problem I have seen is managers not understanding what their job really is. The result is a manager who has a negative productivity impact on the team he/she is managing. Add a few layers of bad managers on top of that, and you have a dysfunctional company.

There are lot of fringe political folks on HN that would prefer everyone shuts up and works. Or that want to turn everything into a moral crisis.

But to them I say, at least we can vote where we want to whittle our lives away, right? Choose the people and products we work with and on.

You're free to work at "do your work" Coinbase if you want. Or "everyone is now a vegan" WeWork.

You can choose to build spy tech, ad pipes, weapons systems. It's all up to you.

People complaining about culture (or defending it) might be making different choices than you.

The flip side is forced culture. Watch some videos of corporations making workers sing and essentially peer pressure everyone in participating was cringeworthy.

Some people just want to go to work and do their job.

Corporations always give you a false image that they "care about their employees", "saving them world/environment", "mission", etc. Just stop the marketing BS, they don't care about anything else than just making money at any cost, it is all an upfront.

Even improving morale has an ulterior motive- to boost productivity for profit. It is fine as corporations' sole purpose is to give shareholders value, but don't color it around HR bs to fool people. As least most companies are this way, the exceptions are few. People are not dumb once they realize they are disposable and start smelling the bs.

I think why most people complain about management is due to their false sense of leadership and character, pretending to be virtuous, while stabbing workers in the back (i.e. hypocrisy). There are not many good managers or employers- most lack real leadership or morals

If by "culture" you mean, a group of people with the same attitudes and goals- there is no denying that humans work better in groups. Just keep the "do-good" BS out please...unless you really meant it by embodying those ideals- living as example.

The moment a company tells the world how “caring it is” or how much it “cares about it’s employees”, run (don’t walk) away from it as fast as possible. The companies I have worked for that actually cared about its employees never told anyone about it because it was an unspoken rock solid part of the culture. As in “of course you need to make sure employees are happy to stay. Anything else would be stupid!”.

>That's literally the only thing that prevents work from becoming a sterile factory.

There is a difference between everyone being cold and taking it to such an extreme, everyone has to essentially be, ironically, the same robot in the rainbows and sunshine "work family".

>Well that gave me a good laugh.

Pulling out random numbers (goes for grandparent and your comment) doesn't help. Many people work in 1:5 manager:dev overhead, often more, due to multiple management layers all applying pressure on the bottom level. Not everyone is mentally a child that still needs to be babysat while an adult. Heck, college, university and all that are exactly there to ensure one is self-sufficient to an extend you don't need to manually moderate their every move.

It is fairly ironic you're devolving into the same behavior you accuse GP of, when a much more intellectual discussion can be held.

You're so deep in the BS yourself you can't even see it anymore? Office politics BS is commonplace and it's part of human nature in a place where humans interact socially, but that becomes a lot harder when you're working remotely (no references to give you about this statement, but I believe a lot of people have been saying this in the past few months). Can you really not believe that people can do work without a manager telling them to? I think that if that's all you know, yeah, can be difficult to adjust... but I am fairly certain most people would adjust just fine to a situation where they are their own manager: they have a job to do, a target to achieve, and they have to figure out how to get there. Some level of administration is always needed, but that doesn't require a manager as we normally have them. Just another worker whose focus is on metrics/people.

I manage a team of 20. A few people are good at and enjoy being independent and don’t need much management, but most people fall apart and actually end up with a lower job satisfaction. I’m not saying they all desire micromanagement (though I have one high needs but high output developer that enjoys work more with weekly meetings and daily checking, as a stress reliever), but they all appreciate good management as it reduces unnecessary work, wasted effort, and results in a higher quality product.

I started a company and was always a “leave me alone to do it my way” individual contributed, and it took a huge amount of effort on my part to remove that bias of how I like to work, so I could effectively manage people who don’t work best that way.

Culture by the way, is just a common ground tying people together to make everything a little less transactional. I have some transactional people and I tend to be that way myself, but most of our team enjoys shared memories, values, etc. they are the ice breaker between most people that otherwise wouldn’t have the desire or reason to hang out, but are forced to by work. Most people actually recognize this as a tool and happily play the game.

You nailed it. A good manager will adapt his/her approach to the individuals he/she manages. A bad manager will try and force all individuals to become identical clones.

I think you’re fighting straw men here, but a worker whose focus is on metrics/people sounds like a good definition of a manager.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com