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People are rewarded highly at the top with the assumption they are valuable contributing intelligent leaders who can do the job better than the people getting paid poorly. They have boats and vacation homes and generational wealth, I find it VERY easy to blame them for their poor leadership. We should blame them much more often, they don't face any blame because there aren't enough people above them to enforce it. Shareholders aren't close enough to structure incentives in a way that require leaders to face any blame. You want to be rich and say it's because you earned it? Then earn it.

I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you in principle but I still have no idea how this comment relates whatsoever to the parent comment.

Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that layoffs are hitting non-management harder than management.

> Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that layoffs are hitting non-management harder than management.

It implies that layoffs are hitting non-supervisory non-managers more than line supervisors; but “management” includes non-supervisory specialist managers, and middle and upper management above the line level, all of which could be hit more than line supervisors and those they supervise. (Ideally, not enough to really make a difference in this effect – but an overload of non-line, particularly middle and specialist, management is not an uncommon organizational disease.)

I agree with the core sentiment expressed here, though I think your statements come off as absolutist. I think there are plenty of people in management (though maybe not the majority) that don't come from generational wealth. I think the boats + vacation homes + generational wealth statements you brought up are irrelevant to the main point you're making, which is that leaders should be held accountable (which I fully agree with).

Take care not to let cynicism, spite, or resentment overshadow a strong core argument.

Yes, that is true. The other thing that is true is complete lack of accountability for managers.

They can lack social skill, be rude, be incompetent, slow the project to and make it ineffective. And many still keep failing upwards.

There are good managers, it is not they don't exist. But bad ones are way more frequent then should be. People completely unsuitable for leadership keep staying managers despite destruction they cause.

Of course, the more obvious answer is that they don't earn what they earn because of performance, but because of broken market incentives.

You're not wrong, but to make an analogy, someone who was hired to be a great runner can't really be blamed when they're forced to swim and they're not very good at it. You lose the race either way though of course.

I think a lot of people have a very self oriented view.

Managers have issues too, particularly good ones who care about their direct reports and getting projects done without death marches. The incentive structure is off. They are rewarded for the wrong metrics, things like number of reports (top tier metric and is a primary basis for getting titles like senior manager, director, VP, CTO, etc), which encourages growing your kingdom. Politics, credit for accomplishment when you're only a proxy for work and don't have control of all the constraints.

It's not uncommon to find yourself in the position where making the right call will be bad for your prospects for internal growth. Which means when you don't corrupt yourself, after a time you dust off your resume and try to make the next step at the next position instead of internally.

Still, you work with where you are and what you have and do your best. I want to be able to take a hand on the business side as I'm tired of projects falling apart due to bad business underpinnings I can identify from the outset. That means playing the management game from the inside so I can get to CTO where I hope to be able to make a bigger difference.

>I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank priorities. I

I can't speak for other people, but personally, I always speak my mind. I don't care what level the person above me is. I don't do it in a dickish way, but I will say my say. I always feel that is my duty, to let people above me know what the situation on the ground is, because they just don't know. And usually, in a new job, I'll start out small and work my way up to bigger things as I get to know the system and services/products better. And I've never had any kind of weird shit happen to me, like have someone blow up that I contradict them in the slightest way. Especially in knowledge work. Every boss I've ever had has been good with my feedback and has taken it very seriously. Very often they change their decisions with my input. Often I'll say, "No, can't be done, nope" and explain why, unless they know something I don't know which they always let me know if that is the case.

It's all of our jobs to tell our bosses if something can't be done and be very clear about it, or to have them prioritize work, and also give feedback on that as well.

If you have a boss that is a dick and won't listen - time to move jobs.

Resources are finite, even during flush times, companies go out of business due to squandering of resources.

I'm so glad to see you say this, because I also do it. I thought I was the only one, but I see it as part of my job responsibilities to be "say my say" in an honest, polite way. Especially towards management, telling people what the consequences of their decision are(good or bad).

You need clever middle management to navigate that. The solution is to play the fiefdoms against each other.

One way I navigated a team through this is that we just halted work on critical stuff and we doubled down as rockstars for politically important critical stuff. As each other team complained, we let the people up the chain kill each other, and eventually got relief from the crazy.

Having a line manager or director who can play the VPs and SVPs against each other is invaluable for an IC on a critical team, and honestly a pretty good indicator of who the next director or VP might be.

VP, SVP, IC?

Vice President, Senior Vice President, Individual Contributor.

My first big tech manager was incredible at this. Took me a few other managers to realize what a specific (and rare!) skill this is, as she made it seem so easy.

I miss working for her.

Spectacular! Can we get a show out of this short story? Name it DevCrowd or smth.

> The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no...

I really respected my manager at my last job for frequently saying no, for good reasons that he articulated so well that the other managers who he said no to actually agreed and accepted his decisions.

That's a rare quality in managers that I haven't seen before or since. Most are pushovers who usually agree to do almost anything asked of them, no matter how ridiculous and unrealistic.

There's a whole book about this sort of thing called The Phoenix Project that you may be interested in reading. A lot of what you're saying falls under "the first way" which covers systems thinking and the flow of work.

I enjoyed the book, but after looking at the situation from a querying theory pov, I became skeptical of some of the authors claims

Care to elaborate?

Kind of a non- statement. The book is fiction, and an extended advertisement for the author's management consulting business. Its "claims" are barely hypotheses.

Learning to say no to management was one of the hardest things for me in my career. It has also been the one of the best things.

Boundaries are crucial, but one must derisk their downside to effectively enforce them.

And how did you actually do it? Any good advice/books on this.

I know my management has clear ideas what they want so even if I am told - it’s my job to figure it out they say what needs to happen (not accepting a No).

Entire engineering / infrastructure team quit. I hired in just after last one gave notice. System was in complete collapse. Nothing was documented. I had to reboot servers at random to even find out what might get system going again.

Couple weeks in CEO asked when new feature would be ready.

It took that level of complete absurdity for me to finally say no. I eventually rebuilt the entire infrastructure, scaled traffic 3x, hired and trained new team. It was about a year before I would even listen to a request for a new feature. Took me a long time to recover from that job.

Easiest way to is to provide an illustration of the cost of doing said action. Those costs need to be put in terms that they understand. That way they can evaluate how much they really want things.

This is an indirect no. We can do that, it will cost X and take Y time and have Z impact on the code base and our long term velocity. Is this what you would like to do?

Quite often, they will say no themselves. If you have no trust with management and they ignore your warning, the org is already at high levels of toxicity and there isn't much you can do anyway. Realize that and navigate the position accordingly.

This seems to happen more frequently than people realize - ie more project equals more meetings equals less time to do real work. I've heard people talk about it before but not as frequently as I expected after noticing it. Steve Jobs seemed to be aware.