Hacker News Reader

Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

Based on the article and the loyalty shown by openai employees, he appears to be the "difficult to manage" type, rather than the "difficult to work for" type.

That's not necessarily a bad thing in employees. I was once told that it is easier to round off the corners of a cube than to develop corners on a sphere.

View on HN

From this story sounds more like "difficult to not work for".

Or you know, he personifies paper millions everyone thought they had in the bank

IME one almost always implies the other.

Not in my experience, at all. Working beneath someone who’s difficult to work for can make your every day at work terrible. Working with someone who’s hard to work with is much more maintainable since you’re more in control of the interactions and can effect change by working with people higher in the org.

Oh, I mean that if someone’s a bad subordinate or peer they’ll probably also be a bad boss, or vice versa. I’d agree that a bad boss tends to be a worse thing to have than the other too.

But not as a truism. It's possible to manipulate well enough that people above and below you both believe you are working in their interest, but it's quite hard. Great for job security if you can pull it off.

I haven’t seen that. Some of my favorite coworkers and managers have been people who were hard to manage. It’s because they have strong principles and they prioritize good relations with their peers and subordinates over being promotable.

I understand you are probably talking about people who uniformly act like jerks but I haven’t found them to be as common.

Not my experience at all. Someone who pushes back on their boss to get the team they manage what they need is exactly that type of person.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com