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Comment by lolive | Hacker News Reader

During a face2face with my n+2, he once told me « manage your manager ». I discovered later that he had been forced to hire my n+1 but did not like him at all. And that the message was basically: « he is a bozo whereas you a competent engineer. Don’t be fooled by the organization chart. »

So sometimes saying no to your n+1 is totally in line with your n+2 :)

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I’ve seen a situation like this. The n+2 changed jobs, leaving the employee reporting to an n+1 who now hated them and no n+w to back them up.

I’m with the other commenter: If you find yourself in a situation this dysfunctional, you’ve already lost. Blowing off your boss to appease your skip level isn’t guaranteed to work out, even if the skip level likes you.

Either way, that’s not relevant to this blog post. The author said they were just going to say “no” to assigned work, which isn’t going to work out.

By the time a company is that dysfunctional, why bother? Just do the minimum to get paid.

I mean it. I want to work for a company where everyone is working towards the common goal of making the company profitable. But there comes a point where the company is overrun by politics and selfish and harmful decisions.

By the time dysfunctional company politics empower a "bozo", why should I stress or put any care into such a company? I'll just do the minimum.

My company is insanely profitable, plagued with bozos as middle managers. But after some years you have your network of righteous fellows, and live with them much more than with your organization chart. So that is not a big deal.

But I agree that promotion is not exactly an option, as I would become crazy only surrounded by bozos.

There is also an expert path, for people wanting to be promoted, but for their technical excellence. Guess what? There too, the political tricks have led to empower not so excellent people, i.e bozo-compatible ones.

> Just do the minimum to get paid.

Who wants to live like this?

Conservation of energy is highly selected for biologically.

I don't want to live like this. It's miserable, but not as miserable as putting in effort to change a dysfunctional organization that doesn't want to change.

Consider this example: I once worked for a contracting agency and we were on a project that was going really poorly and so I put in some effort to improve things and try to make it better. Things were not improving, people were angry with me. Eventually I learned that the person I was working for wanted me to fail, because he wanted to use a different contracting agency, so he wanted me to fail and look bad to give him an excuse to switch to a different contracting agency. But, then people even higher in the organizations were friends with my contracting agency and so I stayed on the contract and kept doing an honest but minimal amount of work. My boss literally wanted the project to fail.

It's fairly common for organizations to become this screwed up, and yes, it sucks to work for them, but it sucks even more to burn yourself out trying to change them when they don't want to change.

What were the clues, in hindsight?

I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.

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