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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I saw a case when sysadmins left an exchange database to grow to crazy size and then it failed, cue days of trying to restore backups which also failed because disaster recovery practices had never been written or tested. After about a week I expected everyone to get sacked, instead they got a literal standing ovation for their ceaseless scrambling around.

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On the other hand, if the people working hard to fix the thing expect to get sacked, they will probably leave before they finish fixing it.

Management is really really hard.

No it's not. All you have to do is treat people right and not be a sociopath.

If you do your job right, you look lazy and they ask why they are paying you in the first place.

If you have no idea what you are doing, you run around, look really busy and that justifies your position.

Shitty companies fire the first guy and keep the second.

There's a guy in my company who rose to upper-middle management faster that anyone I've ever seen. The key to his success was constantly running around, getting social exposure by talking to everybody (about inane bullshit most of the time) and trying to make himself look important.

In the meantime, we lost a really good engineer who was thought to be a slacker because he was a quiet guy and wouldn't expose himself too much.

This sociopathic and pathologic behavior is very common in companies run by "business people with ideas" instead of engineers. It's all based on chest beating, who you know and how much of a smooth talker you are. It's like being in high school all over again. Meritocracy is nowhere to be found.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

-- God(?), Futurama

That is from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), chapter 17.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching_%28Wikisource_tr...

I once introduced a fairly serious bug into our software. It caused, probably, a 40% drop in perceived performance. The bug was based entirely on me misunderstanding what one of the EE's told me. I fixed it in the next release and was lauded in a meeting for improving performance.

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