7 ms·

> 2) People don't leave companies, they leave managers I would love to hear others' thoughts on this statement. It sounds good, but is it real? Would you stay

by numair 11y ago

> 2) People don't leave companies, they leave managers I would love to hear others' thoughts on this statement. It sounds good, but is it real? Would you stay at a company in whose purpose you don't believe, if you liked your manager?

tyre 11y ago
To be clear, that isn't the assertion of that statement. It says that (in general) people who do leave, leave because of bad management. It does not say that people who stay, stay because of their managers. Your statement may also be true or false, but it is independent of the original.
- systems 11y ago
  you seem to be the only one who got it right the opposite of something is not always true you wouldnt stay in a company because it have clean bathrooms but you will surely leave if it has dirty bathrooms having a good manager should be the norm having a bad one, is not acceptable easy
Swizec 11y ago
It's more like you'd quit a company you like if your manager is making your day-to-day life miserable (ish). A good mansger miiight be able to retain you longer under bad external conditions because they shield you from them.
crabasa 11y ago
I think it is. It's easy to be supremely objective here on HN, but belief is malleable. I mean, if you knew what was going to happen, you'd make a fortune on the stock market. I think people are pretty good about differentiating success for their companies vs. personal success (salary, learning, building a network, etc).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
enraged_camel 11y ago
People are more likely to stay at a bad company if their manager is good, than vice versa. A good manager shields team members from politics, drama and similar nonsense, and is not afraid to make personal sacrifices for the good of the team. They create an environment where each team member can thrive and grow professionally. That's why a lot of companies with bad reputation can still retain A+ talent (e.g. Amazon). That said, people tend to have many different reasons for leaving a company. Maybe they're no longer learning at the rate they want, or they don't get paid enough, or they're simply worried about hurting their employability if they stay in one place for too long. It's impossible to generalize. But managers probably have the biggest impact on someone's decision to leave.
- joeax 11y ago
  > It's impossible to generalize. Agree. I worked with a manager who was kind of a dick at work, but really cool outside of work. After I left the company, he confessed he "had to play the part" so to speak. Turns out he hated it too and left shortly after I did. Most people don't leave managers. They leave a crappy company culture that creates bad managers.
RickS 11y ago
Yes and no, respectively. Happy employees require 1) a mission they find internally compelling and 2) a management environment that they feel allows them to do meaningful work towards that mission. 1 is usually pretty fixed. If you sign on because you want to change finance, or help people find apartments, or whatever else, your emotional situation re: that topic will likely be pretty stable over ~years. 2 changes quickly and often. Projects that an employee feels are important get killed. Things that seem silly get prioritized. Accolades are distributed in ways that seem unfair, etc. So, the parent's quote could be rewritten more clearly as: People don't leave because they stop caring about a company's mission. They leave because they lose faith that the company infrastructure is capable of letting them contribute to/achieve that mission. Enormously complex topic. 3 employees at a company may have 3 different slightly different takes on a company's mission at the start, and feel totally different about its trajectory down the line. --- As for your 2nd point about staying under a manager you like at a company you don't care about, personally, I find myself incapable of doing it. I don't have to be doing the most impactful company premise in the world (soylent? watsi?) but I at least have to be working on problems I find highly interesting. I've left some companies whose people, culture, and processes I loved, because ultimately their problem space just didn't keep me up at night. On the contrary, I can tolerate a much more hostile management environment when its offset by work so personally meaningful that I'd be doing it in my spare time even if I weren't an employee.
- quanticle 11y ago
  That's interesting, because my personal experience has been the polar opposite of that. It doesn't matter if I'm working on sending people to Mars (a problem that I'd find very interesting), if I can't get along with my manager any my co-workers, I'm out. On a more practical level, my manager is responsible for my performance reviews. If I don't have a rapport with him or her, then my time at the company is limited, regardless of how much I want to stay.
darkandbrooding 11y ago
Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe? I find it rare for people to take an opportunity with a company they don't feel good about, regardless of how much they might like the interviewing manager. IMO those who do accept such an offer are just resume surfing, and weren't going to stick around regardless.
- branchless 11y ago
  Millions of people are in this bucket - they are doing it to pay the rent.
- codeonfire 11y ago
  There are purposes that one doesn't believe in. Like I don't give a shit about ride sharing. Then there are places that I don't feel good about such as malware creators. So those are two separate things. BTW, engineers should job hop every 6-18 months as engineers have done for decades every year since engineering was a thing.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- quanticle 11y ago
  Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe? Absolutely. Money is money, a job's a job, and honestly, day to day software engineering is pretty boring, whether you're working on ISO-9000 compliance or a Mars Rover. Yeah, writing code for a more "sexy" project makes for a better story over drinks at a cocktail party, but that in no way makes up for the fact that you're miserable for 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week.
6d0debc071 11y ago
> Would you stay at a company in whose purpose you don't believe, if you liked your manager? There are a couple of people on my current project whose company I enjoy and who have personal attributes that I'd like to foster in myself. I'm staying with it solely for that reason, the business model it uses was dead in the water two years ago and it's in the die-off period - the project itself is just making efficiency savings on something that's never going to be profitable again. I'd choose to do so again, it's never made life bad for me to choose to share closer company with the people I respect - and when the time to move jobs has come up, a few months ahead of the crash, there have always been plenty of friends in other companies that would put in a good word. What has been a bad call for me has been to stay in bad company, for the chance to work on something 'important' while management has been incompetent or peers have been markedly hostile. That's contributed to some of the lowest times of my life.
jmspring 11y ago
Yes. I left a startup that eventually exited prior to my first year. vesting. The manager I had was one of those that was a smart guy, but didn't know his limits and between checking in broken code, aggressively (to the point of insult) insisting people work insane hours, and pushing for outsourcing more and more to a firm that was incompetent, I had enough. Being lead engineer and stuck with a launch that had no prep or IT people in place didn't help. My favorite two stories were: 1) Disappearing on a weekend (well before launch) for my wife's birthday down to Big Sur. I had told people, but apparently it didn't register. I was at work Monday and lectured despite a 70 hour week the week before. 2) Getting yelled had for whiffing and underhand toss of a pen to a colleague (and friend) of mine during a meeting where we went up to write what we were doing on the whiteboard. Said manager thought I was annoyed and chewed me out. I pointed out, I had just pulled an all nighter and was fucking beat. When I walked, I told the management team straight up he was the reason I was leaving. A colleague/friend (he was the UI lead) had hoped to stick it out awhile, he lasted a month after I did. I went through the frenzy of bubble one, had fun. I'm usually pretty darn dedicated, but that startup showed me my breaking point and I've avoided such situations since.
- tajen 11y ago
  > I've avoided such situations since That's probably the saddest part. You're obviously a hard worker, dedicated employee, sane manager. A sane start-up would benefit a lot from having you on board, you would get well-paid from it, and the economy would benefit from having employees who fit jobs. But now you probably have to be overly cautious and choose a more reasonable job.
  - jmspring 11y ago
    I have explored a few other startups since then. But, the BS filter is in place when the pitch starts. Consulting or, my current role, where I get to work with startups is not quite the same but still interesting.
ternaryoperator 11y ago
No, I've left companies where I had a great manager, but could tell from the company culture that I would not be able to attain my professional goals or reach the salary I was looking for.
neilk 11y ago
I thought my manager was great, and I still left a troubled company. Granted, our 1:1s were like "Yeah, so what other horrible thing happened to you this week and when are you leaving?" They were also looking for an exit, and left a few months later.
- 0_00_0 11y ago
  The quote isn't really meant to imply your direct manager specifically. It can easily be your managers manager, a vp/director or even upper management as a whole. The last of which sounds like the case in your situation.
quanticle 11y ago
I have stayed at companies and on projects that I knew were "dying", or, at least, not doing so well because I had good management. On the other hand, I have left successful companies because my particular product group wasn't getting enough management support. People forget that companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et. al. are huge. As an individual contributor, Marissa Meyer's policy shifts affect you in subtle and hard to diagnose ways, because they're filtered and mediated through a long chain of management before they get down to you. Your individual manager has a much greater impact on your day-to-day happiness than the CEO of the company. That said, good programmers always have opportunities, and while good management can do a lot towards helping retention, if the company is dying, people will start to look elsewhere. After all, nobody wants to be in the lurch when the layoffs hit. It's always better to have another opportunity arranged, so that you can leave on your own terms, without having a gap on your resume. I would say that I make a trade-off, balancing the benefits of staying where I am (social capital, rapport with my coworkers, etc.) with the potential benefits of moving elsewhere (quit-before-I'm-fired, opportunity to work on a better technology or a more interesting problem). When the benefits of staying become less than the benefits of switching, then I start looking. Individual management can do a lot to increase my propensity to stay where I'm currently at, but it's not an unlimited power. At some point, broader economic concerns swamp the benefit I get from staying with my current team.
yyyuuu 11y ago
My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I left my first company not because of my Manager. It was because the company had started showing signs of decline. I had been working with my manager for more than four years and he was a real gem. But even he couldn't do anything about the nonsense that was being churned out from the top levels of the company. His best team members left long before he did, and it was not his fault.

by numair 11y ago

tyre 11y ago

To be clear, that isn't the assertion of that statement. It says that (in general) people who do leave, leave because of bad management. It does not say that people who stay, stay because of their managers. Your statement may also be true or false, but it is independent of the original.

systems 11y ago
you seem to be the only one who got it right the opposite of something is not always true you wouldnt stay in a company because it have clean bathrooms but you will surely leave if it has dirty bathrooms having a good manager should be the norm having a bad one, is not acceptable easy

Swizec 11y ago

It's more like you'd quit a company you like if your manager is making your day-to-day life miserable (ish). A good mansger miiight be able to retain you longer under bad external conditions because they shield you from them.

crabasa 11y ago

I think it is. It's easy to be supremely objective here on HN, but belief is malleable. I mean, if you knew what was going to happen, you'd make a fortune on the stock market. I think people are pretty good about differentiating success for their companies vs. personal success (salary, learning, building a network, etc).

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

enraged_camel 11y ago

People are more likely to stay at a bad company if their manager is good, than vice versa. A good manager shields team members from politics, drama and similar nonsense, and is not afraid to make personal sacrifices for the good of the team. They create an environment where each team member can thrive and grow professionally. That's why a lot of companies with bad reputation can still retain A+ talent (e.g. Amazon). That said, people tend to have many different reasons for leaving a company. Maybe they're no longer learning at the rate they want, or they don't get paid enough, or they're simply worried about hurting their employability if they stay in one place for too long. It's impossible to generalize. But managers probably have the biggest impact on someone's decision to leave.

joeax 11y ago
> It's impossible to generalize. Agree. I worked with a manager who was kind of a dick at work, but really cool outside of work. After I left the company, he confessed he "had to play the part" so to speak. Turns out he hated it too and left shortly after I did. Most people don't leave managers. They leave a crappy company culture that creates bad managers.

RickS 11y ago

Yes and no, respectively. Happy employees require 1) a mission they find internally compelling and 2) a management environment that they feel allows them to do meaningful work towards that mission. 1 is usually pretty fixed. If you sign on because you want to change finance, or help people find apartments, or whatever else, your emotional situation re: that topic will likely be pretty stable over ~years. 2 changes quickly and often. Projects that an employee feels are important get killed. Things that seem silly get prioritized. Accolades are distributed in ways that seem unfair, etc. So, the parent's quote could be rewritten more clearly as: People don't leave because they stop caring about a company's mission. They leave because they lose faith that the company infrastructure is capable of letting them contribute to/achieve that mission. Enormously complex topic. 3 employees at a company may have 3 different slightly different takes on a company's mission at the start, and feel totally different about its trajectory down the line. --- As for your 2nd point about staying under a manager you like at a company you don't care about, personally, I find myself incapable of doing it. I don't have to be doing the most impactful company premise in the world (soylent? watsi?) but I at least have to be working on problems I find highly interesting. I've left some companies whose people, culture, and processes I loved, because ultimately their problem space just didn't keep me up at night. On the contrary, I can tolerate a much more hostile management environment when its offset by work so personally meaningful that I'd be doing it in my spare time even if I weren't an employee.

quanticle 11y ago
That's interesting, because my personal experience has been the polar opposite of that. It doesn't matter if I'm working on sending people to Mars (a problem that I'd find very interesting), if I can't get along with my manager any my co-workers, I'm out. On a more practical level, my manager is responsible for my performance reviews. If I don't have a rapport with him or her, then my time at the company is limited, regardless of how much I want to stay.

darkandbrooding 11y ago

Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe? I find it rare for people to take an opportunity with a company they don't feel good about, regardless of how much they might like the interviewing manager. IMO those who do accept such an offer are just resume surfing, and weren't going to stick around regardless.

branchless 11y ago
Millions of people are in this bucket - they are doing it to pay the rent.
codeonfire 11y ago
There are purposes that one doesn't believe in. Like I don't give a shit about ride sharing. Then there are places that I don't feel good about such as malware creators. So those are two separate things. BTW, engineers should job hop every 6-18 months as engineers have done for decades every year since engineering was a thing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
quanticle 11y ago
Would you join a company in whose purpose you don't believe? Absolutely. Money is money, a job's a job, and honestly, day to day software engineering is pretty boring, whether you're working on ISO-9000 compliance or a Mars Rover. Yeah, writing code for a more "sexy" project makes for a better story over drinks at a cocktail party, but that in no way makes up for the fact that you're miserable for 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week.

6d0debc071 11y ago

> Would you stay at a company in whose purpose you don't believe, if you liked your manager? There are a couple of people on my current project whose company I enjoy and who have personal attributes that I'd like to foster in myself. I'm staying with it solely for that reason, the business model it uses was dead in the water two years ago and it's in the die-off period - the project itself is just making efficiency savings on something that's never going to be profitable again. I'd choose to do so again, it's never made life bad for me to choose to share closer company with the people I respect - and when the time to move jobs has come up, a few months ahead of the crash, there have always been plenty of friends in other companies that would put in a good word. What has been a bad call for me has been to stay in bad company, for the chance to work on something 'important' while management has been incompetent or peers have been markedly hostile. That's contributed to some of the lowest times of my life.

jmspring 11y ago

Yes. I left a startup that eventually exited prior to my first year. vesting. The manager I had was one of those that was a smart guy, but didn't know his limits and between checking in broken code, aggressively (to the point of insult) insisting people work insane hours, and pushing for outsourcing more and more to a firm that was incompetent, I had enough. Being lead engineer and stuck with a launch that had no prep or IT people in place didn't help. My favorite two stories were: 1) Disappearing on a weekend (well before launch) for my wife's birthday down to Big Sur. I had told people, but apparently it didn't register. I was at work Monday and lectured despite a 70 hour week the week before. 2) Getting yelled had for whiffing and underhand toss of a pen to a colleague (and friend) of mine during a meeting where we went up to write what we were doing on the whiteboard. Said manager thought I was annoyed and chewed me out. I pointed out, I had just pulled an all nighter and was fucking beat. When I walked, I told the management team straight up he was the reason I was leaving. A colleague/friend (he was the UI lead) had hoped to stick it out awhile, he lasted a month after I did. I went through the frenzy of bubble one, had fun. I'm usually pretty darn dedicated, but that startup showed me my breaking point and I've avoided such situations since.

tajen 11y ago
> I've avoided such situations since That's probably the saddest part. You're obviously a hard worker, dedicated employee, sane manager. A sane start-up would benefit a lot from having you on board, you would get well-paid from it, and the economy would benefit from having employees who fit jobs. But now you probably have to be overly cautious and choose a more reasonable job.
- jmspring 11y ago
  I have explored a few other startups since then. But, the BS filter is in place when the pitch starts. Consulting or, my current role, where I get to work with startups is not quite the same but still interesting.

ternaryoperator 11y ago

No, I've left companies where I had a great manager, but could tell from the company culture that I would not be able to attain my professional goals or reach the salary I was looking for.

neilk 11y ago

I thought my manager was great, and I still left a troubled company. Granted, our 1:1s were like "Yeah, so what other horrible thing happened to you this week and when are you leaving?" They were also looking for an exit, and left a few months later.

0_00_0 11y ago
The quote isn't really meant to imply your direct manager specifically. It can easily be your managers manager, a vp/director or even upper management as a whole. The last of which sounds like the case in your situation.

quanticle 11y ago

I have stayed at companies and on projects that I knew were "dying", or, at least, not doing so well because I had good management. On the other hand, I have left successful companies because my particular product group wasn't getting enough management support. People forget that companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et. al. are huge. As an individual contributor, Marissa Meyer's policy shifts affect you in subtle and hard to diagnose ways, because they're filtered and mediated through a long chain of management before they get down to you. Your individual manager has a much greater impact on your day-to-day happiness than the CEO of the company. That said, good programmers always have opportunities, and while good management can do a lot towards helping retention, if the company is dying, people will start to look elsewhere. After all, nobody wants to be in the lurch when the layoffs hit. It's always better to have another opportunity arranged, so that you can leave on your own terms, without having a gap on your resume. I would say that I make a trade-off, balancing the benefits of staying where I am (social capital, rapport with my coworkers, etc.) with the potential benefits of moving elsewhere (quit-before-I'm-fired, opportunity to work on a better technology or a more interesting problem). When the benefits of staying become less than the benefits of switching, then I start looking. Individual management can do a lot to increase my propensity to stay where I'm currently at, but it's not an unlimited power. At some point, broader economic concerns swamp the benefit I get from staying with my current team.

yyyuuu 11y ago

My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I left my first company not because of my Manager. It was because the company had started showing signs of decline. I had been working with my manager for more than four years and he was a real gem. But even he couldn't do anything about the nonsense that was being churned out from the top levels of the company. His best team members left long before he did, and it was not his fault.