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It's hard to know how to apply the appropriate 'grain of salt' when reading things like this thread. I worked for a small (~40 person) start-up before where the
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It's hard to know how to apply the appropriate 'grain of salt' when reading things like this thread. I worked for a small (~40 person) start-up before where there was rampant religious discrimination and inappropriate workplace behavior by executives, even the head of HR who functioned more like a culture gatekeeper to enforce the particular overt religious cultural aspects of the founder.
When developers pushed back, they were called uncooperative, threatened with pay cuts or being fired, told they were not team players or were making too big a deal out of things. It was crazy!
In my experience, the times when management believe they are suffering from a problem developer are actually reflections of the management. There are exceptions like employee theft, issues with employees after they are terminated, and these things are often pretty black and white. But for all the other types of things that are more subjective about effort or cultural fit or finger pointing or tone or attitude or whatever, I tend to think most employees are absolutely not the problem, rather it is inept management and extremely poor culture mandates.
- nemild 8y agoI disagree. Both sides can have issues, and it's not primarily the fault of "managers." You can see some issues that I list elsewhere in this thread. The part I do agree with is that responsibility to address the issues often is in management. I do wonder if every tribe thinks they're good, and it's the other side at fault? ... I think about this a lot in my media literacy work, where I explore the empathy gap: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoBoth sides can definitely have problems. But I think there are severe asymmetries at work, like what is chronicled in Moral Mazes. There is a big asymmetry about how managers and executives think the world is supposed to work for them, vs. what is a realistic compromise between complex teams that have to coordinate. Executive or management bad behavior can be hidden, papered over, politically rewritten, etc. etc., while executive opinions about the behavior of subordinates is often taken as unquestionably 'morally' right within the context of the morals and ethical systems that evolve inside a specific corporate hierarchy. I think as an abstract sociology problem, there is every reason to believe the dynamics of the situation make it far more likely to be problems with management or executives, and that it ought to require extraordinary evidence to overturn that prior point of view and instead believe it's sincerely an attitude / effort / tone / culture fit sort of problem on behalf of employees. This isn't really special to companies where employees are developers. It's just a general property of the phenomenon of a corporation, period.