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> By the Way, All Your Subordinates Are Lying to You (Because You Don't Listen) > One very interesting thing I had found, when I came into an office as an outs

> By the Way, All Your Subordinates Are Lying to You (Because You Don't Listen) > One very interesting thing I had found, when I came into an office as an outside objective evaluator and you had left me to do my job, was that approximately 2 nanoseconds later your employees were already telling me everything that was wrong about you, your company, and your development methodologies. It was not a matter of having a trusting face, or even promising them to make things better, it was about your employees who cared about the growth of the company, and more importantly about their own growth within a company despite feeling unheard and ignored. I just happened to be a new face that wouldn’t judge them for what they would say, and even if I did, often they are so tired of the problem being present that they would even just stop caring about any potential consequences of speaking out against their employer. Whenever I read something like this I wonder if I've just been extremely lucky with my employers, because I see it so often it sometimes feels like it's the norm (despite obviously not benefiting anyone). It should be noted that I don't work in the games industry though

pjc50 6y ago
I've encountered it a little bit, and in both cases I left as soon as I realized I wasn't going to make any more headway. But the key is here: > They immediately asked who was giving up this information and wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather than trying to address the issue One of the key elements of the "boss" social role is to enforce subordination: people doing what you tell them to do. This is kind of intrinsic to the interpersonal dynamic, and it's quite hard to avoid doing at least some of the time even if you're aware of how it can be a problem. The problem with people doing what you tell them to do is that what you tell them to do may be wrong or incomplete. You then have two choices: - admit error. This is uncomfortable. - increase the effort to subordinate the person so the boss does not lose face. There are all sorts of examples and case studies of this kind of thing in command situations. Here's it causing a plane crash: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-pursue-cockpit-culture-changes-after-us-crash.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-pursue-co...
- coderintherye 6y ago
  The boss role does not have to enforce subordination, there's multiple styles of management which encourage self-leadership in terms of what people work on and how they do it. I'm personally a fan of David Marquet's "Leader-Leader" style. But, because so many people expect to be subjugated in their roles it does require some hurdles to get past normal societal expectations and not everyone is a fit for it, some people just want a task list and to be told what to do. I think the world could be a better place if we could effectively help people sort into the companies with the leadership style that best suits their working style.
  - whatever_dude 6y ago
    > so many people expect to be subjugated Was thinking something along the same lines. I work in an environment where a tiny bit of self initiative does very well for one's work and career, and still some people can't get it over their heads. Unless something is very clearly stated somewhere, they won't do it no matter how obvious it is, even people who are trying to get a promotion. I swear sometimes I think people would let the office burn because "yelling fire!" is not of their stated position responsibilities.
    - neatze 6y ago
      This primarily can be attributed to how people perceive risk and risk aversion mechanisms, don't think this would be false to assume it also relates to responsibility. Self initiative people willing to take more risk and thus responsibility if things don't work out, where not self initiative people if things don't work out, take substantially less responsibility by default.
- mch82 6y ago
  I have explicitly instructed my team to let me know if I ask them to do something stupid so we can avoid the mistake. I was so excited the first time someone spoke up to alert me that I was overlooking a better option & made sure to celebrate the alert in order to keep the transparency going. There may be teams where this direct approach wouldn’t work out, but so far it’s seemed to help.
GrumpyYoungMan 6y ago
The old joke that "Consultants tell you what you already knew but didn't want to face." has been around forever for a reason. It's even an accepted tactic by business units to hire a consultant to document all these known problems as a means to force themselves to clean up their own act.
numpad0 6y ago
It’s only natural though, one way to play the salary game is to maximize your perceived involvement and truck factor, while reducing actual efforts needed, all while avoiding getting upsetting colleagues. Workloads at full capacity, with stakes distributed precisely according to power structures, with zero meaningful/impactful output thus zero uncertainty, is Pareto optimal, if you view a corporate as a salary distribution game that you’re a player of.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
I have a close friend who's a director. I've always treated him like an equal but one day I told him that he was never getting the whole story. He felt devastated because he thought it was him but it's not him, it's just the title. Part of getting the fancy title is understanding that you will never get the truth from subordinates, you will get a sugar-coated version of the truth that is close enough to the truth, but not so close that you'd rage and fire someone on the spot. Even if you've never even do that in a million years, somewhere, somehow, someone who is giving you good and bad news will always sugarcoat the truth on the bad news yet hype up the good news.
jacquesm 6y ago
More often than not technical issues are in fact management issues. Plenty of evidence for that.
kmeisthax 6y ago
>It should be noted that I don't work in the games industry though Well there's yer problem! The games industry is basically terrible - the management is full of people who don't understand the industry they're in and see their employees as cheaper-than-slave labor and their customers as open pocketbooks to take. In management's defense, nobody understands the game industry; it's ridiculously hit-driven and producing a "good" game involves taking on as much unmitigated risk as possible. The only risk mitigation strategy you can adopt is diversification - funding as many projects as possible. But that went away along with the PS2 when game development budgets skyrocketed and audience numbers plateaued. Each one of the factors I mentioned above can be gone into with great detail: 1. "Cheaper-than-slave labor": Game studio employees are frequently replaced with fresh hires to keep costs down; expertise is a liability in an industry that remakes how to build a videogame every 5-10 years. You can survive this but it's at the expense of your own health and sanity. You will be abused, mentally and physically, by your studio for the privilege of working at a games company until you quit. 2. "Ridiculously hit-driven": Game studios can spend literal billions of dollars on a project nobody likes. Management wants to do this because games that don't screenshot well don't market well, so you need literal armies of artists to texture every tiny detail in these games and you need them to work 996 so the project ships anywhere close to on time. But that also increases risk which means we need the games to cost more, both in terms of up-front price and after-purchase DLC and microtransactions. 3. "No diversification": Diversification works well when your audience is large relative to your production costs. This hasn't been true since the PS2 era; most companies struggle to afford to make even one game that's up to modern quality standards - now you want to make hundreds of them so we can just "see what works"!? In fact, if you look at the libraries of, say, the PS3 to the PS4; you can almost spot the point at which publishers decided to just focus on one or two online games (which monetize very well) rather than tens or hundreds of projects (which are one-and-done things). This has resulted in an extremely abusive working culture and I highly advise everyone I know getting into software development to not touch videogames with a ten-foot pole. Hell, I wouldn't even recommend it as a hobby: the "more, more, more, better, faster, and yesterday" mentality has even sunk into the people who play videogames. If your boss isn't berating you for not fixing up his fuckups fast enough, your customers will be literally threatening to kill you for having the balls to delay a broken game. This has all been known since the early 2000s (look up easpouse on Wikipedia sometime if you want to know how much HASN'T changed); the entire games industry needs to crash and it needs to crash yesterday before any of this can be fixed.
aero- 6y ago
Sometimes it's an easy conversation starter. People like to bitch about work and speaking about all the things they dislike at the workplace. Often times it is pointing to an underlying problem though and some communication breakdown at the least.

pjc50 6y ago

I've encountered it a little bit, and in both cases I left as soon as I realized I wasn't going to make any more headway. But the key is here: > They immediately asked who was giving up this information and wanted to crack down on this perceived insubordination, rather than trying to address the issue One of the key elements of the "boss" social role is to enforce subordination: people doing what you tell them to do. This is kind of intrinsic to the interpersonal dynamic, and it's quite hard to avoid doing at least some of the time even if you're aware of how it can be a problem. The problem with people doing what you tell them to do is that what you tell them to do may be wrong or incomplete. You then have two choices: - admit error. This is uncomfortable. - increase the effort to subordinate the person so the boss does not lose face. There are all sorts of examples and case studies of this kind of thing in command situations. Here's it causing a plane crash: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-pursue-cockpit-culture-changes-after-us-crash.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/02/10/asiana-airlines-to-pursue-co...

coderintherye 6y ago
The boss role does not have to enforce subordination, there's multiple styles of management which encourage self-leadership in terms of what people work on and how they do it. I'm personally a fan of David Marquet's "Leader-Leader" style. But, because so many people expect to be subjugated in their roles it does require some hurdles to get past normal societal expectations and not everyone is a fit for it, some people just want a task list and to be told what to do. I think the world could be a better place if we could effectively help people sort into the companies with the leadership style that best suits their working style.
- whatever_dude 6y ago
  > so many people expect to be subjugated Was thinking something along the same lines. I work in an environment where a tiny bit of self initiative does very well for one's work and career, and still some people can't get it over their heads. Unless something is very clearly stated somewhere, they won't do it no matter how obvious it is, even people who are trying to get a promotion. I swear sometimes I think people would let the office burn because "yelling fire!" is not of their stated position responsibilities.
  - neatze 6y ago
    This primarily can be attributed to how people perceive risk and risk aversion mechanisms, don't think this would be false to assume it also relates to responsibility. Self initiative people willing to take more risk and thus responsibility if things don't work out, where not self initiative people if things don't work out, take substantially less responsibility by default.
mch82 6y ago
I have explicitly instructed my team to let me know if I ask them to do something stupid so we can avoid the mistake. I was so excited the first time someone spoke up to alert me that I was overlooking a better option & made sure to celebrate the alert in order to keep the transparency going. There may be teams where this direct approach wouldn’t work out, but so far it’s seemed to help.

GrumpyYoungMan 6y ago

The old joke that "Consultants tell you what you already knew but didn't want to face." has been around forever for a reason. It's even an accepted tactic by business units to hire a consultant to document all these known problems as a means to force themselves to clean up their own act.

numpad0 6y ago

It’s only natural though, one way to play the salary game is to maximize your perceived involvement and truck factor, while reducing actual efforts needed, all while avoiding getting upsetting colleagues. Workloads at full capacity, with stakes distributed precisely according to power structures, with zero meaningful/impactful output thus zero uncertainty, is Pareto optimal, if you view a corporate as a salary distribution game that you’re a player of.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

I have a close friend who's a director. I've always treated him like an equal but one day I told him that he was never getting the whole story. He felt devastated because he thought it was him but it's not him, it's just the title. Part of getting the fancy title is understanding that you will never get the truth from subordinates, you will get a sugar-coated version of the truth that is close enough to the truth, but not so close that you'd rage and fire someone on the spot. Even if you've never even do that in a million years, somewhere, somehow, someone who is giving you good and bad news will always sugarcoat the truth on the bad news yet hype up the good news.

jacquesm 6y ago

More often than not technical issues are in fact management issues. Plenty of evidence for that.

kmeisthax 6y ago

>It should be noted that I don't work in the games industry though Well there's yer problem! The games industry is basically terrible - the management is full of people who don't understand the industry they're in and see their employees as cheaper-than-slave labor and their customers as open pocketbooks to take. In management's defense, nobody understands the game industry; it's ridiculously hit-driven and producing a "good" game involves taking on as much unmitigated risk as possible. The only risk mitigation strategy you can adopt is diversification - funding as many projects as possible. But that went away along with the PS2 when game development budgets skyrocketed and audience numbers plateaued. Each one of the factors I mentioned above can be gone into with great detail: 1. "Cheaper-than-slave labor": Game studio employees are frequently replaced with fresh hires to keep costs down; expertise is a liability in an industry that remakes how to build a videogame every 5-10 years. You can survive this but it's at the expense of your own health and sanity. You will be abused, mentally and physically, by your studio for the privilege of working at a games company until you quit. 2. "Ridiculously hit-driven": Game studios can spend literal billions of dollars on a project nobody likes. Management wants to do this because games that don't screenshot well don't market well, so you need literal armies of artists to texture every tiny detail in these games and you need them to work 996 so the project ships anywhere close to on time. But that also increases risk which means we need the games to cost more, both in terms of up-front price and after-purchase DLC and microtransactions. 3. "No diversification": Diversification works well when your audience is large relative to your production costs. This hasn't been true since the PS2 era; most companies struggle to afford to make even one game that's up to modern quality standards - now you want to make hundreds of them so we can just "see what works"!? In fact, if you look at the libraries of, say, the PS3 to the PS4; you can almost spot the point at which publishers decided to just focus on one or two online games (which monetize very well) rather than tens or hundreds of projects (which are one-and-done things). This has resulted in an extremely abusive working culture and I highly advise everyone I know getting into software development to not touch videogames with a ten-foot pole. Hell, I wouldn't even recommend it as a hobby: the "more, more, more, better, faster, and yesterday" mentality has even sunk into the people who play videogames. If your boss isn't berating you for not fixing up his fuckups fast enough, your customers will be literally threatening to kill you for having the balls to delay a broken game. This has all been known since the early 2000s (look up easpouse on Wikipedia sometime if you want to know how much HASN'T changed); the entire games industry needs to crash and it needs to crash yesterday before any of this can be fixed.

aero- 6y ago

Sometimes it's an easy conversation starter. People like to bitch about work and speaking about all the things they dislike at the workplace. Often times it is pointing to an underlying problem though and some communication breakdown at the least.