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Becoming too emotionally invested and involved in the welfare of the company where I worked for seven years. This had the opposite affect with my boss and manag

Becoming too emotionally invested and involved in the welfare of the company where I worked for seven years. This had the opposite affect with my boss and management because I was making delusional organizational and engineering decisions with no authority to do so. Even though I thought my intentions were aligned with the future of the company, nothing could have been further from the truth. My advice is keep things professional and even ruthless long into your career at a given company. Clock in and clock out and always take challenges impersonally. Be the impeccable toy model your boss wants you to be and nothing more.

tyleo 5y ago
I agree with this right up until the last sentence. If you feel the need to be an “impeccable toy model” I’d say leave. Sounds like a recipe for a life of misery.
- makach 5y ago
  It is like that. Leaving for what? Most places are similar. Same shit different people. Some times you get lucky, and you get some time where things are working for you - but teams never remain, good people move on or up. Leaving is not always the answer, keeping your head low and surviving is modus operandi for a lot of people.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyleo 5y ago
    In my experience a team breaking up or role model leaving is a good moment to do a temperature check and decide whether it’s worth staying. Perhaps I’ve been lucky though. I’ve worked at places with potential to move internally which has kept things fresh and allowed me to grow expertise on the same larger team without losing tribal product knowledge altogether. I’ve only switched companies once and it had more to do with curiosity than bad management.
- poletopole 5y ago
  We were codependent, the misery was mutual.
gizdan 5y ago
This is a great point! I'm starting to realise this too. I work for a company where I really think the suggestions I make will set up the company now and in the future, but the more I fight for the decisions I make, the more I realise that a) my team mates aren't interested because they (mostly) don't understand the tech, and b) management isn't interested or doesn't care.
gtvwill 5y ago
Man this epitomises the modern day slave for me. What a dismal life to look forward to.
zmmmmm 5y ago
> This had the opposite affect with my boss and management because I was making delusional organizational and engineering decisions with no authority to do so I have experienced this from the management perspective and it resonates strongly with experiences I have had. Some of the hardest employees to manage are those that are both talented and heavily invested, but unable to accept what their role actually is. When you have someone like that doing things that aren't in alignment with the technical vision - whether its right or wrong - they rapidly diverge towards having negative value.
- thanhhaimai 5y ago
  I also had experience leading both talented and heavily invested teams. Differently from your experience, we were able to get the team hyper productive and accomplished a lot of good things together. A couple lessons I learned: - Micromanaging and "make them accept their role" is how you make them unproductive. Smart/talented people can tell if the manager doesn't care. They know if they are being forced to be a cog in the machine. They either become frustrated and quit, or resigned into doing just enough work 9-5. - Having talented and invested folks voicing ideas that aren't in alignment with the current technical vision is a critical signal you should take note. That may mean you don't have a good Tech Lead that can convince those folks why the current approach is good. It's not the job of those folks to "align" with the Tech Lead. It's the Tech Lead job to convince those folks that the approach is correct. - Everyone requires a different way to lead/manage. But in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy.
  - zmmmmm 5y ago
    > in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy That's a really interesting observation. If this thread was about the opposite - what mistakes did you make later in your career - one of my responses would be the above - because its exactly what I did and it turned out badly. I recognized talented people, seeing in them earlier versions of myself, and I gave them lots of autonomy. And they took it, and I got back amazing works of art that created all kinds of discordance with our longer term architecture and vision. I regret now that I didn't intervene more strongly at that point. Instead, those people have left and I now have years of technical debt to fix. Meanwhile the less talented but more aligned folk are chugging away and creating more value longer term. It's tortoise and the hare.

tyleo 5y ago

I agree with this right up until the last sentence. If you feel the need to be an “impeccable toy model” I’d say leave. Sounds like a recipe for a life of misery.

makach 5y ago
It is like that. Leaving for what? Most places are similar. Same shit different people. Some times you get lucky, and you get some time where things are working for you - but teams never remain, good people move on or up. Leaving is not always the answer, keeping your head low and surviving is modus operandi for a lot of people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tyleo 5y ago
  In my experience a team breaking up or role model leaving is a good moment to do a temperature check and decide whether it’s worth staying. Perhaps I’ve been lucky though. I’ve worked at places with potential to move internally which has kept things fresh and allowed me to grow expertise on the same larger team without losing tribal product knowledge altogether. I’ve only switched companies once and it had more to do with curiosity than bad management.
poletopole 5y ago
We were codependent, the misery was mutual.

gizdan 5y ago

This is a great point! I'm starting to realise this too. I work for a company where I really think the suggestions I make will set up the company now and in the future, but the more I fight for the decisions I make, the more I realise that a) my team mates aren't interested because they (mostly) don't understand the tech, and b) management isn't interested or doesn't care.

gtvwill 5y ago

Man this epitomises the modern day slave for me. What a dismal life to look forward to.

zmmmmm 5y ago

> This had the opposite affect with my boss and management because I was making delusional organizational and engineering decisions with no authority to do so I have experienced this from the management perspective and it resonates strongly with experiences I have had. Some of the hardest employees to manage are those that are both talented and heavily invested, but unable to accept what their role actually is. When you have someone like that doing things that aren't in alignment with the technical vision - whether its right or wrong - they rapidly diverge towards having negative value.

thanhhaimai 5y ago
I also had experience leading both talented and heavily invested teams. Differently from your experience, we were able to get the team hyper productive and accomplished a lot of good things together. A couple lessons I learned: - Micromanaging and "make them accept their role" is how you make them unproductive. Smart/talented people can tell if the manager doesn't care. They know if they are being forced to be a cog in the machine. They either become frustrated and quit, or resigned into doing just enough work 9-5. - Having talented and invested folks voicing ideas that aren't in alignment with the current technical vision is a critical signal you should take note. That may mean you don't have a good Tech Lead that can convince those folks why the current approach is good. It's not the job of those folks to "align" with the Tech Lead. It's the Tech Lead job to convince those folks that the approach is correct. - Everyone requires a different way to lead/manage. But in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  > in general, the more talented a person is, the more autonomy they would expect. To get the best out of them, assume good faith, and trust their autonomy That's a really interesting observation. If this thread was about the opposite - what mistakes did you make later in your career - one of my responses would be the above - because its exactly what I did and it turned out badly. I recognized talented people, seeing in them earlier versions of myself, and I gave them lots of autonomy. And they took it, and I got back amazing works of art that created all kinds of discordance with our longer term architecture and vision. I regret now that I didn't intervene more strongly at that point. Instead, those people have left and I now have years of technical debt to fix. Meanwhile the less talented but more aligned folk are chugging away and creating more value longer term. It's tortoise and the hare.