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I was a CTO once. Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just

I was a CTO once. Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. This could actually be the difference between what makes things fail or succeed. You're job is not to be transparent or honest. Its to make sure everyone stays productive and on track. This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. >My most frequently accessed cloud console pages are the billing sections. Lol yep. Eventually some of those reports will hate you as well even if you do everything perfectly. Its inevitable from being in charge. You may not find out till running into them years later and they just shrug you off when you try to say hi. I think I was good at the job, though of course I'm biased but even looking back there are very few things I would change. I really did try and will never feel like I was inadequate even though the company eventually did go under due to bad investments the owner made.

capableweb 4y ago
> Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. Following this advice is another way of loosing employees, at least I'd leave a company quickly if the CTO started lying about potential problems not being problems. In the end, depends on the company. Usually the company I've worked in, have valued transparency, so employees can decide themselves if they want to continue working there or not, when there are potential issues. Not sure who it'll be good for if things are delayed in a project, you might be able to ship a good product but then the executive team is all like "Noooo, what you're hearing is just rumors, everything is fine and all will be good when we release".
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  > I'd leave a company quickly if the CTO started lying about potential problems not being problems Absolutely. In the case of someone saying a clear problem is not a problem, we have a few cases: The first, they're lying to me, in that case they're dishonest and I dont want to work there, they're probably just covering it up to make some money and then move on when things fall apart. The second, they're incompetent and actually don't realize it's a problem, why would I want to work for someone who's bad at their job. Probably others but I can't think of them
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  >all will be good when we release Well I've literally been in the position where this was true to close a deal so we could stay in business. What would be the best option in your opinion? Risk a critical person leaving right then and loosing the customer and then losing everyone job? Or lying and telling them we are all ok just keep on doing your job and don't listen to rumors? You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.
  - celdon25 4y ago
    In real life, some people are human lie detectors, or at least better at detecting lies than you are a liar. But I can acknowledge there are cases where transparency is simply not an option.
  - warent 4y ago
    "Things are tough right now, but once we close this deal then we'll be in a much more comfortable position. Your role on this is critical to our success." Is this not a reasonable way of approaching it? It seems to be simultaneously honest and empowering. What lie is necessary? EDIT: slight revision
    - random314 4y ago
      Compulsive liars cannot change their habits.
      - sahila 4y ago
        And gasp you may have to reward your worker because they truly are that valuable instead of reaping all the benefit for the cto.
        citizenpaul 4y ago
        Thats mostly a CEO trait. Remember CTO,CFO,COO,CIO, ect are all just jobs. You ultimately report to the CEO, whom ultimately reports to the investors,stakeholders, capital partners, b2b relationships and so on. For the record I gave 100% of bonuses I had awarded to my staff and 0% to myself the entire tenure.
stormbrew 4y ago
> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". Sometimes your employees can tell things aren't going well, and you bald face lying to them like this will make them leave even faster. This is also a great strategy to fuck people over, where if they believe in the stability of the company right until the day layoffs are announced they might have just bought a house or something else that will make the next few months for them excruciating, if not disastrous. So please don't take this advice to the extreme imo. I'm not saying you shouldn't be positive, or give every detail. But you should be realistic. Save the rose tint for the investors and just make sure people have what they need to do their best work, within your power.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  I actually wrote several responses and realized I was rambling on because of just how difficult it is to explain the reality of being in a decision making role. Rumors and politics are far far more prevalent than any acutal problems that will affect your people. It is not your job to be responsible for other peoples personal lives, you are not the messiah. All you can do is fight to get them the pay they deserve. What they do with the money you have no control over anyway. Layoffs at non Fortune 500 companies generally have less warning than anything can be done about anyway. Sure if its budgeted at Pfizer 6mo in advance your an ahole for not telling people. However its usually more like 2-4 weeks that the people in charge even know beforehand. ALso remenber we are talking about CTO. Its the CFO that knows the truth about the finances and may be hiding it from you as the CTO.
  - warent 4y ago
    There seems to be quite a lot wrong in this post in my humble opinion... In brief, this reads as: * Allowing rumor/politics to become malignant through deceit rather than healing through truth * Dismissing responsibility for other people's livelihood because "hey its not my fault they didn't save money in case I throw them in the guillotine" * Using lack of information as a reason to lie, rather than just telling your workers that you don't know the answers. These are definitely the antithesis of "good" leadership. "Good" from an empathetic, humane perspective, and "good" for business and profit. It's true we have to make unpopular, hard, sad decisions. Yet it is absolutely imperative that we remain mindful and diligent to our team as individual humans.
warent 4y ago
> Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. I've only been performing roles of director / vp to small/mid size companies so far, so maybe there's some secret CTO sauce I'm still missing. To me this advice seems toxic and destructive. Vent upwards, yes. Manage expectations, yes. But you're hiring brilliant people who will eventually know when youre lying or concealing info from lack of trust. good luck with loyalty at that point.
- random314 4y ago
  Exactly what I thought. This is a view of employees as mindless drones whose only function is to make themselves busy. A very toxic management style. The advice that it is ok to be hated dogs the ditch further. This is also an implicit permission to the employees to lie to the CTO. This is pretty standard narcissistic behavior, where your lies to employees are just doing business, while employees lying to the management is a grave offence that calls for job termination.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    >employees as mindless drones ... very toxic management style. I agree.
    - random314 4y ago
      Did you just agree that you are a toxic manager?
- 0x457 4y ago
  There is only so much you can hide. Do you have BI? Well, they know numbers better than you, guess what? They talk to the rest of the company. Do you have metrics available somewhere? Doesn't matter real-time or N days report - people can connect the dots: signs up are flat, but we keep hiring. You can't meet requirements without marketing pushes? Well, shit, I wonder if a company spends 2 dollars to earn 1 dollar. You can lie and bullshit all you want, but your reports and their reports will know. I worked in a company where the analytics team suddenly decided to leave, all within days of each other. Month later - layoff. They weren't told that things are bad, they were the one who told you that things are bad.
pvorb 4y ago
> Eventually some of those reports will hate you as well even if you do everything perfectly. Its inevitable from being in charge. You may not find out till running into them years later and they just shrug you off when you try to say hi. Maybe they simply found out that you kept lying to them?
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  That was not the reason. I know its hard to understand if you are never in such a role. People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Even if they are the cause of those bad things. I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work, not showing up/logging in, not making deadlines. He went off on me for like 30 min when I fired him and never spoke to me again despite warnings and discussions about the problem before getting fired for one example. In his irrational opinion I was holding him back from getting rich by expecting him to do his job.
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    I've been on the reverse side, where it was obvious the CTO and CEO were hiding things. It's annoying for a while and then eventually there's some proverbial straw that breaks the camels back. Word spread pretty quickly through various cliques in the company. Some teams had no idea what was happening, other teams lost literally all their developers and and couple managers over the course of 30 days. During my exit interview I mentioned the dishonesty and they just doubled down that I was imagining it.
  - my_usernam3 4y ago
    > People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Isn't that what you did? > Even though the company eventually did go under due to bad investments the owner made.
    - citizenpaul 4y ago
      That was a factual statement, so no. I think I get the personal attack you are trying to make at me though.
random314 4y ago
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. Are you ok with employees and reports reciprocating by lying to you as well.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless.
  - random314 4y ago
    My reports have lied to me very rarely, and I have never had to lie to my reports. For the reports that lied to me, I managed them out of my team irrespective of their work performance. I have quit jobs where my manager lied to me. It is really really easy to tell when someone is lying. You seem to live in some alternate dystopia where everyone lies to each other. How many of the companies that you have worked at have gone under?
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Yeah I'm really confused about this guy. I get that the world is not black and white, and conditions aren't always ideal... but I absolutely do not put up with the kind of dishonesty he's seemingly advocating. Perhaps not everyone has the luxury to be so picky, but... damn, I really have not gotten the impression (in my experience, and in the experience of friends and acquaintances) that this sort of bullshit is that common. At least not at successful, healthy companies.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    > Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless. If you create a culture where you lie, then people will lie to you. If you create a culture where you are honest, people will be honest back to you. There's nothing more powerful than going to your team and saying "Look, I fucked this up. I need your help". Honesty is disarming. I'm in a field where I manage scientists. If people start to lie to me or even start to bend the truth a little, we will waste years chasing ghosts. The people that work for me are very savvy at figuring out what I think might be true and they can always present just the right data to make me happy. I had to learn early on that I need to be really explicit: we need to do good work, it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, all that matters is progress. So no. Your employees don't need to lie to you. Mine come to me regularly and explain what went wrong. Judgement-free. And we do deep dives to prevent problems in the future. You are causing the problems, not them.
colechristensen 4y ago
>You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". When you've been lied to enough you stop believing the lies, a leader who can't be relied on to tell the truth unless it's positive might as well not say anything at all or be there in the first place. Having to doubt and read between the lines for each and every message from leadership is a waste of my time and leads directly to me A) no longer caring and B) not trusting my leadership. This kind of manipulation only works on stupid or inexperienced people. There is a big difference between putting a hopeful spin and always fighting for the best outcome and straight up saying everything is fine until there's nothing left but ashes.
baby 4y ago
> Transparency is not your job I would argue the opposite: transparency is one of the biggest part of your job. You're not in a leadership position, and it's your choice: do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success? Or do you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins?
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  Real life is not fair. If the company initiative is to be transparent then sure you can be. However that is the vast minority of companies. Though people on HN may have a skew to thinking the opposite.
  - warent 4y ago
    Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.
    - citizenpaul 4y ago
      > do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success >you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins? The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it. CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.
      - jcheng 4y ago
        What part of the world are you from?
        citizenpaul 4y ago
        USA East coast.
rektide 4y ago
This is the job for 80% of corporations, the same 80% of corporations ruled by non-technical highly-political spin-based organizations, that dont really grok what they are up to. Having technical depth in the leadership ranks, having real competency & belief & understanding in what you are doing, is, alas, not common. But wow, what a difference it makes for an org.
jklp 4y ago
I see a lot of responses to this comment, especially these lines: > Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thought "there shouldn't be this many fires" but I soon realised that that was my job, to put them out, escalate when required, etc all while making sure the ship is steady and doing it with a smile on my face. Some examples include: - News that a sales person has sold a huge project which will save the company, but we can't deliver or build with our current backlog / resources - One key team member has been taking a lot of doctor's appointments recently - and suspect they might be quitting / job hunting - There's a very obscure security issue which could be fatal if discovered, but is a huge task which will disrupt a project which is already delayed and over budget If I ran into any of these when I first started I would have freaked out - and that would have disrupt my team as they couldn't be productive with that anxiety over their heads. Instead I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control. Of course if something was too big to handle I'd escalate, or if something blew up I'd take responsibility etc - but I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions and let them do what they're best at doing.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I hope that's what the original poster who you quoted meant, because I don't see all that much wrong with the examples you mention. No, there's no need to engage people in discussions about things if it doesn't really impact them, or they can't really jump in and help the situation. However, in the absence of some legal requirement to keep quiet, if some employee got wind of one of those situations, and came to you and asked you about it, I really do hope you'd be honest and forthcoming. Because otherwise I think that's when you'd cross the line (for me at least) into being untrustworthy. One thing to mention though: in the case of your first example, if that huge deal really is going to fall through, no question, and the company is going to fail because of that, no question, I would lose all respect for an executive who didn't pro-actively have the hard talk with employees about that situation. Yes, some people will leave. But that's life, and your employees have entrusted their livelihood with you; you owe them that level of honesty. > I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control. Which is fine! Because if you truly did put out those fires, or at least put in place some mitigating strategies, then you were absolutely telling the truth that it was under control. > I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions The difference is that some "distractions" can have a material impact on those employees' lives. An executive who hides those things and lies about them to employees is not worthy of respect. For "distractions" that truly are just distractions, sure, fine, no need to broadcast. But I think a key question is: if a bit of news could make a reasonable employee, thinking logically about the news, decide to quit, then... you absolutely should be disclosing that news. Anything else is just a betrayal of the implicit trust an employee must have in their employer. And yes, I know all this might seem pretty idealized, and I know there are a lot of companies and executives who won't get these things right. But that doesn't mean I want to work for those people.
kelnos 4y ago
> Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. Gross. I worked at at company where the CEO and CTO were hiding important things about the company from employees. When we found out, we felt lied to and betrayed, and there was a mass exodus. The company folded less than a year later. I'm not saying leadership should be telling employees every little tiny thing. (And certainly some things just cannot be talked about in early stages of the deal, like funding rounds and being acquired.) But employees should have a pretty good handle on the health of the company and what's going on at a high level. If employees get anxiety or start looking for new jobs because the executive team is being truthful, then either a) the company is doomed, and only an asshole executive would lie to keep employees around, or b) the company is just in a difficult spot, but leadership is not doing a good job of communicating the solid, likely-to-succeed plans in place to get things back on track. I refuse to work for leadership teams who are not transparent. If they don't think they can trust me to act well in the face of difficult information, then I don't see why I should trust them to run the company that's responsible for my paycheck and livelihood.
deleted 4y ago
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drc500free 4y ago
At this point in my career, I think the #1 responsibility for everyone above VP is to maintain everyone's fantasy of a stable paycheck in exchange for stable work. Once you peek behind the curtain of where your firm's cash comes from and where it goes, you have to live with a deep existential fear that you could mess up a bunch of people's lives... and you don't want others to have to live with that.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  Finally someone that seems to actually have some real life mgmt experience replying.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    It's very convenient to believe that everyone replying to you who disagrees with you has no management experience, and the one lone voice giving uncritical agreement is the one person who does.
lawgimenez 4y ago
Wow is this straight up lying though? When shit hits the fan, what is your plan B?
29athrowaway 4y ago
> "You're job" I could not even finish reading this comment. As a C-level leader in an organization, communication should be your strong card. It's unacceptable that you don't even know the difference between "you are" and "your". If as an employee I get an e-mail from a "CTO" consistently getting confused with such elementary, trivial shit, I would fucking resign immediately as that makes it evident that the organization is led by illiterate people and has absolutely no future.
- danwee 4y ago
  I wouldn't judge so quickly, this kind of mistakes happen sometimes among non-native English speakers. In any case, CTOs don't do much, so the future of a company is not tied to the IQ of its CTO.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    You do a solid job of feigning niceties for someone that seems to hold themselves so highly.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  Good point, I agree. I do know the difference though. I probably copy/pasted part of the comment around and missed that I changed the context. Shame on me for not proofreading my internet comment though. You should probably erase me from existence for my lack of vigilance as punishment...
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Attention to detail is a big part of technical work.
uvesten 4y ago
I had a CTO like you once. Totally destroyed morale, made the best people leave, and created a toxic work environment where there was no trust in management at all. If that’s your goal, good work I guess.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  >I had a CTO like you once. Then you didn't have a CTO like me. I'm still in regular contact with most of the people that used to work for me. One actually just texted me this morning to ask how I was doing. Even though our lives will almost certainly never intersect again.
matwood 4y ago
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. I've been CTO/equity partner/division director/tech lead/IC/etc... and this is terrible advice. The one thing you need as a leader is trust - your people need to trust you and you need to trust them. Treat people like the adults they are, tell them what's happening to the best of your ability, and people will work their asses off to accomplish the goal.

capableweb 4y ago

> Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. Following this advice is another way of loosing employees, at least I'd leave a company quickly if the CTO started lying about potential problems not being problems. In the end, depends on the company. Usually the company I've worked in, have valued transparency, so employees can decide themselves if they want to continue working there or not, when there are potential issues. Not sure who it'll be good for if things are delayed in a project, you might be able to ship a good product but then the executive team is all like "Noooo, what you're hearing is just rumors, everything is fine and all will be good when we release".

NegativeLatency 4y ago
> I'd leave a company quickly if the CTO started lying about potential problems not being problems Absolutely. In the case of someone saying a clear problem is not a problem, we have a few cases: The first, they're lying to me, in that case they're dishonest and I dont want to work there, they're probably just covering it up to make some money and then move on when things fall apart. The second, they're incompetent and actually don't realize it's a problem, why would I want to work for someone who's bad at their job. Probably others but I can't think of them
citizenpaul 4y ago
>all will be good when we release Well I've literally been in the position where this was true to close a deal so we could stay in business. What would be the best option in your opinion? Risk a critical person leaving right then and loosing the customer and then losing everyone job? Or lying and telling them we are all ok just keep on doing your job and don't listen to rumors? You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.
- celdon25 4y ago
  In real life, some people are human lie detectors, or at least better at detecting lies than you are a liar. But I can acknowledge there are cases where transparency is simply not an option.
- warent 4y ago
  "Things are tough right now, but once we close this deal then we'll be in a much more comfortable position. Your role on this is critical to our success." Is this not a reasonable way of approaching it? It seems to be simultaneously honest and empowering. What lie is necessary? EDIT: slight revision
  - random314 4y ago
    Compulsive liars cannot change their habits.
    - sahila 4y ago
      And gasp you may have to reward your worker because they truly are that valuable instead of reaping all the benefit for the cto.
      - citizenpaul 4y ago
        Thats mostly a CEO trait. Remember CTO,CFO,COO,CIO, ect are all just jobs. You ultimately report to the CEO, whom ultimately reports to the investors,stakeholders, capital partners, b2b relationships and so on. For the record I gave 100% of bonuses I had awarded to my staff and 0% to myself the entire tenure.

stormbrew 4y ago

> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". Sometimes your employees can tell things aren't going well, and you bald face lying to them like this will make them leave even faster. This is also a great strategy to fuck people over, where if they believe in the stability of the company right until the day layoffs are announced they might have just bought a house or something else that will make the next few months for them excruciating, if not disastrous. So please don't take this advice to the extreme imo. I'm not saying you shouldn't be positive, or give every detail. But you should be realistic. Save the rose tint for the investors and just make sure people have what they need to do their best work, within your power.

citizenpaul 4y ago
I actually wrote several responses and realized I was rambling on because of just how difficult it is to explain the reality of being in a decision making role. Rumors and politics are far far more prevalent than any acutal problems that will affect your people. It is not your job to be responsible for other peoples personal lives, you are not the messiah. All you can do is fight to get them the pay they deserve. What they do with the money you have no control over anyway. Layoffs at non Fortune 500 companies generally have less warning than anything can be done about anyway. Sure if its budgeted at Pfizer 6mo in advance your an ahole for not telling people. However its usually more like 2-4 weeks that the people in charge even know beforehand. ALso remenber we are talking about CTO. Its the CFO that knows the truth about the finances and may be hiding it from you as the CTO.
- warent 4y ago
  There seems to be quite a lot wrong in this post in my humble opinion... In brief, this reads as: * Allowing rumor/politics to become malignant through deceit rather than healing through truth * Dismissing responsibility for other people's livelihood because "hey its not my fault they didn't save money in case I throw them in the guillotine" * Using lack of information as a reason to lie, rather than just telling your workers that you don't know the answers. These are definitely the antithesis of "good" leadership. "Good" from an empathetic, humane perspective, and "good" for business and profit. It's true we have to make unpopular, hard, sad decisions. Yet it is absolutely imperative that we remain mindful and diligent to our team as individual humans.

warent 4y ago

> Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. I've only been performing roles of director / vp to small/mid size companies so far, so maybe there's some secret CTO sauce I'm still missing. To me this advice seems toxic and destructive. Vent upwards, yes. Manage expectations, yes. But you're hiring brilliant people who will eventually know when youre lying or concealing info from lack of trust. good luck with loyalty at that point.

random314 4y ago
Exactly what I thought. This is a view of employees as mindless drones whose only function is to make themselves busy. A very toxic management style. The advice that it is ok to be hated dogs the ditch further. This is also an implicit permission to the employees to lie to the CTO. This is pretty standard narcissistic behavior, where your lies to employees are just doing business, while employees lying to the management is a grave offence that calls for job termination.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  >employees as mindless drones ... very toxic management style. I agree.
  - random314 4y ago
    Did you just agree that you are a toxic manager?
0x457 4y ago
There is only so much you can hide. Do you have BI? Well, they know numbers better than you, guess what? They talk to the rest of the company. Do you have metrics available somewhere? Doesn't matter real-time or N days report - people can connect the dots: signs up are flat, but we keep hiring. You can't meet requirements without marketing pushes? Well, shit, I wonder if a company spends 2 dollars to earn 1 dollar. You can lie and bullshit all you want, but your reports and their reports will know. I worked in a company where the analytics team suddenly decided to leave, all within days of each other. Month later - layoff. They weren't told that things are bad, they were the one who told you that things are bad.

pvorb 4y ago

> Eventually some of those reports will hate you as well even if you do everything perfectly. Its inevitable from being in charge. You may not find out till running into them years later and they just shrug you off when you try to say hi. Maybe they simply found out that you kept lying to them?

citizenpaul 4y ago
That was not the reason. I know its hard to understand if you are never in such a role. People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Even if they are the cause of those bad things. I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work, not showing up/logging in, not making deadlines. He went off on me for like 30 min when I fired him and never spoke to me again despite warnings and discussions about the problem before getting fired for one example. In his irrational opinion I was holding him back from getting rich by expecting him to do his job.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  I've been on the reverse side, where it was obvious the CTO and CEO were hiding things. It's annoying for a while and then eventually there's some proverbial straw that breaks the camels back. Word spread pretty quickly through various cliques in the company. Some teams had no idea what was happening, other teams lost literally all their developers and and couple managers over the course of 30 days. During my exit interview I mentioned the dishonesty and they just doubled down that I was imagining it.
- my_usernam3 4y ago
  > People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Isn't that what you did? > Even though the company eventually did go under due to bad investments the owner made.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    That was a factual statement, so no. I think I get the personal attack you are trying to make at me though.

random314 4y ago

> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. Are you ok with employees and reports reciprocating by lying to you as well.

citizenpaul 4y ago
Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless.
- random314 4y ago
  My reports have lied to me very rarely, and I have never had to lie to my reports. For the reports that lied to me, I managed them out of my team irrespective of their work performance. I have quit jobs where my manager lied to me. It is really really easy to tell when someone is lying. You seem to live in some alternate dystopia where everyone lies to each other. How many of the companies that you have worked at have gone under?
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Yeah I'm really confused about this guy. I get that the world is not black and white, and conditions aren't always ideal... but I absolutely do not put up with the kind of dishonesty he's seemingly advocating. Perhaps not everyone has the luxury to be so picky, but... damn, I really have not gotten the impression (in my experience, and in the experience of friends and acquaintances) that this sort of bullshit is that common. At least not at successful, healthy companies.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  > Yes. FYI They will lie to you regardless. If you create a culture where you lie, then people will lie to you. If you create a culture where you are honest, people will be honest back to you. There's nothing more powerful than going to your team and saying "Look, I fucked this up. I need your help". Honesty is disarming. I'm in a field where I manage scientists. If people start to lie to me or even start to bend the truth a little, we will waste years chasing ghosts. The people that work for me are very savvy at figuring out what I think might be true and they can always present just the right data to make me happy. I had to learn early on that I need to be really explicit: we need to do good work, it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, all that matters is progress. So no. Your employees don't need to lie to you. Mine come to me regularly and explain what went wrong. Judgement-free. And we do deep dives to prevent problems in the future. You are causing the problems, not them.

colechristensen 4y ago

>You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". When you've been lied to enough you stop believing the lies, a leader who can't be relied on to tell the truth unless it's positive might as well not say anything at all or be there in the first place. Having to doubt and read between the lines for each and every message from leadership is a waste of my time and leads directly to me A) no longer caring and B) not trusting my leadership. This kind of manipulation only works on stupid or inexperienced people. There is a big difference between putting a hopeful spin and always fighting for the best outcome and straight up saying everything is fine until there's nothing left but ashes.

baby 4y ago

> Transparency is not your job I would argue the opposite: transparency is one of the biggest part of your job. You're not in a leadership position, and it's your choice: do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success? Or do you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins?

citizenpaul 4y ago
Real life is not fair. If the company initiative is to be transparent then sure you can be. However that is the vast minority of companies. Though people on HN may have a skew to thinking the opposite.
- warent 4y ago
  Curious to know where the statement "real life is not fair" is coming from / what it's referring to.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    > do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success >you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins? The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it. CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.
    - jcheng 4y ago
      What part of the world are you from?
      - citizenpaul 4y ago
        USA East coast.

rektide 4y ago

This is the job for 80% of corporations, the same 80% of corporations ruled by non-technical highly-political spin-based organizations, that dont really grok what they are up to. Having technical depth in the leadership ranks, having real competency & belief & understanding in what you are doing, is, alas, not common. But wow, what a difference it makes for an org.

jklp 4y ago

I see a lot of responses to this comment, especially these lines: > Transparency is not your job. > You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what > This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thought "there shouldn't be this many fires" but I soon realised that that was my job, to put them out, escalate when required, etc all while making sure the ship is steady and doing it with a smile on my face. Some examples include: - News that a sales person has sold a huge project which will save the company, but we can't deliver or build with our current backlog / resources - One key team member has been taking a lot of doctor's appointments recently - and suspect they might be quitting / job hunting - There's a very obscure security issue which could be fatal if discovered, but is a huge task which will disrupt a project which is already delayed and over budget If I ran into any of these when I first started I would have freaked out - and that would have disrupt my team as they couldn't be productive with that anxiety over their heads. Instead I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control. Of course if something was too big to handle I'd escalate, or if something blew up I'd take responsibility etc - but I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions and let them do what they're best at doing.

kelnos 4y ago
I hope that's what the original poster who you quoted meant, because I don't see all that much wrong with the examples you mention. No, there's no need to engage people in discussions about things if it doesn't really impact them, or they can't really jump in and help the situation. However, in the absence of some legal requirement to keep quiet, if some employee got wind of one of those situations, and came to you and asked you about it, I really do hope you'd be honest and forthcoming. Because otherwise I think that's when you'd cross the line (for me at least) into being untrustworthy. One thing to mention though: in the case of your first example, if that huge deal really is going to fall through, no question, and the company is going to fail because of that, no question, I would lose all respect for an executive who didn't pro-actively have the hard talk with employees about that situation. Yes, some people will leave. But that's life, and your employees have entrusted their livelihood with you; you owe them that level of honesty. > I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control. Which is fine! Because if you truly did put out those fires, or at least put in place some mitigating strategies, then you were absolutely telling the truth that it was under control. > I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions The difference is that some "distractions" can have a material impact on those employees' lives. An executive who hides those things and lies about them to employees is not worthy of respect. For "distractions" that truly are just distractions, sure, fine, no need to broadcast. But I think a key question is: if a bit of news could make a reasonable employee, thinking logically about the news, decide to quit, then... you absolutely should be disclosing that news. Anything else is just a betrayal of the implicit trust an employee must have in their employer. And yes, I know all this might seem pretty idealized, and I know there are a lot of companies and executives who won't get these things right. But that doesn't mean I want to work for those people.

kelnos 4y ago

> Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. Gross. I worked at at company where the CEO and CTO were hiding important things about the company from employees. When we found out, we felt lied to and betrayed, and there was a mass exodus. The company folded less than a year later. I'm not saying leadership should be telling employees every little tiny thing. (And certainly some things just cannot be talked about in early stages of the deal, like funding rounds and being acquired.) But employees should have a pretty good handle on the health of the company and what's going on at a high level. If employees get anxiety or start looking for new jobs because the executive team is being truthful, then either a) the company is doomed, and only an asshole executive would lie to keep employees around, or b) the company is just in a difficult spot, but leadership is not doing a good job of communicating the solid, likely-to-succeed plans in place to get things back on track. I refuse to work for leadership teams who are not transparent. If they don't think they can trust me to act well in the face of difficult information, then I don't see why I should trust them to run the company that's responsible for my paycheck and livelihood.

deleted 4y ago

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drc500free 4y ago

At this point in my career, I think the #1 responsibility for everyone above VP is to maintain everyone's fantasy of a stable paycheck in exchange for stable work. Once you peek behind the curtain of where your firm's cash comes from and where it goes, you have to live with a deep existential fear that you could mess up a bunch of people's lives... and you don't want others to have to live with that.

citizenpaul 4y ago
Finally someone that seems to actually have some real life mgmt experience replying.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  It's very convenient to believe that everyone replying to you who disagrees with you has no management experience, and the one lone voice giving uncritical agreement is the one person who does.

lawgimenez 4y ago

Wow is this straight up lying though? When shit hits the fan, what is your plan B?

29athrowaway 4y ago

> "You're job" I could not even finish reading this comment. As a C-level leader in an organization, communication should be your strong card. It's unacceptable that you don't even know the difference between "you are" and "your". If as an employee I get an e-mail from a "CTO" consistently getting confused with such elementary, trivial shit, I would fucking resign immediately as that makes it evident that the organization is led by illiterate people and has absolutely no future.

danwee 4y ago
I wouldn't judge so quickly, this kind of mistakes happen sometimes among non-native English speakers. In any case, CTOs don't do much, so the future of a company is not tied to the IQ of its CTO.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  You do a solid job of feigning niceties for someone that seems to hold themselves so highly.
citizenpaul 4y ago
Good point, I agree. I do know the difference though. I probably copy/pasted part of the comment around and missed that I changed the context. Shame on me for not proofreading my internet comment though. You should probably erase me from existence for my lack of vigilance as punishment...
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Attention to detail is a big part of technical work.

uvesten 4y ago

I had a CTO like you once. Totally destroyed morale, made the best people leave, and created a toxic work environment where there was no trust in management at all. If that’s your goal, good work I guess.

citizenpaul 4y ago
>I had a CTO like you once. Then you didn't have a CTO like me. I'm still in regular contact with most of the people that used to work for me. One actually just texted me this morning to ask how I was doing. Even though our lives will almost certainly never intersect again.

matwood 4y ago

> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point. I've been CTO/equity partner/division director/tech lead/IC/etc... and this is terrible advice. The one thing you need as a leader is trust - your people need to trust you and you need to trust them. Treat people like the adults they are, tell them what's happening to the best of your ability, and people will work their asses off to accomplish the goal.