38 ms·

Leadership is a hell of a drug

385 points by l0b0 3y ago

novok 3y ago
The author works at some pretty shit companies if these bozos are the leadership there. Or he has been working at profitable companies where he is working in a cost center vs. a profit center and thus doesn't really matter. Tech in Australia is bleak, the place who's top tech company is Atlassian, creator of some of the most loathed software in the world forced on others by such as described here. Does he work there? Wouldn't be surprised that a place that made JIRA would do this to their own staff. #2 is Canva, a mail order print shop. The internet is some of the shittiest and expensive in the developed world because it's so captured by the local telecom monopoly. It's the place with the worse anti-espionage laws. It's the country that the other ones in the 5 eyes go to do the most unethical spying because even their own fig leaf laws prevent them from doing so. Bleak bleak bleak. Get out and go somewhere competent, like the US west coast or western europe. You obviously have taste, go to somewhere with some taste.
gardenhedge 3y ago
OP, I love this post and topic. I hate the term leadership. Leadership teams that have never shown leadership, or any expertise or skills, drive me mad.
pbadg3r 3y ago
"You don't work at SpaceX - the largest project we're working on right now is a big spreadsheet that is nonetheless six months behind schedule. Sleeping is higher energy than that." https://dontbuildsaas.com/ https://dontbuildsaas.com/
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
This person is a fantastic writer, and they quote one of the best authors ever to boot.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Very kind of you to say so, thank you!
  - aydyn 3y ago
    Question, for people who you work with it probably wouldn't be hard to trace who you are. You've said some pretty harsh things, aren't you afraid of backlash?
    - ludicity 3y ago
      Ah, not really. I worried about this quite a bit at first, but there are quite a few mitigating factors. The first is that I have an audience of a few thousand people at this point, and that's enough of a network that I will probably find work if I get laid off. And, you know, they're not going to kill me, the worst case is I've misjudged things and I'll need to enter a new industry. The second thing is that my writing has reduced my employability at the kind of company I would hate anyway, but increased it at the truly excellent places. I've been in touch with the CEOs and directors at high-functioning organizations, and I'd rather work with them anyway. They wouldn't find work for me instantly, but they might eventually. The only reason I remain employed at this place is that they agreed to give me a three day a week permanent contract (because they pissed the engineers off so much that four of them left in one week). It's a convenient deal, and it gives me time to focus on my own business, but I'd survive without them. I'm already looking elsewhere but don't want to land in a similarly toxic environment. But I think, most importantly, I used to be very inauthentic at work (which is almost half my time and most of my daylight hours!), and it made me miserable. I'd rather be who I am and get forced to work at McDonald's for a bit. So I'm a little bit afraid, but I'm more afraid of what happens when I don't say what I think.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    No, seriously. Huge fan of your posts. Share them with the clued-in members of my team.
    - ludicity 3y ago
- lanamo 3y ago
  You must refer to the author David Whyte :) his narration voice is fantastic as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IygDX7Vdql0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IygDX7Vdql0
  - ludicity 3y ago
    I suspect they actually meant Terry Pratchett, but David Whyte is certainly a contender. I read The Three Marriages expecting it to be awful because of the title, but came away with an unquenchable thirst for all his material. (And I read the book after hearing him recite his poem, The Faces At Braga, which is the only piece of poetry that has ever moved me, a very level-headed and unemotional man despite my writing, to tears.)
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
      I did mean Terry Prachett, was probably overly coy about it, but I definitely need check out David Whyte! I had to google the "gibberish" quote and was very pleasantly surprised! For those curious it is Discworld Dwarvish for: > I bargain with no axe in my hand.
tuatoru 3y ago
Just reading the quoted email started a histamine reaction in me. I now have itchy hands.
- sshine 3y ago
  I’ve got the itches, too. I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy. The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats. On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.
  - yard2010 3y ago
    This is the ultimate truth. It makes me sad that most of the companies I work at are like this :(
harimau777 3y ago
I suspect that leadership is unlikely to be found in places with at will employment. That is because much of the work of leadership is learning how to lead different personalities and align people with different goals. In a company with at will employment there is no need to do that. You simply get rid of anyone who doesn't naturally fit in with your preferred personality.
- RhysU 3y ago
  This perspective ignores employee acquisition costs and reputation costs. It is not free to churn at-will employees.
  - jq-r 3y ago
    Its not free, but it can be cheap as in the recent times. You fire/"RTO"/"manage out" the well paid engineers of yesterday and hire cheaper engineers while the market is flooded with them.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    it's not free, it's profitable. see the meta layoffs and what it did for Musk and other major stockholders' wealth.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    Reputation costs are zero once people get desperate enough. When you're not sure if you'll be able to pay your rent or feed your family, you'll join any organization, regardless of reputation. It's not free but it can be made very cheap. Look at Amazon literally running out of people to churn in the near future.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      That's assuming they're even well known or big enough to have a reputation.
- al_borland 3y ago
  My company made it very clear I was being hired in an at will state when I was taking the job. They brought it up many, many times. People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role. A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.
hinkley 3y ago
Man I need to work with leaders again.
RHSman2 3y ago
Nod of the hat to the title.
echelon 3y ago
While I agree with the author, I also don't think I want to work with this person. People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.
- wz14 3y ago
  [dead]
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Yep, I think both compulsory 4-hour meetings and long rants complaining about them are a bummer.
- cm11 3y ago
  This is like taking the batteries out of the fire alarm. It's not like there aren't times where maybe you should do that, but they're rare and temporary. How many situations are there where you'd rather have the fire than the alarm? Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author." I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    A fire alarm is useless if it's always going off. The point of a fire alarm is that it goes off only when it's needed. Negative people are like a fire alarm that's always going off. I'm not accusing the writer of that, it's just a general comment.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  My rule is “If you’re complaining you better be quitting”. I have followed it so far. Granted it can take a few months to sort things out.
RHSman2 3y ago
Toxic
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
There's definitely something a little weird about people who proclaim themselves a "Leader" on their LinkedIn title. I can't even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? "Today's the day!" Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea? Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson: "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king." I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king," but I think the point still holds.
- ludicity 3y ago
  It must be being struck by the "brilliant" idea, right? The first one is too weird for me to contemplate. In either case, I don't judge people too much for this because I think it signals compliance with corporate norms. My theory is that anyone that says "Leader" on their LinkedIn title is actually saying "I'm not going to point out the emperor has no clothes as long as I'm salaried and allowed to give talks."
- reidjs 3y ago
  Dress for the job you want, not have.
  - 4gotunameagain 3y ago
    Dressing is one thing, being pretentious, glib and cringe online is another
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dartharva 3y ago
  Some obscure company cultures demand you address everyone and yourself as "leader" in third-person, irrespective of designation and rank. So fresh grads are leaders, janitors are "sanitation leaders", SDEs are "development leaders" and so on.
cinbun8 3y ago
This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them. It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  "energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs
- sidcool 3y ago
  At least it's not AI generated junk
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.
  - ludicity 3y ago
    Hah, I've done this with people before! Drop me an email. I can tell from your name that we'd vibe.
- yard2010 3y ago
  I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style. Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"
- t0mas88 3y ago
  Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.
timwaagh 3y ago
This made me laugh a lot. You know how to write.
pram 3y ago
"Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality." Great line, and it's true outside of work too.
- _pdp_ 3y ago
  I came to post this exact same line.
throwitaway222 3y ago
[flagged]
- aydyn 3y ago
  Not everyone likes beer after work? You're projecting your preferences onto others, which ironically is narcissistic.
  - sgt 3y ago
    Beer after work doesn't necessarily mean you need to drink beer. You can drink a fruit juice, if you want.
    - bo0tzz 3y ago
      After work I personally prefer to just go home.
      - rafaelero 3y ago
        [flagged]
        aydyn 3y ago
        [flagged]
CityOfThrowaway 3y ago
Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them. It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal. I don't like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. That's just called being an adult.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice. A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables. It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.
- danjac 3y ago
  You would terminate someone for...having an opinion? They didn't mention the company they worked for (if indeed it is their company and not some made-up example). Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.
  - forgotusername6 3y ago
    For long meetings I've dreamed about having a taxi style fare meter running on the screen. It would add up all the wages of the people present and give a running total for the speaker so they know the (minimum) cost of the meeting.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.
- ludicity 3y ago
  I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives. PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits? Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
  - sanitycheck 3y ago
    This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power. From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible. So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state. (I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)
hardwaresofton 3y ago
> Larry, I'm on ducktales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76HijAoXi6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76HijAoXi6k
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Great show though, you can tell everyone involved was extra passionate about it. But yeah he wouldn’t have a private plane from it.
ashton314 3y ago
The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader. For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security? — Hugh Nibley, Leaders and Managers
- ludicity 3y ago
  I adore this, though I have to re-organize my brain a bit to parse it after defining management and leadership so differently. Thank you for the lovely recommendation, and I'll be sure to give the whole thing a read/listen.
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    The corpo leeches collectively caught on to this interpretation of manager/leader long ago, and subjugated these ideals for their own, sad, status-quo maintaining goals...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
eeasss 3y ago
Based on what you said I think that you should change jobs. Too much toxicity and obvious incompatibility with the company preferred approach to working.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Absolutely, I'm keeping an eye out. Unfortunately, due to path dependence in jobs, it takes a while to find a better place. Plus this company culture is very typical in Australia, so you're looking at a small percentage of the market. I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  The reality is that most companies are dysfunctional and caputed by the professional managerial class, people with few other skills than nepotism and favour trading, and that would crawl over broken glass to avoid doing something that benefits customers, shareholders or employees.
Phiwise_ 3y ago
>That level of self-regard is narcissistic to such a degree that I have screeched so far past horror that I've looped around to arrive at a grudging respect. It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.
a_bonobo 3y ago
Do OP and I work in the same place? I can't stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There's nothing to learn from these people, they can only 'manage', they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...
- zztop44 3y ago
  It sounds like they actually can’t ‘manage’ if nothing of depth ever comes out of their efforts.
DannyBee 3y ago
"Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I've had a 1:1 with at a big company?" I mean, it's sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as "C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering" i'm going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that 1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective 2. Big-company CTO's have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be "I probably should not have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who I ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to" If the article said "small company CTO's", I think it would make more sense.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Extremely fair. #2 is a tricky one. On one hand, I know a few executives who genuinely have some demonstrable area of expertise that isn't related to technology. On the other hand, an executive whose area of expertise always seems to be "It's in things that are impossible for you to understand" is unfalsifiable from my viewpoint. I err on the side of caution until they do something that simply can't be explained away... like scheduling a four hour meeting to say nothing as the outcome of a six month process.
  - DannyBee 3y ago
    Sure, I think that is a fair view. I almost added to the comment the following, which i suspect you would agree with: "obviously they should have some area of significant technical competence that is within an area the company cares about or works on. I just wouldn't necessarily expect it to be programming languages, and they should definitively not try to overstep their competency". You are giving the case where either they have no area of technical competence, or one that, uh, charitably, is so far outside anything the company does/cares about that they can't explain it to you. That one is a clear fail of this particular test :) also obviously, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good CTO. Another good condition would be "generally assumes the time of people 'on the ground' is the most valuable time the company has, as this is what directly leads to features/revenue/customers/etc".[1] As such, the number of situations where such a meeting would be net positive for the company amount to something like: 1. you are about to save everyone 4.001 hours worth of work, increase per-employee revenue by 4.001 hours worth, etc, by talking at them for 4 hours. 2. The company is going under and therefore you are saving everyone 100% of their time :) #1 is actually within the bounds of possibility, but I would certainly agree that it is much more likely that anyone who believes they are about to accomplish that is probably suffering from hubris of the highest order. [1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be. To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both. Instead, i think you see managers/leaders who start by believing they exist as a net positive and think occasionally they screw it up and are only a little net positive. On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ysw0 3y ago
tldr
sidcool 3y ago
Pretentious leadership that only howls orders and no execution is toxic.
andxor_ 3y ago
A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute. To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.
- smugglerFlynn 3y ago
  In my experience it is the opposite, very few people qualify for "knowing their stuff well". Let me put it this way: Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently. This combination is extremely rare, and I think survivorship bias that you mention mostly exists due to original business goals not being defined formally enough - i.e. people commonly valuing "execution as an activity" instead of "execution is getting from A to B". You can execute while failing many times over because you lack knowledge or understanding. You can get recognised and praised for execution because nobody bothered to validate that you actually got the result. This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result. Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
  - andxor_ 3y ago
    > this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result. That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.
Sparkyte 3y ago
Leadership will eat themselves alive at the cost of valuable talent. I think leadership often needs to consider how valuable they are as a unit and work together and not build martyrs for causes. The number one problem in the failure of businesses is the ability to lead and do it effectively. Then something stirs up the dynamic the company faulters and loses that momentum. Then a divide forms where now they pit talent against each other this talent becomes a martyr for the leadership. This is a systematic problem when hirer level leadership fails to lead and creates rifts.
travelinmyblood 3y ago
Oh my, I’m conflicted about this post. (Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. ) I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership. Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met. So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water? Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly. Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager/leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to. One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake. And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.) ~ Edit ~ I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too. https://www.simplermachines.com/mr-reciprocity/ https://www.simplermachines.com/mr-reciprocity/
- CreepGin 3y ago
  > Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly. Are you quoting Dwight Schute?
  - travelinmyblood 3y ago
    I see you agree with the author’s premise However, one of the few people who he admires in the post most definitely describes themselves as a leader. The post would be less funny with the appropriate disclaimers (‘of course not all people who see themselves as a leader are like this’) so I think we can safely assume that he trusting in the intelligence of his readership to figure this out.
quadhome 3y ago
If programmers can call themselves engineers, managers can call themselves leaders.
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
> There is something genuinely scary about the idea of people so caught up in their own self-image that they think leadership is turning up on stage to dispense divine corporate manna unto the huddles masses, then expectantly waiting for the choir to raise their voices in sickly-sweet supplication: "That's a great idea, boss. Amen, amen. Let us rejoice for a prophet has arisen that cuts through the corporate image.
- t43562 3y ago
  A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following. In reality we are all wrong N times a day and rely on other people's help often. Who would ever listen to an idea by someone who was too timid to voice it though? Many bullshitters have succeeded in management. This is why I think people should not be so frightened of giving it a try - there will certainly be a lot worse examples than you who made a living out of it.
  - torginus 3y ago
    The problem is that people who have an internal drive to have their statements and suggestions grounded in reality will always lose to bullshitters who don't.
  - crabmusket 3y ago
    > A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following. But people are not worth following. In the context of work, ideas might be good or bad, and the good ones don't need spin unless the environment is already as toxic as Chernobyl.
    - t43562 3y ago
      Everyone has competing ideas. There's no unanimous agreement on what "good" is. We don't all have enough knowledge to judge each idea purely on merit - a lot of the time our only way to judge is to see if the proposer really believes in it. So ideas have to be sold. I think this is the cause of lots of problems in the world - we cannot all be scientists, laywers, doctors, engineers etc and we have to make judgements about who to put our faith in.
begueradj 3y ago
You nailed it by pointing out to narcissism.
t43562 3y ago
I feel a bit smug that I thought "this must be an Australian" about 5 paragraphs before I found out :-D It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic. I am in a Japanese owned company where I must seem far more extreme to them than the OP seems to me so I'm not criticising. IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all. They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty? In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they're working on and that starts with "leaders" - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn't nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished. Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There's a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn't happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn't go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure? You do get people who "don't believe in leadership" or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.
- robocat 3y ago
  > "this must be an Australian" ... It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic. Your stereotype is 100% wrong. They emigrated to Australia from Southeast Asia according to: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-animals-2023/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    ... so they're Australian now.
hschne 3y ago
Guess what. Based on the success of your blog, not only are you a leader - you're a _thought_ leader now! Good luck.
- ludicity 3y ago
  The original draft of this post ended with: "If I ever become a thought leader, someone has to assassinate me."
dclowd9901 3y ago
Bout to show my hand here, but do you folks really sit down after a day of work and read a book about leadership? I might kill myself before I do something like that.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Hah, this is fair. I read a lot and corporate dysfunction really bothered me for a long time, so I studied and got some mentorship on the topic. It helps that Turn The Ship Around is actually a genuinely interesting read - my brain got a lot of dopamine reading about cool nuclear submarine stuff, and it's satisfying to read about the progression of the team. Reminds me a bit of a friend who enjoys a genre called LitRPG.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    I’ll look into it. I really enjoyed the book Command and Control (about the bureaucratic handling of nuclear weaponry), so maybe that submarine angle can deliver it to me in a more digestible way.
andrewflnr 3y ago
> If someone doesn't have the ability to award someone else status or money, they're told they're a good manager. This is usually a person whose job it is to hover in the air, screaming, while the organization channels all their dysfunction like bolts of Atlassian-branded lightning into their twitching, smoking mortal coil. To the author: did you use this line before, in another post? I'm pretty sure this is not the first time I've laughed uncontrollably at it.
- ludicity 3y ago
  I've used a very similar one but I can't remember which post it was in. The lightning wasn't Atlassian-branded, which I was very proud of this time, haha.
verisimi 3y ago
When I someone says 'leader' I think another suckass follower yesing their way to the top. The environment, morals, humanity has nothing to do with their actions.
skrebbel 3y ago
My theory is that this is the new blog of michealochurch. It’s entertaining reading, but the underlying message of this entire blog is “everything that’s wrong is everybody else’s fault, my job sucks and this is systemic so getting a different one won’t help”. While I love the humor here, I think the conclusion is awful. In case the author reads this: I recognize that happiness will make your writing suffer, but there are companies out there that don’t completely suck and that actively want driven competent independent thinkers to come work for them.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Most companies suck, but I started a small one with some friends and my blog has introduced me to the small circle of competent people in my city - fret not for me! And I spend a lot of time getting engineers out of toxic organizations. I'm currently building a small application for my readers to network with each other, because I can no longer afford to spend so much time personally deciding which people to connect with each other. So that is not my conclusion at all. However, I looked around for quite a while and failed to find placement at a good company (in fact, I suspect the best companies almost never go to market, they just hire friends and former colleagues). "Start a popular blog and escape" is not a viable strategy for most people, and I'm trying to do something about it. You are right though, relentless negativity is pointless. I can only afford it in these concentrated bursts because... well, my situation is actually quite good. (But I think you've said something very valuable nonetheless for many people, including anyone that reads me regularly. Complaining is cathartic but you've gotta chart a way out, and there IS a way out in basically every case.)
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Woa loved to read that :-) thanks for your response! Cool stuff with the business & using the blog For Good.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I kind of have the same style as you, where I do my best writing when I'm complaining about stuff, but also I don't like to be negative so I've just stopped writing :(
dimask 3y ago
When did the term "leadership" get this so widespread use in such contexts? I have studied and worked in universities, and I used to know the head of the department as the head of the department. Now in my last department the head of the department is "the leadership" and the bunch of managers and admin people around them is "the leadership team" and this is how they go around, introduce themselves and sign their emails. They radiate all the madness and narcissistic vibes that the author describes. And the talk has become all this corporate blah blah void of real content stuff, with all that jargon as if they forgot how to talk like actual people and as we have all forgotten what we actually do. It is all madness. I have heard similar from other departments, so I do not think we are the only ones. So, anyway, when has the word "leadership" started becoming more widely used to describe essentially "management"?
doodaddy 3y ago
The title was intriguing. The setup, too. But then another 3,500 or so words that amounted to not much more than a rant and to conclude with “see, I was right!” Author isn’t wrong to be upset with the sorry state of leadership in the business world. But it should be a two-way street - you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek. I was happy to see the distinction drawn between leadership and management. Leaders manage but not all managers lead. Sometimes that’s just fine - a good manager who stays in their lane will be effective. Sometimes they will even turn into decent leaders without knowing it. But the ones who are oblivious to the distinction will probably fail in both.
- lukan 3y ago
  "you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek." Why should you give time and energy for something worthless? Listening to 4 hours of bullshit rants about leadership on a monday morning, while you could be relaxed and productive at your home office? Also, of course he was "willing" to give those 4 hours. He had to as it was mandatory.
low_tech_love 3y ago
I recently went through two instances of three-full-day versions of the author’s Monday meeting, in the context of academic “research leadership”, organized by a team of people who never wrote a single research article in their lives (let alone an actual thesis) and headed by an actual “leadership coach”. My conclusion after this nightmarish experience is that “leadership” has become a meaningless buzzword, like “freedom”: it means something at its core, and used to mean something (I guess), but its potential to be misused is so great that anyone who actually mean it should avoid using it (as for ex. I avoid using the “freedom” even if I think it’s one of the most important things in life). I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative/management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work. This is in my opinion a form of understated and poorly understood violence, but also a natural survival instinct for those who feel themselves useless (maybe correctly) and must then fight to remain relevant at all costs. Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are and this is not for you.
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  Yep the gulf between proper leadership and corporate managerialism was never more apparent to me than when I left the army and did an MBA. Leaders are 'in the trenches', in a commercial environment this means they know their stuff, are putting themselves 'on the line' and are demonstrating the values and standards expected of those further down the ladder. Corporate managers are more like administrators, they dispassionately work the system for their own benefits and pay lip service to the cares and concerns of those they're meant to be leading.
  - dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
    A corollary to what you put above, i.e your main point still holds: A quote attributed to Charles Bukowski here: The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. Translates to a work place here is what happens: often when you offer competent people position of authority or power they don't take it or are extremely reluctant to take it.
saberience 3y ago
Another week, another cliched rant against "leadership" that throws out all the usual tropes. You know, it would be much more worth reading for someone to write about great leadership and acknowledge it exists and in fact isn't all that uncommon, call out great leaders, and try and understand what makes them great. Any shlub can rant about "muh bad management", annoying meetings, the Peter Principle, "terrible middle management", it's become so frequent in comments on Hackernews that my eyes automatically start rolling as soon as I read the same tired old crap. Does gibbering out the same old criticisms make anything better or just perpetuate the myth that all managers are somehow shitty and horrible people or somehow never wrote a line of code in their lives? What does the author intend by writing out this sort of sophormoric rant? Is it just for the clicks? To try and big up their own profile? I suggest doing something better with their time that would actually make the world a slightly better place.
svilen_dobrev 3y ago
heh "..dragged to the office.." a very recently invented company policy stated that any company device for home office (just ordered new or old, all the same), should be hand-picked from the office. Which coincided (?) with ordering some monitors.. and in my case, is 600 kms away. And there are two of us to travel that distance.. over not the-safest roads. And we are on the critical path of the new project (?). And i was the So called "cto".. i am not any more. That was the last straw. What a Fresh breath. so i am Looking for mentoring a team. "Leading".. is a loaded word. links, e-mail etc in profile (also in recent HN-who-wants-to-be-hired [0]). have fun [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573993
ssss11 3y ago
There’s two leaderships. There’s the people in the highest management jobs - they aren’t necessarily leaders but they call themselves leadership. They can actually be terrible at their job (or good). Then there’s leaders - people in various levels and roles who empower others, build teams, drive successful change, know shitloads about their company and are sought out to help by all kinds of colleagues. Be one of those regardless of your level.
shudza 3y ago
In your leadership team's defense, they are all probably on blow.
- ludicity 3y ago
  I can't tell if that would make me respect them more or less.
warrenmiller 3y ago
" This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning" 100% this is written by ChatGPT. It gets very excited.
begueradj 3y ago
You mentioned narcissism, and here is an article about narcissism and leadership: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201212/are-all-leaders-narcissists https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leaders...
newsclues 3y ago
As a kid I was in a military youth program and learned about leadership and had the opportunity to practice it. It’s ruined me by setting an unattainable standard for most people and makes me afraid of the future. Management is not leadership.
lordnacho 3y ago
The problem is that management is one of the best places to hide. What do I mean by that? You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive. But you also get to hide, in the sense that it's hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn't know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn't incompetent management. It's nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don't deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic? So there's a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation. This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You're clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that's why you have an agile coach for your team. It's not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like "we want to exit any business where we're not number 1 or 2 within 5 years". That's not stupid, but it also isn't time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you're a senior leader, you already have that. I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don't do anything during the day. The decisions they make don't take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn't take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.
kqr 3y ago
> Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I've had a 1:1 with at a big company? That one is easy! The sort of metacognition and reflection exhibited by the lawyer makes one a bad politician. Good politicians get the C-level seats.
paulmendoza 3y ago
“And I've never formally held a position of leadership in an organization.” It shows. Whoever wrote this is very immature. Management isn’t making a big ask here.
j7ake 3y ago
Thank you for the reminder that management is not the same as leadership. Management is something you do by mostly moving your lips and typing text, leadership is something you actively do and are that inspires others to put in their best work.
CountTwo 3y ago
I think a lot of the discussion in comments describes the "how" to be a good (people) leader rather than define "what" is a good leader. From a sociological point of view however, isn't the most broad definition of "leadership" simply the ability to get a bunch of people to do what is best for the collective (or more cynically the corporation/country), rather than what is best for the individual? Or taking the logical inverse position, can one be considered a good leader if they cannot inspire that kind of decision-making? I do think there is some truth around all people managers wanting to be considered good leaders... and very few of them actually conforming to that definition. But that's a different topic.
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drstrangevibes 3y ago
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bengale 3y ago
I really liked this post and the way it was written. My critique is that it feels a little idealistic. That might not be the best description, but it's like railing against the way the world just is. I'd love to see counter-examples of successful companies that do things right, but it feels to me like what most companies turn into is just the best of a bad bunch of options. At the end of the day, we're all uniquely flawed people trying to work together in increasingly sized groups. It feels like some amount of dysfunction is to be expected. Having leadership flow between people depending on the problem being solved has the potential to make many people very uncomfortable day to day and in turn, erode the benefit of optimising competency for each task. At the end of the day, though, that's why many of us tend to aim at small companies: the pain is not amplified. The advice I used to give colleagues at large companies was not to try and fight the ocean; you just need to let it wash over you. Bottom-up change is so rare at large companies that it just burns out those who try and alienates the people they need to impress to move up and actually effect change. The truth is that even at a high level very people can really change things fundamentally. But maybe that's for the best. Fundamentally changing the way things work for thousands of people's livelihoods should be hard.
drdrek 3y ago
This feels like it was written in 1993
littlelady 3y ago
> "why did you need someone from outside the organization who doesn't know a damn thing about our work to come in and tell you how you're screwing up? I'll tell you for free! That is a breathtaking level of disconnection." There are times where external advice can be helpful, but it can also be a form of plausible deniability. Managers can display a "willingness" to improve a situation, without engaging with their team or changing their actions. I think a big part of this is ego, as stated in the post, but a lot of the times it's piss poor communication skills. The worst manager I've ever dealt had been very skilled engineer, but he suddenly found himself in a position where he had to actually listen to subordinates and mediate conflicts between departments. He simply did not. Mind you, this is not a large organization. Departments almost never talked to each other, even if they were on the same floor. Feedback was futile and met with hostility. Bright and motivated employees were quickly demoralized and retention was low.
consf 3y ago
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whatindaheck 3y ago
While this article resonates with my experience, it makes me want to consider trying to move into “leadership”. Like the author said, it’s usually a bunch of clowns who are paid way too much money to do jack. Sounds cushy if you’re willing to sell your soul. Which leads me to ask. How exactly do you begin such a journey? It doesn’t seem as if there’s a particular (useful) skill you need to have.

385 points by l0b0 3y ago

The author works at some pretty shit companies if these bozos are the leadership there. Or he has been working at profitable companies where he is working in a cost center vs. a profit center and thus doesn't really matter. Tech in Australia is bleak, the place who's top tech company is Atlassian, creator of some of the most loathed software in the world forced on others by such as described here. Does he work there? Wouldn't be surprised that a place that made JIRA would do this to their own staff. #2 is Canva, a mail order print shop. The internet is some of the shittiest and expensive in the developed world because it's so captured by the local telecom monopoly. It's the place with the worse anti-espionage laws. It's the country that the other ones in the 5 eyes go to do the most unethical spying because even their own fig leaf laws prevent them from doing so. Bleak bleak bleak. Get out and go somewhere competent, like the US west coast or western europe. You obviously have taste, go to somewhere with some taste.

gardenhedge 3y ago

OP, I love this post and topic. I hate the term leadership. Leadership teams that have never shown leadership, or any expertise or skills, drive me mad.

pbadg3r 3y ago

"You don't work at SpaceX - the largest project we're working on right now is a big spreadsheet that is nonetheless six months behind schedule. Sleeping is higher energy than that." https://dontbuildsaas.com/ https://dontbuildsaas.com/

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

This person is a fantastic writer, and they quote one of the best authors ever to boot.

ludicity 3y ago
Very kind of you to say so, thank you!
- aydyn 3y ago
  Question, for people who you work with it probably wouldn't be hard to trace who you are. You've said some pretty harsh things, aren't you afraid of backlash?
  - ludicity 3y ago
    Ah, not really. I worried about this quite a bit at first, but there are quite a few mitigating factors. The first is that I have an audience of a few thousand people at this point, and that's enough of a network that I will probably find work if I get laid off. And, you know, they're not going to kill me, the worst case is I've misjudged things and I'll need to enter a new industry. The second thing is that my writing has reduced my employability at the kind of company I would hate anyway, but increased it at the truly excellent places. I've been in touch with the CEOs and directors at high-functioning organizations, and I'd rather work with them anyway. They wouldn't find work for me instantly, but they might eventually. The only reason I remain employed at this place is that they agreed to give me a three day a week permanent contract (because they pissed the engineers off so much that four of them left in one week). It's a convenient deal, and it gives me time to focus on my own business, but I'd survive without them. I'm already looking elsewhere but don't want to land in a similarly toxic environment. But I think, most importantly, I used to be very inauthentic at work (which is almost half my time and most of my daylight hours!), and it made me miserable. I'd rather be who I am and get forced to work at McDonald's for a bit. So I'm a little bit afraid, but I'm more afraid of what happens when I don't say what I think.
- busterarm 3y ago
  No, seriously. Huge fan of your posts. Share them with the clued-in members of my team.
  - ludicity 3y ago
lanamo 3y ago
You must refer to the author David Whyte :) his narration voice is fantastic as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IygDX7Vdql0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IygDX7Vdql0
- ludicity 3y ago
  I suspect they actually meant Terry Pratchett, but David Whyte is certainly a contender. I read The Three Marriages expecting it to be awful because of the title, but came away with an unquenchable thirst for all his material. (And I read the book after hearing him recite his poem, The Faces At Braga, which is the only piece of poetry that has ever moved me, a very level-headed and unemotional man despite my writing, to tears.)
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
    I did mean Terry Prachett, was probably overly coy about it, but I definitely need check out David Whyte! I had to google the "gibberish" quote and was very pleasantly surprised! For those curious it is Discworld Dwarvish for: > I bargain with no axe in my hand.

tuatoru 3y ago

Just reading the quoted email started a histamine reaction in me. I now have itchy hands.

sshine 3y ago
I’ve got the itches, too. I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy. The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats. On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.
- yard2010 3y ago
  This is the ultimate truth. It makes me sad that most of the companies I work at are like this :(

harimau777 3y ago

I suspect that leadership is unlikely to be found in places with at will employment. That is because much of the work of leadership is learning how to lead different personalities and align people with different goals. In a company with at will employment there is no need to do that. You simply get rid of anyone who doesn't naturally fit in with your preferred personality.

RhysU 3y ago
This perspective ignores employee acquisition costs and reputation costs. It is not free to churn at-will employees.
- jq-r 3y ago
  Its not free, but it can be cheap as in the recent times. You fire/"RTO"/"manage out" the well paid engineers of yesterday and hire cheaper engineers while the market is flooded with them.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  it's not free, it's profitable. see the meta layoffs and what it did for Musk and other major stockholders' wealth.
- Draiken 3y ago
  Reputation costs are zero once people get desperate enough. When you're not sure if you'll be able to pay your rent or feed your family, you'll join any organization, regardless of reputation. It's not free but it can be made very cheap. Look at Amazon literally running out of people to churn in the near future.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    That's assuming they're even well known or big enough to have a reputation.
al_borland 3y ago
My company made it very clear I was being hired in an at will state when I was taking the job. They brought it up many, many times. People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role. A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.

hinkley 3y ago

Man I need to work with leaders again.

RHSman2 3y ago

Nod of the hat to the title.

echelon 3y ago

While I agree with the author, I also don't think I want to work with this person. People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.

wz14 3y ago
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sanderjd 3y ago
Yep, I think both compulsory 4-hour meetings and long rants complaining about them are a bummer.
cm11 3y ago
This is like taking the batteries out of the fire alarm. It's not like there aren't times where maybe you should do that, but they're rare and temporary. How many situations are there where you'd rather have the fire than the alarm? Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author." I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  A fire alarm is useless if it's always going off. The point of a fire alarm is that it goes off only when it's needed. Negative people are like a fire alarm that's always going off. I'm not accusing the writer of that, it's just a general comment.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
My rule is “If you’re complaining you better be quitting”. I have followed it so far. Granted it can take a few months to sort things out.

RHSman2 3y ago

Toxic

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

There's definitely something a little weird about people who proclaim themselves a "Leader" on their LinkedIn title. I can't even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? "Today's the day!" Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea? Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson: "Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king." I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king," but I think the point still holds.

ludicity 3y ago
It must be being struck by the "brilliant" idea, right? The first one is too weird for me to contemplate. In either case, I don't judge people too much for this because I think it signals compliance with corporate norms. My theory is that anyone that says "Leader" on their LinkedIn title is actually saying "I'm not going to point out the emperor has no clothes as long as I'm salaried and allowed to give talks."
reidjs 3y ago
Dress for the job you want, not have.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  Dressing is one thing, being pretentious, glib and cringe online is another
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dartharva 3y ago
Some obscure company cultures demand you address everyone and yourself as "leader" in third-person, irrespective of designation and rank. So fresh grads are leaders, janitors are "sanitation leaders", SDEs are "development leaders" and so on.

cinbun8 3y ago

This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them. It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.

gardenhedge 3y ago
"energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs
sidcool 3y ago
At least it's not AI generated junk
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Hah, I've done this with people before! Drop me an email. I can tell from your name that we'd vibe.
yard2010 3y ago
I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style. Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"
t0mas88 3y ago
Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.
dclowd9901 3y ago
You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.

timwaagh 3y ago

This made me laugh a lot. You know how to write.

pram 3y ago

"Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality." Great line, and it's true outside of work too.

_pdp_ 3y ago
I came to post this exact same line.

throwitaway222 3y ago

[flagged]

aydyn 3y ago
Not everyone likes beer after work? You're projecting your preferences onto others, which ironically is narcissistic.
- sgt 3y ago
  Beer after work doesn't necessarily mean you need to drink beer. You can drink a fruit juice, if you want.
  - bo0tzz 3y ago
    After work I personally prefer to just go home.
    - rafaelero 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - aydyn 3y ago
        [flagged]

CityOfThrowaway 3y ago

Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them. It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal. I don't like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. That's just called being an adult.

giantrobot 3y ago
> Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice. A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables. It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.
danjac 3y ago
You would terminate someone for...having an opinion? They didn't mention the company they worked for (if indeed it is their company and not some made-up example). Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.
- forgotusername6 3y ago
  For long meetings I've dreamed about having a taxi style fare meter running on the screen. It would add up all the wages of the people present and give a running total for the speaker so they know the (minimum) cost of the meeting.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.

ludicity 3y ago
I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives. PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
isoprophlex 3y ago
What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits? Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power. From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible. So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state. (I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)

hardwaresofton 3y ago

> Larry, I'm on ducktales https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76HijAoXi6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76HijAoXi6k

dclowd9901 3y ago
Great show though, you can tell everyone involved was extra passionate about it. But yeah he wouldn’t have a private plane from it.

ashton314 3y ago

The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader. For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security? — Hugh Nibley, Leaders and Managers

ludicity 3y ago
I adore this, though I have to re-organize my brain a bit to parse it after defining management and leadership so differently. Thank you for the lovely recommendation, and I'll be sure to give the whole thing a read/listen.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  The corpo leeches collectively caught on to this interpretation of manager/leader long ago, and subjugated these ideals for their own, sad, status-quo maintaining goals...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

eeasss 3y ago

Based on what you said I think that you should change jobs. Too much toxicity and obvious incompatibility with the company preferred approach to working.

ludicity 3y ago
Absolutely, I'm keeping an eye out. Unfortunately, due to path dependence in jobs, it takes a while to find a better place. Plus this company culture is very typical in Australia, so you're looking at a small percentage of the market. I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
The reality is that most companies are dysfunctional and caputed by the professional managerial class, people with few other skills than nepotism and favour trading, and that would crawl over broken glass to avoid doing something that benefits customers, shareholders or employees.

Phiwise_ 3y ago

>That level of self-regard is narcissistic to such a degree that I have screeched so far past horror that I've looped around to arrive at a grudging respect. It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.

a_bonobo 3y ago

Do OP and I work in the same place? I can't stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There's nothing to learn from these people, they can only 'manage', they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...

zztop44 3y ago
It sounds like they actually can’t ‘manage’ if nothing of depth ever comes out of their efforts.

DannyBee 3y ago

"Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I've had a 1:1 with at a big company?" I mean, it's sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as "C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering" i'm going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that 1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective 2. Big-company CTO's have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be "I probably should not have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who I ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to" If the article said "small company CTO's", I think it would make more sense.

ludicity 3y ago
Extremely fair. #2 is a tricky one. On one hand, I know a few executives who genuinely have some demonstrable area of expertise that isn't related to technology. On the other hand, an executive whose area of expertise always seems to be "It's in things that are impossible for you to understand" is unfalsifiable from my viewpoint. I err on the side of caution until they do something that simply can't be explained away... like scheduling a four hour meeting to say nothing as the outcome of a six month process.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  Sure, I think that is a fair view. I almost added to the comment the following, which i suspect you would agree with: "obviously they should have some area of significant technical competence that is within an area the company cares about or works on. I just wouldn't necessarily expect it to be programming languages, and they should definitively not try to overstep their competency". You are giving the case where either they have no area of technical competence, or one that, uh, charitably, is so far outside anything the company does/cares about that they can't explain it to you. That one is a clear fail of this particular test :) also obviously, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good CTO. Another good condition would be "generally assumes the time of people 'on the ground' is the most valuable time the company has, as this is what directly leads to features/revenue/customers/etc".[1] As such, the number of situations where such a meeting would be net positive for the company amount to something like: 1. you are about to save everyone 4.001 hours worth of work, increase per-employee revenue by 4.001 hours worth, etc, by talking at them for 4 hours. 2. The company is going under and therefore you are saving everyone 100% of their time :) #1 is actually within the bounds of possibility, but I would certainly agree that it is much more likely that anyone who believes they are about to accomplish that is probably suffering from hubris of the highest order. [1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be. To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both. Instead, i think you see managers/leaders who start by believing they exist as a net positive and think occasionally they screw it up and are only a little net positive. On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ysw0 3y ago

tldr

sidcool 3y ago

Pretentious leadership that only howls orders and no execution is toxic.

andxor_ 3y ago

A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute. To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.

smugglerFlynn 3y ago
In my experience it is the opposite, very few people qualify for "knowing their stuff well". Let me put it this way: Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently. This combination is extremely rare, and I think survivorship bias that you mention mostly exists due to original business goals not being defined formally enough - i.e. people commonly valuing "execution as an activity" instead of "execution is getting from A to B". You can execute while failing many times over because you lack knowledge or understanding. You can get recognised and praised for execution because nobody bothered to validate that you actually got the result. This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result. Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
- andxor_ 3y ago
  > this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result. That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.

Sparkyte 3y ago

Leadership will eat themselves alive at the cost of valuable talent. I think leadership often needs to consider how valuable they are as a unit and work together and not build martyrs for causes. The number one problem in the failure of businesses is the ability to lead and do it effectively. Then something stirs up the dynamic the company faulters and loses that momentum. Then a divide forms where now they pit talent against each other this talent becomes a martyr for the leadership. This is a systematic problem when hirer level leadership fails to lead and creates rifts.

travelinmyblood 3y ago

Oh my, I’m conflicted about this post. (Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. ) I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership. Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met. So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water? Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly. Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager/leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to. One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake. And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.) ~ Edit ~ I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too. https://www.simplermachines.com/mr-reciprocity/ https://www.simplermachines.com/mr-reciprocity/

CreepGin 3y ago
> Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly. Are you quoting Dwight Schute?
- travelinmyblood 3y ago
  I see you agree with the author’s premise However, one of the few people who he admires in the post most definitely describes themselves as a leader. The post would be less funny with the appropriate disclaimers (‘of course not all people who see themselves as a leader are like this’) so I think we can safely assume that he trusting in the intelligence of his readership to figure this out.

quadhome 3y ago

If programmers can call themselves engineers, managers can call themselves leaders.

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

> There is something genuinely scary about the idea of people so caught up in their own self-image that they think leadership is turning up on stage to dispense divine corporate manna unto the huddles masses, then expectantly waiting for the choir to raise their voices in sickly-sweet supplication: "That's a great idea, boss. Amen, amen. Let us rejoice for a prophet has arisen that cuts through the corporate image.

t43562 3y ago
A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following. In reality we are all wrong N times a day and rely on other people's help often. Who would ever listen to an idea by someone who was too timid to voice it though? Many bullshitters have succeeded in management. This is why I think people should not be so frightened of giving it a try - there will certainly be a lot worse examples than you who made a living out of it.
- torginus 3y ago
  The problem is that people who have an internal drive to have their statements and suggestions grounded in reality will always lose to bullshitters who don't.
- crabmusket 3y ago
  > A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following. But people are not worth following. In the context of work, ideas might be good or bad, and the good ones don't need spin unless the environment is already as toxic as Chernobyl.
  - t43562 3y ago
    Everyone has competing ideas. There's no unanimous agreement on what "good" is. We don't all have enough knowledge to judge each idea purely on merit - a lot of the time our only way to judge is to see if the proposer really believes in it. So ideas have to be sold. I think this is the cause of lots of problems in the world - we cannot all be scientists, laywers, doctors, engineers etc and we have to make judgements about who to put our faith in.

begueradj 3y ago

You nailed it by pointing out to narcissism.

t43562 3y ago

I feel a bit smug that I thought "this must be an Australian" about 5 paragraphs before I found out :-D It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic. I am in a Japanese owned company where I must seem far more extreme to them than the OP seems to me so I'm not criticising. IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all. They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty? In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they're working on and that starts with "leaders" - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn't nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished. Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There's a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn't happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn't go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure? You do get people who "don't believe in leadership" or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.

robocat 3y ago
> "this must be an Australian" ... It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic. Your stereotype is 100% wrong. They emigrated to Australia from Southeast Asia according to: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-animals-2023/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...
- dsr_ 3y ago
  ... so they're Australian now.

hschne 3y ago

Guess what. Based on the success of your blog, not only are you a leader - you're a _thought_ leader now! Good luck.

ludicity 3y ago
The original draft of this post ended with: "If I ever become a thought leader, someone has to assassinate me."

dclowd9901 3y ago

Bout to show my hand here, but do you folks really sit down after a day of work and read a book about leadership? I might kill myself before I do something like that.

ludicity 3y ago
Hah, this is fair. I read a lot and corporate dysfunction really bothered me for a long time, so I studied and got some mentorship on the topic. It helps that Turn The Ship Around is actually a genuinely interesting read - my brain got a lot of dopamine reading about cool nuclear submarine stuff, and it's satisfying to read about the progression of the team. Reminds me a bit of a friend who enjoys a genre called LitRPG.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I’ll look into it. I really enjoyed the book Command and Control (about the bureaucratic handling of nuclear weaponry), so maybe that submarine angle can deliver it to me in a more digestible way.

andrewflnr 3y ago

> If someone doesn't have the ability to award someone else status or money, they're told they're a good manager. This is usually a person whose job it is to hover in the air, screaming, while the organization channels all their dysfunction like bolts of Atlassian-branded lightning into their twitching, smoking mortal coil. To the author: did you use this line before, in another post? I'm pretty sure this is not the first time I've laughed uncontrollably at it.

ludicity 3y ago
I've used a very similar one but I can't remember which post it was in. The lightning wasn't Atlassian-branded, which I was very proud of this time, haha.

verisimi 3y ago

When I someone says 'leader' I think another suckass follower yesing their way to the top. The environment, morals, humanity has nothing to do with their actions.

skrebbel 3y ago

My theory is that this is the new blog of michealochurch. It’s entertaining reading, but the underlying message of this entire blog is “everything that’s wrong is everybody else’s fault, my job sucks and this is systemic so getting a different one won’t help”. While I love the humor here, I think the conclusion is awful. In case the author reads this: I recognize that happiness will make your writing suffer, but there are companies out there that don’t completely suck and that actively want driven competent independent thinkers to come work for them.

ludicity 3y ago
Most companies suck, but I started a small one with some friends and my blog has introduced me to the small circle of competent people in my city - fret not for me! And I spend a lot of time getting engineers out of toxic organizations. I'm currently building a small application for my readers to network with each other, because I can no longer afford to spend so much time personally deciding which people to connect with each other. So that is not my conclusion at all. However, I looked around for quite a while and failed to find placement at a good company (in fact, I suspect the best companies almost never go to market, they just hire friends and former colleagues). "Start a popular blog and escape" is not a viable strategy for most people, and I'm trying to do something about it. You are right though, relentless negativity is pointless. I can only afford it in these concentrated bursts because... well, my situation is actually quite good. (But I think you've said something very valuable nonetheless for many people, including anyone that reads me regularly. Complaining is cathartic but you've gotta chart a way out, and there IS a way out in basically every case.)
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Woa loved to read that :-) thanks for your response! Cool stuff with the business & using the blog For Good.
- stavros 3y ago
  I kind of have the same style as you, where I do my best writing when I'm complaining about stuff, but also I don't like to be negative so I've just stopped writing :(

dimask 3y ago

When did the term "leadership" get this so widespread use in such contexts? I have studied and worked in universities, and I used to know the head of the department as the head of the department. Now in my last department the head of the department is "the leadership" and the bunch of managers and admin people around them is "the leadership team" and this is how they go around, introduce themselves and sign their emails. They radiate all the madness and narcissistic vibes that the author describes. And the talk has become all this corporate blah blah void of real content stuff, with all that jargon as if they forgot how to talk like actual people and as we have all forgotten what we actually do. It is all madness. I have heard similar from other departments, so I do not think we are the only ones. So, anyway, when has the word "leadership" started becoming more widely used to describe essentially "management"?

doodaddy 3y ago

The title was intriguing. The setup, too. But then another 3,500 or so words that amounted to not much more than a rant and to conclude with “see, I was right!” Author isn’t wrong to be upset with the sorry state of leadership in the business world. But it should be a two-way street - you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek. I was happy to see the distinction drawn between leadership and management. Leaders manage but not all managers lead. Sometimes that’s just fine - a good manager who stays in their lane will be effective. Sometimes they will even turn into decent leaders without knowing it. But the ones who are oblivious to the distinction will probably fail in both.

lukan 3y ago
"you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek." Why should you give time and energy for something worthless? Listening to 4 hours of bullshit rants about leadership on a monday morning, while you could be relaxed and productive at your home office? Also, of course he was "willing" to give those 4 hours. He had to as it was mandatory.

low_tech_love 3y ago

I recently went through two instances of three-full-day versions of the author’s Monday meeting, in the context of academic “research leadership”, organized by a team of people who never wrote a single research article in their lives (let alone an actual thesis) and headed by an actual “leadership coach”. My conclusion after this nightmarish experience is that “leadership” has become a meaningless buzzword, like “freedom”: it means something at its core, and used to mean something (I guess), but its potential to be misused is so great that anyone who actually mean it should avoid using it (as for ex. I avoid using the “freedom” even if I think it’s one of the most important things in life). I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative/management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work. This is in my opinion a form of understated and poorly understood violence, but also a natural survival instinct for those who feel themselves useless (maybe correctly) and must then fight to remain relevant at all costs. Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are and this is not for you.

jack_riminton 3y ago
Yep the gulf between proper leadership and corporate managerialism was never more apparent to me than when I left the army and did an MBA. Leaders are 'in the trenches', in a commercial environment this means they know their stuff, are putting themselves 'on the line' and are demonstrating the values and standards expected of those further down the ladder. Corporate managers are more like administrators, they dispassionately work the system for their own benefits and pay lip service to the cares and concerns of those they're meant to be leading.
- dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
  A corollary to what you put above, i.e your main point still holds: A quote attributed to Charles Bukowski here: The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. Translates to a work place here is what happens: often when you offer competent people position of authority or power they don't take it or are extremely reluctant to take it.

saberience 3y ago

Another week, another cliched rant against "leadership" that throws out all the usual tropes. You know, it would be much more worth reading for someone to write about great leadership and acknowledge it exists and in fact isn't all that uncommon, call out great leaders, and try and understand what makes them great. Any shlub can rant about "muh bad management", annoying meetings, the Peter Principle, "terrible middle management", it's become so frequent in comments on Hackernews that my eyes automatically start rolling as soon as I read the same tired old crap. Does gibbering out the same old criticisms make anything better or just perpetuate the myth that all managers are somehow shitty and horrible people or somehow never wrote a line of code in their lives? What does the author intend by writing out this sort of sophormoric rant? Is it just for the clicks? To try and big up their own profile? I suggest doing something better with their time that would actually make the world a slightly better place.

svilen_dobrev 3y ago

heh "..dragged to the office.." a very recently invented company policy stated that any company device for home office (just ordered new or old, all the same), should be hand-picked from the office. Which coincided (?) with ordering some monitors.. and in my case, is 600 kms away. And there are two of us to travel that distance.. over not the-safest roads. And we are on the critical path of the new project (?). And i was the So called "cto".. i am not any more. That was the last straw. What a Fresh breath. so i am Looking for mentoring a team. "Leading".. is a loaded word. links, e-mail etc in profile (also in recent HN-who-wants-to-be-hired [0]). have fun [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573993

ssss11 3y ago

There’s two leaderships. There’s the people in the highest management jobs - they aren’t necessarily leaders but they call themselves leadership. They can actually be terrible at their job (or good). Then there’s leaders - people in various levels and roles who empower others, build teams, drive successful change, know shitloads about their company and are sought out to help by all kinds of colleagues. Be one of those regardless of your level.

shudza 3y ago

In your leadership team's defense, they are all probably on blow.

ludicity 3y ago
I can't tell if that would make me respect them more or less.

warrenmiller 3y ago

" This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning" 100% this is written by ChatGPT. It gets very excited.

begueradj 3y ago

You mentioned narcissism, and here is an article about narcissism and leadership: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201212/are-all-leaders-narcissists https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leaders...

newsclues 3y ago

As a kid I was in a military youth program and learned about leadership and had the opportunity to practice it. It’s ruined me by setting an unattainable standard for most people and makes me afraid of the future. Management is not leadership.

lordnacho 3y ago

The problem is that management is one of the best places to hide. What do I mean by that? You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive. But you also get to hide, in the sense that it's hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn't know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn't incompetent management. It's nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don't deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic? So there's a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation. This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You're clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that's why you have an agile coach for your team. It's not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like "we want to exit any business where we're not number 1 or 2 within 5 years". That's not stupid, but it also isn't time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you're a senior leader, you already have that. I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don't do anything during the day. The decisions they make don't take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn't take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.

kqr 3y ago

> Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I've had a 1:1 with at a big company? That one is easy! The sort of metacognition and reflection exhibited by the lawyer makes one a bad politician. Good politicians get the C-level seats.

paulmendoza 3y ago

“And I've never formally held a position of leadership in an organization.” It shows. Whoever wrote this is very immature. Management isn’t making a big ask here.

j7ake 3y ago

Thank you for the reminder that management is not the same as leadership. Management is something you do by mostly moving your lips and typing text, leadership is something you actively do and are that inspires others to put in their best work.

CountTwo 3y ago

I think a lot of the discussion in comments describes the "how" to be a good (people) leader rather than define "what" is a good leader. From a sociological point of view however, isn't the most broad definition of "leadership" simply the ability to get a bunch of people to do what is best for the collective (or more cynically the corporation/country), rather than what is best for the individual? Or taking the logical inverse position, can one be considered a good leader if they cannot inspire that kind of decision-making? I do think there is some truth around all people managers wanting to be considered good leaders... and very few of them actually conforming to that definition. But that's a different topic.

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drstrangevibes 3y ago

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bengale 3y ago

I really liked this post and the way it was written. My critique is that it feels a little idealistic. That might not be the best description, but it's like railing against the way the world just is. I'd love to see counter-examples of successful companies that do things right, but it feels to me like what most companies turn into is just the best of a bad bunch of options. At the end of the day, we're all uniquely flawed people trying to work together in increasingly sized groups. It feels like some amount of dysfunction is to be expected. Having leadership flow between people depending on the problem being solved has the potential to make many people very uncomfortable day to day and in turn, erode the benefit of optimising competency for each task. At the end of the day, though, that's why many of us tend to aim at small companies: the pain is not amplified. The advice I used to give colleagues at large companies was not to try and fight the ocean; you just need to let it wash over you. Bottom-up change is so rare at large companies that it just burns out those who try and alienates the people they need to impress to move up and actually effect change. The truth is that even at a high level very people can really change things fundamentally. But maybe that's for the best. Fundamentally changing the way things work for thousands of people's livelihoods should be hard.

drdrek 3y ago

This feels like it was written in 1993

littlelady 3y ago

> "why did you need someone from outside the organization who doesn't know a damn thing about our work to come in and tell you how you're screwing up? I'll tell you for free! That is a breathtaking level of disconnection." There are times where external advice can be helpful, but it can also be a form of plausible deniability. Managers can display a "willingness" to improve a situation, without engaging with their team or changing their actions. I think a big part of this is ego, as stated in the post, but a lot of the times it's piss poor communication skills. The worst manager I've ever dealt had been very skilled engineer, but he suddenly found himself in a position where he had to actually listen to subordinates and mediate conflicts between departments. He simply did not. Mind you, this is not a large organization. Departments almost never talked to each other, even if they were on the same floor. Feedback was futile and met with hostility. Bright and motivated employees were quickly demoralized and retention was low.

consf 3y ago

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whatindaheck 3y ago

While this article resonates with my experience, it makes me want to consider trying to move into “leadership”. Like the author said, it’s usually a bunch of clowns who are paid way too much money to do jack. Sounds cushy if you’re willing to sell your soul. Which leads me to ask. How exactly do you begin such a journey? It doesn’t seem as if there’s a particular (useful) skill you need to have.