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Managers got way to much power over their subordinates. The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-

Managers got way to much power over their subordinates. The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-kissing it is not healthy for a company. I guess Netflix could make the rule bilateral? "Should we hire your boss right now?" being asked each quarter.

29athrowaway 2y ago
But your manager operates in a jurisdiction where defamation law exists. Defame someone verbally and it is slander, defame someone in writing and it is libel. A defamatory statement must be false. When psychopaths ascend, they will abuse their position and assassinate the character of people that cannot be used as pawns. When I say psychopaths, note that only a subset of managers are psychopaths, but psychopathic traits are favored by organizations and they are more likely to become managers, and that subset is highly toxic. Freedom of expression has limits, defamation is one of them. You cannot just say whatever you want and cause financial losses to others. The fiction created by a psychopathic manager through manipulation can cross legal lines. And it is time to put an end to this practice that plagues engineering organizations. It is time to let the justice system do its work. We have enough technology to automatically detect problematic behaviors like sycophancy and other types of manipulation with AI and take that as a factor in evaluations, or take administrative action. In this way, we can finally let people focus on doing their job without the distractions of office politics. i.e.: analyze the sentiment of words used with peers vs managers and if sentiment diverges too much then fire the sycophant, and if a manager only has sycophants as reports, fire the manager too. And while we are at it, completely destroy the culture of lying through idioms such as "maybe later", "I will think about it" instead of simply saying "no" as they are predictors for dishonesty which ultimately it is a waste of time. Being a manager should require a license and manipulative behavior past certain limits should get it permanently revoked. We need to make a piñata out of the concept of being a professional liar in an engineering organization as a source of income, we are better than this.
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  I’d love to try and detect sycophancy with ai
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    Sentiment analysis has existed for decades.
- mplewis 2y ago
  Congratulations, you’ve come up with the worst managerial policy I’ve heard proposed all year.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    Might be the worst but at least it is better than the ones that came before.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Employee evaluation is not defamation. Boss evaluation is called 360 and has been around forever. I regularly submitted my direct reports to my boss for candid comments about my performance. It's part of a healthy culture. Also, maybe we're all ICs here, but your boss has a boss who is asking the same damn question about them as they are about you. And up it goes until you reach the board, YC, etc, who just has a different kind of boss.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    Feedback that is based on evidence is not defamation. False statements that damage your reputation are defamation. And managers can engage in defamation.
- infamouscow 2y ago
  Short of offering realistic suggestions, this is at best wishful thinking. In real life, virtually nothing you said is remotely true.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    About psychopathy and manipulative behavior at work, you can read about this here: "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work" ISBN: 978-0061147890 "The No Asshole Rule" ISBN: 978-0-446-52656-2 The rest is my own prescription of how to detect and fix the problem. We have the technology.
rayiner 2y ago
It’s surprising this attitude (and stuff like stack ranking) is so prevalent in tech. Tech workers are professionals, not burger flippers. You create all sorts of incentives that are bad for the institution long term, like discouraging cooperation, discouraging people from owing up to mistakes, acknowledging when ideas don’t work, etc.
- sharts 2y ago
  At big companies everyone is a burger flipper in the end, it seems. But that’s part of the deal when joining these massive orgs — good pay at the expense of being a cog.
- miohtama 2y ago
  Even if the professionals are not burger flippers, they might lack the sufficient motivation to push the company forward. Here is a good tweet from ex-Googler https://x.com/mbacarella/status/1804543158912754021?t=qGi3APKNFHDW7oaR2tCN7Q&s=19 https://x.com/mbacarella/status/1804543158912754021?t=qGi3AP... Positive incentives can get you only so far. For the organisation it might be better to get rid of these people at the cost of low morale, to ensure that the company stays competitive.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  The purpose of tech workers is to increase the ROI on compute capital for the 0.1% that own most all stocks. This group has captured all the technology induced productivity gains since the 70s from nearly all of society as a %, so their system is working extremely well on average (for them).
CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
> The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-kissing it is not healthy for a company. My guess is that if you work at Netflix, you've done at least a bit of research into the culture, and they aren't exactly secretive about how fire-happy they are, so hopefully most know what they're getting themselves into. https://www.dice.com/career-advice/netflix-company-culture-termination https://www.dice.com/career-advice/netflix-company-culture-t... (2018) > Specifically, Netflix has something called the “keeper test,” which is a measure for management to fire or retain staff. It's very simple; a manager is supposed to ask: "If one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would I try hard to keep them from leaving?" > CEO Reed Hastings and then-HR Chief Patty McCord wanted to encourage “independent decision making” among employees, but also retain only those who were “highly effective.” As a result, they nurtured a culture in which even longtime employees were ruthlessly evaluated; if they were no longer the best at their role (at least in the eyes of their manager), they were out. > crux of these tests is to help managers decide (as Hastings did with McCord) if they would fight to keep an employee around. If the answer is no, that employee is terminated or asked to leave. Netflix’s 360 tool provides broad context for personnel decisions. It’s meant to encourage objectivity, but it also seems to produce obscure, sometimes startling changes in the hierarchy. > Simply put, you can’t copy it, because you’re not Reed Hastings, and your company isn't Netflix. Nor can you likely become him. Employees describe him as a man “unencumbered by emotion.” Maybe Netflix is successful because of it, maybe they're successful despite of it. They don't seem to at least have any issues recruiting, despite widespread knowledge of the conditions.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  Paying salaries in the p99 certainly helps keep the hiring pipeline healthy
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  > Employees describe him as a man “unencumbered by emotion.” Classic example of sociopaths rising to the top
  - 2y ago
pllbnk 2y ago
But it wouldn't help to cut the headcount sufficiently if the question was reversed. I think that Netflix is dying and they need to extract the last drops of value for the shareholders. As a technology company, they were among the first to solve large-scale streaming but now everyone's caught up, so they have nothing to show for.

29athrowaway 2y ago

But your manager operates in a jurisdiction where defamation law exists. Defame someone verbally and it is slander, defame someone in writing and it is libel. A defamatory statement must be false. When psychopaths ascend, they will abuse their position and assassinate the character of people that cannot be used as pawns. When I say psychopaths, note that only a subset of managers are psychopaths, but psychopathic traits are favored by organizations and they are more likely to become managers, and that subset is highly toxic. Freedom of expression has limits, defamation is one of them. You cannot just say whatever you want and cause financial losses to others. The fiction created by a psychopathic manager through manipulation can cross legal lines. And it is time to put an end to this practice that plagues engineering organizations. It is time to let the justice system do its work. We have enough technology to automatically detect problematic behaviors like sycophancy and other types of manipulation with AI and take that as a factor in evaluations, or take administrative action. In this way, we can finally let people focus on doing their job without the distractions of office politics. i.e.: analyze the sentiment of words used with peers vs managers and if sentiment diverges too much then fire the sycophant, and if a manager only has sycophants as reports, fire the manager too. And while we are at it, completely destroy the culture of lying through idioms such as "maybe later", "I will think about it" instead of simply saying "no" as they are predictors for dishonesty which ultimately it is a waste of time. Being a manager should require a license and manipulative behavior past certain limits should get it permanently revoked. We need to make a piñata out of the concept of being a professional liar in an engineering organization as a source of income, we are better than this.

jncfhnb 2y ago
I’d love to try and detect sycophancy with ai
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Sentiment analysis has existed for decades.
mplewis 2y ago
Congratulations, you’ve come up with the worst managerial policy I’ve heard proposed all year.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Might be the worst but at least it is better than the ones that came before.
jvanderbot 2y ago
Employee evaluation is not defamation. Boss evaluation is called 360 and has been around forever. I regularly submitted my direct reports to my boss for candid comments about my performance. It's part of a healthy culture. Also, maybe we're all ICs here, but your boss has a boss who is asking the same damn question about them as they are about you. And up it goes until you reach the board, YC, etc, who just has a different kind of boss.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Feedback that is based on evidence is not defamation. False statements that damage your reputation are defamation. And managers can engage in defamation.
infamouscow 2y ago
Short of offering realistic suggestions, this is at best wishful thinking. In real life, virtually nothing you said is remotely true.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  About psychopathy and manipulative behavior at work, you can read about this here: "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work" ISBN: 978-0061147890 "The No Asshole Rule" ISBN: 978-0-446-52656-2 The rest is my own prescription of how to detect and fix the problem. We have the technology.

rayiner 2y ago

It’s surprising this attitude (and stuff like stack ranking) is so prevalent in tech. Tech workers are professionals, not burger flippers. You create all sorts of incentives that are bad for the institution long term, like discouraging cooperation, discouraging people from owing up to mistakes, acknowledging when ideas don’t work, etc.

sharts 2y ago
At big companies everyone is a burger flipper in the end, it seems. But that’s part of the deal when joining these massive orgs — good pay at the expense of being a cog.
miohtama 2y ago
Even if the professionals are not burger flippers, they might lack the sufficient motivation to push the company forward. Here is a good tweet from ex-Googler https://x.com/mbacarella/status/1804543158912754021?t=qGi3APKNFHDW7oaR2tCN7Q&s=19 https://x.com/mbacarella/status/1804543158912754021?t=qGi3AP... Positive incentives can get you only so far. For the organisation it might be better to get rid of these people at the cost of low morale, to ensure that the company stays competitive.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
The purpose of tech workers is to increase the ROI on compute capital for the 0.1% that own most all stocks. This group has captured all the technology induced productivity gains since the 70s from nearly all of society as a %, so their system is working extremely well on average (for them).

CaptainOfCoit 2y ago

> The looming one-sided threat of being instant-fired cultivates such a psychotic inducing culture of ass-kissing it is not healthy for a company. My guess is that if you work at Netflix, you've done at least a bit of research into the culture, and they aren't exactly secretive about how fire-happy they are, so hopefully most know what they're getting themselves into. https://www.dice.com/career-advice/netflix-company-culture-termination https://www.dice.com/career-advice/netflix-company-culture-t... (2018) > Specifically, Netflix has something called the “keeper test,” which is a measure for management to fire or retain staff. It's very simple; a manager is supposed to ask: "If one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would I try hard to keep them from leaving?" > CEO Reed Hastings and then-HR Chief Patty McCord wanted to encourage “independent decision making” among employees, but also retain only those who were “highly effective.” As a result, they nurtured a culture in which even longtime employees were ruthlessly evaluated; if they were no longer the best at their role (at least in the eyes of their manager), they were out. > crux of these tests is to help managers decide (as Hastings did with McCord) if they would fight to keep an employee around. If the answer is no, that employee is terminated or asked to leave. Netflix’s 360 tool provides broad context for personnel decisions. It’s meant to encourage objectivity, but it also seems to produce obscure, sometimes startling changes in the hierarchy. > Simply put, you can’t copy it, because you’re not Reed Hastings, and your company isn't Netflix. Nor can you likely become him. Employees describe him as a man “unencumbered by emotion.” Maybe Netflix is successful because of it, maybe they're successful despite of it. They don't seem to at least have any issues recruiting, despite widespread knowledge of the conditions.

coffeebeqn 2y ago
Paying salaries in the p99 certainly helps keep the hiring pipeline healthy
red-iron-pine 2y ago
> Employees describe him as a man “unencumbered by emotion.” Classic example of sociopaths rising to the top
- 2y ago

pllbnk 2y ago

But it wouldn't help to cut the headcount sufficiently if the question was reversed. I think that Netflix is dying and they need to extract the last drops of value for the shareholders. As a technology company, they were among the first to solve large-scale streaming but now everyone's caught up, so they have nothing to show for.