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I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a fo

I've dabbled in management a few times in my career. This meant attending manager-only meetings and trainings. I'll never forget one time when a manager in a focus group said something along the lines of, "The tech sector is going through a rough patch, so we can turn the screws on our employees and they'll have to take it because they will have a hard time trying to find a job somewhere else." This is at a company where most of the employees are on work visas, so losing their job can very rapidly escalate into having to leave the country in short order. After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction. I know not every manager is like that. I'd like to think I wasn't. But there are enough of them that think that way that legal protections often need to be there.

nine_zeros 2y ago
> After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." This is the reason why I always tell young engineers to treat companies with utmost business-only mentality. It's not that all managers are bad. It's that the company rewards psychopathic behaviors - that aren't easily apparent to humble people. Companies are merely out there squeezing and exploring employees. Employees should feel free to return the favor. In short, Fuck the corporations. They fired the first shot.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  > that aren't easily apparent to humble people. This is indeed a major problem. The stereotypical engineers is such a humble personality. A kind of almost idiot-savant syndrome.
- antimemetics 2y ago
  Corporations are a form of “slow” AI - this is literally a war against the machines
- bruce511 2y ago
  Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on. Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse. Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on. Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on. Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you. Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.) Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not. For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.
  - steelframe 2y ago
    I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001. I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
  - consteval 2y ago
    I disagree. The fundamental idea of a company causes this behavior. They, the company, actually doesn't have a choice. You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it. You might say "well you can be less exploitative" - but not really. Because you ALSO have to thrive in your market. Even if you are an angel sent from God to save corporate America, your competition isn't. They lie, they cheat, they steal. If you don't you're a sucker, and it's only a matter of time until your company goes under. Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time. And they don't actually know much about the company, they only know advertising. And they don't know much about the product either, because products are complex. Even domain-specific products, like, say, medical equipment - the buyers don't know shit. They know what the product should do, but do they know the materials are reliable? Do they know the power system is reliable? Do they know the software is written in a memory-safe manor? No, they don't. So you lie (advertise). And you steal (pay your employees a low wage). And you cheat (use capital to undercut competitors, sometimes selling at a loss in new markets). And if you say no, then you will be replaced by someone who does. Nobody has any choice in this system.
benjaminwootton 2y ago
In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions. Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.
- throwaway984393 2y ago
  The invisible hand of the market does not make shitty people with power become less shitty people with power.
alvah 2y ago
I had a similar experience with an HR manager in Australia, boasting about how they'd used a recent downturn to cut individuals' hourly rates by 10% (including many of my friends), while not reducing the charge-out rate to the client. Corporate management (as distinct from small business) selects for people like this.
crossroadsguy 2y ago
I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving in to any manager's pressure and still trying to maintain calm and composure avoiding direct conflict. It's like walking on egg shells.
- abhinai 2y ago
  I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    I have had 7 managers from India at big US companies over a 30 year span and 6 of them where like this. It is an interesting phenomenon, in another timeline I'd like to be a tech ethnographer.
  - potamic 2y ago
    Most people who have worked both in the west as well as in the country will say there is a stark difference in the superior-subordinate dynamic between these two places. Concepts of professional respect, upward feedback and personal boundaries are less evolved here. It's a byproduct of the region's culture which is inherently hierarchical. While there are places which actively eschew traditional ways, especially those that are part of global orgranizations, given the size of the industry there are many more where a strong hierarchy and subordination is unfortunately the norm.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    Basing the claim, "you're probably extrapolating from a small sample size" on only your experience, is extrapolating from a small sample size.
- 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jonathrg 2y ago
Sorry for the annoying language comment: your issue was not lack of scruples but presence of scruples.
- steelframe 2y ago
  Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
He's right, and I think we're seeing this done across the industry (especially FAANG). However, just because employees "have to take it" doesn't mean that it's better for the company to have employees that actively hate it and are just staying because of a lack of alternatives. Especially in a field where work output and especially quality is hard to measure, and the success of many companies hinged on motivated employees...
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  I always like analogies, eg: Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it. I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.
- pjerem 2y ago
  The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more. imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability. Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.
matwood 2y ago
This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.
fergie 2y ago
Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.
- zhengyi13 2y ago
  Normalize it now; take advantage of it later when there is some sort of benefit, however short-term/sighted it may be.
bitcharmer 2y ago
[flagged]
dools 2y ago
Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price". It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations. Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked). I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?". The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it. People be jerks yo.
- xivzgrev 2y ago
  Being a jerk extends all around. As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist. Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.
    - mulmen 2y ago
fullshark 2y ago
Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.
eric_cc 2y ago
> turn the screws on our employees This is gross.. > I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction. But so is this. I’d rather quit some crappy place than rely on legal protections.
geoelectric 2y ago
I had a manager relate to me overhearing almost that exact comment made in a manager meeting at a mid-size corp I worked for in 2008. He left in part because of that attitude, and I ultimately did too. It’s egregiously abusive.
kalyantm 2y ago
You pretty much summed up managers that have most of their employees on H1-B in the US. I know multiple managers that offload most of the work to the Asian immigrants on the H1-B visa, have them work 10+ hours a day and know that they can get them to do anything they want, because if they don't, they are scared that they can get fired and have to leave the country. I know multiple friends who silently work on weekends to potentially avoid being fired and leave the country!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nine_zeros 2y ago

> After I picked my jaw up off the floor I realized I simply lacked the scruples I'd need to be "one of them." This is the reason why I always tell young engineers to treat companies with utmost business-only mentality. It's not that all managers are bad. It's that the company rewards psychopathic behaviors - that aren't easily apparent to humble people. Companies are merely out there squeezing and exploring employees. Employees should feel free to return the favor. In short, Fuck the corporations. They fired the first shot.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
> that aren't easily apparent to humble people. This is indeed a major problem. The stereotypical engineers is such a humble personality. A kind of almost idiot-savant syndrome.
antimemetics 2y ago
Corporations are a form of “slow” AI - this is literally a war against the machines
bruce511 2y ago
Unfortunately the word "company" encompasses hundreds of millions of entities, of enormously different cultures, attitudes, ethics and so on. Personally, I think behavior does (and likely has to) evolve with size. Unfortunately bigger tends to be worse. Culture is also primarily a top-down flow. I'd the CEO is a screamer expect screamers all the way down and so on. Of course there are companies, too many of them, that behave badly. There are too many people who treat other people as nameless, expendable and exploitable. There are also many others, the ones that don't make the juicy comments on reddit, which behave well, treat people as people, and so on. Treating your work-place as a hostile environment can be emotionally and mentally draining. It can be counter-productive if the environment desires to support you. Equally, if your environment is hostile then at least be looking elsewhere. Not all companies are created the same so there are likely better options elsewhere (although getting those posts is harder because people tend not to leave.) Your advice rings true for many companies. But people stay in those places because they believe everywhere is the same. So a more nuanced advice might be to understand the culture and behavior where you work and decide if that's a culture you want to assimilate, and support, long term or not. For the record, the place where I work has never expected anyone to do emails etc out-of-hours and you'd be laughed at if you suggested people should behave otherwise.
- steelframe 2y ago
  I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001. I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
- consteval 2y ago
  I disagree. The fundamental idea of a company causes this behavior. They, the company, actually doesn't have a choice. You have to turn a profit and the only way to achieve that is exploitation. You have to take labor and pay less than it's worth and pocket the difference. There's no way around it. You might say "well you can be less exploitative" - but not really. Because you ALSO have to thrive in your market. Even if you are an angel sent from God to save corporate America, your competition isn't. They lie, they cheat, they steal. If you don't you're a sucker, and it's only a matter of time until your company goes under. Because consumers will choose the cheaper option almost every time. And they don't actually know much about the company, they only know advertising. And they don't know much about the product either, because products are complex. Even domain-specific products, like, say, medical equipment - the buyers don't know shit. They know what the product should do, but do they know the materials are reliable? Do they know the power system is reliable? Do they know the software is written in a memory-safe manor? No, they don't. So you lie (advertise). And you steal (pay your employees a low wage). And you cheat (use capital to undercut competitors, sometimes selling at a loss in new markets). And if you say no, then you will be replaced by someone who does. Nobody has any choice in this system.

benjaminwootton 2y ago

In a strong market the management and owners will have to pay more and improve conditions. Maybe some managers will be faster to exploit things when supply/demand turns in their favour, but pretty quickly the invisible hand of the market would have readjusted anyway.

throwaway984393 2y ago
The invisible hand of the market does not make shitty people with power become less shitty people with power.

alvah 2y ago

I had a similar experience with an HR manager in Australia, boasting about how they'd used a recent downturn to cut individuals' hourly rates by 10% (including many of my friends), while not reducing the charge-out rate to the client. Corporate management (as distinct from small business) selects for people like this.

crossroadsguy 2y ago

I am from India and this is very common thing from Indian managers whether they are in India or working abroad (and I am sure this is not limited to India but since I am from there I am sharing this example). It's just a thing. I often am a pariah at workplace when it comes to views on work-life balance. So I have learnt to never get into discussions about it and just shut up and keep my head down while never giving in to any manager's pressure and still trying to maintain calm and composure avoiding direct conflict. It's like walking on egg shells.

abhinai 2y ago
I've had Indian managers and never experienced this. You're probably extrapolating from a small sample size which may all be from same company / industry.
- sitkack 2y ago
  I have had 7 managers from India at big US companies over a 30 year span and 6 of them where like this. It is an interesting phenomenon, in another timeline I'd like to be a tech ethnographer.
- potamic 2y ago
  Most people who have worked both in the west as well as in the country will say there is a stark difference in the superior-subordinate dynamic between these two places. Concepts of professional respect, upward feedback and personal boundaries are less evolved here. It's a byproduct of the region's culture which is inherently hierarchical. While there are places which actively eschew traditional ways, especially those that are part of global orgranizations, given the size of the industry there are many more where a strong hierarchy and subordination is unfortunately the norm.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  Basing the claim, "you're probably extrapolating from a small sample size" on only your experience, is extrapolating from a small sample size.
2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jonathrg 2y ago

Sorry for the annoying language comment: your issue was not lack of scruples but presence of scruples.

steelframe 2y ago
Not annoying at all. I'm more annoyed by people just letting me keep making the same mistake without saying anything. In fact when I first wrote that something in my brain said maybe it wasn't right, so I looked up the word "scruples" and saw the definition "motivation deriving logically from ethical or moral principles that govern a person's thoughts and actions." I thought maybe that it might be a valid interpretation for the ethical or moral principles to be flawed in that context. What I should have done was look up examples of "lack of scruples" being used in sentences; that would have made it clear that I wasn't using it right.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

He's right, and I think we're seeing this done across the industry (especially FAANG). However, just because employees "have to take it" doesn't mean that it's better for the company to have employees that actively hate it and are just staying because of a lack of alternatives. Especially in a field where work output and especially quality is hard to measure, and the success of many companies hinged on motivated employees...

zmgsabst 2y ago
I always like analogies, eg: Skimping on feed because the penned milk cattle have to take it. I would actually appreciate if our systems were coherently sociopathic rather than chaotic due to individual personality faults. At least then, conditions “on the farm” might make sense rather than look like an expression of mental illness and unchecked antipathy.
pjerem 2y ago
The thing is that it’s not that important if it hurts the company long term. If the company is big enough, any of those "managers" have plenty of time to make a great career there for several years if not more. imo, that’s the issue when company’s ownership gets so diluted that nobody have personal interest anymore in the company’s long term viability. Heck when your company is owned by private equity, even the company itself becomes a line in some excel spreadsheet. And you’d better not get that conditional formatting turn to red.

matwood 2y ago

This has nothing to do with being a manager or not, it's just that many people are jerks. I've seen non-managers do something similar when they consider themselves hard to replace. It's unfortunate this is where we have ended up as a society.

fergie 2y ago

Ex-manager here as well. I have always been surprised at how many managers will jump at the opportunity to put pressure on employees, even when there is no real benefit to the manager themselves or the organisation.

zhengyi13 2y ago
Normalize it now; take advantage of it later when there is some sort of benefit, however short-term/sighted it may be.

bitcharmer 2y ago

[flagged]

dools 2y ago

Early on in my career when I was first put into the position of hiring both employees and contractors, a guy I was working with said "We can ask him for a better price and promise to give him a better deal on the next one", and I said "but we won't have any more work after this one" and he said "yeah I know but we can just tell him that to get a better price". It was one of the first times I realised that people are actively being jerks in business negotiations. Another time was when I put my prices up to $160/hour from $80/hour after I realised I wasn't making any money (in fact by my calculations I was losing $3/hour for every hour my staff worked). I didn't lose a single customer. They all just said "oh, right, well, okay when will you have it done?". The same guys who had been crying poor a couple of months prior about how they "just didn't have the budget" were now paying double the rate and they could totally afford it. People be jerks yo.

xivzgrev 2y ago
Being a jerk extends all around. As a manager I’ve had two employees tell HR that I was racist. The evidence? One I fired for performance, the other I had on a performance improvement plan. Mind you I had other minorities on my team in parallel that had no performance issues and strangely enough did not say I was a racist. Also one time the HR guy (who also doubled as office manager) ran a large scheme where he claimed employees were expensing things, he did it on their behalf and got reimbursed. I found this out after the fact where I was asked if I ever asked him to order laptops or ran up huge Uber bills.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  No idea why you're being down voted. I've had the very same experience once. Employee just sucked, after some nudges that went either ignored or just unnoticed I gave a very clear speech on where they're standing. Three months later I got him fired. He went to HR and claimed I was racist, and threatened with a lawyer. This really stressed me out for a good while, this was dragging along for weeks, with ugly mails and calls.
  - mulmen 2y ago

fullshark 2y ago

Yeah i got a peek at how the sausage gets made at the higher levels and I decided I needed to keep my HH costs down and reach FI(maybe)RE asap. Until that happened I was ultimately a wage slave, and that's how they wanted it, with a gun to my head in the form of rent/mortgage/kids's schooling whatever keeping me desperate to perform for them.

eric_cc 2y ago

> turn the screws on our employees This is gross.. > I also started looking into every legal protection I had available to me in my jurisdiction. But so is this. I’d rather quit some crappy place than rely on legal protections.

geoelectric 2y ago

I had a manager relate to me overhearing almost that exact comment made in a manager meeting at a mid-size corp I worked for in 2008. He left in part because of that attitude, and I ultimately did too. It’s egregiously abusive.

kalyantm 2y ago

You pretty much summed up managers that have most of their employees on H1-B in the US. I know multiple managers that offload most of the work to the Asian immigrants on the H1-B visa, have them work 10+ hours a day and know that they can get them to do anything they want, because if they don't, they are scared that they can get fired and have to leave the country. I know multiple friends who silently work on weekends to potentially avoid being fired and leave the country!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]