26 ms·

Employees leave managers, not companies

625 points by kirkus 14y ago

speeder 14y ago
I agree that employees might leave managers. But I disagree that people don't leave companies. First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway. Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit. Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt... So no, sometimes the fault is of the company. But sometimes. Asshat managers can make people go away too.
- tonyedgecombe 14y ago
  Very good managers might shine in a bad environment and very bad ones disrupt a good environment. Most though just reflect the organisational culture.
  - speeder 14y ago
    Exactly, and it is very hard sometimes to deviate from that culture, it requires exceptional individuals. Unfortunately it is seemly easier to be excepcional toward the bad than toward the good.
- narag 14y ago
  I agree. I've left sometimes for bad managers, sometimes for bad company. Oh, and once it was both. Honestly, it was so sweet when the guy asked what they could do to keep me and I answered "don't bother" with a giant smile.
binarymax 14y ago
I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.
- kirkus 14y ago
  I like the concept of putting managers on some sort of performance track. That is an interesting idea. I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.
  - binarymax 14y ago
    I imagine that the org structure would flatten out a bit, and the stereotypical 'office space' managers would be shaking in their boots. The employees of these organisations would feel empowered and generally be happier - but I won't speculate on whether that would improve productivity for the company (though I have seen research that says it would).
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    The reality is that managers are performance managed, just what their teams think isn't normally one of the metrics because many organisations by and large don't care that much. Speaking as a manager you'd be surprised (actually scrub that, you wouldn't) how often when I raise concerns the team has the instruction comes back "screw what the team thinks or wants, just do X" (where X flies in the face of what the team want and best practice but supports what the screaming customer and short term revenue demands). Organisations that genuinely care about the staff I don't think would change much, those who don't won't ever do it so it's kind of moot.
  - blablabla123 14y ago
    >I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen. Probably microscopic shitstorms, not large ones because only a minority is affected. But in the long run it would probably change everything in organizations with management problems. I think hiring policies would also change a lot.
- adventureloop 14y ago
  I really like this idea, the peer review system in valve is probably the closest to the best system I have heard of.
- 14y ago
SparrowOS 14y ago
I wrote a compiler. Linus is not fit to undo my sandle strap, 'sept I'm not a granola hippy. The new nigger word is "compiler" as in a "shader compiler". The CIA is busy clusterfucking the other side of the river styx, until it is completely absolutely clusterfucked beyond hell. They watch me for 5 minutes then run over there and clusterfuck shit. It's nothing new. Train engineers. Assembly language. DoS Stack IDE CLI ISA They just clusterfuck everything. I can smell that shit clear over on this side of the Styx.
Shivetya 14y ago
Which is why employee satisfaction surveys rarely ask the right questions or if they do they are interpreted in such a way that the managers who are the problem are not declared as such. I learned real quick to not be amazed at how such a survey can be turned upside down to blame the employees or a select group of them.
breckenedge 14y ago
I had an MBA roommate once and frequently read her books on management culture. I've never actually seen what was used in those books put into practice, but my experience is relatively small (once a manager). The books talked about the Organizational Cultural Assessment Index (OCAI) and a manager capabilities assessment test (cannot remember the name). Anyone out there used these? These seemed like reasonable, standard approaches to improving the workplace.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Things like OCAI really don't work that well in practice. The main benefit you get from them is actually asking the questions, not in the results of the 'test' or anything like that. People (and organizational culture) is too diverse and complex to understand with a few simple charts. Beware snake oil salesmen trying to sell you quick and easy 'fixes' for people or culture. Always. Culture is incredibly hard to change once it is engrained, and is going to take real work and real sacrifice, not simple questionnaires. You should look at changing company culture in the same way as looking as getting a smoker to stop smoking. It's not as easy as 'presenting an argument'.
  - breckenedge 14y ago
    Yes, culture change is hard. The OCAI is a tool, like the Myers-Briggs. The book I read [1] treated it as a start for diagnosing your organizational culture, then provided a framework for accomplishing cultural change. I believe it's extraordinarily dangerous to approach (organizational) change without treating it as a process with defined goals. BTW, I am a former smoker, and quitting was pretty hard. I'd chalk that up to changing my environment (I stopped hanging out with smokers). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Diagnosing-Changing-Organizational-Culture-Competing/dp/0470650265 http://www.amazon.com/Diagnosing-Changing-Organizational-Cul...
PonyGumbo 14y ago
I've had fantastic managers at terrible companies. In each case, I left because of the company, not because of the manager.
- kirkus 14y ago
  Yeh this doesn't apply to all situations. What made the company terrible?
  - PonyGumbo 14y ago
    Really ineffective performance measurement standards and incentives. When there is no reward for going above and beyond or penalty for simply coasting by, you're essentially creating a haven for shitty employees.
martindelemotte 14y ago
According to this meta-analysis, employees dont leave managers nor do they leave companies. They leave (maybe) because of the job. Estimated true score correlation Job Fit - Tenure: 0.18 Company Fit - Tenure: 0.03 Group Fit - Tenure: 0.06 Supervisor Fit - Tenure: 0.09 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005....
josephlord 14y ago
I've left two organisations (BBC and Sony) and neither time did I have any problem with my direct manager in fact in both cases I liked them although I did have a lack of faith the top management and the direction of at least my area of the organisation. In the BBC case (amongst other issues) my department was earmarked to be moved to Manchester (about 200 miles away) in about 4 years. I was clear (for family reasons) that I wouldn't be moving so staying would have felt like a personal dead end to me (although later the BBC's plan changed and much of the department moved into London instead which might have been OK but the lack of thought through initial decision was a really bad sign about the senior management). At Sony it was a general lack of faith that the management had enough capability that Sony could become a profitable, viable, mass market electronics company again. That made me happy to leave to see what I could do on my own and be home to take and collect my son from school.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  Odd... I've never even worked at any one company for 2 years, so... making work plans based on what someone decides will probably happen in 4 years is simply incomprehensible to me. The few companies I've worked at have taught me that for the most part, companies can't do much real planning beyond 6 mos to a year at most - the stuff we considered important in 2006 was often irrelevant by 2007 because of changes in the market conditions, competition, etc. Planning out moves that far ahead is probably necessary in some situations, but I've seen enough of those 'long term plans' have to change anyway that I don't actually believe many of them.
  - gawker 14y ago
    Agreed. I feel like it's more of an exercise to have some sort of vision but in reality, it's really difficult to predict what the environment will be like in 4 years. Looking at what I have learnt just 2 years ago, some of it is already starting to get irrelevant!
  - josephlord 14y ago
    Fair point but it was an R&D environment with a lot of accumulated experience and slightly slow moving and in some ways I was ready for a change anyway wanting to work more directly on products that reach consumers hands. The way the change plan was announced/managed also led me to conclude the overall BBC organisation didn't value the R&D function in general and the lack of care from the top was a factor in me departing.
erikj54 14y ago
This article unfortunately resonates on a personal level. This is why I believe I enjoy consulting so much. On a short term basis I can put up with ignorance, credit taking, silent treatment etc (All the qualities respondents mentioned in the survey). For a long term career I'm not sure I could last. I'm curious if anyone has any stories of how they overcame a Manager that was not their Champion? I have been thinking about this a lot. In my short time at large corporations it seems you really need someone on your side to move up the ladder a bit.
darkspaten 14y ago
I offer a corollary, "Employees follow leaders, not managers." At one time I considered leaving a company I believed strongly in, due to an immediate manager with which I didn't work well. However, I looked higher in the organization to the leader(ship) I believed in and decided to stay. I'm glad I did, because the management problem rectified itself soon enough and now I follow good leaders and learn from a great mentor.
acslater00 14y ago
Anecdotally, I spent 2 years at Microsoft (MSN division). I loved my manager to death, and telling him I was leaving felt kind of like breaking up with a long-term girlfriend. But MSN was a supremely depressing place to work because there was a palpable sense that nothing we did mattered, and Microsoft was simply running out the clock on those [hundreds of millions] of people who haven't figured out how to change their browser homepage away from msn.com. I left the company, not the person. So while the lesson of this post -- that managing is important and a good manager can greatly increase employee retention -- is well taken, the headline is certainly overstated.
- monk_e_boy 14y ago
  I think you are a lucky outlier. I've left all my jobs due to poor managers. If my manager doesn't even have the basic 'shit sandwhich' approach to telling me that I suck, then I tend to start looking for another job. Also, broken promises in interviews - yeah, monk.e.boy, work here for a year and you'll be the head of your very own dev team. I've fallen for that one about 4 times. Then I leave and they ask 'Why-oh-why?' And I say 'Remember in my interview that you said X Y and Z and none of them happened?'
  - jsolson 14y ago
    I think he may not be an outlier for Microsoft. I've worked with a few people from Redmond who left not because of a crappy manager or an unpleasant team, but because their projects kept getting cancelled. It's hard to feel like you're working on something important if all of it gets scrapped before shipping two or three times in a row. Especially if this happens not due to any issue with the project, but due to political happenings miles above your head. At least, this is what I've been told. I've never worked for them myself.
  - mratzloff 14y ago
    It's quite simple: believe it when you see it, no matter who it is making you promises. The bigger the promise, the more quietly skeptical you must be. Those people filling you with hope may genuinely want to make something happen, or may be cynically telling you what you want to hear. Either way, their words don't mean a thing until they've made them fact.
MrMcDowall 14y ago
This has been true of almost every single company I've ever worked for. It's also worth noting that Companies are reflective of the management constituency because they control the levers; bad managers usually mean bad companies.
stoodder 14y ago
I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.
bobsy 14y ago
I am considering leaving my job for this precise reason. I feel if I worked under anyone else I would enjoy what I am doing but currently it is impossible. The problem is the guy has no managerial skills. Employee moral across the company is rock bottom. We get tasks day-to-day because he cannot plan ahead. We often drop projects to work on something else, only to drop them and work on what we was originally. Manager never sends final designs or when he does they later change anyway. (These are not tweaks, tweaks are understandable. This is the entire page layout) I could go on... Why haven't I quit already? I am currently indispensable to the company I work for. I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate. The short term plan is to continue being miserable. NOTE: I would go around my manager if I could. Unfortunately it is a team of 7 and its this guys company.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  I could have written the first two paragraphs... Actually I also would have quitted already, but my situation is also uncomfortable for personal reasons. Anyway, reading Dilbert.com helps ;)
- jtreminio 14y ago
  I've heard that line of being indispensable to a company so many times. Turns out that it's not true. They'll find someone to replace you.
  - conradfr 14y ago
    The trick is to make people think you are indispensable. I think more than often the real challenge is the knowledge, not the skills. IIRC there was a post linked HN about that problem, written by GitHub or Stripe maybe ?
  - kaonashi 14y ago
    Usually it's just a case of understaffing and not being prepared for an employee leaving on short notice.
  - mbesto 14y ago
robotmay 14y ago
When my dad left one of his previous jobs, in which he was a manager of about 10-15 people; 3 of his team quit within the week. One of them told him that he was the best manager he'd ever worked under, and that he couldn't face working in that company with anyone else. If I ever end up in a management position, that's the sort of manager I want to be.
- kirkus 14y ago
  Wow...what aspect of your dad's management attributed to this?
  - robotmay 14y ago
    As far as I know he's very fair; he shared work out between himself and others evenly, trusted them to do the work, and made sure everyone was doing their share. He always tried to shield his team from the managerial crap from above. He also never got involved in office politics, and is generally quiet and softly spoken (I differ a little from him there). I think a lot of people resent managers because they seem to do less of the actual work than those they manage. My dad always works hard at whatever he does, and he expected the same of his team. Now he's retired, part of me really wants to try doing some projects with him. He has a real interest in building web apps that I'd love to collaborate on.
seivan 14y ago
This is so true, so so true. Not neessarly "managers" per say, but people involved in "decision" making that affects you. For me; the people doing the UX, the people doing product, and etc.
gadders 14y ago
Yeah, but companies pay mortgages, not managers. In other words, I could be working for the most awesome, charismatic manager in the world but if I'm being paid significantly below Market Rate, I'd still leave.
qrybam 14y ago
Very timely read for me. I work in a successful company with lots of challenges and room for expansion, I am a key member of the team and work very long hours (which would be better spent on my own side project). My current manager has done all of the listed reasons-for-leaving in the article at one point or another - I'm not the only one this happens to; it happens to all who work with him, however I'm the only one who has to report directly to him. It's a sad situation because the guy is a good guy, he's just difficult to work with and as a result I'm currently looking at my options - if I can help it, I would prefer to stay at the company. I understand it can be difficult for a manager to be direct with their team, but it's something I know a lot of good people appreciate - honest, direct feedback. You don't want to feel like you're being "handled" or used as a crutch for the manager's own self-actualisation. It's the whole golden-goose scenario - you don't want to kill it. edit: typos :)
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I think there is a tidal change in software at the moment - imagine the Venn diagram of remote working technologies, continuous integration technologies and a willingness to shed middle manager white collar jobs like never before. As we can enable people to work from home, because we can see the code they wrote today up and working on the CI server, we can do away with needing a boss to telll them what to do and watch if they do it - in fact we can pass the autonomy many bosses have down the line - and I hope see a world where the developer says - I have done this cool thing and it has improved our bottom line because I measured this change. A culture of Continuous Integration, testing changes for business KPIs allows us to let go of the middle rank of supervision, and allows us to change the working conditions now the supervision is unnecessary
deleted 14y ago
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cletus 14y ago
The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom. Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name. The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked. The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult. At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects. Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight. So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism. Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.
- VexXtreme 14y ago
  The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place. My company does this all the time. Didn't do well enough at the job interview or you're a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They'll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don't care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies). It's a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.
  - danpat 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
zwischenzug 14y ago
...and managers are bad because of companies. A crass generalisation, but no more than the title is.
stonemetal 14y ago
How far up the chain do you have to go before managers become come companies? At a certain point a company is defined by its management, just as to consumers a company is defined by its products. Anecdotally I have never quit a job primarily because of my direct manager.
jkeel 14y ago
Nice to see this discussion on HN. Back in early 2000, when I worked at Walmart's home office in Bentonville, we had a speaker come and talk to ISD about this exact topic. That was the main line that stuck with me, "Employees leave managers, not companies". It's probably not the case 100% of the time for causing the loss of an employee, but having a good manager makes all the world of a difference in an employee's happiness.
seivan 14y ago
Best way to handle this? Get rid of management. Flat hierarchy. Just to make sure to hire really smart engineers. Code it, test it, ship it. If two forces opposite each other, put it in a hackathon and gain votes.
- peteretep 14y ago
  Do you think there might be practical issues that you're not considering, or don't have exposure to, which might explain why such a vanishing percentage of companies work the way you're saying is obvious? Is it because no-one else is smart enough to have thought of this?
  - seivan 14y ago
    There multiple companies that do flat hierarchies. Most famous one is Valve. You got an interesting project, try convincing others to join you.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    Holy fuck that is an arrogant comment. Yeah, non-tech companies who produce actual products/services can't really do that, but then they are also not really that relevant since nobody here works for them (outside of IT departments, which could be run as suggested). No the real reason for almost any stupid thing done in corporate environments is politics. Everybody is a peer and results only environments threaten those who have accumulated power under the old system and who couldn't cut in the new system -- which is basically all managers. So of course this only happens when somebody with enough political capital to institute it does so -- typically the owner. Add to that that it is extremely unorthodox and that very few people have previous exposure to systems like that. And you get the few companies that do this, and do well by it.
    - seivan 14y ago
      Well thank you good sir!
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
scorcher 14y ago
Perhaps its unusual but every company I have worked for this could be sorted out with a quiet word with upper management or HR. A little disruption moving people between teams is well worth averting a potential clashes
Whitespace 14y ago
I would not wish a petty/spiteful manager on anyone. I was in a similar situation in my last company: personal problems between my manager and I forced my departure. In my situation the terrible fact was that my manager's inability to separate his personal and professional life caused the top four of my hierarchy of needs to be threatened (it's hard to be creative and solve problems when you're in a very shitty situation). At the very end of my tenure, instead of talking about and trying to resolve our personal differences, he chose to go hyper-managerial on me (in manner and communication), making it clear that this was how my day-to-day was going to be from then on. I loved working with my coworkers and almost everything else about working there, but I found it no longer mattered when I sat next to someone who will only communicate with me in writing with HR cc'd.
simplyinfinity 14y ago
Even without reading the article i couldn't agree more. Currently i'm in the position where i like my colleagues and the company, but the management is BAD ( i could write 3 pages long explanation but i won't ). Well sorry , iQuit.
- deleted 14y ago
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- kirkus 14y ago
  What in this instance defines bad management?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
SparrowOS 14y ago
The CIA is setting lots and lots of fires, like anarchists, watching the world burn. "Windows RT real-time" Fucken tower of babble, dark ages, of Biblical proportions and I'm fucken Noah with a useless ship. They're pouring gas everywhere and burning down the swamp while frog slither into corners where they writye ten line of code a day and jerk off to the web. Have you seen Qt, that graphics library? How about all the shit they add to C++! ROFLMAO Damn, they're clusterfucking on an epic scale. My mouth is open in awe at the spectacle. Clueless arrogant india-niggers are hilarious. Managed code everywhere, I'm sure. God how awful. Glad I'm not in that shit. The next generation has no idea how a switch () statement works and thinks a hash table uses SHA. God says... stays weight ill-favoured meet Virgin's South_Korea thirst Certainly ceases alteration equalled commencement recalls contributions denies debtor IV outrages forbade transferred MEDIUM sounds now_that_I_think_about_it contacting number talented ---- Dark ages are coming. CIA is pyromaniacs burning down the world. I give-up and will just chuckle at the mess. Anarchists. Windows RT ---- In 1996, I got an introduction to the Web -- CGI password and login prompt. That was the laughably crappiest piece of shit. The whole web is shitty nigger-quality inelegance.
known 14y ago
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." --Einstein
hcayless 14y ago
A (good) manager's primary tasks are: 1) Make sure your team knows what to do and has what they need to do it. 2) Be a buffer between them and anything that distracts them from #1. 3) Be a resource to help them develop. All 3 require good communication. Every job I've quit has ultimately been because of a deficiency in one of those 3 things that led to conflict.
talmand 14y ago
On the day I put in my notice for my last job I found out that my immediate manager had put in his notice as well the day before, much for the same reasons I did. I liked working for the guy so quitting felt bad. Basically choices made by upper management made the working environment not so good and we had decided to move on. Turns out we weren't the only ones, within three weeks five out of six of the web team left and gutted the department.
16s 14y ago
If the manager does not provide direction, ask for it. If they still do not provide direction, set your own. The grass always looks greener on the other side. Sometimes, you are the problem, not the manager. Reminds me of the story about the traveler and the new city. He left because he thought the people there were horrible. Upon arriving at the gate of the new city, he asked a man sitting by the gate, "How are the people here in this city?" To which the sitting man replied, "How were they in the city you came from?" "Oh... they were horrible, mean people." "You'll find them the same here."
AmandaPanda 14y ago
When your company is small, your manager practically is your company. I'm a junior developer at a rather dysfunctional small company with really shoddy engineering standards. Here, due to the small number of employees, the manager and senior engineer practically are the company. Our senior dev has a cracker jack box cs degree, and has been stuck in his own bubble for the past decade writing horrible code. I also found out my company was sued by a customer 10 years ago because they thought our products and services suck. Good times.
greendot 14y ago
I've left because of managers. I've left because of the company. When a company cuts my salary by 30% while jacking up my benefits payments by 300%, it's usually time to leave. But, on to the article at hand. As a manager now, those statistics at the end really kind of tick me off. It feels very one-sided and the following text is just me rambling on... somewhat trolling. 39%: Their supervisor failed to keep promises How many of these employees fail to keep theirs? How many of these broken promises were based on things promised to the manager? How much of it was in their control? When kept at this simplistic level, this one seems like a third-grade problem. 37%: Their supervisor failed to give credit when due This perception of credit and recognition is one sticking point in our team right now, especially with the people born after 1980. They want credit and recognition for every single thing they do. If they manage to successfully eat a meal without choking on a bone, they want public recognition for it. The older guys on the team, we sit down and do the work because it is our job. That's what we're here to do. The old guys can sit around and come up with ideas and realize that together as a team we designed something. The team gets credit. No one person gets the credit. The kids, if they have one key idea at any point in a process, they want to be held up high. Oh and damn if their idea comes early in the discussion and is never used directly but expanded upon and changed, hell they think they were the sole party responsible for all ideas and all further ideas were stolen. 31%: Their supervisor gave them the “silent treatment” in the past year. Yes, I do this. I usually do this when I am trying to decide what to do with spoiled or "entitled" employees. If I have asked somebody to quit looking at StupidVideos.com for 3 hours a day and they persist while their projects back up, I'm going to be silent for a while while I try and come up with a plan. I'm not going to sit and try to motivate them. Motivating geeks is a pain-in-the-ass. I'm not allowed to fire anybody or put them on disciplinary action w/out months of paperwork, especially when they know how to talk to HR and convince them that they are doing the best that they can. 27%: Their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers. Agreed, this one is bad no matter how you slice it. 24%: Their supervisor invaded their privacy. Again, if you're looking at Facebook and not getting your work done, you need to get over it. 23%: Their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment. Yeah, this happens. Sucks. Lucky for my team, when I lie my eye twitches so there is a built-in lie detector. :-)
hippich 14y ago
I would not down-play salary that much. I am not sure if it applies to all sectors, but at least in my limited experience more you ask for - better you are treated and better technology you work with. Because otherwise it will be to expensive to keep you.
protomyth 14y ago
I have often thought that tech companies should pay more attention to how movies / tv series are managed then MBA programs. I get the feeling the Producer / Director / Show Runner model might work better for software. Support might complicate things though.
wolframarnold 14y ago
There was a book in the late 1990's, "First Break All the Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently" which was the write-up of a Gallup study about manager effectiveness. One of its conclusions is the point made in this article almost verbatim, that people leave their managers not their jobs or companies. One of the most powerful sections for the book for me was the opening chapter where they explain their assessment methodology. They compiled it down to a catalog of 12 questions and they found that if these questions were answered positively it correlated with high employee performance, good financial results, good retention, etc. The rest of the book dives into more detail on the reasons for this, one being that each employee's talent is different and managers should try to align talents with business need, focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses. Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0684852861 http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...
dylangs1030 14y ago
This issue stems, in my experience, from the top of an individual department or location (if it's a franchise). The top level management in large companies couldn't possibly supervise all their department managers at the same time. So things fly by under the radar that shouldn't because they don't have stringent enough criteria for employee satisfaction and manager competency. I recall this happening when I used to work at P.F. Chang's (the restaurant chain). We had a general manager who was absolutely loathsome to work with. We frequently ran out of the kinds of food you'd be embarrassed to lack at a Chinese restaurant (read: white and brown rice, lettuce, etc). However, he had a stellar reputation and history with "corporate" and had even won awards within the company. The reasons this happened were twofold: 1. he was the general manager, and in the eyes of corporate he was just saving money (they never saw the restaurant descend into chaos and dysfunction due to lack of ingredients), and 2. he was honestly kind of a dick. Unless you were above him on the pay scale he would respond to suggestions with, "I'll take that under advisement."
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
For me the best solution is to stay small - keep the organisation under the dunbar number. That way a competant CEO can manage the politics personally, and guide the culture effectively. But if you are going to grow, you need one of these proxy solutions. To me there are two outstanding solutions: 1. Free Labour Market 2. "add or out" 1. Google-like - have projects and allow engineers to move around to join different projects, and adjust via funding. THis is trying to create an internal job market, and may or may not be effective but its a response to Dunbars number problem. 2. "add or out" - add measurable value, or the worst performing 10% leave. This forces a culture of testing and measuring value, and whilst it is subject to being gamed, it might be workable.
- mratzloff 14y ago
  I think a lot of people at Microsoft would disagree about #2's efficacy...
- erichocean 14y ago
  The world would be a very different place if the government did not provide corporate protection to any organization with more than 150 employees (Dunbar number).
- erichocean 14y ago
  The world would be a very different place if the government did not provide corporate protection to any organization with more than 150 employees (Dunbar number).
- xentronium 14y ago
  Is (1) what happens at Google? I always thought they used forced allocation as opposed to Valve's open allocation. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
j_s 14y ago
Employees also leave other employees, especially when they are the manager's favorites.
riazrizvi 14y ago
Either the boss is incompetent and so that boss makes work intolerable for the employee, or the employee is incompetent and the boss makes work intolerable for the employee. It's often hard to tell.
kylered 14y ago
This article sounds like a recap of Hertzberg's Two-Factor theory which is basically the application of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the corporate world. See: http://www.businessballs.com/herzbergmotivationdiagram.pdf http://www.businessballs.com/herzbergmotivationdiagram.pdf See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory
stcredzero 14y ago
I suspect Valve has a good way of dealing with this. There, manager is a role, and people can decide if you are good enough at that role to merit working with you in that capacity, or not. They get to vote with their feet, without leaving the company.
kenjagi 14y ago
A bad manager is going to hire a bad manager, and if you follow the organization chart to the top it stops being a bad manager, it becomes the company mantra.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Companies are still fighting yesterday's war. Traditional industrial labor has a concave relationship between input (effort, skill) and output (diminishing returns) where the difference between mediocrity and excellence is minimal to zero. Modern technological work has a convex curve (accelerating returns) where the difference between mediocrity and failure is minimal while that between mediocrity and excellence is massive. When the work is concave, you want to minimize variance, which means you eliminate individuality and manage toward mediocrity. Control-freak managers and petty tyrants are good at that, because you can trust them to tighten down bolts and yell at people. ("Ahem! There's SAND in my boots!" -- Kefka.) You build out a hierarchy, give managers total control over their reports, and even though there's a lot of loss in the form of attrition (good people fired by bad bosses) and squandered capability (strong people doing mediocre tasks) that's treated as a rounding error. People are fungible and, if they're not, then something is wrong with your process. Your goal isn't excellence. It's repeatable mediocrity. Convex work is an entirely different game. It's much more like R&D. The problems being solved are a lot harder, although the upside of a success is much greater. Technological work is becoming increasingly convex with time. When you have concave work, your management strategy is to beat up on the slackers. If the best people are 1.5 times as productive as the average, then one slacker cancels out 2 excellent people, so rooting them out and disciplining them is the right strategy. With convex work, the danger isn't having a few slackers. It's that you don't have any excellent people, or that the excellent people you do have are unmotivated and underperforming. The best way to "manage" convex work is to hire the best people and get out of their way. Managerial extortion (i.e. the manager's use of his unilateral ability to damage an employee's career to put the employee toward his career goals, rather than company goals or individual growth) is ruinous when one is attempting convex work, but large companies don't see it that way. Their processes are oriented completely toward concave, commodity labor. So, "employees leave managers" is only half the story. Managers go bad because companies allow them to do so. A company that doesn't want managerial extortion can implement Valve-style open allocation, but few do. Companies allow them to do so because they're fighting the last century's war. They're industrial machines, and anachronistic in a technological era.
- tokenizer 14y ago
  So how would you recommend fixing this? You mentioned hiring excellent workers and getting out of their way, but I'm hoping you could elaborate.
LilValleyBigEgo 14y ago
Actually every job I've left voluntarily I've left because it was at a shitty company whose policies made my job uncomfortable. Most of the time my manager and my manager's manager are just doing what they've been told because they're not allowed to do anything else.
Symmetry 14y ago
I'm sure that this happens a lot, but it isn't my experience. I lost my first job when 2/3 of the company way laid off. I left my second job for manangerial reasons, but that was more that my position was an experiment and when the manager who'd created it left the person who took over didn't know how to manage me. The company after that I left because we were bought out and I wouldn't sign the new, draconian NDA.
gr3yh47 14y ago
I love working for my supervisor, manager, and director. My company sucks, pay is sub par, benefits suck, policy sucks, forced overtime sucks.... If I leave I'll be leaving my company, not my manager. and the company is HUGE
ashcairo 14y ago
I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the root cause of the management practices that result in this situation is the byproduct of company direction and culture. As an example, if the direction of the company is primarily to maintain a headcount, then there is only so many mental games a manager can play to retain it's ambitious employees.
ownagefool 14y ago
From the article:- "The key to being able to keep the good employees is not so much the salary you offer them or even the actual work, it is more about how you manage them and how they feel working under you as their manager. " Personally I don't think there is a key, instead it's a case of all of the above. You can't keep an underpaid employee happy. You can't keep a bored employee happy. You can't keep an employee happy when you don't treat them well. I've left companies for all 3 of these reasons, it only takes one reason.
pknerd 14y ago
We usually don't like our managers for one reason or another unless we ourselves become one and someone else replace us. This has been happening for centuries. Point is why don't we learn lessons from past mistakes?
jrarredondo 14y ago
That was a great article. One issue that came to mind is how to interview for these skills when hiring managers. The more I think about this, the more I realize this is not something you can truly screen for during an interview. Reference checks are important, but they will have to be more comprehensive and less "self-selected" referrals (which would almost be very positive about a given candidate).
11Blade 14y ago
There is one thing that is overlooked here. There is as much pathology at the managerial level as is at the subordinate level. We can all say we have shitty bosses. Lets face it, there are shitty workers among us too. It is easy to complain about managers, but "craving credit" and "silent treatment" happen asymmetrically because the average worker is an order of magnitude different than his cube mate. Going from a concrete project/goal focused position with expectations to managing those people is a much harder proposition. I hated managing people. As a manager, you expect the same things from your crew as you would yourself. Instead you hear every excuse, tragedy and jealous rant for attention, rather than just getting the work done. You try to "nurture" and "empathize" but in the end, workers run the whole gamut from narcissist to kaamchor to subservient drone.
PeterisP 14y ago
That is a well known (decades+) fact - employees join companies based on their global reputation but leave mostly based on their direct supervisor quality.
ChristianMarks 14y ago
At my former place of employment -- I won't bore you with the "consolidation" memo and the unannounced reshuffling of titles and the change to generic job descriptions in the name of "flexibility." After the reorganization, I had to work for a smug, platitudinous, self-important, patronizing, repulsive know-nothing. I left within a couple months of the reorganization. In just about every case I've left jobs because I detested my boss. I tend to dislike bosses in general, unless they are exceptionally intelligent.
jmspring 14y ago
Seems like there are a lot of war stories on this thread. I disagree with the article based on my personal statistics. When I have decided to move on, in all but one case it has been that either we weren't shipping or the overall product path got stale (beyond the control of day to day engineers). I like working on things and I like working on things people use. If we aren't shipping, I have to ask why. Periods of development are certainly reasonable but at the end of the day you have to ship. Where I have moved on due to management? An alpha presence who treated everyone under him as a contractor, yet we weren't hourly, and we weren't compensated for following up on inane decisions. I ended up stepping up, guiding two mis-managed resources, and pushing back on some very dumb decisions (a few were backed by the CTO). However, at the end of the day, when I stepped back anded look at the energy I put in and what I was getting out, it was time to leave. Decisions to leave are complex.
sc0rb 14y ago
I'm about to leave my company and it has nothing to do with the manager. I actually feel bad that I'm leaving him.
epo 14y ago
I had exactly this issue at a well known British telecommunications company, I had a personality clash with my (newly promoted) manager and leaving was impossible because the manager did not want to see a diminished headcount. I manouevered myself out by working almost all of my time on some other manager's project and it got to the point where the argument that I may as well report to, and be appraised by this other manager was unarguable.
nanidin 14y ago
I'm coming a bit late, so don't expect many to see this... but I worked at a company and had several friends leave for other jobs, but they were sad to part with their managers. They left mostly because the direction of the company as a whole wasn't satisfying them, which is a function of management, but usually not your immediate manager.
Shivetya 14y ago
FWIW - I cannot view this site as I get malware alerts, is anyone else seeing that?
toddnessa 14y ago
Personally, I have observed this becoming more of an issue related to the times that we live in. Let's face it, America has been so ingrained with the survival of the fittest mentality for so long that finally it is sinking in. Until people start valuing others more in society I do not feel that this will change. Behaviors flow out of beliefs. When the beliefs change then people change. Loving our neighbor as ourself is not a cherished value right now.
mjheil 14y ago
you developers have no idea how good you have it. Choose your boss? yes, by accepting a job offer. Move to a different team? Again, by choosing a company. Move internally? Yes, if you don't mind a firestorm that burns bridges, and moving to a job that won't use the skills I was hired for. I'm the only one -- or at best, one of a handful of people -- who can do my job at my nonprofit. Does that give me more power? Heck no. Best I can do is threaten to quit, and if the boss and I don't get along, then they probably are just aching to hire in someone else.

625 points by kirkus 14y ago

I agree that employees might leave managers. But I disagree that people don't leave companies. First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway. Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit. Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt... So no, sometimes the fault is of the company. But sometimes. Asshat managers can make people go away too.

tonyedgecombe 14y ago
Very good managers might shine in a bad environment and very bad ones disrupt a good environment. Most though just reflect the organisational culture.
- speeder 14y ago
  Exactly, and it is very hard sometimes to deviate from that culture, it requires exceptional individuals. Unfortunately it is seemly easier to be excepcional toward the bad than toward the good.
narag 14y ago
I agree. I've left sometimes for bad managers, sometimes for bad company. Oh, and once it was both. Honestly, it was so sweet when the guy asked what they could do to keep me and I answered "don't bother" with a giant smile.

binarymax 14y ago

I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.

kirkus 14y ago
I like the concept of putting managers on some sort of performance track. That is an interesting idea. I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen.
- binarymax 14y ago
  I imagine that the org structure would flatten out a bit, and the stereotypical 'office space' managers would be shaking in their boots. The employees of these organisations would feel empowered and generally be happier - but I won't speculate on whether that would improve productivity for the company (though I have seen research that says it would).
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  The reality is that managers are performance managed, just what their teams think isn't normally one of the metrics because many organisations by and large don't care that much. Speaking as a manager you'd be surprised (actually scrub that, you wouldn't) how often when I raise concerns the team has the instruction comes back "screw what the team thinks or wants, just do X" (where X flies in the face of what the team want and best practice but supports what the screaming customer and short term revenue demands). Organisations that genuinely care about the staff I don't think would change much, those who don't won't ever do it so it's kind of moot.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  >I wonder what organizations would look like if this was allowed to happen. Probably microscopic shitstorms, not large ones because only a minority is affected. But in the long run it would probably change everything in organizations with management problems. I think hiring policies would also change a lot.
adventureloop 14y ago
I really like this idea, the peer review system in valve is probably the closest to the best system I have heard of.
14y ago

SparrowOS 14y ago

I wrote a compiler. Linus is not fit to undo my sandle strap, 'sept I'm not a granola hippy. The new nigger word is "compiler" as in a "shader compiler". The CIA is busy clusterfucking the other side of the river styx, until it is completely absolutely clusterfucked beyond hell. They watch me for 5 minutes then run over there and clusterfuck shit. It's nothing new. Train engineers. Assembly language. DoS Stack IDE CLI ISA They just clusterfuck everything. I can smell that shit clear over on this side of the Styx.

Shivetya 14y ago

Which is why employee satisfaction surveys rarely ask the right questions or if they do they are interpreted in such a way that the managers who are the problem are not declared as such. I learned real quick to not be amazed at how such a survey can be turned upside down to blame the employees or a select group of them.

breckenedge 14y ago

I had an MBA roommate once and frequently read her books on management culture. I've never actually seen what was used in those books put into practice, but my experience is relatively small (once a manager). The books talked about the Organizational Cultural Assessment Index (OCAI) and a manager capabilities assessment test (cannot remember the name). Anyone out there used these? These seemed like reasonable, standard approaches to improving the workplace.

RyanZAG 14y ago
Things like OCAI really don't work that well in practice. The main benefit you get from them is actually asking the questions, not in the results of the 'test' or anything like that. People (and organizational culture) is too diverse and complex to understand with a few simple charts. Beware snake oil salesmen trying to sell you quick and easy 'fixes' for people or culture. Always. Culture is incredibly hard to change once it is engrained, and is going to take real work and real sacrifice, not simple questionnaires. You should look at changing company culture in the same way as looking as getting a smoker to stop smoking. It's not as easy as 'presenting an argument'.
- breckenedge 14y ago
  Yes, culture change is hard. The OCAI is a tool, like the Myers-Briggs. The book I read [1] treated it as a start for diagnosing your organizational culture, then provided a framework for accomplishing cultural change. I believe it's extraordinarily dangerous to approach (organizational) change without treating it as a process with defined goals. BTW, I am a former smoker, and quitting was pretty hard. I'd chalk that up to changing my environment (I stopped hanging out with smokers). [1] http://www.amazon.com/Diagnosing-Changing-Organizational-Culture-Competing/dp/0470650265 http://www.amazon.com/Diagnosing-Changing-Organizational-Cul...

PonyGumbo 14y ago

I've had fantastic managers at terrible companies. In each case, I left because of the company, not because of the manager.

kirkus 14y ago
Yeh this doesn't apply to all situations. What made the company terrible?
- PonyGumbo 14y ago
  Really ineffective performance measurement standards and incentives. When there is no reward for going above and beyond or penalty for simply coasting by, you're essentially creating a haven for shitty employees.

martindelemotte 14y ago

According to this meta-analysis, employees dont leave managers nor do they leave companies. They leave (maybe) because of the job. Estimated true score correlation Job Fit - Tenure: 0.18 Company Fit - Tenure: 0.03 Group Fit - Tenure: 0.06 Supervisor Fit - Tenure: 0.09 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005....

josephlord 14y ago

I've left two organisations (BBC and Sony) and neither time did I have any problem with my direct manager in fact in both cases I liked them although I did have a lack of faith the top management and the direction of at least my area of the organisation. In the BBC case (amongst other issues) my department was earmarked to be moved to Manchester (about 200 miles away) in about 4 years. I was clear (for family reasons) that I wouldn't be moving so staying would have felt like a personal dead end to me (although later the BBC's plan changed and much of the department moved into London instead which might have been OK but the lack of thought through initial decision was a really bad sign about the senior management). At Sony it was a general lack of faith that the management had enough capability that Sony could become a profitable, viable, mass market electronics company again. That made me happy to leave to see what I could do on my own and be home to take and collect my son from school.

mgkimsal 14y ago
Odd... I've never even worked at any one company for 2 years, so... making work plans based on what someone decides will probably happen in 4 years is simply incomprehensible to me. The few companies I've worked at have taught me that for the most part, companies can't do much real planning beyond 6 mos to a year at most - the stuff we considered important in 2006 was often irrelevant by 2007 because of changes in the market conditions, competition, etc. Planning out moves that far ahead is probably necessary in some situations, but I've seen enough of those 'long term plans' have to change anyway that I don't actually believe many of them.
- gawker 14y ago
  Agreed. I feel like it's more of an exercise to have some sort of vision but in reality, it's really difficult to predict what the environment will be like in 4 years. Looking at what I have learnt just 2 years ago, some of it is already starting to get irrelevant!
- josephlord 14y ago
  Fair point but it was an R&D environment with a lot of accumulated experience and slightly slow moving and in some ways I was ready for a change anyway wanting to work more directly on products that reach consumers hands. The way the change plan was announced/managed also led me to conclude the overall BBC organisation didn't value the R&D function in general and the lack of care from the top was a factor in me departing.

erikj54 14y ago

This article unfortunately resonates on a personal level. This is why I believe I enjoy consulting so much. On a short term basis I can put up with ignorance, credit taking, silent treatment etc (All the qualities respondents mentioned in the survey). For a long term career I'm not sure I could last. I'm curious if anyone has any stories of how they overcame a Manager that was not their Champion? I have been thinking about this a lot. In my short time at large corporations it seems you really need someone on your side to move up the ladder a bit.

darkspaten 14y ago

I offer a corollary, "Employees follow leaders, not managers." At one time I considered leaving a company I believed strongly in, due to an immediate manager with which I didn't work well. However, I looked higher in the organization to the leader(ship) I believed in and decided to stay. I'm glad I did, because the management problem rectified itself soon enough and now I follow good leaders and learn from a great mentor.

acslater00 14y ago

Anecdotally, I spent 2 years at Microsoft (MSN division). I loved my manager to death, and telling him I was leaving felt kind of like breaking up with a long-term girlfriend. But MSN was a supremely depressing place to work because there was a palpable sense that nothing we did mattered, and Microsoft was simply running out the clock on those [hundreds of millions] of people who haven't figured out how to change their browser homepage away from msn.com. I left the company, not the person. So while the lesson of this post -- that managing is important and a good manager can greatly increase employee retention -- is well taken, the headline is certainly overstated.

monk_e_boy 14y ago
I think you are a lucky outlier. I've left all my jobs due to poor managers. If my manager doesn't even have the basic 'shit sandwhich' approach to telling me that I suck, then I tend to start looking for another job. Also, broken promises in interviews - yeah, monk.e.boy, work here for a year and you'll be the head of your very own dev team. I've fallen for that one about 4 times. Then I leave and they ask 'Why-oh-why?' And I say 'Remember in my interview that you said X Y and Z and none of them happened?'
- jsolson 14y ago
  I think he may not be an outlier for Microsoft. I've worked with a few people from Redmond who left not because of a crappy manager or an unpleasant team, but because their projects kept getting cancelled. It's hard to feel like you're working on something important if all of it gets scrapped before shipping two or three times in a row. Especially if this happens not due to any issue with the project, but due to political happenings miles above your head. At least, this is what I've been told. I've never worked for them myself.
- mratzloff 14y ago
  It's quite simple: believe it when you see it, no matter who it is making you promises. The bigger the promise, the more quietly skeptical you must be. Those people filling you with hope may genuinely want to make something happen, or may be cynically telling you what you want to hear. Either way, their words don't mean a thing until they've made them fact.

MrMcDowall 14y ago

This has been true of almost every single company I've ever worked for. It's also worth noting that Companies are reflective of the management constituency because they control the levers; bad managers usually mean bad companies.

stoodder 14y ago

I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.

bobsy 14y ago

I am considering leaving my job for this precise reason. I feel if I worked under anyone else I would enjoy what I am doing but currently it is impossible. The problem is the guy has no managerial skills. Employee moral across the company is rock bottom. We get tasks day-to-day because he cannot plan ahead. We often drop projects to work on something else, only to drop them and work on what we was originally. Manager never sends final designs or when he does they later change anyway. (These are not tweaks, tweaks are understandable. This is the entire page layout) I could go on... Why haven't I quit already? I am currently indispensable to the company I work for. I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate. The short term plan is to continue being miserable. NOTE: I would go around my manager if I could. Unfortunately it is a team of 7 and its this guys company.

blablabla123 14y ago
I could have written the first two paragraphs... Actually I also would have quitted already, but my situation is also uncomfortable for personal reasons. Anyway, reading Dilbert.com helps ;)
jtreminio 14y ago
I've heard that line of being indispensable to a company so many times. Turns out that it's not true. They'll find someone to replace you.
- conradfr 14y ago
  The trick is to make people think you are indispensable. I think more than often the real challenge is the knowledge, not the skills. IIRC there was a post linked HN about that problem, written by GitHub or Stripe maybe ?
- kaonashi 14y ago
  Usually it's just a case of understaffing and not being prepared for an employee leaving on short notice.
- mbesto 14y ago

robotmay 14y ago

When my dad left one of his previous jobs, in which he was a manager of about 10-15 people; 3 of his team quit within the week. One of them told him that he was the best manager he'd ever worked under, and that he couldn't face working in that company with anyone else. If I ever end up in a management position, that's the sort of manager I want to be.

kirkus 14y ago
Wow...what aspect of your dad's management attributed to this?
- robotmay 14y ago
  As far as I know he's very fair; he shared work out between himself and others evenly, trusted them to do the work, and made sure everyone was doing their share. He always tried to shield his team from the managerial crap from above. He also never got involved in office politics, and is generally quiet and softly spoken (I differ a little from him there). I think a lot of people resent managers because they seem to do less of the actual work than those they manage. My dad always works hard at whatever he does, and he expected the same of his team. Now he's retired, part of me really wants to try doing some projects with him. He has a real interest in building web apps that I'd love to collaborate on.

seivan 14y ago

This is so true, so so true. Not neessarly "managers" per say, but people involved in "decision" making that affects you. For me; the people doing the UX, the people doing product, and etc.

gadders 14y ago

Yeah, but companies pay mortgages, not managers. In other words, I could be working for the most awesome, charismatic manager in the world but if I'm being paid significantly below Market Rate, I'd still leave.

qrybam 14y ago

Very timely read for me. I work in a successful company with lots of challenges and room for expansion, I am a key member of the team and work very long hours (which would be better spent on my own side project). My current manager has done all of the listed reasons-for-leaving in the article at one point or another - I'm not the only one this happens to; it happens to all who work with him, however I'm the only one who has to report directly to him. It's a sad situation because the guy is a good guy, he's just difficult to work with and as a result I'm currently looking at my options - if I can help it, I would prefer to stay at the company. I understand it can be difficult for a manager to be direct with their team, but it's something I know a lot of good people appreciate - honest, direct feedback. You don't want to feel like you're being "handled" or used as a crutch for the manager's own self-actualisation. It's the whole golden-goose scenario - you don't want to kill it. edit: typos :)

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

I think there is a tidal change in software at the moment - imagine the Venn diagram of remote working technologies, continuous integration technologies and a willingness to shed middle manager white collar jobs like never before. As we can enable people to work from home, because we can see the code they wrote today up and working on the CI server, we can do away with needing a boss to telll them what to do and watch if they do it - in fact we can pass the autonomy many bosses have down the line - and I hope see a world where the developer says - I have done this cool thing and it has improved our bottom line because I measured this change. A culture of Continuous Integration, testing changes for business KPIs allows us to let go of the middle rank of supervision, and allows us to change the working conditions now the supervision is unnecessary

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cletus 14y ago

The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom. Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name. The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked. The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult. At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects. Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight. So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism. Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.

VexXtreme 14y ago
The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place. My company does this all the time. Didn't do well enough at the job interview or you're a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They'll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don't care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies). It's a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.
- danpat 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

zwischenzug 14y ago

...and managers are bad because of companies. A crass generalisation, but no more than the title is.

stonemetal 14y ago

How far up the chain do you have to go before managers become come companies? At a certain point a company is defined by its management, just as to consumers a company is defined by its products. Anecdotally I have never quit a job primarily because of my direct manager.

jkeel 14y ago

Nice to see this discussion on HN. Back in early 2000, when I worked at Walmart's home office in Bentonville, we had a speaker come and talk to ISD about this exact topic. That was the main line that stuck with me, "Employees leave managers, not companies". It's probably not the case 100% of the time for causing the loss of an employee, but having a good manager makes all the world of a difference in an employee's happiness.

seivan 14y ago

Best way to handle this? Get rid of management. Flat hierarchy. Just to make sure to hire really smart engineers. Code it, test it, ship it. If two forces opposite each other, put it in a hackathon and gain votes.

peteretep 14y ago
Do you think there might be practical issues that you're not considering, or don't have exposure to, which might explain why such a vanishing percentage of companies work the way you're saying is obvious? Is it because no-one else is smart enough to have thought of this?
- seivan 14y ago
  There multiple companies that do flat hierarchies. Most famous one is Valve. You got an interesting project, try convincing others to join you.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Holy fuck that is an arrogant comment. Yeah, non-tech companies who produce actual products/services can't really do that, but then they are also not really that relevant since nobody here works for them (outside of IT departments, which could be run as suggested). No the real reason for almost any stupid thing done in corporate environments is politics. Everybody is a peer and results only environments threaten those who have accumulated power under the old system and who couldn't cut in the new system -- which is basically all managers. So of course this only happens when somebody with enough political capital to institute it does so -- typically the owner. Add to that that it is extremely unorthodox and that very few people have previous exposure to systems like that. And you get the few companies that do this, and do well by it.
  - seivan 14y ago
    Well thank you good sir!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

scorcher 14y ago

Perhaps its unusual but every company I have worked for this could be sorted out with a quiet word with upper management or HR. A little disruption moving people between teams is well worth averting a potential clashes

Whitespace 14y ago

I would not wish a petty/spiteful manager on anyone. I was in a similar situation in my last company: personal problems between my manager and I forced my departure. In my situation the terrible fact was that my manager's inability to separate his personal and professional life caused the top four of my hierarchy of needs to be threatened (it's hard to be creative and solve problems when you're in a very shitty situation). At the very end of my tenure, instead of talking about and trying to resolve our personal differences, he chose to go hyper-managerial on me (in manner and communication), making it clear that this was how my day-to-day was going to be from then on. I loved working with my coworkers and almost everything else about working there, but I found it no longer mattered when I sat next to someone who will only communicate with me in writing with HR cc'd.

simplyinfinity 14y ago

Even without reading the article i couldn't agree more. Currently i'm in the position where i like my colleagues and the company, but the management is BAD ( i could write 3 pages long explanation but i won't ). Well sorry , iQuit.

deleted 14y ago
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kirkus 14y ago
What in this instance defines bad management?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

SparrowOS 14y ago

The CIA is setting lots and lots of fires, like anarchists, watching the world burn. "Windows RT real-time" Fucken tower of babble, dark ages, of Biblical proportions and I'm fucken Noah with a useless ship. They're pouring gas everywhere and burning down the swamp while frog slither into corners where they writye ten line of code a day and jerk off to the web. Have you seen Qt, that graphics library? How about all the shit they add to C++! ROFLMAO Damn, they're clusterfucking on an epic scale. My mouth is open in awe at the spectacle. Clueless arrogant india-niggers are hilarious. Managed code everywhere, I'm sure. God how awful. Glad I'm not in that shit. The next generation has no idea how a switch () statement works and thinks a hash table uses SHA. God says... stays weight ill-favoured meet Virgin's South_Korea thirst Certainly ceases alteration equalled commencement recalls contributions denies debtor IV outrages forbade transferred MEDIUM sounds now_that_I_think_about_it contacting number talented ---- Dark ages are coming. CIA is pyromaniacs burning down the world. I give-up and will just chuckle at the mess. Anarchists. Windows RT ---- In 1996, I got an introduction to the Web -- CGI password and login prompt. That was the laughably crappiest piece of shit. The whole web is shitty nigger-quality inelegance.

known 14y ago

"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." --Einstein

hcayless 14y ago

A (good) manager's primary tasks are: 1) Make sure your team knows what to do and has what they need to do it. 2) Be a buffer between them and anything that distracts them from #1. 3) Be a resource to help them develop. All 3 require good communication. Every job I've quit has ultimately been because of a deficiency in one of those 3 things that led to conflict.

talmand 14y ago

On the day I put in my notice for my last job I found out that my immediate manager had put in his notice as well the day before, much for the same reasons I did. I liked working for the guy so quitting felt bad. Basically choices made by upper management made the working environment not so good and we had decided to move on. Turns out we weren't the only ones, within three weeks five out of six of the web team left and gutted the department.

16s 14y ago

If the manager does not provide direction, ask for it. If they still do not provide direction, set your own. The grass always looks greener on the other side. Sometimes, you are the problem, not the manager. Reminds me of the story about the traveler and the new city. He left because he thought the people there were horrible. Upon arriving at the gate of the new city, he asked a man sitting by the gate, "How are the people here in this city?" To which the sitting man replied, "How were they in the city you came from?" "Oh... they were horrible, mean people." "You'll find them the same here."

AmandaPanda 14y ago

When your company is small, your manager practically is your company. I'm a junior developer at a rather dysfunctional small company with really shoddy engineering standards. Here, due to the small number of employees, the manager and senior engineer practically are the company. Our senior dev has a cracker jack box cs degree, and has been stuck in his own bubble for the past decade writing horrible code. I also found out my company was sued by a customer 10 years ago because they thought our products and services suck. Good times.

greendot 14y ago

I've left because of managers. I've left because of the company. When a company cuts my salary by 30% while jacking up my benefits payments by 300%, it's usually time to leave. But, on to the article at hand. As a manager now, those statistics at the end really kind of tick me off. It feels very one-sided and the following text is just me rambling on... somewhat trolling. 39%: Their supervisor failed to keep promises How many of these employees fail to keep theirs? How many of these broken promises were based on things promised to the manager? How much of it was in their control? When kept at this simplistic level, this one seems like a third-grade problem. 37%: Their supervisor failed to give credit when due This perception of credit and recognition is one sticking point in our team right now, especially with the people born after 1980. They want credit and recognition for every single thing they do. If they manage to successfully eat a meal without choking on a bone, they want public recognition for it. The older guys on the team, we sit down and do the work because it is our job. That's what we're here to do. The old guys can sit around and come up with ideas and realize that together as a team we designed something. The team gets credit. No one person gets the credit. The kids, if they have one key idea at any point in a process, they want to be held up high. Oh and damn if their idea comes early in the discussion and is never used directly but expanded upon and changed, hell they think they were the sole party responsible for all ideas and all further ideas were stolen. 31%: Their supervisor gave them the “silent treatment” in the past year. Yes, I do this. I usually do this when I am trying to decide what to do with spoiled or "entitled" employees. If I have asked somebody to quit looking at StupidVideos.com for 3 hours a day and they persist while their projects back up, I'm going to be silent for a while while I try and come up with a plan. I'm not going to sit and try to motivate them. Motivating geeks is a pain-in-the-ass. I'm not allowed to fire anybody or put them on disciplinary action w/out months of paperwork, especially when they know how to talk to HR and convince them that they are doing the best that they can. 27%: Their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers. Agreed, this one is bad no matter how you slice it. 24%: Their supervisor invaded their privacy. Again, if you're looking at Facebook and not getting your work done, you need to get over it. 23%: Their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment. Yeah, this happens. Sucks. Lucky for my team, when I lie my eye twitches so there is a built-in lie detector. :-)

hippich 14y ago

I would not down-play salary that much. I am not sure if it applies to all sectors, but at least in my limited experience more you ask for - better you are treated and better technology you work with. Because otherwise it will be to expensive to keep you.

protomyth 14y ago

I have often thought that tech companies should pay more attention to how movies / tv series are managed then MBA programs. I get the feeling the Producer / Director / Show Runner model might work better for software. Support might complicate things though.

wolframarnold 14y ago

There was a book in the late 1990's, "First Break All the Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently" which was the write-up of a Gallup study about manager effectiveness. One of its conclusions is the point made in this article almost verbatim, that people leave their managers not their jobs or companies. One of the most powerful sections for the book for me was the opening chapter where they explain their assessment methodology. They compiled it down to a catalog of 12 questions and they found that if these questions were answered positively it correlated with high employee performance, good financial results, good retention, etc. The rest of the book dives into more detail on the reasons for this, one being that each employee's talent is different and managers should try to align talents with business need, focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses. Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0684852861 http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...

dylangs1030 14y ago

This issue stems, in my experience, from the top of an individual department or location (if it's a franchise). The top level management in large companies couldn't possibly supervise all their department managers at the same time. So things fly by under the radar that shouldn't because they don't have stringent enough criteria for employee satisfaction and manager competency. I recall this happening when I used to work at P.F. Chang's (the restaurant chain). We had a general manager who was absolutely loathsome to work with. We frequently ran out of the kinds of food you'd be embarrassed to lack at a Chinese restaurant (read: white and brown rice, lettuce, etc). However, he had a stellar reputation and history with "corporate" and had even won awards within the company. The reasons this happened were twofold: 1. he was the general manager, and in the eyes of corporate he was just saving money (they never saw the restaurant descend into chaos and dysfunction due to lack of ingredients), and 2. he was honestly kind of a dick. Unless you were above him on the pay scale he would respond to suggestions with, "I'll take that under advisement."

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

For me the best solution is to stay small - keep the organisation under the dunbar number. That way a competant CEO can manage the politics personally, and guide the culture effectively. But if you are going to grow, you need one of these proxy solutions. To me there are two outstanding solutions: 1. Free Labour Market 2. "add or out" 1. Google-like - have projects and allow engineers to move around to join different projects, and adjust via funding. THis is trying to create an internal job market, and may or may not be effective but its a response to Dunbars number problem. 2. "add or out" - add measurable value, or the worst performing 10% leave. This forces a culture of testing and measuring value, and whilst it is subject to being gamed, it might be workable.

mratzloff 14y ago
I think a lot of people at Microsoft would disagree about #2's efficacy...
erichocean 14y ago
The world would be a very different place if the government did not provide corporate protection to any organization with more than 150 employees (Dunbar number).
erichocean 14y ago
The world would be a very different place if the government did not provide corporate protection to any organization with more than 150 employees (Dunbar number).
xentronium 14y ago
Is (1) what happens at Google? I always thought they used forced allocation as opposed to Valve's open allocation. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

j_s 14y ago

Employees also leave other employees, especially when they are the manager's favorites.

riazrizvi 14y ago

Either the boss is incompetent and so that boss makes work intolerable for the employee, or the employee is incompetent and the boss makes work intolerable for the employee. It's often hard to tell.

kylered 14y ago

This article sounds like a recap of Hertzberg's Two-Factor theory which is basically the application of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the corporate world. See: http://www.businessballs.com/herzbergmotivationdiagram.pdf http://www.businessballs.com/herzbergmotivationdiagram.pdf See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory

stcredzero 14y ago

I suspect Valve has a good way of dealing with this. There, manager is a role, and people can decide if you are good enough at that role to merit working with you in that capacity, or not. They get to vote with their feet, without leaving the company.

kenjagi 14y ago

A bad manager is going to hire a bad manager, and if you follow the organization chart to the top it stops being a bad manager, it becomes the company mantra.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Companies are still fighting yesterday's war. Traditional industrial labor has a concave relationship between input (effort, skill) and output (diminishing returns) where the difference between mediocrity and excellence is minimal to zero. Modern technological work has a convex curve (accelerating returns) where the difference between mediocrity and failure is minimal while that between mediocrity and excellence is massive. When the work is concave, you want to minimize variance, which means you eliminate individuality and manage toward mediocrity. Control-freak managers and petty tyrants are good at that, because you can trust them to tighten down bolts and yell at people. ("Ahem! There's SAND in my boots!" -- Kefka.) You build out a hierarchy, give managers total control over their reports, and even though there's a lot of loss in the form of attrition (good people fired by bad bosses) and squandered capability (strong people doing mediocre tasks) that's treated as a rounding error. People are fungible and, if they're not, then something is wrong with your process. Your goal isn't excellence. It's repeatable mediocrity. Convex work is an entirely different game. It's much more like R&D. The problems being solved are a lot harder, although the upside of a success is much greater. Technological work is becoming increasingly convex with time. When you have concave work, your management strategy is to beat up on the slackers. If the best people are 1.5 times as productive as the average, then one slacker cancels out 2 excellent people, so rooting them out and disciplining them is the right strategy. With convex work, the danger isn't having a few slackers. It's that you don't have any excellent people, or that the excellent people you do have are unmotivated and underperforming. The best way to "manage" convex work is to hire the best people and get out of their way. Managerial extortion (i.e. the manager's use of his unilateral ability to damage an employee's career to put the employee toward his career goals, rather than company goals or individual growth) is ruinous when one is attempting convex work, but large companies don't see it that way. Their processes are oriented completely toward concave, commodity labor. So, "employees leave managers" is only half the story. Managers go bad because companies allow them to do so. A company that doesn't want managerial extortion can implement Valve-style open allocation, but few do. Companies allow them to do so because they're fighting the last century's war. They're industrial machines, and anachronistic in a technological era.

tokenizer 14y ago
So how would you recommend fixing this? You mentioned hiring excellent workers and getting out of their way, but I'm hoping you could elaborate.

LilValleyBigEgo 14y ago

Actually every job I've left voluntarily I've left because it was at a shitty company whose policies made my job uncomfortable. Most of the time my manager and my manager's manager are just doing what they've been told because they're not allowed to do anything else.

Symmetry 14y ago

I'm sure that this happens a lot, but it isn't my experience. I lost my first job when 2/3 of the company way laid off. I left my second job for manangerial reasons, but that was more that my position was an experiment and when the manager who'd created it left the person who took over didn't know how to manage me. The company after that I left because we were bought out and I wouldn't sign the new, draconian NDA.

gr3yh47 14y ago

I love working for my supervisor, manager, and director. My company sucks, pay is sub par, benefits suck, policy sucks, forced overtime sucks.... If I leave I'll be leaving my company, not my manager. and the company is HUGE

ashcairo 14y ago

I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the root cause of the management practices that result in this situation is the byproduct of company direction and culture. As an example, if the direction of the company is primarily to maintain a headcount, then there is only so many mental games a manager can play to retain it's ambitious employees.

ownagefool 14y ago

From the article:- "The key to being able to keep the good employees is not so much the salary you offer them or even the actual work, it is more about how you manage them and how they feel working under you as their manager. " Personally I don't think there is a key, instead it's a case of all of the above. You can't keep an underpaid employee happy. You can't keep a bored employee happy. You can't keep an employee happy when you don't treat them well. I've left companies for all 3 of these reasons, it only takes one reason.

pknerd 14y ago

We usually don't like our managers for one reason or another unless we ourselves become one and someone else replace us. This has been happening for centuries. Point is why don't we learn lessons from past mistakes?

jrarredondo 14y ago

That was a great article. One issue that came to mind is how to interview for these skills when hiring managers. The more I think about this, the more I realize this is not something you can truly screen for during an interview. Reference checks are important, but they will have to be more comprehensive and less "self-selected" referrals (which would almost be very positive about a given candidate).

11Blade 14y ago

There is one thing that is overlooked here. There is as much pathology at the managerial level as is at the subordinate level. We can all say we have shitty bosses. Lets face it, there are shitty workers among us too. It is easy to complain about managers, but "craving credit" and "silent treatment" happen asymmetrically because the average worker is an order of magnitude different than his cube mate. Going from a concrete project/goal focused position with expectations to managing those people is a much harder proposition. I hated managing people. As a manager, you expect the same things from your crew as you would yourself. Instead you hear every excuse, tragedy and jealous rant for attention, rather than just getting the work done. You try to "nurture" and "empathize" but in the end, workers run the whole gamut from narcissist to kaamchor to subservient drone.

PeterisP 14y ago

That is a well known (decades+) fact - employees join companies based on their global reputation but leave mostly based on their direct supervisor quality.

ChristianMarks 14y ago

At my former place of employment -- I won't bore you with the "consolidation" memo and the unannounced reshuffling of titles and the change to generic job descriptions in the name of "flexibility." After the reorganization, I had to work for a smug, platitudinous, self-important, patronizing, repulsive know-nothing. I left within a couple months of the reorganization. In just about every case I've left jobs because I detested my boss. I tend to dislike bosses in general, unless they are exceptionally intelligent.

jmspring 14y ago

Seems like there are a lot of war stories on this thread. I disagree with the article based on my personal statistics. When I have decided to move on, in all but one case it has been that either we weren't shipping or the overall product path got stale (beyond the control of day to day engineers). I like working on things and I like working on things people use. If we aren't shipping, I have to ask why. Periods of development are certainly reasonable but at the end of the day you have to ship. Where I have moved on due to management? An alpha presence who treated everyone under him as a contractor, yet we weren't hourly, and we weren't compensated for following up on inane decisions. I ended up stepping up, guiding two mis-managed resources, and pushing back on some very dumb decisions (a few were backed by the CTO). However, at the end of the day, when I stepped back anded look at the energy I put in and what I was getting out, it was time to leave. Decisions to leave are complex.

sc0rb 14y ago

I'm about to leave my company and it has nothing to do with the manager. I actually feel bad that I'm leaving him.

epo 14y ago

I had exactly this issue at a well known British telecommunications company, I had a personality clash with my (newly promoted) manager and leaving was impossible because the manager did not want to see a diminished headcount. I manouevered myself out by working almost all of my time on some other manager's project and it got to the point where the argument that I may as well report to, and be appraised by this other manager was unarguable.

nanidin 14y ago

I'm coming a bit late, so don't expect many to see this... but I worked at a company and had several friends leave for other jobs, but they were sad to part with their managers. They left mostly because the direction of the company as a whole wasn't satisfying them, which is a function of management, but usually not your immediate manager.

Shivetya 14y ago

FWIW - I cannot view this site as I get malware alerts, is anyone else seeing that?

toddnessa 14y ago

Personally, I have observed this becoming more of an issue related to the times that we live in. Let's face it, America has been so ingrained with the survival of the fittest mentality for so long that finally it is sinking in. Until people start valuing others more in society I do not feel that this will change. Behaviors flow out of beliefs. When the beliefs change then people change. Loving our neighbor as ourself is not a cherished value right now.

mjheil 14y ago

you developers have no idea how good you have it. Choose your boss? yes, by accepting a job offer. Move to a different team? Again, by choosing a company. Move internally? Yes, if you don't mind a firestorm that burns bridges, and moving to a job that won't use the skills I was hired for. I'm the only one -- or at best, one of a handful of people -- who can do my job at my nonprofit. Does that give me more power? Heck no. Best I can do is threaten to quit, and if the boss and I don't get along, then they probably are just aching to hire in someone else.