3 ms·

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-t

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.
blowski 14y ago
My thoughts exactly. A good manager can make a difficult company bearable, and vice versa.
arjunnarayan 14y ago
Ideally your manager would leave, and take you along to the new company. Such situations do exist --- and they're immensely valuable, when you hire a manager to hire his team. Elite CEOs often work like this - they have a "legal guy", a cohort of CxOs, etc. who they bring along when hired.
kawsper 14y ago
> 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 worked for a company that did content creation for MSN. The amount of pageviews on MSN sounds daunting, but the ad revenue was not on par with the pageviews.

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.

blowski 14y ago

My thoughts exactly. A good manager can make a difficult company bearable, and vice versa.

arjunnarayan 14y ago

Ideally your manager would leave, and take you along to the new company. Such situations do exist --- and they're immensely valuable, when you hire a manager to hire his team. Elite CEOs often work like this - they have a "legal guy", a cohort of CxOs, etc. who they bring along when hired.

kawsper 14y ago

> 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 worked for a company that did content creation for MSN. The amount of pageviews on MSN sounds daunting, but the ad revenue was not on par with the pageviews.