I'm going to sit a bunch of people down and show them videos of managers talking about times they failed and I'm gonna be like SO DO YOU THINK THIS WAS EVIL OR JUST HUMAN
@grimalkina (note that I do not blame them, I totally understand the environment they are in. And that demands made to management are not really consistent with how we talk of the role, creating even more dissonance)
@fmhueffer do IC engineers ever harass their colleagues and gaslight people? I'm not debating the possibility of bad people and the complexities of power but it's a bad faith reading of this to assume so
@fmhueffer@grimalkina I believe the premise is whether it is an automatic, immediate change. Versus existing issues exacerbated by incentives and pressures. And not about specific pathologies.
@grimalkina It has always seemed to me that the skills required for leadership/management are significantly different than many of the skills required to excel technically as an engineer. Yet it also seems like engineers are frequently "promoted" to management/leadership because of technical success, so you essentially have people being given a job based on the wrong qualifications. It's hardly a novel insight, I'm sure, but I'm curious for your much more educated perspective.
@internic no I totally agree with you. This is clearly exhausting and saddening for people. I also think not having the skills to succeed in your job is NOT the same thing as being a bad person, and that a lot of these managers who have in some sense been set up to fail and are being judged by too many different rubrics are probably suffering a lot. That doesn't mean they aren't causing suffering too, but I hear a lot of care from them across hundreds of people in our research so far.
@grimalkina mm. be sure to consider both low-level management roles, and management roles that require having been through an executive training program. informally, we consider the point of those programs to be testing people's willingness to do bad things when the company needs them to.
@grimalkina Management in the typical US business commonly includes implementing policies that are plausibly/reasonably considered unjust or unfair by a non-trivial set of those being managed.
When receiving a negative response in the course of implementing these policies, plenty of managers reach for hurtful (and sometimes harmful) social behaviors to gain a sense of control of the situation.
Of course. And, at some point, sufficient progress along the putative IC track is a de-facto management role, even if it's nominally "not management".
My comment doesn't suggest that any/all harmful behavior by managers is reasonably characterized as "evil".
IME, it is most commonly characterized as evil when the harmful behavior is rationalized and defended as appropriate, despite the impact—which plenty of managers do when presented with the impact of their behavior.
@watters yeah I think that's a fair observation. However, what I encounter and a basis for this joke (it's a joke) is pretty extreme in-group outgroup thinking among practitioners that leads them to "exile" someone on very flimsy evidence and initial mistakes. If we have a situation where most engineering managers are struggling, that's what we have. But struggling in an atmosphere of extreme scrutiny even when it comes from those you have some power over, that's hard.
@grimalkina That said, I do think it's reasonable to have more stringent expectations of a Dir Eng w/ 20 years of experience and an org of 100+ engineers than an early career IC.
(I say that having been both of those things at different times)
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