Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (and What to Do About It)

In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion. They treat their reports like serfs who are obliged to burnish their image.

The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.

I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.

Anecdotal, but every Engineering Manager I've had for the past 10 years has had a calendar I could see. One EM had anonymous event names on their calendar, but I think it might have been the default setting in AD.

> trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion

There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.

One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.

And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.

The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.

> I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team.

Is this an American thing? Here in Europe, it seems common. How else can you schedule meetings if you can't see when everybody's free?

It is technically systemically called an unstable equilibrium. Admitting even one person in a company that places carreer above all else, forces either a full austing by the rest of the company, incurring a coordination cost, or at an individual level facing untennable competition as you operate at a severe disadvantage in self promotion.

This is why, besides maybe a small time window at some startups, management will always on average consist of ruthless looking after number one personality types.

While in a small business their goals migght still by nescessity align with those if the actual company, in a more corporate setting the relation between actual company performance and personal activity is so detached that even those taking into account alignment to a certain degree are handicapped relative to those going 100% self promotion.

The systemic stable equilibrium is therefor a shark tank of rutheless egoists trying to exploit anything and everyone they can to climb over each other and pull each other down.

yup exactly ! the 'geravis principle' comes to mind, cogently described here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

You can see availability but not the content of the existing meetings.

> In my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion.

Heh, I'm a worse manager. I keep trying to impress the people I manage. Working on the mama bear part though.

That's frustrating that you've only had one manager whose calendar was viewable by their team. That's the norm all up the chain of the current place I work. I think it was like that previously too.

I like that your manager had _you_ make the meetings for them after sending all the materials to prep for it. I get the feeling that several times that resulted in solving the problems asynchronously instead of actually having the meeting.

I've been meaning to write a blog post about the "level of purpose" in a job:

At level 3, the best level: The company is curing children's cancer or something else that you are personally motivated to do and satisfied by. The work is something you would do without pay (though you might not have as much time to do it if you weren't paid). Your highest purpose is to cure children's cancer.

At level 2: The company is doing work you are not personally interested in, but you work with good people doing good work. The company and people support each other and build a profitable product. Your highest purpose is to make the company profitable.

At level 1: The company starts doing stupid shit and acting in self-destructive ways. The company is run by managers who care more about growing their own headcounts than the overall profitability of the company. Your highest purpose is to make your manager happy.

At level 0: Your manager is also doing bad things. At this level the only purpose the job fulfills is giving you money, and there's no reason to not go full psychopath and do whatever it takes to maximize the amount of money you get. Your highest purpose is to make money without doing anything too illegal and avoid trouble.

What level is your job at?

Level 3 is rare and always will be, that's okay.

Level 2 is good, and I sometimes hear people on HN offering level 2 as the correct attitude to have towards work. But we need to recognize that workers are often asked to do stupid or semi-dishonest things that are not profitable for the company.

Level 1 and 0 are stages of hell, and it's sad how common they are.

I think there are actually two separate axes here, one for the meaningfulness of the job, and one for the behavior of management. There are lots of companies where the work is personally fulfilling (level 3) but the bosses are in it for themselves (level 1 or 0). From what I've heard, SpaceX would fall in this category for me, as would many non-profits.

That's an interesting model, but I see it different: one axis is a prerequisite for the other axis--they aren't separate.

The company as a whole might serve a noble purpose, but your purpose as an employee will have no connection to that if you're just redesigning the coversheet for TPS reports.

That’s pretty standard in Europe too. It makes sense - what if the meetingd are about downsizing or outsourcing the team? The company and worker’s interested are often not alligned, so a layer of secrecy is warranted.

>solving the problems asynchronously instead of actually having the meeting.

Yes and over time we got better at knowing what needed brainstorming to fix as meeting of minds.

The people who think this secrecy isn't warranted probably think their managers should treat them as equals and with respect enough to discuss those things relatively in the open. Its kind of a weird thing though - a meeting can just have who is in it and not a highly revealing title like "pick the 10% of your team for my RIF so I get my bonus".