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.

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.