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.

> 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 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.