On one hand, I’m upset the director can’t appropriately lead and allows the entire department to be corrupted by a single non-performer. On the other hand, maybe I’m too involved and should just worry about myself. I’d get less professional development potentially (verses leaving) but I could kick back more.
I've left a few "imperfect" jobs that I've regretted, because the next job was worse than the one I left.
IMO: Understand that no company is perfect: Unless you have extensive management experience or a multi-decade career, it's hard to build empathy for what your manager's job requires and their day-to-day challenges. In some cases, criticizing your manager is akin to being a backseat driver; or a "monday morning quarterback" who's never played a day of professional football.
Now that's said, if you really believe that it's best to move on to greener pastures, understand that the software engineering field is in a periodic downturn. Now isn't a good time to find a job. Thus, "if you have a good thing going," stick around for another year or two, and get your resume out there when the industry heats up again. Hopefully, you know how to screen potential employers so you find a job you like better.
Finally: Early in our careers, a lot of us need to "take what we can get." As we advance, we can start to smell unhealthy working environments. I think this is partially why some older engineers take longer to find jobs... We walk away from bad situations that only younger naive engineers will accept.
As I was going through some old papers, I found my offer letter from a previous job. I'd underlined a whole bunch of things and written questions in the margin to ask the HR guy. Things like, "who will I report to," and "what's the name of the team I'll be on?" Needless to say, in retrospect these were all red flags, and now I know how to spot a company that's not being run by grown-ups.
To me it feels like there needs to be more information before we can come to a judgement (excluding bias aside). I don't feel like "failing to include" people is necessarily an indication that a manager is bad... rather it feels like his communication style clashes with your preference. There are plenty of places where information is shared on the "need-to-know" basis. Is the manager not including your team on things that your team should be knowing?
Was the manager also given a fair chance to receive the feedback and take action on it?
This led to situations where a lead is asked in a quick IM or call “are we doing X in our system?” without any context or materials provided to the lead, which often contain crucially important info that the manager feels is just noise (especially if they consider themselves very technical from engineering roles in a previous era).
Just my two cents there; in my case I just learned to roll with it, after some time of striving to work “around” management to find info they never passed down, which resulted in poorer performance evaluations than simply following oft-misguided orders
If you're "representing the team" in a technical call, you should either 1. be prepared to yourself go as deep technically as the other participants, or 2. bring someone deeply technical along to provide that expertise. These "quick side chats" are like trying to pass answer notes back and forth during an exam. Too late bro, you should have studied.
Is this something you can do anything about? Well, "fixing your manager" is a high risk, low reward activity and personally I'd advise against it. My advice would be to try and get an internal transfer while things are still "good" and if that's not an option, look elsewhere.
I'm reminded of a book I read once called "No More Mr Nice Guy" where it explains that "nice guys" are actually kind of jerks because they behave certain ways to try to manipulate people and they expect reciprocation.
They live by a sort of unspoken code that they believe exists but which other people may or may not be aware of.
When a "nice guy" doesn't get his way, he can become bitter and resentful.
(I am using the term "guy" to fit the name, but it could be a woman too)
I'm not sure if you intended to describe your manager as "nice" in this way, but niceness has become a huge red flag to me ever since reading that book. I much prefer someone who is good (in competence and/or in behavior) than someone who is nice.
That's just red pill BS right there. Somebody is nice, I'm jealous, so he must be incompetent+manipulative, how else can I justify to myself that I want to see him as bad and myself as good? So let's just equate nice with bad, then jerk must be good, so I can just be a jerk and feel good about it!
No, just don't. Incompetent or not, nice is always better than jerk/toxic/.. No matter what red pill folks tell you.
I never said any of those things, that it was better to be a jerk or toxic, but you assume that I did.
The opposite view can be taken here though, also discussed in the book. If you are not the manager, you should avoid trying to fill that role. The manager and director certainly don't want you to "help fix their problems".
You're right, it is more in the context of romantic relationships, but I have since noticed nice guys can be a problem everywhere.
I certainly had some "nice guy" tendencies in the past, and maybe still do sometimes, bit I try to be aware and strive to be more direct in my words and behavior.
It's been a few years since I read it... I may read it again actually.
Nice guys can become resentful when their kindness isn’t reciprocated in environments where reciprocity is a reasonable expectation, but that I don’t see how that makes them jerks nor does it make being nice a red flag.
Just know that if someone is nice to you that they are likely to expect to be treated how they treat you and either meet that expectation or turn down their assistance in the first instance.
It doesn't. Sure, there's such things as being "phony nice". But unsociable people tend to over-analyze others and do a ton of projection. The idea that "nice guys" are sociopaths trying to game you is, well, way too cynical for me and my life experience. Some people are just nice.
What if you're both? This makes me feel self-conscious about being "nice" and toning it down.
Given the choice between two persons of equal competence, where one is nice and one is not, I would be surprised if anybody chose the less nice one, all other things being equal.
I suggest continuing to be genuine, rather than focusing on "niceness", and not allowing a single comment on the internet to make you feel self-conscious about your character.
I try to be a nice guy but also believe (hope) I'm competent!
On the above that's something I've recognized though, I do feel like I bring some sort of unwritten moral code to my work (as do we all I'm sure) but realizing that nobody else is actually aware of it or follows it is quite important.
I think this goes some way to being able to be "nice" without getting resentful or bitter when things don't go your way.
From the kind-hearted colleague who's freindly at the water cooler but actually very difficult to work with - through to the people who are just rude, dismissive or belligerent - acknowledging that they operate by a different set of principals to you and accepting that somewhat release's you from their effects.
Anyhow. OP, it is not your firm and not your problem. Try to run a community playground or something instead of wasting energy on some random company you should not care about.
It is possible to be nice, considerate, and assertive with discretion and truthfulness.
Overvaluing "nice" above all else can lead to failure, an appearance of dishonesty, and a lack of respect.
Once you know the answer to that, my "3 classes of managers" might help you pick a next step.
Good: These managers actively support you. They know how to play whatever games your company has evolved, will support you through tough times, and create growth opportunities that advance your goals (and theirs).
Useless but harmless: These managers are not actively "good", but they won't stop you serving yourself. You'll need to take matters into your own hands, but when you do, they'll support you. They normally know how to play the company games, and are sometimes "good" managers that have burned out or stretched themselves further than they have capacity for. Finding good mentors can help you leverage "Useless but harmless".
Useless and harmful: These managers aren't helping you, but then actively hinder your attempts to help yourself. They'll block your attempts to achieve things - even if they're good for the team. When you go to them for support that only they can provide (e.g. performance reviews), they won't really listen to your feedback.
Sounds like you're somewhere between "Harmless" and "Harmful", and you need to work out which one your situation is closer to. If you've got a "Useless but harmless", then you're fine. Work with them to generate the outcomes you want, trusting that - in general - they'll support you in "self-management". If they're not helping you and preventing you from helping yourself, then - despite being "nice" - they're probably harmful to your own goals (project and personal), and you _might_ want to consider other options.
Since this is a problem you can't really fix, the thing I would ask yourself is if it makes your day to day so miserable that you would rather quit your job. That's hard for me to give advice on because it's a personal call. I have had some bad bosses over the years and I just gritted my teeth and put up with it because the job had other redeeming qualities I liked. Maybe that's the case for you, maybe not, but it's worth thinking about.
As an engineering manager, I have had people in my team that would much prefer me to shield them from other department heads and any higher levels of management as they want to minimise meetings and just deliver on work without the hassle of communicating with multiple stakeholders.
I have also had people that want to be included, enjoy documenting their work and communicating across the company and are naturally suited to lead the team – as a manager these people save me a ton of time as I know I can rely on them to run the team in my absence.
I might be naive as I don't understand the specifics of your team dynamics, but it might be worth to voice out your concerns to your manager and try to find a solution before you simply quit – it might be they are not aware of any of this or are inexperienced at leading senior people
When skip levels and skip skip levels and skip skip skip levels exist, it creates more and more distance between what the business wants and what the middle managers end up asking engineers to do. This is dysfunctional but still exists. The only way out of this is for the upper management to build direct rapport with engineers - which means they need to be directly invested in the success of certain projects, and let other projects fall into place on their own. Middle management overhead is a big problem for the top and the bottom.
Between the CEO and I were an incompetent manager, a very incompetent director, and a very sharp President who preferred the status quo.
In hindsight, that the CEO was encouraging me to basically undermine my manager showed a chaotic and unspoken power dynamic that I wasn't mature enough at the time to understand. What followed was a frustrating 2 years of trying to show a manager who was being managed by his team that our tiny 80 person company wasn't Google scale, didn't need to be Google scale, and that we were wasting 75% of our development efforts gold plating everything for no reason.
What I should have done, almost immediately, was either shut up and collected a paycheck or moved on to brighter and better things (which is what I eventually did).
The org chart is the org chart. You can communicate information upwards, but you can't communicate action upwards.
> The director [...] communicates only through [the manager]
It sounds like this is the intended culture of your management structure, or at least in this local hierarchy you exist within. Only you can really tell how negatively this impacts your happiness this is but fwiw, this isn't generally that uncommon of a setup.
You might have to up your political game if you want positive change that would benefit you and the company.
Also, how many other layers of paycheck-collecting managers are there between you and the CEO? If there are too many, they might not care about competency and favor rapport, relationships, and leverage.
- wherever your manager exerts soft responsibility, you can likely take over safely. Might need a lot of peer leadership and related capital with peers
- wherever your manager has those firm only-manager responsibilities, you are at their whim unfortunately. This can include layoff decisions, how much you manager will be involved in layoff decisions about their own teams, kill/green light projects, etc. basically all those invisible levers your manager might have access to but you don’t. Not much to do here but risk manage your personal career management accordingly.
I'm suspicious because I immediately wonder who considers them incompetent. Is it their boss, is it everyone else in the organization, or is it just you? My point is that you have a particular lens on their performance, but you probably don't have a synoptic view of everything they do.
Of course, I don't know the details of your situation, but the hypothesis I'd test first is that they may be good at everything in their job description except the one specific thing you mentioned, which is that they're not communicating enough. If you talked to them about their communication, directly and unambiguously telling them how it is affecting your team, and what you expect instead, what happens?
My general advice is to follow your gut. If you feel like your manager is actually hurting your long term career prospects, then you should switch teams or company. If not, and it's just a passing feeling, you can stay. A decent check for the former is to see how much growth you've had under this manager and then take a call.
Caring about it can result in a few different paths:
1) You can care and accept the reality of it (easy, but stagnant)
2) You can care and act to fix things (difficult but rewarding if you succeed)
3) You can care and choose to leave the organization.
It is up to you what actions to take, but I have to recommend caring enough to deliberately choose one of those overall paths. Personally, I have almost universally regretted staying in an org if multiple levels of management are problematic. But everyone's situation is different.
I’ve seen this before and virtually always one or more ICs get to be fall guy before a bad manager faces consequences.
More generally, building relationships with other hiring managers at your company is generally a very good practice. This is best done by being a visible contributor to their team’s success. Usually that’s because your team is somewhere in their dependencies and you stand out as someone who delivers.
Maybe your boss and their boss really are terrible, or maybe you are angling for more power, and want them (even subconsciously) to look bad so you can be a hero in comparison.
There's a lot of space between "I don't like my boss" and "they are ruining this company and need to go and I should replace them"
Is this not something that a good team builder would be able to fix, at least in theory? Team building is easy when everyone agrees and gets along; solving this issue would solidify your reputation (within and without).
Going with the flow has its advantages if you feel your position is relatively stable, as I do. Make sure you find purpose outside of your job to help with your mental health
You're not going to change the organization; they'll find a reason to fire you. Find a company or work where you can have some agency and be principled without dealing with structural nonsense. Quit doing good things for this company. The director and whoever hired them deserve to fail. Don't fix it for them.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. They've told you, clearly, in actions and words that they don't care about actually doing the right thing, it's all about appearances.
If you find yourself covering for the incompetence of your management, your peers, or otherwise where it's not the work you're paid to do, knock that shit off. It's not nice or good or kind or anything other than you being exploited by unscrupulous people who either know and don't care, or are incompetent and don't know. Leave and let them learn from the pain.
If you like your work, and you feel like your career is headed in the right direction, and you trust this manager then I'd stay. All your complaints don't sound unusual and just part of working in a large organization, where your satisfaction is not the primary goal of said organization.
If you have ambition and want to grow and learn, you should seek out another manager. (Note what I did not say: you do not have to seek out another _job_.)
A good manager will identify your career goals and give you a framework and guardrails in which you can launch yourself to the next level. A good manager will care about you personally ("nice") while being tough about the realities of the business ("serious"). When I hear about a manager that's nice but incompetent, I think of the term "ruinous empathy," which basically means they're so nice that they can't be effective.
Sometimes tough love is what people need, and even if it's not "nice," it's kind and it's the right thing to do.
You have, in my mind, a few options:
1. Be compassionately candid with your boss. "Look, I know your job is tough and that you're a really nice guy and care about us a lot, but if you let the little things slide, nobody will take you seriously, and I want to be taken seriously." If that doesn't work, escalate to the boss. Read up on ruinous empathy and be prepared to give examples. "They are too nice" isn't a good critique, but "Their reluctance to enforce discipline is causing problems A, B, and C" is hard to ignore.
2. Find a mentor either externally or within your company. This means finding someone that you respect that can give you candid advice on how to improve in whatever areas you are interested in. This does not have to be your boss. It cold be another manager at your company, another engineering leader, or even an HR person. Alternately, you can find a new job -- although that's not always guaranteed to be better, as other posters have pointed out!
3. You can abdicate responsibility, say "It's not my problem," and put your energy into non-work things. This is a totally valid approach. It's not what _I_ would do, but it's something that is totally fair. Maybe you want to level up your guitar or piano skills, or you want to get really fit. Take that extra energy you have and throw it into your chosen hobby. Spend more time with your family. Sleep better at night. Work isn't everything. It's just a job and a paycheck.
But my big piece of advice: don't settle. Don't settle for mediocrity. Keep pushing to be a better person, a better colleague, a better team player. Practice giving compassionate and candid feedback. Keep an eye out to avoid becoming obnoxiously aggressive or ruinously empathetic (two sides of the compassionately candid spectrum). Identify your goals, whether that's leveling up at work or leveling up in your private life, and go after them with gusto and abandon.
I've been where you are. It's tough. But you sound like the kind of person that can and will do better.
Best of luck to you.
I'm not a manager, but I expect you get there through strong relationships and trust.
Going over somebody's head indicates you don't have a strong relationship with that person, and that you can't be trusted by a direct superior.
Asserting ones personal priorities supersede the defined goals is also a classic mistake, as productivity means different things to different people.
One can have high output, but still be a liability for company projects that require cooperation with other disciplines including business operations.
Yes even geniuses get fired for poor team conduct, and it is usually always a surprise to their ego.
I am not saying you aren't necessarily on a boondoggle project, but rather your role is likely poorly defined in the team. A common issue for smaller firms, especially relevant when layoffs are in the pipeline. i.e. better to bail than be declared redundant or a problem.
Have a great day, and lets try to be less presumptuous about other peoples motives Professor X. =3
"Failing to include you" is a perception. It may not be a failure. It may be intentional, either because you're technically good at your job but lack the soft skills that are also important. "Clear communication" isn't necessarily compassionate communication. It may also be unintentional, because the manager and director have other priorities, or see you as autonomous.
Bottom line, it's your responsibility to ask for what you need. Manage up.
My advice when you find you’re working at that kind of company? Leave. Consider becoming a founder or working at a smaller company.
Sometimes your spider sense is telling you the right thing. So many people are so hopelessly dependent on the system they will convince themselves that soft skills are more important than execution. Those folks are wrong.
Either learn to adapt or leave and join a firm with top tier culture. Do your homework on that.
Part of being a lead or even any kind of role is to be able to deal with people that absolutely suck at their job and in the end, still make people as satisfied as you humanly can with your performance in your role.
Just accept it and treat it as "ambiguity" and don't let this bring you down, otherwise if you keep thinking about it, you'll make the issue much bigger and that will prevent you from doing your main objective, which should be paying your bills and putting that time in, so eventually you move to a different company that you'll have similar issues, but hopefully you'll have a higher salary.
I do struggle with this some as well, but with more experience this has been affecting me less and less, to go up the ladder, you need to get comfortable with people that sucks or things that don't work right.
Just have a look at the top of the ladder, the Elon Musks, Bidens and Trumps... they are terrible at their jobs, being good has never been a pre-requisite, but the connections you have and how lucky you are. You weren't born rich so you'll work in the company of a son of an emerald miner owner, how do you deal with that? That's how you should behave.
Some people here might tell you to read a book or do this or do that, but it won't change the fact that your superior is bad, what you need is to work through those misconceptions like "meritocracy" that wolves teach to sheeps, there's no meritocracy at work, maybe only in the amount of hours you put in and how good you are perceived by your peers, but meritocracy alone won't take you to $200B networth.
Summing up: all companies suck and those hierarchy structures have the natural tendency of creating those issues, you need to remember you do this because you need money and accept that you can't fix everything, and focus on what you can actually make better, otherwise consider going back to IC where you don't need to wrestle with so much ambiguity and people.
