>In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.
Usually, it's more ignorance rather than (intentional) cruelty. If your office has a relaxed atmosphere, as a manager, it is very easy to make the mistake of thinking that you are just a regular part of the gang. But of course, you're not, and everyone (except you) is aware of your status and the fact that you control their continual employment, bonuses/raises and career advancement.
This view is reinforced in modern tech culture which is deeply uncomfortable with power and status hierarchies without realizing that a proper hierarchy with defined roles and responsibilities actually makes everyone more comfortable because everyone knows where they stand. The Valve case study of a fully horizontal organization is complete bullcrap because they replaced defined roles and responsibilities and chain of command with an ambiguous and implicit set of roles, responsibilities and chain of command. Nobody there believes that Gabe Newell is just a regular joe, regardless of what his title says.
>Yes, and that ignorance is a _privelege_ of power.
No it's not.
There we go. My statement has as much evidentiary support as yours.
Have you ever thought about the usefulness and evidentiary support of using this weird leftist nomenclature to reframe traditionally understood concepts? Like what value did you bring by reframing 'ignorance' as 'privilege' - but 'privilege' not in the sense of the dictionary definition but as a loaded concept that came out of dark recesses of some leftist writings that has no actual backing and does not actually lead to a better understanding of the world.
Seems like a pretty straightforward point to me. Powerful people are punished less for their lack of understanding of less powerful, even though the consequences of their ignorance are worse.
Who has more reason to worry, a manager making a joke about firing someone, or an employee making a joke about forming a union with their coworkers? There's a reason that one of these two groups needed to be given legal protection for their joke.
>Powerful people are punished less for their lack of understanding of less powerful
That's not true. Or it's true in some situations and not in others. It is also true in some situations of subordinates.
>Who has more reason to worry, a manager making a joke about firing someone, or an employee making a joke about forming a union with their coworkers?
There are occasions where an employee can make a joke that would get a manager into trouble or into MORE trouble if they made that joke. There are behaviours that would get a manager into trouble and not the employee. The managerial and subordinate positions each come with their own set of rights, responsibilities, and privileges. My good friend, for example, declined a managerial 'promotion' because he was happy doing what he was doing and didn't want the extra stress and pressure. Back in uni when I worked as a part-timer at Staples, my manager was the hardest worker I've ever seen. She pulled crazy hours while some of us messed around and did as little as we could to get through the shift. To top it all off, she is the one that got yelled at by difficult customers, and not us - even if we screwed up. You can come up with alternative examples where the manager was a lazy bum and employees were super hard workers ... why? Because human organizations are complex and each one has different dynamics at play and different cultures. So thinking about it terms of the idiotic and shallow 'privilege' idea misses all those dynamics and complexity. So no, 'privilege' is not the right metaphor for the discussion at hand, and it isn't straightforward.
Yes, I guess nothing is ever that simple. But the fact that you are able to have a dialogue about this shows that leftist nomenclature can lead to understanding in the same way as any other nomenclature, which is the understanding that's developed in a back and forth dialogue about a subject. Maybe if the OP had declared their belief as an unquestionable religious dogma (as many people do with their political opinions), there would be grounds to criticize them, but they didn't.
Privilege isn't weird leftist nomenclature, it's a well-documented fact about how the world works. Some people receive less blow-back for their misbehavior than others, because of their position in society. Whether their misbehaviour is from ignorance or cruelty is irrelevant to this point:
More powerful[1] people are more insulated from the consequences of their ignorance.
The response to you did not contradict your statement. It added important context to it.
[1] Two people can have more, or less power, relative to eachother, depending on the social context they are in.
>Some people receive less blow-back for their misbehavior than others, because of their position in society.
Talk about a truism. Yes, some people receive less blow-back for their misbehavior due to their position in society.
It could be the case that one individual receives blow-back for this misbehaviour because, for example, they are in a position of responsibility whereas someone who isn't, wouldn't. That happens all the time. How about this, in my city, vagrancy is completely unpunished, even though it's illegal, but you're going to get tagged if you let your chihuahua off-leash in an empty park. Are homeless people privileged? Under a colloquial reading of definition, they sure are. But we know you don't mean that because you're importing extreme Leftist ideas into this definition and being dishonest that you are doing that.
Yes. That's the dictionary definition of 'privilege'. Now show me where in that definition is the position of 'manager' cast as a 'privileged' position or an example of 'privilege of power'? You had to import that from ideas put out from leftists writings where this word is reframed and redefined to mean something completely different. This bait-and-switch is a dishonest equivocation on your part because you're hijacking regular, commonly understood words in order to backdoor extreme ideas.
Back to the topic at hand, another way to look at a position of 'manager', that actually matches reality, is to admit that it is a necessary role in any sized organization of people focusing on completing a common task. This is true if the organization is a club, or a sports team or a corporation because there will always be a need, to manage and organize groups of people. This position comes with its own set of responsibilities and accountability and as such frequently the punishments and repercussions for 'misbehaviour' are greater than what a subordinate employee would receive for the same action. It's not an intrinsically 'privileged' position. I made this argument to another poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23479872
Slightly related. My father owned a restaurant when I was growing up and employed local high school students as dishwashers. I was young, probably around 12 and I was at a summer camp that our dishwasher at the time was also attending and I made a joke to him about getting him fired. Ill never forget how mad my father was with me when he found out and how sternly he reprimanded me. He stressed early on with me that when you have control over people's livelihoods you never ever abuse the power dynamic that comes with that position.
I spent most of my career with what I now consider abusive bosses. I didn't even start to realize it until I lucked into a few good bosses. You go through that for years and you become so anxious about asking for things, taking vacations, making any peep, etc. You want to just be as quiet as possible and not ruffle any feathers.
I've heard and seen way worse than jokes about being fired. I started out in the web hosting industry, it was insanely toxic, unless that's just how jobs were during the 08 recession. I was pretty much a kid and had no experience back then, so I had no frame of reference.
As a non manager, from arm chair, when presented as an abstract concept, I can see it seeming incredulous.
The whole point however is that in the moment, in the context, with familiar people, as a new manager, there will be part of your brain that says "Do this". The advice is not even targeting the jerk-manager, who is ignorant and boisterous and does this consistently. It is targeting a manager in transition who may do this accidentally, as a misfiring instinct. It's the stereotypical best man / maid of honours making an inappropriate joke at a wedding with best intentions... but consequences.
To your question therefore:
Yes, there frequently is that part of one's brain for new team leads in some situations.
No, don't do it.
FWIW: To those taking a cynical view on such articles - There are any number of things, managementy or technical, that seem obvious when written down... but still get done wrong any day of the week :). In related but different context: my previous transition from hands-on to architect was similarly enlightening - all the designs and solutions that seemed so obvious and easy when presented with finished document; were so much more intimidating when faced with a blank slate, an empty sheer where any design pattern, infrastructure architecture can go :O.
It's scary to be a new architect, it's scary to be a new manager, and simple, actionable, clearly-good advice can be a good way to gain comfort and confidence, and provide a starting point to build on.
Describing a joke out of context can make a person sound very cruel indeed. I've been in situations where someone has made a joke about me dying, for example, and I found it to be funny and light-hearted. But if you strip out the context and say "he made a joke about me being murdered", it sounds far, far more cruel than it really was.
The reason the blog post was written is that jokes that would usually be fine among friends can take on a different tune as soon as the power dynamic changes, and that's not always obvious to the person with the upper hand.
Yes I did. The point I was trying to make was, this really shouldn’t come to anyone naturally. It is like writing a blog post about not bullying anyone. People still do it, but I think those people are psychologically unstable, should be isolated and needs help.
In the context of one team member gets promoted to manage the rest of the team, I can see how this type of "joke" could happen. If the team was really close and everyone was friends, it's easy to keep the friend mindset and make what you think is just a dumb joke without really thinking it through.
Yep. It’s natural. It’s happened to me, and I’ve done it as well. It never bothered me when it happened to me, so I thought it was OK. This is a good reminder to be more careful.
I've had this happen at two jobs. Both times I immediately voiced that that was in poor taste, and next time they joke about it they'd best just let me go, because I don't want to work for someone who doesn't respect my livelihood. At the first job I was reprimanded for being "confrontational", which led to the second job where the manager apologized and took it to heart; we have a great working relationship now. It's the manager's responsibility to be the champion of good communication.
Only time I've seen a manager joke like that was with a senior engineer that also joked about quitting fairly often. It was banter and it worked for them. Same manager never joked about it with anyone else though.
Yeah that's about the only time it works. When I was managing a former teammate we used to joke about it, but it was just between us and there was never any reason to worry.
In general, though, never a good joke. And even with friends, be careful.
There are a lot of tech blog posts to the effect of "Here is the obviously common sense business thing we learned" as a way of building a personal brand. I blame it on the fact that the tech culture starts in HS or College and then takes a worker straight into the industry; HS coder -> University -> jr coder role -> startup, but without the exposure to other contexts/jobs/roles/experiences.
But yeah, it's basic professionalism -- don't joke about firing people, quitting, pay cuts/raises, etc.
> I blame it on the fact that the tech culture starts in HS or College and then takes a worker straight into the industry; HS coder -> University -> jr coder role -> startup
As a counter to this, I have seen multiple managers make jokes like this and they all came from nontechnical backgrounds and had 20+ years of experience. I literally had a (nontechnical) manager say in a supposedly joking manner once about going to some meeting “Well you want to put food on the table for your family don't you? So remember that you have to be there for <some not-that-important meeting> Ha ha ha”.
So the whole “it's just coders learning basic professionalism” narrative might not be as cut-and-dried as you think it is. One (unproven) hypothesis I have is that it's possible that people who went to college and had their first decade's worth of jobs in a comfortable economic climate are more comfortable making these kind of jokes than others who were not so fortunate.
> One (unproven) hypothesis I have is that it's possible that people who went to college and had their first decade's worth of jobs in a comfortable economic climate are more comfortable making these kind of jokes than others who were not so fortunate.
It's probably both that and how financially secure they are in general, whether that be via grunt work, inheritance, safety net, whatever.
I spent the first 5 years of my career spending the equivalent of minimum wage or less. Now I don't need to give a fuck. Realistically, on a starter dev salary, you can save >50% if that's your target.
As a result, it's a manual process for me to empathise with people who actually _need_ their job.
Don't get me wrong - I understand their predicament - it's just not an automatic impulse, because for me, work is like a side quest I do to keep myself ticking over in the long term, a bit like regular exercise or a good diet, it's never present constantly in my mind like I imagine it must be for a wage slave.
> ...and how financially secure they are in general, whether that be via grunt work, inheritance, safety net, whatever.
True. Privilege, and assumptions of “But of course you can find another job” probably play a huge part too. I've never had a manager belonging to an underrepresented community in tech, but I imagine they would be far less likely to say something like that.
My manager does this. My managers' boss does it to him. One of the very few complaints I have about my management or my job.
I've sort of become inoculated to it though. Was tough at first though, especially since I have some (undiagnosed) manner of anxiety disorder. So the joke would happen and I would think about it for the rest of the day, if not longer.
It is probably a regional humor thing but with so much mobility these days it's hard to use your regional humor without offending people.
In some places you can ask "Are you smoking crack?" when someone suggests something silly or wrong. In other places that would be very wrong.
In some places certain words are insults and other places they're euphemisms.
Some places tolerate or encourage "harmless" sexual innuendo, others do not.
I have had employees that would appreciate a joke about performance or firing so long as it was obvious that it wasn't a veiled threat. I've had employees who that would probably have them working on finding another job. I'm not the type to joke about that, but I know who would appreciate it and who wouldn't.
> have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone?
It can be a good joke if it is immediately obvious that it is a joke.
I would rather work with alright people that make stupid jokes than some of the more formally correct ones who'd mess up my salary month after month, drag me through stupid American-style personal-improvement-programs in hope of finding a firable offense etc. (And no, they didn't find anything, and I had my job until I was ready for something else ;-)
That said I certainly wouldn't recommend that sort of jokes and my guess is the people who come up with those kinds of jokes are mostly exactly the same people who shouldn't try them as it really isn't obvious at all.
I recall the game of thrones episode where this guy is telling a really old and well-known joke, and when he gets to the punchline, basically everybody in the room can't help but blurt it out before he can.
Or if you're in line and the cashier can't ring up your stuff for some technical reason, and you blurt out "well, I guess it must be free, huh?" But they have heard that one ever single day since they started.
Even I, paragon of ...uh... stuff... I once cracked a joke in the TSA line.
I would just imagine that most of this is human nature and I expect graduating to a higher level of power and responsibility has the same sort of well-traveled detours.
I've seen it a bunch in companies where the management was less formal - but not in IT, my impression of IT culture is borderline autistic - social interactions are very awkward compared to other industries I've worked in (manufacturing, marketing and newspapers) so this wouldn't go over well. Admittedly I didn't fit in well in those circles because I would put myself in the IT category, but I can still spot the difference. Even the tone of this discussion sounds so formal and alien to how people usually interact.
So I saw situations where it was said as a joke and taken as one, I wouldn't describe it as cruel or stupid.
The CEO of one of my previous companies at his birthday celebration joked at one of the employees that if he doesn't sing Happy Birthday song louder he will fire him.
And this is not the worst that has come out of his mouth.
Having to explain this out is pretty common or understandable. And I think it's less about the specific example not saying X, and more about new leadership role = same words now mean totally different things, especially if it's your first go at it.
Many think that leadership IQ is something innate, but some aspects definitely either have to be explained, or learned the hard way. That's totally ok though - it means most of us have what it takes to manage if we're willing to learn.
I once jokingly said it to an employee and immediately felt bad about it. Did a quick all-hands (we're a small company), apologized and said it wouldn't happen again.
On our (very small) team, our manager jokes about it constantly. Every day. It's a running joke. But we all get along and know he's 100 % joking and he is very protective of his team. So in our case I think it's fine.
So to your first point, I think the managerial relationship is complicated enough that it warrants thinking about it, anyway.
If my previous manager had made a joke like that, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. We had a great relationship inside and outside of work and my job was very secure. If my current manager did, it would make me nervous -- i'm new to the team and I don't know him that well. It's all about context.
Not sure if this blog post should or should not be written, but having seen many managers bootstrapping themselves out of individual contributor roles; you have to learn somewhere. Blog posts are just one avenue.
I've seen it happen a few times and in every case, the context was such that it was very well known to be a joke and done in a very self-deprecating manner so it wasn't a problem.
But it still shouldn't be done.
Cases, where it's used as a tiny micro-aggression or kind of with a dark undertone, are especially bad.
New managers may not quite comprehend the existential nature of the comment.
There are a ton of worse things that new managers do, usually, things need to be spelled out clearly.
I am not a manager, but here is a question for managers, have you or anyone you know, joked about firing someone?
In my opinion, that would be incredibly cruel and stupid.