Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"?
Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?
I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot.
In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.
Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more.
That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.
To be honest, reading the communications, the manager backed him in a corner and then just kept hammering. There's no place for the employee to go besides to defensive.
If you're a manager and the employee can't give you anything but complete and utter capitulation to satisfy you, you're not taking to them, you're just making yourself feel better about disliking them
The manager was hounding Jerry because (at least according to their version of the story) he was still not accepting responsibility for his actions and acknowledging that what he did was wrong.
If Jerry was not willing to accept that responsibility, then him quitting would be the ideal outcome anyway, so I understand why the manager was pushing him like this.
OTOH the manager should have been smarter about acknowledging Jerry's thinking (technically Bermuda is not in the Caribbean) and in explaining why they needed to overrule that (vacationers searching for Caribbean destinations mostly want to see listings for Bermuda). Their messaging was pretty disempowering to Jerry, kind of like saying "shut up code monkey, dance when the product team tells you to".
> every team member is treated as an adult
Adults take responsibility for their own actions. If someone is lying like this and being difficult to work with you want them to either get it together or leave. It's not about saving their feelings or letting them save face anymore. Let them leave. You can replace Jerry, and you'd rather he leave than the people who aren't being difficult.
Eh, even when you don't like it, managing egos is an important part of being an effective leader. We're social creatures, and nobody wants to work with somebody that is comfortable humiliating them.
Yeah, even just acknowledging the other guy's valid point, like "I agree with you, Bermuda is not part of the Caribbean, so yes it's deceptive to return it in the search results."
Sales is often deceptive. I think that's why the author was so defensive, notably about "honesty".
>>> Jerry: But I made some good decisions about what shows up when. For instance, I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for “Caribbean”
While Bermuda not being part of the Caribbean might be true…it’s really not a valid point in this circumstance. It was an apparent dev assumption that this level of precision was desired even if it wasn’t requested or its absence as a requirement was a mistake. When it was reported as a bug, that should have prompted the developer to clarify with the PM the OG requirement so they were both on the same page. He didn’t, he assumed she was wrong…apparently twice.
The PM probably understood that to their lay users the terms “Bermuda”, “Caribbean”, and “Islands” all have a degree of marketing relevance to each other (There is a reason why you might dumb down search results for something like that). Judging by what was information given in the story, apparently dumbed down search results was known and required in the past.
Not sure there is any “right” way to gently coach an employee that disregarded proper protocol and requirements, lied about it, blamed a colleague, and initially refused to accept responsibility when it was brought to their attention. That would be damn frustrating. I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer. It least in my opinion.
It’s super easy to coach an employee about this. I’ve done it many times, even once publicly to a director while I was a senior. Just acknowledge their train of thought extra generously, then explain why this case is different. ChatGPT has been trained to do this. I’d say your paragraph 2 was great, and yes the manager should have tried talking about “level of precision” or “marketing relevance” instead of defaulting forcefully to “because i/product said so”.
Yeah I agree that the manager seemed to leap pretty quick onto the “you don’t get to have independent thought in secret” train. Of course we only see one side of the story too. But it kind of feels to me like this might not have been the first time there has been a need to coach this person either. Not sure that just one instance really gets you to lack of trust.
I’ve been in the business a long time in multiple roles up to senior leadership. I am at the sunset of my career and found a lovely tech role where I happily don’t have to manage anyone but myself and it’s glorious. In all that time I have encountered my fair share of the Jerry types in the last almost 40 years so I am probably jaded and know the frustration.
> I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer.
Yeah, that is a tell that the manager is being unreasonable. What are the odds that every portion of this sits with the developer? Close to 0. That isn't how miscommunications generally happen. But it is a pattern that turns up when borderline abusive people report their interactions on the internet [0]. I don't trust this paraphrase of what Jerry was saying at all. It seems much more likely he led with something reasonable "Bermuda isn't in the Caribbean and we made a decision in the past to exclude Caribbean deals when that sort of search happens" then the manager fumbled the conversation in follow-up and managed to make it weird.
Though it does seem like the developer was making mistakes; I've seen scenes play out that I'd rate as similar. Part of the dev's job is to manage their manager when that manager is struggling. In this case the manager seems to have gotten stuck in the mindset of being a big monkey and the response to that is to let them monkey out peacefully and not make a fuss.
It could have been worse; but this looks like bad-to-average leadership on display.
[0] Big red flags in the "I wasn't sure he was working in good faith" and "Maybe he was feeling lazy" quote with no evidence. We're likely seeing misreported conversation; the manager doesn't understand what is going on conversationally if he got to that mindset in this sort of situation. What else did he get wrong?
> letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.
When you combine this with a difference in authority, as it is in this situation, it's even worse to behave this way. If this person was a peer and wasn't forced to sit through this "meeting" I can imagine they would have hung up about 20% through it.
He treated his subordinate like a child and didn't even handle it well in that context. Even in the situation where the employee was is wrong it reflects poorly on the manager. It's wild to be bragging about it on the internet. Being the authority figure means you are expected to be the adult in the room and understand the other person even when they lack the words to express themselves. That's why you're paid the big bucks.
This is truly psychotic, not as an ad hominem. And I don't mean his behavior, which you can just chalk up to an antisocial "I'm the boss" personality - I mean specifically the fact that he believes he is being respectful.
This reads awfully, as both people seem to be wrong. The coder's just avoiding work and dismissing product, but the manager's just bullying the guy into getting a respectful "yes, sir" like an authoritarian parent.
The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager's actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a "us vs then" culture.
Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than "John is good and Betty is bad".
I really don't understand why the two(or even three) of them didn't hop on a 5 minute call to understand what was being asked, instead of whatever hellish version of Chinese whispers this team dynamic is.
Pretty incredible that when pressed on the assumptions the author made about Jerry’s motivations, the author just doubles down on assuming these motivations again in the defense of the first article.
Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W
That is an interesting scenario, I am glad they shared it.
Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR.
Also need to address culture. It should be like a "door desk" (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first.
You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs.
Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.
The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author
This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss.
This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.
9) wrote a blog post about it on the internet with a detailed transcript of all the conversations, so that the entire world knows how much of an idiot Jerry and how much of a saint the author was.
It was supposedly Jerry's code that intentionally caused results for Bermuda to not show up for "Caribbean", but the fix for it was to change their search engine config because there was an error copying from the database?
The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author "several hours" to fix it.
I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn't interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn't cuss?
Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable.
Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word "cunt" is insufficient to describe him.
> The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it?
I think he meant that if the ticket was dismissed in a much shorter time than the allotted then it also needs a good reason.
I also believe a bug ticket saying “this shouldn’t happen” is not solved until until “this” no longer happens or everyone involved agrees that it’s okay for it to happen.
I've found presence helps a lot in these situations, where perspectives don't align; it's not doable with back and forths from my experience. Get the people who are disagreeing in the same room, virtual or otherwise; preferably before the tone turns sour.
He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn't possibly be disrespectful because he didn't swear and he didn't raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance.
Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.
Why ? Like everything else money, in the last 60 years or so, more people started chasing money at all costs, ignoring the impact on society.
Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees.
Decades ago, at least these "CEOs" would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to "how much can I get and screw everyone else".
"No, I'll do it myself" and "I feel like you aren't listening to me" comes straight out of couple's therapy handbooks on what not to do.
You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.
Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"?
Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?
I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot.
In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.
Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more.
That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.
To be honest, reading the communications, the manager backed him in a corner and then just kept hammering. There's no place for the employee to go besides to defensive.
If you're a manager and the employee can't give you anything but complete and utter capitulation to satisfy you, you're not taking to them, you're just making yourself feel better about disliking them
The manager was hounding Jerry because (at least according to their version of the story) he was still not accepting responsibility for his actions and acknowledging that what he did was wrong.
If Jerry was not willing to accept that responsibility, then him quitting would be the ideal outcome anyway, so I understand why the manager was pushing him like this.
OTOH the manager should have been smarter about acknowledging Jerry's thinking (technically Bermuda is not in the Caribbean) and in explaining why they needed to overrule that (vacationers searching for Caribbean destinations mostly want to see listings for Bermuda). Their messaging was pretty disempowering to Jerry, kind of like saying "shut up code monkey, dance when the product team tells you to".
> every team member is treated as an adult
Adults take responsibility for their own actions. If someone is lying like this and being difficult to work with you want them to either get it together or leave. It's not about saving their feelings or letting them save face anymore. Let them leave. You can replace Jerry, and you'd rather he leave than the people who aren't being difficult.
There is a difference between humiliating someone and driving a point home for sure.
But the world doesn't have time for people who need to "save face". That is a personal problem that needs to be figured out off company time.
Eh, even when you don't like it, managing egos is an important part of being an effective leader. We're social creatures, and nobody wants to work with somebody that is comfortable humiliating them.
Yeah, even just acknowledging the other guy's valid point, like "I agree with you, Bermuda is not part of the Caribbean, so yes it's deceptive to return it in the search results."
Sales is often deceptive. I think that's why the author was so defensive, notably about "honesty".
>>> Jerry: But I made some good decisions about what shows up when. For instance, I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for “Caribbean”
While Bermuda not being part of the Caribbean might be true…it’s really not a valid point in this circumstance. It was an apparent dev assumption that this level of precision was desired even if it wasn’t requested or its absence as a requirement was a mistake. When it was reported as a bug, that should have prompted the developer to clarify with the PM the OG requirement so they were both on the same page. He didn’t, he assumed she was wrong…apparently twice.
The PM probably understood that to their lay users the terms “Bermuda”, “Caribbean”, and “Islands” all have a degree of marketing relevance to each other (There is a reason why you might dumb down search results for something like that). Judging by what was information given in the story, apparently dumbed down search results was known and required in the past.
Not sure there is any “right” way to gently coach an employee that disregarded proper protocol and requirements, lied about it, blamed a colleague, and initially refused to accept responsibility when it was brought to their attention. That would be damn frustrating. I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer. It least in my opinion.
It’s super easy to coach an employee about this. I’ve done it many times, even once publicly to a director while I was a senior. Just acknowledge their train of thought extra generously, then explain why this case is different. ChatGPT has been trained to do this. I’d say your paragraph 2 was great, and yes the manager should have tried talking about “level of precision” or “marketing relevance” instead of defaulting forcefully to “because i/product said so”.
Yeah I agree that the manager seemed to leap pretty quick onto the “you don’t get to have independent thought in secret” train. Of course we only see one side of the story too. But it kind of feels to me like this might not have been the first time there has been a need to coach this person either. Not sure that just one instance really gets you to lack of trust.
I’ve been in the business a long time in multiple roles up to senior leadership. I am at the sunset of my career and found a lovely tech role where I happily don’t have to manage anyone but myself and it’s glorious. In all that time I have encountered my fair share of the Jerry types in the last almost 40 years so I am probably jaded and know the frustration.
Yeah and maybe the employee has been asked to implement dark patterns before. Such is modern capitalism.
> I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer.
Yeah, that is a tell that the manager is being unreasonable. What are the odds that every portion of this sits with the developer? Close to 0. That isn't how miscommunications generally happen. But it is a pattern that turns up when borderline abusive people report their interactions on the internet [0]. I don't trust this paraphrase of what Jerry was saying at all. It seems much more likely he led with something reasonable "Bermuda isn't in the Caribbean and we made a decision in the past to exclude Caribbean deals when that sort of search happens" then the manager fumbled the conversation in follow-up and managed to make it weird.
Though it does seem like the developer was making mistakes; I've seen scenes play out that I'd rate as similar. Part of the dev's job is to manage their manager when that manager is struggling. In this case the manager seems to have gotten stuck in the mindset of being a big monkey and the response to that is to let them monkey out peacefully and not make a fuss.
It could have been worse; but this looks like bad-to-average leadership on display.
[0] Big red flags in the "I wasn't sure he was working in good faith" and "Maybe he was feeling lazy" quote with no evidence. We're likely seeing misreported conversation; the manager doesn't understand what is going on conversationally if he got to that mindset in this sort of situation. What else did he get wrong?
> letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.
When you combine this with a difference in authority, as it is in this situation, it's even worse to behave this way. If this person was a peer and wasn't forced to sit through this "meeting" I can imagine they would have hung up about 20% through it.
He treated his subordinate like a child and didn't even handle it well in that context. Even in the situation where the employee was is wrong it reflects poorly on the manager. It's wild to be bragging about it on the internet. Being the authority figure means you are expected to be the adult in the room and understand the other person even when they lack the words to express themselves. That's why you're paid the big bucks.
This is truly psychotic, not as an ad hominem. And I don't mean his behavior, which you can just chalk up to an antisocial "I'm the boss" personality - I mean specifically the fact that he believes he is being respectful.
His conscience is bothering him, that’s why he’s publicly reliving every detail lol.
This reads awfully, as both people seem to be wrong. The coder's just avoiding work and dismissing product, but the manager's just bullying the guy into getting a respectful "yes, sir" like an authoritarian parent.
The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager's actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a "us vs then" culture.
Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than "John is good and Betty is bad".
I really don't understand why the two(or even three) of them didn't hop on a 5 minute call to understand what was being asked, instead of whatever hellish version of Chinese whispers this team dynamic is.
Pretty incredible that when pressed on the assumptions the author made about Jerry’s motivations, the author just doubles down on assuming these motivations again in the defense of the first article.
Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W
That is an interesting scenario, I am glad they shared it.
Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR.
Also need to address culture. It should be like a "door desk" (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first.
You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs.
Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.
The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author
This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss.
This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.
9) wrote a blog post about it on the internet with a detailed transcript of all the conversations, so that the entire world knows how much of an idiot Jerry and how much of a saint the author was.
But no, author never gives in to anger...
It was supposedly Jerry's code that intentionally caused results for Bermuda to not show up for "Caribbean", but the fix for it was to change their search engine config because there was an error copying from the database?
The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author "several hours" to fix it.
I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn't interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn't cuss?
Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable.
Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word "cunt" is insufficient to describe him.
I agree story has holes but regarding
> The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it?
I think he meant that if the ticket was dismissed in a much shorter time than the allotted then it also needs a good reason.
I also believe a bug ticket saying “this shouldn’t happen” is not solved until until “this” no longer happens or everyone involved agrees that it’s okay for it to happen.
I've found presence helps a lot in these situations, where perspectives don't align; it's not doable with back and forths from my experience. Get the people who are disagreeing in the same room, virtual or otherwise; preferably before the tone turns sour.
He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn't possibly be disrespectful because he didn't swear and he didn't raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance.
Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.
[dead]
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Why ? Like everything else money, in the last 60 years or so, more people started chasing money at all costs, ignoring the impact on society.
Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees.
Decades ago, at least these "CEOs" would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to "how much can I get and screw everyone else".