Leadership is a hell of a drug

...when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king,"

I can't help myself but swap it with the German translation of "Leader", which is "Führer". Especially when somebody insists on calling himself a "Leader" (in English) in an otherwise German conversation, which unfortunately is quite common.

I agree, and my "favorite" title is Thought Leader.

In my experience, people who call themself leaders, are often not performing very well in their main role, which usually happens to that of a people manager.

Are you implying leadership is not a skill that can be honed? Is being a leader not a profession?

Edit: instead of responding to individual comments, I will just edit this comment.

I am just a little bit sad about the emotional responses here on this thread, just echoing a sentiment, without much critical discourse.

Maybe it's a bit like I heard as a kid (perhaps incorrectly), that the term sensei is one of respect, from student towards teacher. Not something one claims for oneself.

Even if I heard incorrectly, I still like the idea.

Some obscure company cultures demand you address everyone and yourself as "leader" in third-person, irrespective of designation and rank. So fresh grads are leaders, janitors are "sanitation leaders", SDEs are "development leaders" and so on.

I went on a hardcore training course once - four days in the mountains in Wales (UK) in winter, in the pouring rain, with ex-military trainers, competing as teams on tasks that were deliberately designed to cause tension in the teams. It was fascinating. All the guys that declared themselves the leaders at the start were practically (and literally in one case) in tears by the end, realising that nobody respected them and everyone thought they were jerks. The quiet, respectful, thoughtful ones became the leaders that everyone wanted to follow.

Dress for the job you want, not have.

Self-proclaimed leaders and experts basically signal to me that they stopped bothering to upskill, leveled off, and use their new title as a form of justification or personal flattery.

It's because nobody is interesting in hiring you otherwise.

That is despite the fact that post-hiring they want you to be a follower, not a leader.

What if your name is King? :)

Probably so that you can put Director on your resume even though you're an M1 manager and not get called out for it publicly.

It must be being struck by the "brilliant" idea, right? The first one is too weird for me to contemplate. In either case, I don't judge people too much for this because I think it signals compliance with corporate norms. My theory is that anyone that says "Leader" on their LinkedIn title is actually saying "I'm not going to point out the emperor has no clothes as long as I'm salaried and allowed to give talks."

I think the answer is much more simpler. My own CEO and his immediate lackeys consider themselves "leaders". This is just to distingush themselves from lower level management. They "lead" the company, so "of course" they are "leaders".

Or to put it even shorter: leadership is reserved for the top of the org-chart.

This is kind of a silly question. In essence you're asking why people do things that other people find stupid (I agree it's pretty bad to see that).

I think there are people who can control processes better than others. So why wouldn't call yourself a leader

My favorite one comes from our current "operations manager", where he shared his best performance in the last years ( he joined us 2 years ago).

"They found me after 1,5 years" lol

Odd, it's probably true. Just not what I thought.

You know, for all I agree with the post, and that leadership-as-cult is horrible, the question _why_ would someone put that in their LinkedIn title is trivial to answer:

Because they want to get the moneys! Because they want to get hired as a leader!

Because _you're_ not the audience. Their cronies are, the other cultists. They didn't come up with this themselves, they're just copying what everyone else (in their peer group / bubble) are doing... shrug

Management sucks period. As to why management sucks my friend offered a good insight:

Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want.

These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there.

As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.

It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.

Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc.

This person sounds like an energy vampire.

The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.

As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.

The line of thinking you're showcasing is exactly of the type I've had to deal with in so many companies before, and is the real energy vampire.

Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap.

That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI

I think that’s subjective. I was pretty invigorated reading it. I’d love to complain about shit with this guy for hours.

You know why it’s easy? Because management fucking sucks.

I disagree, I think the king is indeed naked and not only does he have the balls telling everyone about it, he does it with style.

Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"

Exactly. While he may be very good at something, this kind of person is an net negative for a team.

At least it's not AI generated junk

This person sounds like an energy vampire...

Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/

"energy vampire" sounds like some corporate bs

Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders/managers; you know who you are

100% of managers nodding as they read this

Yep the gulf between proper leadership and corporate managerialism was never more apparent to me than when I left the army and did an MBA.

Leaders are 'in the trenches', in a commercial environment this means they know their stuff, are putting themselves 'on the line' and are demonstrating the values and standards expected of those further down the ladder.

Corporate managers are more like administrators, they dispassionately work the system for their own benefits and pay lip service to the cares and concerns of those they're meant to be leading.

I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative/management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work.

You need to read David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs".

I think the situation is very much more complicated than this in the sense there is not just one way to behave, the right way to behave is situational. Good wartime leaders might be bad peacetime leaders and so on etc.

Do you want high or low aggression? Guess what: it depends.

I do want to suggest an option I haven't seen before which is "what if it turns out that middle management is more automatable than everything everything else"? i.e, very broad status updates are scalable with ai and it turns out middle management isn't as needed in the future as it used to be.

went through two instances of three-full-day versions of the author’s Monday meeting

Sometimes it takes more indoctrination than others to try and convince people that the social climbers who seek leadership positions above all else can be suitable for the job.

Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug

The concept makes sense, with "leadership-seeking behavior" manifesting itself strongest in those who have the greatest (yea, bigliest) lack of natural leadership ability, and who need some kind of a "fix" to supplement this deficiency. Kind of analogous to the drug addict and their toxic drug-seeking behavior which is not only self-destructive but damaging to everyone involved in one way or another, whether apparent or hidden behind closed doors.

And once they've gotten their fix they still can't perform as well as ordinary people who don't need some kind of artificial aggrandizement.

I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if...

I can assure you that there is no leadership team competent enough that I would be "fine" with a mandatory four-hour all hands on Monday morning. Not even the bosses I have liked personally could make that worthwhile.

For what it's worth, as I can see there have been some flak from the commenters here, I think we're probably on the same page. There are people who I do identify as leaders, and I probably wouldn't object to them calling themselves leaders... but I think the word has been so thoroughly captured that it's wise to use something else.

It's a bit like how there are some legitimate blockchain use cases (or so I've been told by a friend who works in the space) but you'd have to be nuts to identify yourself as a crypto-advocate with no further context.

One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.

In the tech space, what do you make of high turnover? Do people get a pass if their staff average a 1.5 year tenure, or is this indicative of systemic issues?

Also, this would only be done by a true sociopath, but you can fake that number with sufficiently intense levels of psychological manipulation, enforced skill atrophy, and fear. Someone recently told me that they can't leave their organization before a contract expires because their CEO litigated very aggressively against the last person to do so, even though it was perfectly legal.

I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.

Absolutely correct. I can imagine a useful four hour meeting, but it would be very rare. A lengthy face-to-face meeting would always be an annoyance, but they've made plenty of other mistakes and this is the cherry on top. I had hoped more people that didn't 100% agree would have been able to make that charitable inference, but I'm glad someone did.

EDIT: I apparently don't know how quotes work on HN, and don't have time to find out. Sorry!

I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.

Disagree. Speaking for myself, even if I already liked my leadership, if they gave me a mandatory 4 hour meeting with that kind of language, I would wonder if they had been eaten and replaced by aliens. Clearly something changed, because that's a bad meeting, and if I was ok with them before it's because they don't do stuff like that.

Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.

Are you quoting Dwight Schute?

A 4 hour lecture/seminar (it's not going to be a real meeting, is it) is just not ever a useful thing. Even if the information conveyed is somehow important and somehow can't be supplied as a document, everybody will be snoozing by hour 2 - not to mention resentful from minute 1.

A barely related anecdote to illustrate why some people mistrust management. Not entirely necessary but having typed it I might as well press the button:

The only time I've ever been pulled into a 4-hour all-hands meeting it turned out to be a covert way to fire a bunch of employees without giving them the chance to say goodbye to their colleagues.

One by one, people got summoned out of the room ("hey, there's a phone call for you", etc) and never returned. The rest sat listening to the "leaders" (including one fairly well known public figure) droning on about nothing. By the end many of us had figured out what was happening, and when we all returned to the office to find ~30% of the desks empty there was universal outrage.

Lots of other people left in the aftermath, and the exodus apparently continued after I went.

This perspective ignores employee acquisition costs and reputation costs. It is not free to churn at-will employees.

My company made it very clear I was being hired in an at will state when I was taking the job. They brought it up many, many times.

People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role.

A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.

I get a lot of reader correspondence from the U.S, and the prevalence of this seems to be the same in places with at-will employment, with an added dose of terror keeping anyone from admitting they hate it.

I suspect you are wrong on the first part, at least for large technology companies. I do agree with the view of what is needed in practice to be a good leader.

However, i think your assumption there is no need to do that is wrong.

Take an area like the bay area - it has about 120k software engineers. This is not a small number. Even so, most companies the scale/size of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have, at this point, interviewed 95+% of the bay area SWE population, and most (Apple is the exception here) had done so by the time they were ~10-12 years in existence. That is a very short time period to go through the available population, and the population does not grow that quickly.

So even if there was zero rampup time, etc, none of which were true, they can't practically afford to churn people as quickly or as randomly as you suggest because they can't replace them fast enough except at very high cost.

If you talk about something that has a much much larger available population, or companies with much smaller need it might be true.

A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following. In reality we are all wrong N times a day and rely on other people's help often. Who would ever listen to an idea by someone who was too timid to voice it though?

Many bullshitters have succeeded in management. This is why I think people should not be so frightened of giving it a try - there will certainly be a lot worse examples than you who made a living out of it.

Very kind of you to say so, thank you!

You must refer to the author David Whyte :) his narration voice is fantastic as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IygDX7Vdql0

You would terminate someone for...having an opinion? They didn't mention the company they worked for (if indeed it is their company and not some made-up example).

Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.

I had to scroll so much to reach the flip side of the coin. IMHO making a 4 hours mandatory bs meeting on monday morning is much more toxic than this.

Terminate people you disagree with and your blindspots get.. blinder? You end up being delusional, which is far from good.

keeping teams aligned is hard

If keeping teams of professionals aligned is hard the problem is unlikely to be in the professionals..

Mr Musk?! Please stop wasting time on HN and attend to the small mountain of legal documents on and around your desk.

Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like.

A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice.

A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables.

It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.

Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard.

It is actually really really easy to not send your employees emails like "This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning". Shockingly easy in fact.

"this must be an Australian" ... It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic.

Your stereotype is 100% wrong. They emigrated to Australia from Southeast Asia according to: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...

I moved here, but I love this about Australia. There's a lot of boot-licking in corporate settings, but one of my first experiences here was someone holding the door open on a train for fun, preventing us from leaving the station. Back home, this would have been a huge ordeal while we waited for the police or someone to arrive, as we all quietly waited and tried to avoid making a scene.

But in Australia, the driver got out of the front carriage and screamed "OI, DICKHEAD!" and that rapidly resolved the issue.

IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all.

That's a really great pithy summary. It gels with one popular definition of software architecture: good software architecture anticipates which bits of a codebase/solution are likely to change more effectively than bad software architecture.

this must be an Australian.. It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic

Nothing really particular to Australia, the same happens in many other places.

Extremely fair. #2 is a tricky one. On one hand, I know a few executives who genuinely have some demonstrable area of expertise that isn't related to technology. On the other hand, an executive whose area of expertise always seems to be "It's in things that are impossible for you to understand" is unfalsifiable from my viewpoint. I err on the side of caution until they do something that simply can't be explained away... like scheduling a four hour meeting to say nothing as the outcome of a six month process.

Not everyone likes beer after work? You're projecting your preferences onto others, which ironically is narcissistic.

Most companies suck, but I started a small one with some friends and my blog has introduced me to the small circle of competent people in my city - fret not for me! And I spend a lot of time getting engineers out of toxic organizations. I'm currently building a small application for my readers to network with each other, because I can no longer afford to spend so much time personally deciding which people to connect with each other.

So that is not my conclusion at all. However, I looked around for quite a while and failed to find placement at a good company (in fact, I suspect the best companies almost never go to market, they just hire friends and former colleagues). "Start a popular blog and escape" is not a viable strategy for most people, and I'm trying to do something about it.

You are right though, relentless negativity is pointless. I can only afford it in these concentrated bursts because... well, my situation is actually quite good.

(But I think you've said something very valuable nonetheless for many people, including anyone that reads me regularly. Complaining is cathartic but you've gotta chart a way out, and there IS a way out in basically every case.)

now there's a name i've not heard in a long time .gif

This is like taking the batteries out of the fire alarm. It's not like there aren't times where maybe you should do that, but they're rare and temporary. How many situations are there where you'd rather have the fire than the alarm?

Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author."

I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.

My rule is “If you’re complaining you better be quitting”. I have followed it so far. Granted it can take a few months to sort things out.

Yep, I think both compulsory 4-hour meetings and long rants complaining about them are a bummer.

What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits?

Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.

I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives.

PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.

I’ve got the itches, too.

I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy.

The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats.

On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.

Absolutely, I'm keeping an eye out. Unfortunately, due to path dependence in jobs, it takes a while to find a better place. Plus this company culture is very typical in Australia, so you're looking at a small percentage of the market.

I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.

The reality is that most companies are dysfunctional and caputed by the professional managerial class, people with few other skills than nepotism and favour trading, and that would crawl over broken glass to avoid doing something that benefits customers, shareholders or employees.

Hah, this is fair. I read a lot and corporate dysfunction really bothered me for a long time, so I studied and got some mentorship on the topic. It helps that Turn The Ship Around is actually a genuinely interesting read - my brain got a lot of dopamine reading about cool nuclear submarine stuff, and it's satisfying to read about the progression of the team. Reminds me a bit of a friend who enjoys a genre called LitRPG.

I adore this, though I have to re-organize my brain a bit to parse it after defining management and leadership so differently. Thank you for the lovely recommendation, and I'll be sure to give the whole thing a read/listen.

In my experience it is the opposite, very few people qualify for "knowing their stuff well". Let me put it this way:

  Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently. 

This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.

Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.

I can't tell if that would make me respect them more or less.

I came to post this exact same line.

The original draft of this post ended with:

"If I ever become a thought leader, someone has to assassinate me."

Great show though, you can tell everyone involved was extra passionate about it. But yeah he wouldn’t have a private plane from it.

"you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek."

Why should you give time and energy for something worthless? Listening to 4 hours of bullshit rants about leadership on a monday morning, while you could be relaxed and productive at your home office?

Also, of course he was "willing" to give those 4 hours. He had to as it was mandatory.

I've used a very similar one but I can't remember which post it was in. The lightning wasn't Atlassian-branded, which I was very proud of this time, haha.

It sounds like they actually can’t ‘manage’ if nothing of depth ever comes out of their efforts.