When employees feel slighted, they work less

Regarding dog training, one can use a placeholder for the reward. This is useful, for example, if you want to reward a dolphin jumping through a hula, because you will not be able to give the reward at that moment, but for example, you can say "yes!" or use a clicker at that moment, and give the reward later, and it will be clear what caused it.

For anyone training any animal, I recommend the book: Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor (not affiliated in any way)

I turned heel and ran in those cases. It's a bad analogy for managing people and should not be perpetuated.

if someone is going to feel slighted and similar things add up to them working less, they probably are not a great colleague to begin with.

What matters more are: assignment to rewarding work, get paid top dollar, not be bored, get recognition for success, coaching on career growth, given leeway to make mistakes, not overlooked for promotion, etc.

Now, as a people manager, if you're not steering those kinds of things, you are not a great manager and you should be replaced with someone who does those things.

If I find out that management is being adversarial to ICs (eg. not offering to pay 75th percentile salaries, giving crap equity offers) I've put pressure to let heads roll. Similarly, if I've seen ICs become adversarial (eg. quiet quitting, overemployed, ignoring brutally honest conversations to upskill, constantly undermining product roadmaps) I've often allowed heads to roll as well.

At least in the Bay Area, the "Netflix Model" has become the norm post-COVID - pay top dollar, but also be open to fire if interests do not align.

What I've noticed in my career as an IC and management is a lot of lower-mid level management are people who were promoted well beyond where their capabilities. To be brutally honest, the stereotypical snarky HNer who is promoted to Staff Eng with an option to become an EM is the worst hire in any organization.

This has happened to me, but it's important to distinguish when boss is speaking for himself, and when he is just forwarding orders from above. These two cases can happen literally in the same sentence.

It feels worse to know that it's just an automatic message and that the person who supposedly signed it doesn't even know who you are.

Work is just work, don't expect anything more than that.

I don't see how anyone can be happy in their job if that were the default. Maybe I am naive or lucky, but I have a very goed relation with my boss, as well as with the boss above.

When that condition is not fulfilled, i definitely tend to slack off and I will eventually leave. I believe such should be the default.

In ‘our’ field, HP, under founders Hewlett and Packard, ran into some trouble in 1970 and instituted a “9 day fortnight”: rather than lay anyone off, everyone took a 10% cut in pay and hours.

As someone who has a 401k, I certainly hope that the CEOs of our biggest companies are more highly compensated (~competent) than the CEO of Martin's Chicken Shack.

You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.

People like dazzling conversation from their manager for like two weeks. Manager who will flex against their own instincts out of respect for my needs? I’ll line up behind that person every time, even if they’re a little awkward here and there.

I also commend you on your concern for doing things that appear fake, because people indeed are good at spotting fakeness. And I bet they appreciate that you are not acting fake, because that’s often refreshing to see, and they probably value what you have to say more as a result, and quite likely respect you considerably because of that.

For birthdays, wish the employees a happy birthday. You don’t need to get a cake or throw a party (getting cakes for birthdays stops scaling past 10 employees). But everyone should feel a little bit special on their birthday. If you don’t feel that way on your birthday, or you grew up in a family that didn’t celebrate birthdays (e.g. in a Jehovah’s Witness cult), it can be difficult to understand why it matters. But look at it as a technical challenge: can your manager “database” of people hold a birthday field? And can you trigger a smile and a “happy birthday!” greeting on each employee’s birthday? You probably can. The risk for fakeness is quite low (so don’t get a cake and make a big deal out of it), your effort is very low, but the upside for employees is a higher feeling of you caring about them as a person.

Death of a loved one is a really important thing to be aware of. Grief fucks people up and it takes at least a year to come back for it. Grieving employees will need more time and space, and are likely to struggle more. They will come back. And they will stick around more if they felt supported. Offer them to take some time off right away and support them by making sure they can take at least a few days off right away. So if someone tells you of a death of a loved one, you must take note! There’s no good advice to give, so don’t feel pressure to give any advice. Offer condolences and acknowledge that it really sucks (“I’m so sorry for your loss, I can’t imagine how difficult it is right now”). You have to be aware of this as a people manager, because your people.

Religious observances? I’m meh on that one. You can try to develop curiosity about it if the employee talks about it. Ask them why is the observance important to them? If they don’t talk about it, I leave it. For winter time, it’s happy holidays, and done with it.

Okay, a new baby is another one that’s important because your employee will have reduced sleep or be sleep-deprived and have a whole lot of new worries. Be more forgiving with the schedule, let them leave work ad hoc for baby emergencies. You do that, they are much more likely to make up work on their own time as gratitude. Ask them how they feel they are handling the workload—-is there an opportunity to change the type of tasks they are doing? Maybe they are not in a position to be writing deep design docs while they are sleep-deprived. I don’t know, but you can check in when you do your one-on-ones.

Write down their spouse or partner’s names, and write down their children’s names. Keep it in your personal manager file. You probably don’t have people with 5+ children. It’s not a lot. It’s hard to remember. But if the employee feels like they don’t have to say “my son” or “my daughter” or “my wife”, but can just say their names to you and you know who they are, it makes them feel more comfortable and more like a human being. This is another one where it’s hard to be fake—-nobody expects you to remember these things, but it sure feels nicer if you do.

Regarding feeling like you have to fake it till you make it, it’s like picking up a new habit. You have to practice. You will get better at it. It’s part of your job as a manager.

If you find it exhausting, adopt things incrementally. What’s most exhausting? Why is it exhausting? Is it because it’s on top of everything else you’re already doing for 40 hrs a week?

As a manager, you have to care about the people, because they are human beings. It’s a part of your job. You can’t not do your job. If it means you spend less time being technical, so you can spend more time managing people as people and not feel exhausted, then that’s what it means. Push back on your manager to make room to do more people stuff and less technical stuff. You can’t spend 90% of your time being technical and 10% managing, unless you have completely self-directed staff. You’re a person too—-and if you job is to manage, you must make time for it, and if there’s not time for it, then that’s your boss’s problem. If your boss doesn’t think it’s a problem, that’s on you because you haven’t told them.

Managing engineers is like herding cats. They won’t respond to lashing. And cats don’t show that they are sick because they don’t want to show weakness. So if you don’t ask about what’s going on in their personal lives, you’ll be blind to how it’s affecting their work. And because ultimately they get paid to do work, it is therefore in your interest (and company’s interest) to not be blind to how their personal life is impacting their work.

Going back to “fake it till you make it” or brute-forcing until you get better at it—-what you’re not considering is the additional information you will get or increased personal response/appreciation from your people. It might feel like brute force at first, but consider the very real possibility that it can start feeling like a smart thing to do because of the results.

The most influential question from team lead trainings over the years has been: Do you trust your employee to want to complete the task and purpose they have, or do you need to control them? There are a few names for this, Theory X and Theory Y mainly.

And don't be snide and just say that the current economy forces you to work due to wages. A lot of people I know would just create their own creative work if they had all the money in the world. So yeah, I think if you frame a persons job and purpose in the company right, you can trust them to work. This may not work in all industries, but in tech it seems to hold.

An example where this is in my experience a good guidance: Someone starts slipping their metrics, whatever those are. Comes in late, is hard to reach remotely. Naturally they should get slapped with the book right? Nah. If you assume they want to work well, the first question should be: Why, what is going on?

In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.

Like one guy on the team recently had some trouble during the last legs of building a house and needed more flexible time. We could've been strict and told him to punch it and take their entire annual vacation to manage that, even if he just needs to be able to jump away for an hour or two here and there. Instead we made sure to schedule simple work for him and have him work with a higher focus on educating his sidekicks, tracked the total time away and then booked it as 3-4 days at the end. Now it's a fun story in the teams lore they are fond of having navigated that, instead of one guy sulking about having lost all of his vacation in that nonsense.

This all reminds me of a phrase that I have heard, repeatedly, in many different organizations: "We need to start working with a sense of urgency."

Aside from the complete lack of leadership (so, your plan is ... keep working, but moreso?), it's almost always insulting (all those people you've been praising for skipping vacations and working while sick, what "sense of urgency" were they missing exactly?)

The bosses with half a brain do this only when the supply of labor is increasing relative to demand for labor. The bet is that the sufficient employees won’t have a choice to find a different job, and people that fail to maintain the new pace can be replaced with newer, and maybe even cheaper employees.

On the other hand, I can understand feeling slighted if the manager consistently recognizes their employees' birthdays but overlooks mine.

When I've seen people feel slighted in the workplace, it's usually due to uneven praise or criticism, or discriminatory stuff like passing over all the black workers with years of experience to promote the one white guy who's been there for 6 months.

It'll end up being a tick box moment in some Friday after 5 minute management training document that got completed while thinking about what to do over the weekend.

That said, half a century of continued slighting of employees is quickly snowballing against them. While I’d hope these studies lead to positive change in the short-term, I doubt anything will move the needle short of mass collective action.

How small the slight is.

How big the effect is.

Meta thing: how the slight is not the kind of thing most managers or executives, or even knowledge workers generally, would care about. (As evidenced by the software people here questioning if a birthday wish is a big deal.)

Lesson: your employees think differently than you. Get curious.

If a team lead or manager spent the time to track birthdays and took time out of their day to have a 10 minute chat with someone on their birthday, they probably exhibit a number of other behaviors that could be summarized as "treating their employees as humans". That's the boss people tend to like to work with and possibly go another mile for them.

If tolerating your boss during a normal day takes 9 of your 12 spoons of energy for the day, it takes very little further push to be spiteful. At worst, they may force you to find another workplace with a better boss.

Luckily I'm self-funded and with good supervisors, so not a problem that I face!

Eventually they promoted a few of the original engineering staff. I was told during one of these promotions cycles that I just barely missed the promotion targets. I asked for concrete metrics of what I could improve on, and was given a few vague and nebulous answers. I worked on these, even though they lacked definition. Come the next promotion cycle, I was, once again, passed up. When asked for clarification, I received more vague, nebulous answers. I was assured that I was going to get it the next round, and they'd be doing promotion cycles more than annually.

They kind of kept their word: promotions cycles started happening every 6 months. But the next cycle came through, and once again I was left behind. So this time, instead of asking for clarification, I just started looking for a new job, and handed in a letter of resignation a few weeks later. Upon handing in the letter, I was told "oh we were going to promote you next week!"

I wasn't born yesterday, so I told them thanks but no thanks.

I would heavily suggest speaking frankly about this with your manager or even going above their head if needed to ensure someone hears and acknowledges this. With your review in hand and any other additional info that can help back you up.

Ask what you need to focus on to secure a substantial Y raise/promotion and bonus etc. over the next X months and work towards that, keeping management updated as things progress. Probably have specific numbers for X and Y to mention as targets.

What people call "social skills" is nearly always manipulating other people into liking you. People of who its is said that they "lack social skills" are often more honest and much less manipulative.

Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

When nobody wants to work for you, that should be a strong indication that you are the problem.

And thinking that employees are "enacting vengence? in the form of vandalism from day 1."... You must be terrible indeed.

Tables from the study available here: https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2...