A manager is not your best friend

> and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.

I think the implication was that making the team feel good shouldn't come at the expense of communicating the truth.

This is a real problem I've had with some managers in the past: They try so hard to keep everyone happy that they're afraid to have difficult conversations. They soften negative feedback so much that the point is lost. They might even open themselves up to being manipulated by employees who learn how to leverage their desire to keep the team happy and use it against them.

Obviously it's not supposed to be like that, but it's a common pitfall for first-time managers especially.

There seems to be a non-standard interpretation of the word 'empathy' in the article there. The word means understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling. As a manager, that shouldn't be conditional; managers should always spare a little attention to tracking how the people around them feel and what they think.

You don't want empathy to be a blocker to telling the truth, fair enough. But one of the lessons high empathy people have to learn is that having empathy for someone and controlling how they feel are two completely different things. One is possible, the other is not. And usually there is a simple way to tell the truth that doesn't hurt anyone beyond what they do to themselves.

> unhappy people generally deliver shitty work

I believe one suggestion the author likely intended but didn't make was that "commiseration" does not create happy people. It may deepen trench bonding, but it doesn't increase happiness. The focus then should be on actions that produce happy people, who then produce better work.

> unhappy people generally deliver shitty work

The anti-pattern I've seen happen very often in some big tech companies is that shitty work is in fact often what is desired -- by your manager.

The CEO wants good work, but you're too many levels from them for that to matter.

Your manager may be trying to get promoted, and isn't looking for "good work" per se, they're looking for whatever will get them promoted, which can be something shitty that their manager wants, or that the company wants for their broken PR strategy.

And if you, lower down on the totem pole, don't deliver that shit, and instead insist on delivering something good that they aren't actually looking for, you'll be on the firing line. You can't align with the CEO at the cost of disaligning with everyone in-between. The CEO will never know you exist, and you'll be managed out well before they ever knew you existed.

I've had bad Managers, like the ones that inspire articles like these. It's a shame people become absolutists after such bad experiences.

When I've played the Manager part, I've always tried to do my best, talk to my team, set them on the proper train to success professionally and from time to time personally too, incentivize them to accomplish company goals, but also when that hasn't worked, I've also had to set them on the proper train out of the team/company.

I've only had issues with 2 out of ~30 people I've managed, all others I've had to lay off have understood (even when there wasn't a reason: Sometimes I was just told to pick someone to send home). Some people don't take it well, no matter how justified you are to fire them. I don't stand for bad friends, why should I stand for a bad employee? Or sometimes "no one" really connects with them, and they never connect with other people, I can only help them so much; maybe this person will "click" somewhere else.

I still talk with some of these people, even sometimes meet with them when I go to their cities, have parties. Normal, human interactions.

For me phrases like "it's family", "they are my blood", "we are friends" are always played like you have to stand for bad people. If you have never cut off a family member or friend, you're probably watching too many films and following too many traditions. Sometimes no matter what, you are different or the tradition is stupid. You may try to make it work, sometimes it simply doesn't.

As a Manager, you can do your job well, you can treat people well, and still bad outcomes come from it, or you can still be seen as the enemy. Whatever, take what may seem good criticism and be done with it.

As an Individual Contributor, I'm not saying not to be best friends with your Manager, I'm just saying that one thing is "the job", which has its own myriad of things happening, and another your personal life. Both can be great experiences as sometimes they aren't.

Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done), because sure it's nice for people to get along, and they're generally better performers when they're happy; but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.

In other words, if a manager's choice comes down to 1) happy people v.s. 2) replacing whoever it takes to get the job done, with or without happiness, then #2 must be done. So 'getting the work done' is the top objective, and everything else is secondary and subordinate to that. An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.

I got to the same quote and stopped reading. This person would be great in charge of robots, too bad humans have emotions.

Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas. All in different companies, cities and countries now, but still try to get together whenever we’re in the same city.

To be honest though, I’ve never been able to replicate that environment again, and it was pre-remote-first days. Might’ve been pure luck, or maybe we just understood how working with people you like is very enjoyable, despite the office politics.

Yes, as a researcher at a non-profit organization, I became very close with the IT department. I would recommend this approach! It's great to finally not talk about work all the time during lunch (but about homelab, selfhosting, or star wars).

>>The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments.

Best friendships I've made at work especially with my managers, in my own teams, have happened when I have openly announced I'm not competing for their position/job. Merely making this clear has made me more friends.

People just don't like to see other people do well, even more so when people are working to take their own position.

That few shitty years I had at work early career often were due to seniors finding books at my desk, or watching me work like mad on side projects, or delivering and speaking a lot during meetings. That's akin to announcing to them they must screw you to save their own jobs. Nothing good happens from there as groups of powerful people mark you up as your enemy and have to get rid of you for their collective good.

The people who got promoted are often those who pretend to be harmlessly inert but are scheming and working behind people's back to get promoted and take top positions. Only last year, a junior I know got a manager fired and took his job, much to the shock of the manager, he eventually learned the junior had been working over an year and bypassing him, talking to managers above, convincing them he could do the job et al. The manager who got fired is struggling from months to find a new job.

Long story short, speak as little as you can, avoid showing off your skills at work, don't appear aggressive, threatening or intimidating. Act totally harmless and inert, but work with people above for your progress. Career growth rarely comes from good performance, its almost always because of interpersonal relationships.

It’s a fine balance.

People don’t like it when you sugarcoat or otherwise patronize them. If something is bullshit, it’s worth calling out.

Commiseration typically leads to feeling disempowered though and you need your reports to feel empowered for a team to function well.

What does that have to do with anything in this article?

Think of it like this: when two soldiers in boot camp are complaining to each other about their drill instructor, the difficulty of the situation, why the food sucks, etc. - they are commiserating. It is a bonding over being in the same shared crappy situation, and having sympathy for that person because of it.

The author is essentially saying this: a manager shouldn’t join in complaining about the job/company/personal problems etc. with his/her subordinates, because it sets up false emotional relationship expectations.

It's a verb used to describe multiple people lamenting the same bad circumstance, with the idea that it's made slightly less bad by the experience of having to go through it together rather than alone. The phrase "misery loves company" is somewhat common in English, and while it's more often used to describe situations where one person feels bad and acts out to make others feel bad as a coping mechanism, the roots of the word are pretty recognizable in it; "co-misery", as in "we're miserable in this together".

I'm a native English speaker, and I also have no idea what the author is talking about. I don't think that word means what he thinks it means. I think he is using "commiserate" to mean "complain".

I think the article is a bit weird. To commiserate means to empathize with another's suffering, such as the getting dumped by your girlfriend example in the article.

But the article launches (literally the first sentence) into "As people become managers, it’s quite common for their team members to want to commiserate with them." as though it is just obvious that all managers have some sadness that their team members need to help them through, which is obviously nonsense.

So yes, it's unusual phrasing.

I can only assume the author omitted context. ex: seems to be primarily expressing sympathy with complaining/venting, particularly when it is about another department or higher level within the company. It is commiseration, but without that additional context it is difficult to understand why it is viewed negatively in the post.

I think of the word as a mixture of complaining and sympathizing.

I would consider it commiseration if one were to complain to their coworkers about an HR policy in the hopes of receiving sympathy or agreement about the problems with the policy.

An uncritical, and perhaps implicit, validation of negative feelings.

> Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad

Many jobs are hard, and I don't think it is a rule that most workers in hard jobs are bad.

My take is multifold:

- Managing takes experience. In the software industry, the evolution has been such that there aren't enough experienced people to fill all the manager positions.

- Startups usually don't hire experience managers because they are deemed too expensive. They end up with inexperienced managers. If it's your first job, you never had a manager yourself, and you're suddenly managing a team, how can you be good?

- It is hard to evaluate the competences of a manager. As an engineer, you can talk with another engineer and get a sense of how good/experienced they are: just ask them to talk about technology. As a manager, it seems harder to evaluate. It's easy to manage a team in a highly functional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is good. It's hard to manage a team in a highly disfunctional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is bad.

- Managers are promoted from above. It's difficult to judge a manager without considering how their subordinates think about them. I have seen too many people climb the management ladder even though all of their subordinates absolutely hated them.