<story><title>Employees leave managers, not companies</title><url>http://www.alaisterlow.com/employees-leave-managers-not-companies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VexXtreme</author><text>The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place.&lt;p&gt;My company does this all the time. Didn&apos;t do well enough at the job interview or you&apos;re a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They&apos;ll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don&apos;t care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom.&lt;p&gt;Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.&lt;p&gt;The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don&apos;t get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.&lt;p&gt;At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.&lt;p&gt;Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.&lt;p&gt;So in many companies employees leave because they can&apos;t escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.&lt;p&gt;Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>melling</author><text>Yes, and they get to give you lots of work then go home.  Meetings and checklists for them.  Plus, every now and then they get to explain how to do your job to you.  It&apos;s kind of weird.  I&apos;ve been doing this for 20 years.  I was wondering if anyone else noticed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Employees leave managers, not companies</title><url>http://www.alaisterlow.com/employees-leave-managers-not-companies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>VexXtreme</author><text>The biggest irony lies in the fact that in most traditional companies managers (people who manage developers) are usually the people who were never smart enough to make it as developers in the first place.&lt;p&gt;My company does this all the time. Didn&apos;t do well enough at the job interview or you&apos;re a total bozo and poor at understanding technical concepts/writing code? No problem! They&apos;ll appoint you as a project manager and you will get a team of developers to manage. At the same time, the brightest and the best engineers rarely get promoted because they are keeping their heads down and actually getting shit done. And there is little incentive for the company to promote such people because they lose a skilled and productive programmer if they do that (they don&apos;t care about anything except for how fast you can crank out code - one of the typical ailments of consulting companies).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a very sad state of affairs. Makes me want to quit really.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom.&lt;p&gt;Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.&lt;p&gt;The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don&apos;t get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.&lt;p&gt;At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.&lt;p&gt;Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.&lt;p&gt;So in many companies employees leave because they can&apos;t escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.&lt;p&gt;Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speeder</author><text>I know a huge bank that had problems that every developer they promoted, quit.&lt;p&gt;It was because their managment positions were so stressful and so communication heavy, that most developers were totally not suited for it, and just plainly quit.</text></comment>