Specially if you are a creative manager, you better get on with the times or lose touch.
He’s certainly of a different generation than the juniors coming in.
I’m 39 and a manager myself. The generational distance is wild. It’s important to place much more emphasis on nurturing rather than pushing if you want people to grow and give their best. It was certainly not the same in my generation.
In an era where we have so many easy-to-use writing collaboration/sketching/mockup tools, and so much good research into organizational psychology, it’s easier than ever to communicate both clearly and humanely without losing the secret sauce that comes from the director’s or founder’s unique taste. I personally don’t believe there was ever a time when yelling, insults or passive-aggressive behavior were required to make great art, but there’s really no excuse these days. (Part of my job involves making sure creative directors set standards while being nice to subordinates and communicating clearly so everyone can go home on time.)
Edit: Also, from now on I’m going to be fantasizing about us having a responsible financial counterparty who can filter troublesome people if they don’t get their act together. :)
When I hear about “micro-aggressions” and “gaslighting”, I get skeptical. Maybe skeptical is the wrong word. Those terms can be sort of “charged”, as you put it though. It’s not that I assume the person using them is untrustworthy, but that those words don’t seem consistently defined or well understood. Maybe it’s just because I’m on Twitter too much, where people will accuse you of gaslighting them for simply disagreeing with them. But if that’s all this was, a news story about employee saying they were gaslit and the manager used micro-aggressions, that’s where I’d basically just back away and wash my hands of the story.
There’s no reasonable or practical way for me to understand the full context of the allegations in the abstract (and often the specific details aren’t public), and nothing to be gained by deciding for myself who the aggrieved party is or to what extent. Maybe the boss is a terrible jerk and bad at managing. Maybe they’re a micro-manager. Maybe the employee doesn’t understand the difference between being managed and being silenced unfairly or personally attacked. Maybe all of the above. Maybe none of the above.
But in this case, it’s not just one person’s complaints about another, there are a dozen people who have quit, and many who have cited the manager. I’m still too removed from the situation to try to work out the specifics of the problem—like, is Gaynor unfair to women specifically, or bad at managing everyone in a company that employed a lot of women? I don’t know.
But it does at this point seem pretty clear he’s the problem, the results speak to that. Was anyone actually gaslit? Don’t know, don’t care. Was Gaynor a bad creative director who they were wise to remove? I’m comfortable assuming that’s a yes.
Do they need really big data? Couldn’t they, I don’t know, ask the managers? See the dates of delivery for the work? etc
Am I hitting a language/crappy translation barrier, or is this sentence as dickish as it reads to me?
60 employees listed among those “expelled” might still stay with the company following discussions with their managers.
Those actually leaving will keep medical insurance and will get severance pay equal to four to six monthly salaries.
IDK, seems almost generous?
Unless that company has figured the formula for what constitutes a productive employee, using an algorithm to figure out who to fire might not be the wisest choice.
Still, it’s Russia, nobody mysteriously fell of a window, so, could be worse.
Super dick sentence along with this one:
Nadia and her care team partnered with seven leading HR agencies, as we will help you find a good place, where you will earn more and work even less.
Edit: Oh shit.
- when analyzing employee performance, time spent in Git \ IDE was not taken into account.
lol, wat
Sounds like a great way to literally fire every software developer you employ.
Can’t miss payroll if you don’t have any employees!
abrandt
2032
Except you’ll keep all of the ones that spent their time chatting on the company platform.
It is a super dick sentence, but frankly I will take super dickish letter and 6 month severance, over super apologetic boss laying me off in person (well, over Teams) and giving me 1 month severance (that is mandated by law at that) that happened to me last year
Aceris
2035
Hahahahaha.
We’re not into this kind of dystopian analysis of individual contributions, but the obsession with data driven management has lead to an increasing obsession with achieving utterly meaningless metrics on some dashboard that don’t affect our customers at all. Management cares deeply about what happens in JIRA, but tends to neglect checking how closely it mirrors what happens in git.
abrandt
2036
I’ve gotten to middle manage about 20 developers for the last few years, and these ideas get floated yearly. Thankfully, we’ve been able to avoid it every time, but I’m really really tired of trying to explain how difficult it is to properly metric the contribution of software engineers and how trying to do it is just asking for very smart people to game the system in a way that doesn’t help the company at all.
To add to that, even with everyone remote right now and me not getting a lot of time with most of my individual developers, it’s still really easy for me to tell who is and isn’t pulling their weight just based on, you know, paying attention to things.
Aceris
2037
Quite.
I dont think the problem is with the line managers knowing who is pulling their weight, the problem is the people one or two levels up from that needing to demonstrate to their management that they are “improving engineering practice” and “using data driven approaches”, which then generates these mandates which take time and even worse have an ongoing maintenance cost and distort priorities in an ongoing way.
The first company to make a proper algorithm to properly evaluate how important employees are is going to make a boatload of money.
I doubt this Russian company did it though. I doubt it even exists, and it it does, it’s probably just Skynet doing it, sometime before deciding the whole human species is a threat and should just go DIAAF.
