I feel like its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks. I care about each and every person on my team, I care if they are engaged and if they can do their job. I care if they get sick and give them the time to make sure they feel better. I care about their career and try to help them along. Maybe I'm the minority, but I think that lots of managers of ICs should and do feel this way. As you go up the ladder, i can see that going down as the scope increases, but thats why you have managers, to keep attention to those details. Now i've had directors and stuff that do not care about their managers. I've also had managers that aren't great and don't care.

You are 100% correct though, we are all cogs in the machine. In the end, the people at the top don't care about anything below them if it isn't making them an the shareholders more money. If they do, they are a unicorn and i hope everyone gets to work with someone like that.

When I was laid off from RAX, it was a super emotional time. I had a job where I got to hang out with my friends and good people doing good stuff, and we also did some work (the work we were doing was so enjoyable most of the time, it didn't feel like work). I've never been able to capture that since and it has contributed greatly to my desire to get out of leadership roles.

> its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks

That's not the claim being made, by my reading. The quote was, "Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you" -- which to me means, it's not clear exactly at what level, but at some point people stop caring about you as an individual. This may be at the direct manager level if you have a shitty manager. Or it may be much higher. But at some point up the chain it will become true if you're at a megacorp.

the mountain to sound green way, billboard free, is amazing, green, and beautiful. more places should do this.

Executive behaves like a child, labor suffers the consequences.

I tend to agree with you. The general pattern behind "x tool came along that made work easier" isn't to fire a bunch of folks, its to make the people that are there work whatever increment of ease of work more. ie, if the tool cuts work in half, you'd be expected to do 2x more work. Automation and tools almost never "makes our lives easier", it just removes some of the lower value added work. It would be nice to live better and work less, but our overlords won't let that happen. Same output with less work by the individual isn't as good as same or more output with the same or less people.

> but our overlords won't let that happen

If you have a job, working for a boss, you're trading your time for money. If you're a contractor and negotiate being paid by the project, you're being paid for results. Trading your time for money is the underlying contract. That's the fundamental nature of a job working for somebody else. You can escape that rat race if you want to.

Someone I know builds websites for clients on a contract basis, and did so without LLMs. Within his market, he knows what a $X,000 website build entails. His clients were paying that rate for a website build out prior to AI-augmented programming, and it would take a week to do that job. With help from LLMs, that same job now takes half as much time. So now he can choose to take on more clients and take home more pay, or not, and be able to take it easy.

So that option is out there, if you can make that leap. (I haven't)

>You can escape that rat race if you want to.

I'm working on it. But it takes money and the overlords definitely are trying to squeeze as of late.

And yes, while I don't think I'm being replaced in months or years, I can a possibility in a decade or two of the ladder being pulled up on most programming jobs. We'll either be treated as well as artists (assuming we still don't unionize) or we'll have to rely on our own abilities to generate value without corporate overlords.

Interesting. So it sounds like I need to get into the market and charge half as much and steal all of his customers.

These things eventually always end up as a Red Queen’s race, where you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place.

From a game theory perspective, it is that simple. But humans are messy and have emotions and feelings and shit.

A different friend who's contractor in a non-tech area told me a client of his secretly showed him his competition's bid for the same project. The competition's bid was much higher, and the reason the client showed him that was to get my friend to raise his rates and resubmit his bid.

So you're welcome to try, but as a programmer looking into the abyss, I'm looking at the whole thing as encouragement to develop all those soft skills that I've been neglecting.

Y'all is Texas' gift to inclusivity. When I joined a dev team that wasn't just guys, I worked hard to get away from saying "you guys", not because someone said I needed to, but because I felt that I needed to. Y'all worked because I came from Texas and its inclusive of everyone on the team. It has been my personal policy to use that in leu of "you guys" in all situations since then.

Y'all is a feature of general Southern vernacular and has nothing to do with Texas other than most of the settlers of Tejas were from the South.

Also saying things are a feature of Texas is a feature of Texas.

This is a really cool project. When I was at Unity, we had a team build a Westworld themed isometric Gameboy game that would let you monitor and admin k8s!

Unfortunately the malevolence comes when your manager was trying to do something out of scope and pushing the team in a direction to win some points, and failed miserably. And then, not wanting to take the fall, throws you under the bus even though you might have signaled your reluctance and risks associated with deviating away from the path the organization needed. There is no way to get out of that other than leave or get canned.

I think the thing that is trying to be solved is promotions, raises, etc. But there is this concept in larger, older companies that this needs to be done once a year. But there is no reason this couldn't be done quarterly or even regularly. If you manage a team and someone on that team is not doing well, it should be an ongoing conversation, not something that should pop up as a surprise one day. When I interviewing for a manager role at Netflix, they often talked about how "it shouldn't be a surprise when you are giving someone the news they are being let go". Unfortunately difficult conversations are difficult and people avoid having them. But the fair thing to do is give people a chance by giving them the feedback they need to improve, and then holding them accountable when they don't. None of this needs to be done in the guise of a "performance review"

Or someone just doesn't like you and they are just making stuff up to throw you under the bus and get rid of you, like my last job!

This is exactly correct. Toxic management (i won't call them leaders). I left because of my last manager, but I miss the company.

If they did care, some good engagement studies/surveys would show where the problems exist from the perspective of the managed. Many ICs are aware their manager is doing good for them, as good as they can and the problem exists up the chain. Some managers are just terrible. But without some kind of upward feedback process, there is no real way to make this work for the managed. Management can always spin the story they want to make up for the issues and with no data, there is not much that is going to be done. Ultimately it is the senior management that is responsible for the toxic environment created by not having a 2 way feedback process.

In the US, per state employment regulations can hamper this as well.