There Is Evil

My background: I’ve worked at six different companies in the past 20 years. In those years, I’ve had ten different jobs ranging from QA engineer to director of engineering. Similarly I’ve worked for a variety of managers, from first-line managers to CEOs. I’ve never worked outside of engineering, but, especially in the senior management roles, I’ve been exposed to the inner workings of the vastly different functional groups that make up a company.

I’ve seen a lot of varieties of organizational pride and panic . At both Borland and Netscape, I experienced the company vibe as it shifted from “We’re the Microsoft killer!” to “We’re screwed!” At the startup, I showed up as employee number 20 and watched it grow to 250 employees before the Internet bubble eroded the company to 50 folks wondering what to do with all the extra hardware.

These drastic shifts in organizational perceptions showed me managers who were great at the pride part, but turned into jerks when the panic started. Likewise, new leaders and lessons showed up during the panic—leaders who were quietly getting their work done during the pride.

In all of this, I can count the number of truly evil people I worked with on one hand. There are evil managers out there. So I apologize—I lied in the title of this chapter. These are genuinely evil and mean people who put themselves before their team, who lie, and who have absolutely no ability to lead There are fewer than you think, but they are out there and my only advice is, upon meeting them, to run away as quickly as possible.

Chances are, your manager is not evil, so you don’t need to run. Still, you do need to understand how he’s built.

Your Manager’s Job

The first and most basic frustration folks have with the management is the easiest to explain. You are frustrated because you’re busting your ass, but each time you walk by your boss’s offices, he’s got his feet kicked up on the table, coffee in one hand, the other hand jumping hither ‘n’ fro, and he’s talking to some guy you don’t know. How in the world could this be work?

Here’s the deal: your manager’s job is not your job.

Ever had a meeting with a completely different part of your company? Maybe you’re in engineering and you’re talking with facilities about getting additional space for your team. Your goal is clear, “I need more space,” but once the meeting kicks off, you realize that you and facilities are speaking a different language. It’s English, but the context is wildly different. Those facilities guys are rambling about lease agreements, safety codes, and scads of unfamiliar acronyms. In five minutes, it’s clear that you have no idea what they really do.

Before that meeting, if I asked you what the role of facilities was in your company, you would’ve scrunched your face and mumbled something about cube construction. I trust that, like me, you’re an optimist and you believe that everyone in your company is busily working on whatever they do. I also believe that because you don’t understand what they do, you are automatically biased against them. You believe that because you understand your job intimately, it is more important than anyone else’s.

In your head, you are king. It’s clear what you do; it’s clear what is expected of you. There is no person who rules you better than yourself because you know exactly what you’re about. Anyone outside of your head is a mystery because they are not you. In a social situation, it’s entertaining to figure out what another person is about, but in an employee/manager situation, there’s more at stake. Who is this guy who decides whether or not I get a raise? What’s he saying to my VP about me? Does he see me as a success or a failure? Who is that guy in his office anyway? What does he do all day?

I am not going to explain what your manager does all day. Sorry.

I am going to hand you seven critical questions that you need to answer in order to figure out if this guy is capable of looking out for number one—you. Ideally, you’d be able to get answers to these questions before you took a new job, but you didn’t and now you’re working for a manager who isn’t speaking your language. These questions might give you insight into where he’s coming from.

Where Does Your Manager Come From?

I’m going to start and finish here because the pedigree of your manager determines not only how you should communicate, but also what to expect when the shit hits the fan.

Ironically, the second most common complaint I’ve heard from frustrated employees is, “My manager has no idea what I do.” It’s good to know the problem goes both ways, no? There are a couple of possible causes for this situation. Your manager may not care what you are doing. It doesn’t mean the work you are doing is good or bad, it’s just not on his radar. Some folks find this arrangement of ignorance to be a cozy, warm blanket. It’s a no-fuss job. No awkward hallway conversation, just me and my code and . . . I’m what? I’m fired? Holy shit. Well, that’s the risk of having a covert job. No one knows your value, which puts you first in line when it’s time to trim the workforce.

Another likely situation is that your manager doesn’t actually understand what you’re doing because he was never an engineer. I’m not talking about the prequalified disasters where some brainiac on senior staff decided it was a good idea to put the head of marketing in charge of engineering, I’m talking about the engineering managers who are hiding the fact they never really did much coding. Sure, they can talk the talk and they’re buzzword-compliant, but what was their last programming assignment? What piece of code are they really proud of? Is their degree in computer science?

If you’re getting vague answers full of words that sound right, my guess is you’ve got a faker on your hands. I’m talking about someone who has managed to wedge their way into a position of engineering leadership on their chutzpah and not their technical ability. You’re not automatically screwed in this scenario. A person who can convince the organization they’ve got leadership ability and hide the fact they haven’t a clue what a pointer is . . . has, well, moxie.

This person has spent their entire career wondering, “When are they going to figure me out?” This paranoia has given them solid information-detection skills , which can be useful to you and your organization. They know when the layoff is coming, they know how to talk to senior management, but they don’t know how to talk to you because you’re actively, passionately doing something they’re clueless about and they believe they have to maintain the appearance they know what they’re doing.

If this is your manager and you believe there is value in what they do, your job is to figure out how to speak their language. Maybe they snuck out of QA? OK, then speak QA. Maybe they just never got around to that computer science degree ? OK, take the time to teach them about your work. I’m not talking teaching this guy Objective C, I’m talking 15 minutes at the whiteboard with flowcharts. This is what I do and this is why it matters.

Your manager is your face to the rest of the organization. Right this second, someone you don’t know is saying something great about you because you took five minutes to pitch your boss on your work. Your manager did that. You gave him something to say.

How Is He Compensating for His Blind Spots ?

Now we’re going to pick on your favorite manager. Tell me about him. Probably a great communicator, funny guy; charismatic, you say? He probably inspired you. You can probably quote a few of his more infamous sayings, like “Better is the enemy of done.” The question is, what are his blind spots?

Each manager, good or bad, is going to have a glaring deficiency. Maybe he did escape from QA and now he’s the director of engineering. Perhaps he’s a stunning technologist with absolutely no sense of humor. The question is, does he recognize he has a blind spot?

I ask the same question in every interview I have: “Where do you need help?” Whether it’s an individual contributor, a manager, or my new boss, I’m always curious where people see their weaknesses. A flippant “I’m solid across the board” response is a terrifying red flag. I’m a fan of pride; I want you to sell yourself in a interview. But if you suggest that you’re flawless, all I’m thinking is that your flaws are so big that you can’t talk about them or you have no clue what they are.

A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak. Dry technologists need team members who are phenomenal communicators, folks who can tell a joke and socially glue the organization together. Those vision guys with zero technology chops need you, the strong technologist, to tell them what is technically possible.

A manager’s job is to transform his glaring deficiency into a strength by finding the best person to fill it and trusting him to do the job.

Does Your Manager Speak the Language ?

OK, so you’re in a square room. There are two clear windows in this room, one on each side. In front of each window is a microphone which, when turned on, pipes whatever you say to whoever is on the other side of the window. Now, your manager is on the other side of one window and your best work friend is behind the other. It’s Friday, and I want you to give your weekly status report to your friend. Something like: “Monday was a disaster. I got in late because I whooped it up on Sunday night. Took a stab at the spec, but left a little early because I washung over. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty good. Finished the spec, closed some bugs, went to the cross-functional review, got some good feedback. You should read the current version. Thursday was meeting hell. Got nothing done. Three useless hours. Friday, well, I had a beer at lunch and I’m leaving early.”

Now, spin around and give your status to your boss.

“Finished the spec early in the week, good mid-week cross-functional review. Lots of meetings later in the week.”

I do not care if you work for the world’s best manager. I do not care if he was the best man in your wedding. You are going to give a vastly different sequence of events because you are not talking to a person when you talk with your manager; you are talking to the organization. You instinctively know that telling your boss that you had a beer at lunch is a bad idea, not because he’d know it, but because the organization would.

The language you are speaking when you talk to your manager is a flavor of managementese (see Chapter 14 for more on managementese). Yeah, the language that Scott Adams has made millions of dollars exploiting. It is a carefully constructed language that is designed to convey information across the organization. Managementese allows managers from very different parts of the organization to communicate even though their respective jobs are chock-full of different acronyms and proper names. And yeah, managementese sounds funny.

An example: “Our key objective for this project is the schedule. We need to keep our teams focused on their respective goals, but also keep them cross-pollinating so they can error correct on their own.”

When you hear that, you think, “Why can’t he talk like a human?” He’s not talking to you. He’s talking to other managers and he’s saying some very Rands-like things, like “Commitments matter!” and “The team is smarter than the individual!” It’d be great if managers could speak with a little more art, but the job at hand is to spread information across the organization as efficiently as possible. And a local dialect of managementese is the best way. Besides, they still need to talk to you, which leads us to . . .

How Does Your Manager Talk to You?

My first piece of advice to all new managers is: “Schedule one-on-ones with direct reports, keep them on the same day and time, and never cancel them.” With this in mind, some of the trickiest transitions for me during the day are when these one-on-ones show up. I’m deep in some problem, writing a specification, answering a critical e-mail, and this person walks in my office and they want to talk about I don’t know what . . . I’m working in the zone here, people. In the brief second I try to figure out some way to reschedule this meeting, I remind myself of a simple rule, “You will always learn something in your one-on-one.”

When is your manager giving you a chance to tell him what’s in your brain? I’m worried if your answer isn’t “at a one-on-one,” but I’m not panicking, yet. Maybe your manager is one of these organic types who likes to jump you in the hallway and gather relevant bits. Terrific. Does he do it consistently or when he needs something? The former is great; the latter is a problem waiting to happen.

What is a manager learning in a one-on-one ? Much of what you’re talking about in a one-on-one your manager already knows. You’re concerned about the reorg, right? Well, everyone is and he’s already talked to four other people about their concerns. You think the field engineers are a bunch of twits? So does he. A good manager has his finger on the pulse of their organization and the one-on-one usually echoes much of that pulse, so why is he carving out 30 minutes for every person on his team?

He wants to learn.

Whether it’s a one-on-one or a random hallway conversation, your manager should always be in active information acquisition. He should love it when you stop him in the hallway and tell him, “I hate your favorite feature.” See, the thing is, he’s been losing sleep over that feature for the past three days and he can’t figure out why. Your random hatred just shoved his thinking in another direction.

Managers who don’t have a plan to talk to everyone on their team regularly are deluded. They believe they are going to learn what is going on in their group through some magical organizational osmosis and they won’t. Ideas will not be discovered, talent will be ignored, and the team will slowly begin to believe what they think does not matter, and the team is the company.

How Much Action per Decision ?

When the new VP showed up for his first day at the startup, he was wearing a Members Only jacket. Sky blue. I didn’t know they still made these throw-backs to the 1980s. A jacket that lived under the tagline, “When you put it on, something happens.” I’d given the VP a thumbs up during the button-up-and-tie phase of the interview, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Three months in, we had a problem. Members Only was doing a phenomenal job of discussing and dissecting the problems facing engineering. We’d leave meetings fresh with new ideas and promises of improvements, but then nothing would happen. OK, so follow-up meeting. WOW! He gets it. I’m fired up again. Let’s roll. Ummm, two more weeks and nothing is happening here.

Now, me being the director of engineering, you can argue that the onus of action was on me. Problem was, I was doing everything I signed up to do. The VP wasn’t. He wasn’t talking with the CEO about our new plans. He wasn’t handling the other director who was totally checked out, sleeping on the job. When the third follow-up meeting was scheduled, the VP again demonstrated his solid problem-solving skills, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was waiting for when we got the next-steps portion of the conversation where I’d pull up the meeting notes from the previous two meetings and carefully point out these were the same next steps as the last two meetings.

The act of delegation is a slippery slope for managers. Yes, you want to figure out how not to be a bottleneck in your organization and, yes, you want to figure out how to scale, but you also want to continue to get your hands dirty. Members Only’s problem was he believed his job was purely strategic. Think big thoughts; delegate the results of those thoughts to the minions. He was a pure delegator and he’d forgotten how to do real work.

Pure delegators are slowly becoming irrelevant to their organizations. The folks who work for pure delegators don’t rely on them for their work because they know they can’t depend on them for action. This slowly pushes your manager out of the loop and, consequently, his information about what is going on in his organization becomes stale. Then, the CEO walks into your boss’s office and asks, “How’s it going?” The third time your boss gives the same generic answer, the CEO goes to you and asks the same question. When you respond with, “Well, we’re fucked,” the CEO has an entire other conversation with your manager.

Real work is visible action managers take to support their particular vision for their organization. The question you need to answer for your manager is simple: does he do what he says he’s going to do? Does he make something happen?

Where Is Your Manager in the Political Food Chain ?

Back at Netscape, Internet Explorer was threatening, but we were under the illusion the sky was not falling. We were merrily planning the next release of the browser under the assumption that Microsoft was going to somehow screw up their browser. Besides, it wasn’t about the browser anymore; it was about owning the entire desktop. Yes, someone was actually suggesting the browser wasn’t an application; it was an operating system, people. The perception of unlimited money makes people stunningly stupid, by the way. Anyhow, of course, everyone at Netscape wanted to be on the “next-generation browser” project. We were just waiting for the execs to crown a director to run the effort.

When the promotion came and it was some engineering manager from an acquired company we’d never heard of, heads were scratched. Until that time, the core engineering team at Netscape was a private club. We’d expected one of our long-time proven managers to the lead the effort. Nope, Mike the New Guy got it and, in a week, he went from no name to the hottest ticket on Middlefield Road.

What happened? Well, turns out the engineering managers were playing a lot of roller hockey and, while they played, Mike the New Guy was working it. He was chatting it up with the execs, getting to know the relevant players, pawns, and free electrons in the organization (see Chapter 10 for more about players and pawns, and Chapter 42 for more on free electrons). Mike the New Guy was hungry. He was driven, and after six months of incessantly demonstrating this hunger, the execs gave him the keys to the executive washroom. Mike the New Guy was a made guy.

Just like delegation, the act of navigating politics in an organization is slippery. The difference between a manager who knows what’s going on in an organization and one who is a purely politically driven slimeball is thin. But I would take either of those over some passive manager who lets the organization happen to him. Politically active managers are informed managers. They know when change is afoot and they know what action to take to best represent their organization in that change.

Of all the questions in this chapter, understanding your manager’s place in the political food chain is the trickiest because you’re often not in the meetings where he is interacting with his superiors. Those are the situations where you understand what their view is of him and, therefore, his organization. The next best gauge of your manager’s political clout is cross-functional meetings where his peers are present. How are they treating him? Is it a familiar conversation or are they getting to know him? Should they know him? If it’s his meeting, is he driving it? If it’s not his meeting, can he actively contribute?

The organization’s view of your manager is their view of you. I’m glad you’re a C++ rock star, but the problem is, your manager is a passive non-communicator who doesn’t take the time to grok the political intrigue that is created by any large group of people. I see him as a non-factor and you’re living in the shadow of a non-factor.

Sorry.

What Happens When They Lose Their Shit?

Pride and panic . The two delicious ends of the management spectrum. Pride is when it’s going swimmingly. Great product release, selling well. Hired that phenomenal guy from the other group who is going to totally write us another fabulous product. More requisitions in the pipeline. Golly, I can’t imagine it going better, can you?

Getting to pride is usually the end result of a lot of work and a little luck. What you can learn from your manager in this phase is how they’ll deal with that swelling head of theirs. Do they take care of those who got them there? Do they have a plan for what’s next? All of these are interesting developments, but they don’t show you half as much as panic and there is no bigger panic than a layoff.

Your manager is not a manager until he participated in a layoff. I mean it. I know he fired that one Fez and he hired a bunch of the team, but those are individual, isolated activities (see Chapter 47 for more about the Fez). He hasn’t truly represented the company until he actively participates in the constructive deconstruction of an organization. There is no more pure a panic than a layoff, and you want to see who your manager will become because it’s often the first time he sees the organization is bigger than the people.

A layoff is a multi-month affair. By the time it’s been announced on the front page of TechCrunch, it’s been bouncing around the boardroom and your boss’s staff meeting for a couple of weeks. This means your boss has been staring at you for the past couple of weeks in one-on-ones and ignoring everything you say because he’s trying to figure out how to lay off half of his staff. You are very interested in who he becomes during this time because that is actually the person you’ve been working for these past few years.

Once you’ve got a confirmed layoff, you need to go back to each of the questions on this list and ask them again. How is he talking to you? How is he talking with the organization? What is he doing to make up for the fact that pretty much everything stops in a company when a layoff is leaked? Is he staying politically active? Or is he checking out? All of these observations teach you about your boss and, conveniently, give you insight into whether or not you should be looking for another gig.

Panic backs a person into a corner and their only means of getting out of that corner is relying on skills that have worked for them in the past. This is how a normally friendly manager can turn into a backstabbing asshole when it comes to a layoff. See, they were an asshole before; you just weren’t there to see it. If you are lucky enough to see this behavior as well as make it through the layoff, well, you learned two things. First, this guy I work for degrades to jerk when the sky falls. Second, he values me enough to keep me around. The question remains: are you going to hang around waiting for him to be a jerk to you?

The Big Finish

When the first layoff hit Borland, I was two years into my QA stint. I don’t remember wondering what a layoff was and I don’t remember wondering if I was going to lose my job. What I remember is that the senior VP of applications walked around the building, gathered the product team up, and then told us the straight dope about the layoff . . . in the hallway. This is what the layoff is about, this is who is affected, and this is when it’s happening. I’d never interacted with Rob, the VP, in my life and, come to think of it, I never really interacted with him again. Still, I think fondly of the guy because during a time of stress, he illuminated. He didn’t obfuscate.

A successful organization is built of layers of people that are glued together with managers. Each layer is responsible for a broad task, be it engineering or QA or marketing. Between each layer is a manager whose job it is to translate from one layer to the next . . . in both directions. He knows what his employees want. He knows what his manager wants, and he’s able to successfully navigate when those wants differ.

The way he navigates these waters is by knowing the answer to two questions. Question #1: Where did I come from? Being able to relate to those you manage comes from intimately understanding their job. It allows you to speak their language. Question #2: Where am I going? A plan for your manager’s next big move is his incentive. It puts him in the uncomfortable position of trying to discern the murky political motivations of the major influencers of your company. It might not be a skill set he has, but he’s never going to stop trying because he knows where he wants to go. He’s got a map defined by his motivation .

Why do you care that your boss wants to be VP of software? You care because his success is your success. If he doesn’t know that, he might be evil.