Personal relations as a manager
This reads to me as someone making excuses to avoid responsibility for their actions.<p>This is a nuanced topic, so don&#x27;t respond to this post if you haven&#x27;t read the whole thing. I&#x27;ll be able to tell, and I&#x27;ll call you out on it.<p>&gt; But the day things go sideways, it backfires in an explosive way. Because at the end of the day, as a manager, you will have to deal with shit situations. You will have to give feedback that the receiver doesn’t want (but needs to hear). You will have to ask someone to shut up and do it anyways. You will have to not promote&#x2F;give a raise to someone and tell them why. You will have to fire someone who under-performs. You will have to distribute some of the blame. And worst of all, as is happening to the friend I mentioned, you will have to lay-off people who don’t deserve it, just because the company says so.<p>Actually, you never have to do anything. You can refuse to give feedback you don&#x27;t believe is true. You can refuse to order someone to do something you don&#x27;t believe is right. You can refuse to fire someone or lay someone off, and make the person who demands it done do their own dirty work.<p>People in positions of economic power always use the language of freedom when discussing harm they do to others. People are free to work elsewhere, regardless of what jobs are available to them. People are free to shop elsewhere, regardless of the lies you&#x27;ve told them to get them to shop with you, or regardless of the monopoly you have, or regardless of their ability to pay.<p>But suddenly when it&#x27;s with regards to their own actions, those with economic power feign that they&#x27;re slaves to forces beyond their control. I had to fire them, I had to lay them off, I had to raise prices or rent, I had to underpay or cut pay or outsource, I had to reduce the size or quality of the product, I had to discontinue service.<p>The fact is everything you do is a choice, and being higher up almost always means you&#x27;re choosing between more options and better options. For the owner of a company, these choices are often choosing between making more or less money when either amount would be enough to meet all their needs and have money to spare. For the employee or customer of the company, these choices are often choosing between spending on health insurance or spending on food, renting an apartment where your kids can go to a good school, or paying for healthier food for your kids so that they can develop better physiologically.<p>It&#x27;s absolutely disgusting to hear people in positions of power abdicating responsibility for their choices when every choice they make has much smaller consequences for them than it does for others. Do not fucking pretend you &quot;have to&quot; do things when you&#x27;re in power. That&#x27;s a lie you&#x27;re telling to yourself to make yourself feel better about doing things you know are wrong. You aren&#x27;t being forced to do things you don&#x27;t want to do: you&#x27;re choosing the option you want from the options you have.<p>If anyone has a right to be saying &quot;I had to&quot; it&#x27;s the people at the bottom: stealing is still a choice, but &quot;I had to steal&quot; is pretty reasonable if the alternative was letting your children starve. &quot;I had to fire him&quot; does not have the same weight if your literal basic survival needs aren&#x27;t on the line.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean you never fire someone or lay someone off, that you never raise prices or rent, than you never underpay or cut pay or outsource, than you never reduce size or quality, or that you never discontinue service. Sometimes those things occur within a context and you have to choose who gets harmed in a situation. But if you make that choice to the best of your ability your conscience will be clear. The only reason you&#x27;re pretending you didn&#x27;t have a choice is that your conscience <i>isn&#x27;t</i> clear.<p>In my career I think I&#x27;ve done a fairly good job of making decisions I don&#x27;t feel guilty about, and don&#x27;t have to pretend that they weren&#x27;t my decisions. That means I&#x27;ve turned down money, refused to work with certain people, and refused to do certain things when I knew there would be negative consequences for me. I&#x27;ve been in positions of power and I&#x27;ve always tried to be a decent human first and a boss second, and that&#x27;s resulted in me losing some of those positions. This <i>isn&#x27;t</i> unrealistic--I&#x27;ve done it.<p>And the flipside is now I work with people who I respect. The people who have power over me, my clients&#x2F;bosses, are people I trust to take responsibility for their actions and do what&#x27;s right to the best of their ability. And in turn that means I&#x27;m willing to go the extra mile for those people, because I know they&#x27;re not just trying to wring as much profit out of me as they can with no consideration for my well-being. I&#x27;m not rich, and I end up working hard, but it&#x27;s a good life.<p>The norm for these conversations on hacker news is for people to read until the first thing they can disagree with, and then respond with some late-stage-capitalist bullshit that I&#x27;ve already responded to later in the post. To guard against that, use the word &quot;potato&quot; in your response, or I&#x27;ll just call you out for not reading what you&#x27;re responding to. I know that&#x27;s against the HN guidelines, but I&#x27;m not going to participate in prioritizing surface-level politeness over genuine care for human beings, which requires taking the time to have real nuanced discussions about important topics.