I think that's what happens in most companies all the time, all around the planet. But the reason is not evil management and it's not a result of planned activity. Management is also hard. They also have to deliver too much with too little budget at hand. The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours. They are naive people like you and me. There are things that are unmanageable so they ask you to help. Then they get used to your help and unconsciously consider it normal. Then their budget gets cut, or they have to cover for other departments who can't deliver as much as expected. And surprise, there is even more work for you.
I don't say that for us to excuse bad management. But I think it's very important to understand the "other side". Understanding them can provide you with options. Just saying they are idiots or evil bastards leaves you powerless.
> The only difference is that they earn more money and they often don't have to pull the team out of the B.S. themselves on weekends and late night hours.
Isn't that what this thread is all about? :-P People working without getting paid and/or getting a choice on weather they want to work more on their supposedly free time?
The difference is big enough to turn a shitty job in a good job :-)
I think you're overstating the case a little here. Instead of seeing everyone as a victim its fair to place blame somewhere and to discuss real solutions. Its obvious to me that if we had mandatory overtime pay for tech workers a lot of this toxic culture would dry up. Managers would push back onto senior leadership the real costs of working undermanned teams this hard. There would suddenly be a financial incentive to do things right and/or hire more people. Right now, there isn't. So of course, the organization just pushes people around. Why wouldn't it? There's really nothing stopping it.
Why aren't tech workers talking about overtime pay? That's the elephant in the room here. Everything about this situation screams 'underegulated industry.' Shame that techies themselves, let alone management, are usually far-right leaning. I think their political views are paying them a huge disservice right now.
Yes, but the amount of emotional stress of the worker is mostly irrelevant to the manager. It only becomes a problem when the company gets bad press like from that article, or when the productivity of the team drops so much that he can't project success to his managers and peers.
Our goal as workers can't be to tell our managers about our emotional stress (which he doesn't care about), but showing him alternatives that contain less stress for us but at least the same amount of projectable success to him, and/or just doing them, because in the end not being informed how the success was achieved is less important to the manager than having spare time to get a massage or visit the golf club.
one thing: as a lead, i can tell you that managers are just as abused often times as the worker.
that's where this pressure on the worker comes from: there is systematic top down hierarchical pressure applied that works almost like hydraulics. A sociopath like Bezos only has to beat down his 6 reports into accepting impossible goals (for a normal working schedule) and they will beat down their aggregate 48 reports and they will beat down their 384 reports and so on.
I can agree that they also face pressure. But on the one hand they have more options, for example putting the work onto a lower level guy, they get less bad feedback for doing bad work (e.g. nobody analysis how stressed his workers are, but the developers code gets analysed for code quality, unit test success, peer reviews).
The last point I put separate because I think that one might actually be just subjective. In my eyes it seems, as if they also have less work on their table, really. Example: There are a lot of things a product manager should do. For instance, he should learn to know the customer. But at least where I worked until now no product manager was asked by his manager how much time he spent with customers. So no product manager spent a single second with a customer. Also a product manager is in my eyes responsible that the user interface is translated correctly. He can pay an external office or convince some engineers to do it who have that other language in their repertoire. But when he constantly hears from the engineers that the three or four languages we can evaluate are so shitty that nobody can even closely know what the corresponding text says, then he should review his translation workflow. Never seen that either. The only situation in which a product managers needs to hussle is when the sales department that actually talks to the customer has a problem they can't communicate directly to engineering because both worlds speak different languages. And the only reason the prod manager needs to get active is because if the stress gets out of these two departments his boss needs to do work and then his boss will be angry. So in these situations he really has a lot of stress, because it's hard to convince engineering of some of the requests that come from sales, but sales needs some kind of results to make the customers happy. But this situation only happens in one of 5 feature or bug requests. Therefore I think the engineers have more stress. They have stress with all 5 requests, all the time. When they finish one, there are already the next three waiting. And in this one request that required prod manager intervention the final result that should be implemented is often so bad that this one is even more stress than the others.
To summarize, yes there is manager stress as well, but it's not as much. And if you get 120% of the pay of another coworker or more, I think it should be okay if you even have a little more stress. Therefore people working on the corresponding lowest level seldom have tolerance for the "hard life" of the manager.
I don't say that for us to excuse bad management. But I think it's very important to understand the "other side". Understanding them can provide you with options. Just saying they are idiots or evil bastards leaves you powerless.