Comment by ljm
1 day ago
Yes. It stands to reason that if a manager can demotivate you, then they must be able to do the opposite. Both building the vibe and killing it can achieve that in terms of extrinsic motivation, culture, the psychological contract, and so on.
These are important factors to consider for people who work in highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves, which is the impression I get from the article and the overall startup vibe I've experienced over the past few years.
HN might be over-indexed on the "leave me alone to do my work", "I don't have friends I have colleagues," type of person but it's not representative of the entire population.
> It stands to reason that if a manager can demotivate you, then they must be able to do the opposite.
You share that with no justification. There's no such "reason".
It would be more useful if you explained why the rest of my comment didn't provide a good enough reason (because of your clear dissatisfaction with the first sentence of it), because this is just snark that doesn't further a conversation.
Anyone can quote a subset of a message and drop a remark without substance after all, but I didn't come on HN to read Twitter-quality stuff.
> There's no such "reason"
You share that with no justification.
It stands to reason that if gravity can make things fall down, it can make things fall up.
It stands to reason that if an earthquake can collapse a building that it can build one.
It stands to reason that if rat poison can kill rats then it can make them stronger.
("reason" left to be worked out by the reader as an exercise)
1 reply →
>> highly collaborative teams as opposed to those who prefer to be 10x lone wolves
I was a decent developer and a much better manager, and I think a big part of it was I learned these are different games. By the time we hit multiple dev teams I had good success framing it wtih senior ICs like this: "If you want to get 10% better (better in context of what they are defining) this year, that's really, really hard. But it would be easy for you to make everyone on the team 2-3% better, and our net improvement would be well over 10%." We then talk & plan relatively straight-forward ways to make this happen, and mix in explicit personal improvement/growth components. They're motivated, they make their teammates motivated, they make me motivated. Meanwhile the 10x'er (not sure I've had one of those) keeps grinding it out in the minor leagues.