As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.

Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.

> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.

These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.

They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.

The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.

The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.

So any extreme is bad.

But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't

> Profit at any cost

Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...

You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.

Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.

Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.

Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.

What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.

What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.

If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?

I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.

The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.

Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.

Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35

ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s