alt Hacker NewsEveryone's job is to please their manager. Their job is shipping functional product features only if that's what their manager likes. In functional companies, that should be the case. There aren't many functional companies.
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cm11 • yesterday at 10:09 PM
Don't forget that they're also functionally structured. The managers don't own products or features, they manage functions (engineering, sales, design). And in practice, they usually only manage people, with little control over the function. So the managers aren't particularly interested or tied to shipping product features. The PM maybe, but they don't have reports or own much.
> Everyone's job is to please their manager.
Indeed. I've spent my professional career seeking out positions at companies of increasing prestige and technical renown, each with a higher reputation for professionalism and performance than the last. And yet this invariant has held in every position.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between each company has been the quality of the manager I was supposed to please, which I have noticed (perhaps predictably) is not strongly correlated with the company's reputation or success.