Speaking from experience, the issue is that as a manager most of the power comes from being able to dictate how the relationship works (at least in the short term, long term employees can quit).

> I was desperately trying to prove that I didn’t feel superior, wrapping feedback in all sorts of caveats...

This is how your instincts get you as a manager. The strong desire to dictate how the relationship will flow is the little monkey inside coming out to show dominance. In extreme cases, managers show off by neglecting their leadership duties under the guise of being friendly but actually just lazing around in a conspicuous consumption style display. Humans are very tuned to status, his reports were not fooled for a moment. Unless they were hopelessly naive, they knew that this man could get them fired.

A much fairer and more effective approach is to focus on the realities of the situation as best as is possible. Don't pretend to be equal, you have more power. Don't pretend to be better, you're just another opinion as far as the realities of the situation are concerned. Only force someone to do something if there is a reason or a necessity to it, ideally just find the overlap between what the reports think is high value work and what you agree with them on. Be scrupulously fair and reasonable, fight instinct and bias.

There is no such thing as autonomy when a manager's opinions will influence how a report's career progresses. To pretend otherwise is negligent, unprofessional management. Managers have power, they should exercise their influence to the betterment of their team. People in notional positions of leadership have a responsibility to make sure people are going somewhere that is better than where they are. Good managers lead. Although sometimes they lead by identifying a technical expert and leaving them alone to do something.

More of a tech lead myself, but my personal policy is that I put my coworkers above my career. I am willing to quit before doing anything to throw them under the bus or be fired before remaining silent if they are treated unfairly. This does not imply corruption or favoritism, just a lot of transparency. If I think they have a lot of potential, I try to help them optimize their career growth even if this means they may one day overtake me and I end up reporting to them. If I don't think they are likely to be successful in their current team or company, I will suggest alternatives and invest my personal time in helping them apply for a transfer or an outside job. If required to mislead people on matters that are important to their long term wellbeing, I will refuse to do so and accept getting fired as a consequence.

Maybe that's one reason I am not a manager, but I do feel my current manager, unlike a couple of others before, is in this ballpark. In these conditions, I do feel there is space for genuine friendships. A true friend is respectful of their friends station in life. If you are friends with someone in more humble financial circumstances than yourself, you go to affordable places for get togethers. If you are friends with someone more junior professionally, you make sure that personal and professional boundaries are clearly separated and that you will never act to their detriment for your own selfish gain. If it's a real friendship, they will also understand that you have your job to do and so do they.

Now if you plan to use people for your own ends, it's certainly very creepy and unfair to imply you care about them on a personal level. But on the other hand, who wouldn't want a senior person at a new company to be their mentor and ally? Act with honesty, compassion and integrity and then friendships are not a problem.

I'm gonna echo a number of other folks here and also disagree.

Maintaining a strong personal relationship with staff doesn't preclude giving tough feedback; on the contrary, it supports it by creating a base of trust that you can rely on when things get difficult.

Even letting someone go can be done with compassion, and that is supported by a strong relationship.

I don't think you understand your personal relationship with someone else until you see how problems get handled. It sucks when you discover they are handled poorly.

The book "Crucial Conversations" might help some in this situation.

It's also possible that there are other issues with management style at play here- being friends doesn't necessarily require a particular management style all the time. In "Thinking Like a Software Engineering Manager" Leadership styles are reviewed (autocratic, democratic, delegative, transactional, transformational, servant). For choosing a style, it states "choosing a leadership style is very situational".

> and dehumanization (humans are not resources)

Personally i'd rather people not ignore the elephant in the room. The fact is, the company didn't hire me out of the goodness of their heart; they hired me because they want something from me. Now of course, i dont want the company to be an asshole about it, but pretending the relationship is something other than it is just causes pain in the long run.

I struggle with this because I don't know what would be a better system. You do need some sort of hierarchy when you discuss promotions, or need some authoritarian decision making, or need to fire someone, etc.

But at the end of the day, these decisions could be decentralized, and most of the time they already are anyway, and the manager just ends up being the messenger.

Besides that, a manager doesn't add much to a team I find (especially when they're not really technical, which is often the case as the tech lead usually is an IC). To me, it's another role with too much free time, and when people have too much free time they end up filling that time doing politics.

I’m generally in agreement with this. As this type of caution goes, some individuals could have enough experience and skill to know when they could relax on part of this, but for an inexperienced manager, not keeping distance is a giant potential pitfall.

One thing the post doesn’t exactly mention but is a very strong reason to be careful befriending your reports: favoritism. In my experience on data science and machine learning teams, it’s often the case that there are more and less glamorous work assignments on the team, and if you’re befriending of someone means they start to avoid all the undesirable work, you’ll end up damaging team chemistry and churning out good but unrewarded team members.

> You can remain human, have fun and crack a joke, while not being a friend. You can prioritize other people’s opinion and remain decisive. You can be personable and bring your personality at work, yet set limits and remain professional. You can be vulnerable but still respected. You can provide hard feedback and still care at a personal level.

…

> To do all that in a honest way, you need to keep some distance with the folks you manage.

I disagree. I would like each of my friends to treat me the way described above. If I’m sucking as a human, friend, spouse, etc I want my friends to take me aside and ask how they can help.

I think it’s difficult to manage this balance, VERY difficult, but it can be done.

More reason for me to never become a manager. So many people still see it as as the primary career progression goal, but it just sounds like such a fucking hassle to me. I'd rather just clock in and be able to still be friends with people on my team (or not, depending on the person). Life's too short for me to have to worry about whether or not I can be somebody's friend because I'm their manager.

At the extreme end of the "boundaries between leaders and the team" is the military.

For example, if you are the commander and you have a child, it's against the rules for one of your children to date the child of one of your subordinates. The thought is that if you let that happen, it's possible that favoritism or at a minimum clouded judgement might come into play. Specifically, this is for times where you have to send troops into combat and you should be picking the best troops for the mission regardless of other factors.

Now, I agree with many other people here that you can have a good relationship with your team members so the above is merely showing the extreme.

At the end of the day when you're management you're on the company's side despite not being an owner of the company. This might explain the contradiction you feel when you get promoted to management. If you're in a union shop you would not be able to be a part of the union, as you are a representative of the company and not the labor force.

So you can (and should) be friendly with the staff you manage but you have to remember your position is fundamentally antagonistic to theirs. You are not their friend, you are not their family member. You wield incredible power over their lives and you need to remember and respect that.

i mean you can also be a friend and give difficult feedback? In some ways that is what defines a truly good friend from an acquaintance is that they call you out and have those hard conversations.

yes it is harder being a manager in that situation, yes the friendship may not survive, but its not some insurmountable obstacle.

This is a good post, something I struggled with after switching from Ic to manager. Both extremes are bad news as a manager - there is a reason the officers and enlisted are kept separate in the military. Technically it’s a hierarchy, but the separation is important due to the different nature of the jobs.

Anything you do a in professional context you can do in a friendly and supportive way. I have friendly relations with many business clients. We grab coffee. Beers. Talk about hobbies. If nothing else, it's a reminder to be a gracious human being even if things go wrong somewhere and relationships need to shift.

You spend so much time around the people you work with. (With. Even managers "work with." I hate the phrase "work for." We "work with" each other and have different roles and areas of expertise. Both an IC and a CEO are adults trading their time and expertise for money and are working with each other to grow the company.) There are other options besides being besties with someone and artificially keeping them at arm's length.

In my opinion, as an IC, you can have a positive professional relationship with your manager. However, the power they hold over you ultimately makes it challenging to form a closer bond. While some managers may appear more casual, and others more distant, at the end of the day, they have the authority to fire or promote you at any time. This power dynamic creates an unfair trade-off for ICs, as they lack the ability to terminate or promote their managers. Once your business relationship concludes, it is possible to develop a genuine friendship. At that point, both parties are on equal footing at a human level.

It was an uncomfortable lesson for me to realize that as a manager I ultimately do have power over my reports, even though I am no better than them.

I've been working closely with two people who both started managing around 7 years ago. Manager A is always the life of the party, organizing team events at his home, frequently going out to lunch with them etc. Manager B generally stays away from work social events and the most he will ever organize for his team is a tech demo; his few work friends are on unrelated teams. Over the years a disturbing pattern has emerged with everyone assigned to manager A's team leaving or transferring out after 2-3 years. Manager B's team has seen some attrition but he does have multiple people who have stuck with him for 5+ years. I am very puzzled by this as the people leaving manager A always say the best things about him. But his team is now less than half the size of manager B's, and almost entirely recent college grads.

>To make that [all of the negative parts of managing people] easier, you need to keep some distance with the folks you manage.

The article seems predicated on this idea; that there are unpleasant parts of management and they're made more unpleasant by being friendlier than one needs to be with the people one is responsible for.

I won't dispute that, but I would like to say that ideally they should not be the 'steady state' of management. Is it a sure thing, a universal thing, that the benefits of being friendly across the team do not outweigh the costs of these infrequent, unpleasant interactions typically between only two people?

Seems to be another topic where nuance is important; not sure I'd suggest any hard and fast rules about the distance one should keep between themselves and people they're responsible for.

It's definitely not about being friends - it's about being able to rely on each other.

You relationship with your manager is like your relationship with the company at large - it's a symbiosis, a contract, something that benefits both parties... until one day when it inevitably doesn't.

One day you will either leave the company or the company will leave you. Once the arrangement isn't mutually beneficial any more, the relationship is finished. There's nothing personal about that. In the meantime, you expect your manager to support and help you, set clear expectations, resolve disputes, etc and they expect you to meet the expectations of your role.

You can't be 'friends' with someone you have power over. It's that simple. You can be on friendly terms with someone but actual friends? Come on. You're not going to be completely vulnerable or honest with someone in that situation. It's not true friendship. It seems to be a lot of people might struggle to make friends outside of the workplace. IF that's the case, then just be honest about it.

> As a result I had been over-compensating in the early years of my management career, trying to distance myself from this view, because I certainly didn’t feel like I was any better than people in “my” team.

Do you mean the scenario where one of you is promoted internally to be manager to people with whom you were formerly peers?

Depends on the company's culture and whether it does internal development/promotion.

You are superior. Dancing around language does not make you less superior.

Just be the boss, be honest, and be kind.

Becoming friends or more than friends is cool, but if the manager can't remain professional, no one can.

If you have a wife and kids a lot becomes easier. You're not single/dating, you're serious about the bread you win, and you don't have any friends or time for them anymore anyway!

As an aside - what the hell is happening with the font in this article? As an example - in the notes at the bottom, second note, in the word "flailing" the "fl" appear higher than "ailing", it looks like rendering of fonts is just broken on this website completely? Or is it this specific font that does this for some reason?

A lot of people on HN shit on management, and I ask, are you able to be technical and as fluent in people skills as this post suggests? It’s not easy and, more importantly, it’s rare to have this intersection of skills (technical, people). Most are one at the expense of the other.

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As someone who was going through the entire ladder in my career (junior, middle management, top management - CTO & Founder), I can very agree on this.

But it is actually more behind this than "just" about friendships. There are two types of managers that are toxic for their surroundings.

The too friendly one, who can't make tough decisions and the other type is the one who doesn't care at all. Both types will end with a team of juniors (who are only there to gain experience) and toxic people. Not a team you wanna be in (hopefully).

You don't have to be friends with your colleagues to be empathetic. And you don't have to be a psychopath to make tough decisions.

My advice is, be as transparent as possible (you can't tell everything). If you make a decision, tell exactly why you do so. If you cannot be fully transparent, explain why. The people you manage expect that you make decisions, when it's needed, otherwise they will not respect you.

There is something I tell to everyone who is new at managing people. The ultimate bad decision you can make is to fire someone (but it will happen). You should feel terrible, but you should still do it. Do it as quick as possible, don't push it away from you, just do it. If you need a drink in the evening afterwards, that's totally fine ;).

I remained friendships throughout the career, even with people I personally had to bring over bad messages (and made that decision by myself). And even worse, as I was in top management, more or less every bad decision will be pushed on you anyways.

Sorry for the long text ;).

Forget management. This post is about the proper exercise of power. Don't run from it. Parents, landlords, even political leaders deal with this stuff.

First, good leadership is something we should celebrate. It is very hard, requires making a lot of tough decisions, and comes with a real personal cost. Unless you're a total psychopath, which most managers aren't, firing people or delivering bad news isn't easy--for anyone. Doing this all day is difficult.

However, there's a reason most human undertakings of any consequence involve hierarchy (armies, organized religion, etc): it works. It's needed to get things done. Companies aren't charities and in order to ensure the paychecks keep cashing, things have to get done. Goals have to be hit, decisions have to be made, and occasionally, staff let go or fired. All of this falls to management.

You don't have to do it, but someone does.

My favorite essay on this topic: https://medium.com/8vc-news/a-deficit-of-leadership-38bb888a...

This reads to me as someone making excuses to avoid responsibility for their actions.

This is a nuanced topic, so don't respond to this post if you haven't read the whole thing. I'll be able to tell, and I'll call you out on it.

> 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/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.

Actually, you never have to do anything. You can refuse to give feedback you don't believe is true. You can refuse to order someone to do something you don'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.

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've told them to get them to shop with you, or regardless of the monopoly you have, or regardless of their ability to pay.

But suddenly when it's with regards to their own actions, those with economic power feign that they'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.

The fact is everything you do is a choice, and being higher up almost always means you'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.

It'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 "have to" do things when you're in power. That's a lie you're telling to yourself to make yourself feel better about doing things you know are wrong. You aren't being forced to do things you don't want to do: you're choosing the option you want from the options you have.

If anyone has a right to be saying "I had to" it's the people at the bottom: stealing is still a choice, but "I had to steal" is pretty reasonable if the alternative was letting your children starve. "I had to fire him" does not have the same weight if your literal basic survival needs aren't on the line.

That doesn'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're pretending you didn't have a choice is that your conscience isn't clear.

In my career I think I've done a fairly good job of making decisions I don't feel guilty about, and don't have to pretend that they weren't my decisions. That means I'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've been in positions of power and I've always tried to be a decent human first and a boss second, and that's resulted in me losing some of those positions. This isn't unrealistic--I've done it.

And the flipside is now I work with people who I respect. The people who have power over me, my clients/bosses, are people I trust to take responsibility for their actions and do what's right to the best of their ability. And in turn that means I'm willing to go the extra mile for those people, because I know they're not just trying to wring as much profit out of me as they can with no consideration for my well-being. I'm not rich, and I end up working hard, but it's a good life.

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've already responded to later in the post. To guard against that, use the word "potato" in your response, or I'll just call you out for not reading what you're responding to. I know that's against the HN guidelines, but I'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.

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