> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.
Following this advice is another way of loosing employees, at least I'd leave a company quickly if the CTO started lying about potential problems not being problems.
In the end, depends on the company. Usually the company I've worked in, have valued transparency, so employees can decide themselves if they want to continue working there or not, when there are potential issues.
Not sure who it'll be good for if things are delayed in a project, you might be able to ship a good product but then the executive team is all like "Noooo, what you're hearing is just rumors, everything is fine and all will be good when we release".
Absolutely. In the case of someone saying a clear problem is not a problem, we have a few cases:
The first, they're lying to me, in that case they're dishonest and I dont want to work there, they're probably just covering it up to make some money and then move on when things fall apart.
The second, they're incompetent and actually don't realize it's a problem, why would I want to work for someone who's bad at their job.
Probably others but I can't think of them
Well I've literally been in the position where this was true to close a deal so we could stay in business. What would be the best option in your opinion? Risk a critical person leaving right then and loosing the customer and then losing everyone job? Or lying and telling them we are all ok just keep on doing your job and don't listen to rumors?
You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.
Is this not a reasonable way of approaching it? It seems to be simultaneously honest and empowering. What lie is necessary?
EDIT: slight revision
You need to read that sentence again. Your comments are very revealing about you and not about CTO level work as you are imagining.
If you get a big enough group of people there are going to be some people with machiavellian tendencies or at least some that read bad advice on the internet about how to get ahead at work and try to apply it with clumsy gusto. You will look like a real fool to your boss the CEO if you are giving information to these type of people and they try to use it for their benefit.
I may be painting too dark a picture due to the focus the comments have on a single sentence. Overall I had good relationships with the vast majority of people that worked for me. I know this because I still have contact with most of them even though we have almost no chance of ever working together again. You are deluding yourself if you think there are no bad apples out there or that people having problems in their personal life may try to pull manipulation at work to get ahead or however they see may solve their problems.
Please don't put words into my mouth.
For the record I gave 100% of bonuses I had awarded to my staff and 0% to myself the entire tenure.
I'd rather my job disappear than still be there because someone with employment power over me lied to me. This isn't false virtue or armchair anything. No exceptions, or I don't work with you ever again. It's not hard. Learn to communicate effectively, and learn to treat your employees with the respect they deserve.
I've been close to situations where the ICs did their absolute best and it was a total waste because of politics outside of their control. Do you tell them that so-and-so highly-respected person was shit-talking them because of an unrelated agenda and invalidated all of their work? Or do you tell them good job (it was a good job) and not get into it?
Personally, I’m okay with not being informed about everything that’s going on. I work at a big enough company that I couldn’t possibly know what goes on all the way up the management chain, but even if I worked at a small startup, I could understand if management didn’t want to be fully transparent. I don’t need to know; it’s none of my business. But I won’t stand being lied to – even about small things, or things I don’t even care about in their own right. I see lies as a breach of trust and as a sign that I can’t trust that person, moving forward.
So it depends on what you mean by “not get into it”. If you really stick to truthful statements, and if there isn’t a high enough prior expectation of transparency to make it amount to a lie of omission, then leaving it at “good job” is perfectly fine. But if you do lie… well, if I find out, I’m probably leaving.
If leadership doesn't fix the problem then just resign in protest.
EDIT: It's now occurring to me that there's probably different schools of thought here. Yes, I've resigned in protest on behalf of my workers before.
If my team is getting fucked, then I've either failed my team, or my purpose is meaningless. Either way, get me out.
And so you take your first step down the path.. "I'm not sure" is a lie here.
Are you lying to the team when you say, "we're not sure how this happened" rather than just quoting the git blame?
Well, no. The problem is much more complicated than a buggy commit. It's a wider problem with the system. So you say "we don't know, we have to look more into it" and do a post mortem because that is the honest truth.
The same principle applies here. So-and-so highly respected person committed a real-life communication bug that got merged into this IC's production career. But the problem is much more complicated than that. You don't know what the actual problem is until you address it with the leadership team.
As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.
Well I've literally been in this position too.
Lying to people is ineffective. It literally leads to the rumors you want to avoid. And even if your lies pay off, people aren't dumb. They realize how close to the edge they were and that you are a liar. Next time it will just be worse!
It's much better to be honest. Explain the situation. Explain what it will take. Use it to motivate people and build them up. People love a challenge, they want to feel like they're the hero of a story.
You literally took a situation where your employees would have come out stronger and more motivated to work for you, and you turned it into one where they walked away with mistrust.
> You are espousing false virtue/armchair quarterback. Real life is complex and lying can save many people jobs.
It has nothing to do with virtue! Even if you don't give a damn about being a good human being, this is a terrible way to manage people.
But I can acknowledge there are cases where transparency is simply not an option.
Gross. I worked at at company where the CEO and CTO were hiding important things about the company from employees. When we found out, we felt lied to and betrayed, and there was a mass exodus. The company folded less than a year later.
I'm not saying leadership should be telling employees every little tiny thing. (And certainly some things just cannot be talked about in early stages of the deal, like funding rounds and being acquired.) But employees should have a pretty good handle on the health of the company and what's going on at a high level.
If employees get anxiety or start looking for new jobs because the executive team is being truthful, then either a) the company is doomed, and only an asshole executive would lie to keep employees around, or b) the company is just in a difficult spot, but leadership is not doing a good job of communicating the solid, likely-to-succeed plans in place to get things back on track.
I refuse to work for leadership teams who are not transparent. If they don't think they can trust me to act well in the face of difficult information, then I don't see why I should trust them to run the company that's responsible for my paycheck and livelihood.
> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.
I've only been performing roles of director / vp to small/mid size companies so far, so maybe there's some secret CTO sauce I'm still missing.
To me this advice seems toxic and destructive. Vent upwards, yes. Manage expectations, yes. But you're hiring brilliant people who will eventually know when youre lying or concealing info from lack of trust. good luck with loyalty at that point.
Do you have metrics available somewhere? Doesn't matter real-time or N days report - people can connect the dots: signs up are flat, but we keep hiring.
You can't meet requirements without marketing pushes? Well, shit, I wonder if a company spends 2 dollars to earn 1 dollar.
You can lie and bullshit all you want, but your reports and their reports will know.
I worked in a company where the analytics team suddenly decided to leave, all within days of each other. Month later - layoff. They weren't told that things are bad, they were the one who told you that things are bad.
This is also an implicit permission to the employees to lie to the CTO. This is pretty standard narcissistic behavior, where your lies to employees are just doing business, while employees lying to the management is a grave offence that calls for job termination.
I agree.
Sometimes your employees can tell things aren't going well, and you bald face lying to them like this will make them leave even faster.
This is also a great strategy to fuck people over, where if they believe in the stability of the company right until the day layoffs are announced they might have just bought a house or something else that will make the next few months for them excruciating, if not disastrous.
So please don't take this advice to the extreme imo. I'm not saying you shouldn't be positive, or give every detail. But you should be realistic. Save the rose tint for the investors and just make sure people have what they need to do their best work, within your power.
It is not your job to be responsible for other peoples personal lives, you are not the messiah. All you can do is fight to get them the pay they deserve. What they do with the money you have no control over anyway.
Layoffs at non Fortune 500 companies generally have less warning than anything can be done about anyway. Sure if its budgeted at Pfizer 6mo in advance your an ahole for not telling people. However its usually more like 2-4 weeks that the people in charge even know beforehand. ALso remenber we are talking about CTO. Its the CFO that knows the truth about the finances and may be hiding it from you as the CTO.
* Allowing rumor/politics to become malignant through deceit rather than healing through truth
* Dismissing responsibility for other people's livelihood because "hey its not my fault they didn't save money in case I throw them in the guillotine"
* Using lack of information as a reason to lie, rather than just telling your workers that you don't know the answers.
Sorry but the reality of human nature is tough.
I know workplaces aren't democracies, but there's no question that I'd vote for the straight shooter (even if their own position in the company is weakened by that trait) over someone who plays the political game well but lies to their reports.
Hell, I would vote, with my feet, if I had to.
If someone is actually better suited for a role than I am, then let them have it. I'll find another role and keep growing. Where is the problem?
If some team makes the mistake of confusing trust and openness with weakness, then good riddance, I'm better off with a different team.
You can also be honest with them so that they can make informed decisions for themselves. The best CTOs I've worked for have been honest people who give you the bad and the good news together.
> However its usually more like 2-4 weeks that the people in charge even know beforehand
I'm guessing you're not referring to public companies with significant revenue. There's almost always warnings well before the 2 week mark.
>Layoffs at non Fortune 500
Yeah Literally what I said in my comment.
There are many public companies not in the F500, and I agree with the grandparent that every executive will either know, or have a really good idea that a layoff is coming, well before 2-4 weeks prior, even if the internal finance/HR process hasn't quietly, officially started yet.
> Transparency is not your job.
> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what
> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.
To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thought "there shouldn't be this many fires" but I soon realised that that was my job, to put them out, escalate when required, etc all while making sure the ship is steady and doing it with a smile on my face.
Some examples include:
- News that a sales person has sold a huge project which will save the company, but we can't deliver or build with our current backlog / resources
- One key team member has been taking a lot of doctor's appointments recently - and suspect they might be quitting / job hunting
- There's a very obscure security issue which could be fatal if discovered, but is a huge task which will disrupt a project which is already delayed and over budget
If I ran into any of these when I first started I would have freaked out - and that would have disrupt my team as they couldn't be productive with that anxiety over their heads.
Instead I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control.
Of course if something was too big to handle I'd escalate, or if something blew up I'd take responsibility etc - but I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions and let them do what they're best at doing.
However, in the absence of some legal requirement to keep quiet, if some employee got wind of one of those situations, and came to you and asked you about it, I really do hope you'd be honest and forthcoming. Because otherwise I think that's when you'd cross the line (for me at least) into being untrustworthy.
One thing to mention though: in the case of your first example, if that huge deal really is going to fall through, no question, and the company is going to fail because of that, no question, I would lose all respect for an executive who didn't pro-actively have the hard talk with employees about that situation. Yes, some people will leave. But that's life, and your employees have entrusted their livelihood with you; you owe them that level of honesty.
> I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control.
Which is fine! Because if you truly did put out those fires, or at least put in place some mitigating strategies, then you were absolutely telling the truth that it was under control.
> I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions
The difference is that some "distractions" can have a material impact on those employees' lives. An executive who hides those things and lies about them to employees is not worthy of respect. For "distractions" that truly are just distractions, sure, fine, no need to broadcast.
But I think a key question is: if a bit of news could make a reasonable employee, thinking logically about the news, decide to quit, then... you absolutely should be disclosing that news. Anything else is just a betrayal of the implicit trust an employee must have in their employer.
And yes, I know all this might seem pretty idealized, and I know there are a lot of companies and executives who won't get these things right. But that doesn't mean I want to work for those people.
I do think scenario #1 is interesting to talk about though.
I.e. If I was that manager receiving that news, I wouldn't outright tell the devs and say "it could be crunch time for the next 6 months", which might cause a panic and devs will start looking for other jobs.
Instead I'd call a meeting with leadership / sales, see what was sold and if there's any flexibility on deliverables with the client. If we need more resource, is it worth finding funding to hire more staff, or maybe postpone another project to get this higher priority one done.
Once that's resolved then I can think about delivering the news. Maybe it's a non issue (e.g. a new team is spun up to handle the project and someone gets a promotion to head the team), maybe it's crunch time (in that case it's time to have a difficult conversation with the team), or maybe the client is flexible on delivery (so it's business as usual).
Again, I could see how some managers would be uncomfortable not telling their team everything (and potentially cause unnecessary panic) - but I think that's part of management, knowing what level of detail your team are happy with, knowing what you can / cannot handle, and knowing how to delivery good / bad news and sometimes having to be the bad guy.
What scares people is uncertainty. Not uncertainty of outcome (50% chance this will save us). It's uncertainty of what the options are, what the roadmap might be. That's the job of a good manager. Insulate the team from uncertainty and politics. Figure out the space of options, what the outcomes can be, negotiate it with leadership, and present a reasonable and clear plan to the team. That won't cause panic.
Show the team the plan, its rationale, and what needs to be done. What the upside will be. Let them take ownership of it. Let them make the lower-level decisions of how to split time, of what to prioritize, of what edges can be cut. With your feedback.
People generally don't bail when faced with a challenge. They like challenges. You just need to define the challenge clearly and set the path for overcoming it.
Yes I did for the most part. I was replying to another persons wording though so many people have gotten out their pitchforks.
Once you peek behind the curtain of where your firm's cash comes from and where it goes, you have to live with a deep existential fear that you could mess up a bunch of people's lives... and you don't want others to have to live with that.
Maybe they simply found out that you kept lying to them?
I know its hard to understand if you are never in such a role. People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen. Even if they are the cause of those bad things.
I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work, not showing up/logging in, not making deadlines. He went off on me for like 30 min when I fired him and never spoke to me again despite warnings and discussions about the problem before getting fired for one example. In his irrational opinion I was holding him back from getting rich by expecting him to do his job.
Word spread pretty quickly through various cliques in the company. Some teams had no idea what was happening, other teams lost literally all their developers and and couple managers over the course of 30 days.
During my exit interview I mentioned the dishonesty and they just doubled down that I was imagining it.
I think we are all very obviously not at all talking about the kind of situation you describe.
I left a company a little over a decade ago where the CEO and CTO (both co-founders) were lying to us about the company's situation for the better part of a year (which was longer than half the company had been employed there). I fortunately haven't had the chance to run into them since then, but I would absolutely give them the cold shoulder if I did. And that's because of what they did. I put in 80-hour weeks (including many weekends)[0] for over a year at that place, and they repaid me with a middling salary and worthless equity (after all common stock got wiped out less than a year later when the company got sold to one of the investors for peanuts and scraps).
Anyway, the one "nice" thing I can say about that CTO is that after they had a layoff (half the company), and I didn't get laid off, I went to the CTO and volunteered, and he let me go with the 4-week layoff severance package, which gave me a much-needed month off while I found another job.
(Speaking of startup equity, I'm just glad I wasn't quite out of college during the original dot-com crash, when colleagues I would meet a few years later ended up underwater on the loans they were encouraged to take out in order to exercise their company stock options. I can totally imagine wide-eyed 22-year-old me falling for a garbage scheme like that.)
> People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen.
And sometimes blaming the person in charge is correct and rational.
[0] All stuff I will never again do for any company after that experience...
Not really. My words were some people will hate you even if you do everything right. This was an example of a situation that was handled right but the person ended up hating me and slandering me for years afterwards. Just because I would not allow the company to fund their get rich quick scheme instead of their job.
I've even found people that I did not manage that got fired blamed me sometimes. Like all of mgmt was some evil cabal that conspired together to fire them cause thats what we really want instead of making the company money so we can all get out paychecks.
What people are doing is going off on a tangent of how they don't agree with how I handle the grey area stuff. There is a great deal of Silicon Valley worldview going on as well. The majority of the working world has lots of politics and pettiness going on along with power struggles and backstabbing. You cant be S.V. idealistic and keep your MGMT job in the middling business world.
Isn't that what you did?
> Even though the company eventually did go under due to bad investments the owner made.
When you've been lied to enough you stop believing the lies, a leader who can't be relied on to tell the truth unless it's positive might as well not say anything at all or be there in the first place. Having to doubt and read between the lines for each and every message from leadership is a waste of my time and leads directly to me A) no longer caring and B) not trusting my leadership.
This kind of manipulation only works on stupid or inexperienced people.
There is a big difference between putting a hopeful spin and always fighting for the best outcome and straight up saying everything is fine until there's nothing left but ashes.
I would argue the opposite: transparency is one of the biggest part of your job. You're not in a leadership position, and it's your choice: do you want an opaque company where politics drive individual success? Or do you want a transparent company where employees respect their leaders and where the best insight wins?
If the company initiative is to be transparent then sure you can be. However that is the vast minority of companies. Though people on HN may have a skew to thinking the opposite.
The comment I replied to has very startup company silicon valley skew to it naive of the majority of the world. Very few of us are in any position to determine or change the political/cultural/driving forces of a company we have to work at. Usually the best you can do is adapt to whatever is already there and try to make the best of it.
CTO is not a powerful position at most companies.
This I do agree with. Many CTOs don't actually have the entire engineering organization under them in the reporting chain (at a reasonably-mature company; not talking about a startup where the CTO is often one of the co-founders and runs engineering), so they have no real power to get other people to do what they think should be done.
At best they have an "Office of the CTO", or perhaps run the company's software architecture group (if the company even has one), and then they just have a tiny army of people who try their hardest to convince other teams to do things that aren't in their roadmap and would mean pissing off their bosses if they took them on. Not fun!
A lot can be achieved by aligning themselves with successful projects and crapping on others at the start or just at the cusp point of success or failure.
Are you ok with employees and reports reciprocating by lying to you as well.
If you create a culture where you lie, then people will lie to you.
If you create a culture where you are honest, people will be honest back to you.
There's nothing more powerful than going to your team and saying "Look, I fucked this up. I need your help". Honesty is disarming.
I'm in a field where I manage scientists. If people start to lie to me or even start to bend the truth a little, we will waste years chasing ghosts. The people that work for me are very savvy at figuring out what I think might be true and they can always present just the right data to make me happy. I had to learn early on that I need to be really explicit: we need to do good work, it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter if they're right or wrong, all that matters is progress.
So no. Your employees don't need to lie to you. Mine come to me regularly and explain what went wrong. Judgement-free. And we do deep dives to prevent problems in the future.
You are causing the problems, not them.
I had a junior EE come and find me while I was on a smoke break to immediately inform me that he had mixed up two connectors and had accidentally put 48V into a piece of kit that could only handle 12V, resulting in $10k worth of blue smoke. That’s what a high trust engineering org looks like. He could have lied about it, I didn’t see it happen, “I dunno I went to reboot it and it didn’t power back on”.
That’s what I want to see. He was open and honest with me because I don’t feed him bullshit.
I have quit jobs where my manager lied to me. It is really really easy to tell when someone is lying.
You seem to live in some alternate dystopia where everyone lies to each other. How many of the companies that you have worked at have gone under?
I've been CTO/equity partner/division director/tech lead/IC/etc... and this is terrible advice. The one thing you need as a leader is trust - your people need to trust you and you need to trust them. Treat people like the adults they are, tell them what's happening to the best of your ability, and people will work their asses off to accomplish the goal.
Having technical depth in the leadership ranks, having real competency & belief & understanding in what you are doing, is, alas, not common. But wow, what a difference it makes for an org.
Totally destroyed morale, made the best people leave, and created a toxic work environment where there was no trust in management at all.
If that’s your goal, good work I guess.
Then you didn't have a CTO like me. I'm still in regular contact with most of the people that used to work for me. One actually just texted me this morning to ask how I was doing. Even though our lives will almost certainly never intersect again.
I could not even finish reading this comment. As a C-level leader in an organization, communication should be your strong card. It's unacceptable that you don't even know the difference between "you are" and "your".
If as an employee I get an e-mail from a "CTO" consistently getting confused with such elementary, trivial shit, I would fucking resign immediately as that makes it evident that the organization is led by illiterate people and has absolutely no future.
I do know the difference though. I probably copy/pasted part of the comment around and missed that I changed the context. Shame on me for not proofreading my internet comment though. You should probably erase me from existence for my lack of vigilance as punishment...
Transparency is not your job. You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors". If you don't they will start getting anxiety or looking for new jobs instead of pressing on. This could actually be the difference between what makes things fail or succeed. You're job is not to be transparent or honest. Its to make sure everyone stays productive and on track. This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.
>My most frequently accessed cloud console pages are the billing sections.
Lol yep.
Eventually some of those reports will hate you as well even if you do everything perfectly. Its inevitable from being in charge. You may not find out till running into them years later and they just shrug you off when you try to say hi.
I think I was good at the job, though of course I'm biased but even looking back there are very few things I would change. I really did try and will never feel like I was inadequate even though the company eventually did go under due to bad investments the owner made.