skipidarink

I hear you on all of that, I'm just saying that leadership gets complicated. Sometimes the lie is better for all involved, especially the IC. You recognized this with your first instinct on how to communicate it.

As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.

> Just tell my IC "I'm not sure why your work was invalidated. Let me look into it for you."

And so you take your first step down the path.. "I'm not sure" is a lie here.

Consider that you're advertising yourself as the type of person who absolutely must be lied to in order to maintain morale.

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?

Perhaps, I don't know, my biases and schadenfreude aren't that sophisticated.

Of course we do (real people, not the media). Not defending snobbery or anything but SV costs NYC rent for someplace that's.. definitely not NYC.

Lame-os who are primarily interested in the most-coveted jobs might be motivated by what you're saying but there's a lot more to NYC than that.