The article persuaded me, except in one respect— none of it implies that a manager can’t complain. In fact, complaining is a legitimate tactic that brings results.
Also, even if you have no human rights, asserting that you do and acting accordingly can also be a viable tactic.
Incoherence and dishonesty is, I agree, an inevitable result of growing an organization. I’ve been in the tech industry for 41 years.
This is it. If you don't complain everybody can pretend this is business as usual. I would probably try to be very strategic with my complaints, since you want to make each of them count — and that does not happen if you are known to complain instead of delivering.
The writer hinted at being from the former Soviet Union, with especially Russia being culturally famous for seeing merit in an individuals ability to suffer. I am not saying the author themselves believes this, but declaring you belong to a class without human rights, which can't complain (which is factually not true) and presenting this as your fate which you now stoically carry is a suspiciously close to that cliché.
I am not saying the text has no points or doesn't accurately portrait parts of reality, what I say is that the conclusion it seems to draw fits very much with the cultural background. I prefer an approach of calculated optimism more — that means you know things are shit and there is conflict, but you also know that there is no use in moving forward based on that world view unless you want to move down a spiral where things get even worse — so you insert your own calculated optimism, a assumption that the world is better than it is, people are more understanding, more intelligent and more caring than they are and so on. Of course you are fully aware that it is essentially not true, but hey, how else to educate a child than the show them how it is being done?
How would hacker news look like if instead of calculated optimism (relying on a positive interpretation of what the other wrote) we would all choose a realistic or even a pessimistic reading of what the other intended to say? The discourse would turn into shit pretty fast.
Turns out clculated optimism works even better if everybody does it and there is such a thing as institutional culture — and just like traffic it turns put if you complain about it, you are likely part of the problem.
More than single digit, but I don't get how this is relevant to the question at hand?
This seems to be about manager-to-manager-interactions, not about manager-to-employer interactions or organizational issues stemming from a particular number of subordinates.
Sure if you are the only person at your department you might be in a different position, as described in the article — but I stand by the statement that calculated optimism is a superior stance to stoic pessimism — again, regardless of the number of subordinates.
Now you could convince me that there are certain particularly cut-throath-on-th-sinking-ship-institutions out there where all you're doing is constant damage control and calculated optimism under these circumstances would be aomething you could neither afford, nor would it change anything. Granted. But I wouldn't choose to work there and if I worked there I wouldn't choose to stay there.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39895900