Why do people quit jobs with bad bosses?
maybe because it was easier to change jobs than to change bosses
I wonder about that and maybe it is easier to change jobs than to change bosses. Or at least it was before 2022 in the tech industry when lay-offs and relatively easy funding ended after ludicrous spending in many companies.
Jobs don’t need to be particularly bad, but in tech companies usually it is easier to look around than bother too much above limitations of the context where one is. We (uhm… I?) tend to complain about the 20% that’s wrong in the job rather than appreciate the 80% that is good or OK.
Reading an HBR article on bosses it kept me pondering… What makes a boss bad and not just how technically competent a boss needs to be? The article is about retention and to a lesser extent productivity.
The article talks about 3 measurements:
The boss seconding the employee
The boss grew in the company
The boss’ technical competence
Then it drives the conclusion that the employees’ job satisfaction, and therefore the retention problem, is correlated to the boss’ technical competency. I would say that the article is too shallow on understanding how it affects the relationship.
Given that I’m a boss I do have some experience on being a bad boss and a good boss, I’ll recap some of my experience.
A boss can do your job
For example, programming as good as the employees, less well or better than them. My rule of thumb is if you’re better at programming, you should aim to be a staff engineer, an specialised individual contributor. It may also mean that the boss can cover for you when you’re ill or on vacation to some extent. Unfortunately many companies don’t have a rewarding path for staff engineers.
I prefer the analogy of sports more, you as a manager need to ensure the athletes do their best and get the team results you’re looking after. You train with the players and when the player is not available the day of the match they almost always find a replacement player.
A competent boss is not an expert
As a boss you need respect to do your work properly; if you’re incompetent, people won’t trust you’re evaluating them fairly. However, a deep expertise in the employees’ core activities contradicts the idea of a generalist working with a plethora of skills to ensure things happen: organisation, connection, listening, followability, strategic thinking.
The technical expertise needs to be acknowledged, and in my experience it’s easier to see when you’re part of the furniture than when you aren’t. On the other hand, even if technical expertise buys you respect, it doesn’t buy you efficacy as a manager. You still need to prioritise, delegate, coach and hold people accountable which is a different set of skills than recursion or multi thread programming. Some ideas are transferable such as saying that people “talk to each other in TCP mode, you always need to establish a connection”.
As a manager, I always struggle to strike a balance between learning enough to understand what’s on the table and trying not to get too rusty on the basics.
Disliking the job
Again, it’s not the main reason to quit, all jobs have aspects we dislike to different extents. The fact that you dislike what you do can be bogged down with the lack of support, challenge or recognition from your boss. To make matters worse, a boss that doesn’t hear you or a boss that doesn’t understand has little use for sponsoring your career. Happiness may boost productivity, but the counter reciprocal is more important: unhappy employees can be problematic in too many ways so it’s safer to reduce deep unhappiness, particularly the one caused by chronic company issues rather than transient ones.
Changing the boss
It’s usually very hard to change the boss. It's a very unpleasant job to point out shortfalls to your boss, and more threatening to share that info with the boss’ boss. Moreover, your boss could be performing great in other areas. Last but not least companies also struggle to “I want to change team(s)/I want to change boss”