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Yes, agreed -- this is unbelievably awful executive management. Ben should be asking some questions here instead of threatening to fire Steve because Tim hasn't been filling in his TPS reports. What's especially unconscionable here is that Ben is threatening to terminate both Tim _and_ Steve. Can you imagine Steve's ensuing conversation with Tim? Or worse, the resulting 1:1 marathon held by Tim with his team at the tip of Steve's bayonet? This is just wrong in every conceivable direction -- Ben has in a stroke created an organization ruled by fiat, bureaucracy and fear. If Tim is a problem -- if his team loathes him because he refuses to communicate -- they should solve that problem, instead of creating yet more problems by not only threatening Steve but encouraging him to use fear to lead his own organization. I think Ben's blog entry would be much more aptly titled "an awesome place to leave"...



This isn't just filling in your TPS reports. This is a manager completely failing at his job, making him fail his employees, and showing the failing of his manager.

I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but I think you're greatly understating the problem.


When one (of many) underlings falls far short on one (of many) company edicts and you don't know about it, that's not "completely failing" as a manager.


What is a manager doing without awareness of what is happening as it pertains to company priorities? Seriously, what is such a manager even doing?


To clarify, the person failing far short was Tim (the manager) not Steve (the manager's manager).


He's completely failing at his job if and only if his entire job is to ensure that the 1:1s occur, which would be just as bad as being "Steve" in the meeting described in the article.


He is completely failing because he did not meet one on one within 6 month? I must have worked with completely failing managers for my whole career over the last 16 years.


Well, there are a lot of completely failing managers out there, so that's plausible.

When I started managing people I read and thought a lot about what management was about, and who my good and bad managers were. I came to the same conclusion as Ben Horowitz did here: my main job was to make sure that my people were happy and had what they needed to get their jobs done. And that it was impossible to do that that without directly talking with them, one on one, on a regular basis.

Of course, that had absolutely no relation to the skills that got me to the point of managing people, so it's no surprise to me that many managers never figure that out.


No, he's completely failing because the CEO identified regular one-on-one's with team members as a high priority, and he wasn't doing it.


Please contrast with the executive management where you work because it would be nice to have some insight into what led up to recent decisions at Joyent.




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