Seriously though, it depends on the boss and the relationship you have with them. It can really fall into either camp and it might even be situational with the same person!
I would say that, generally, I would prefer to be direct in these relationships unless you both know each other really well. It does make things easier for all involved.
That wasn’t the intention of what I wrote. I was referring more to how people speak. It’s very common in British English to phrase a request as a question. The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.
That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.
For your hypothesis to work, it would mean it’s not possible for me to tell my boss “no.” Yet I do this all the time without repercussion. Trying to boil every relationship down to “power dynamics” is outright childish.
Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
Are there people out there that abuse the position of boss to extract unreasonable concessions? Undeniably, yes. Is this relevant to a discussion of your boss asking if a task can be finished sooner? Not in the slightest.
> Do my boss and I have a formal relationship based on expectations we have of each other? Yes, absolutely. Are there consequences if I repeatedly go against those expectations? Yes. Are we friends? No. Does that give him unlimited control over me? Also no. Are there consequences for my boss repeatedly going against my expectations of him? Yes. Are they the same?
What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
> I hope this clarifies things for you.
This seems oddly passive aggressive and dismissive. I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
> What you are describing is what we call power dynamics, the effect of a power differential on the dynamics of a relationship.
My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
> I wonder would you speak to me this way if I was your boss, or the CEO of your company, or the majority owner.
It seems from your comments that you are confusing power dynamics with coercive control.
Power dynamics doesn’t refer to coercion, but to asymmetric authority wielded, social status, risk distributed, or cost borne by individuals in a group. Even when refusal is possible, where the one or more of the above is uneven, power dynamics are at play.
> My wife and I have a formal relationship: our marriage contract. If I violate that contract then there can be consequences for me. Are there power dynamics at play?
I'm not sure this is landing the way you think it is, as yes, of course there are power dynamics at play in personal relationships, including between you and your wife.
>I sign a contract with a supplier (or vice-versa). If one of us violates that contract, there are consequences. Are there power dynamics at play?
Yes, of course.
> I have done, yes.
And of course you would speak to each differently as you would to me or to a subordinate, due to the power dynamics at play.
Power dynamics are definitely a factor. There have been many scandals around people in power asking subordinates to sleep with them, and it appears that the majority of the (Anglo) public now considers this morally wrong.
The publicly accessible article is the article, it isn’t the reader’s fault that the publisher decided to only make a little bit of it accessible to us.
> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.
It boggles my Detroit-grown mind that so many people claim this about so many thriving cities.
I live in the PNW and regularly visit most of the major cities there and in NorCal. What exactly is more depressing there than any other city of any economic relevance in the nation?
I worked on the MS Word core team for a little over three years from 2010-2014, and de-facto owned a significant part of implementing ODF / OOXML Strict support.
The binary format was a liability for Microsoft to begin with, because of decades of cruft lining up with actual memory alignment. During my tenure there I ran into code my GM had written as an intern and was still intact -- he had 20+ years of tenure (mostly on Word) when I joined the team.
The translation of the file format to XML involved a significant amount of performance degradation if you weren't careful. Hundreds of millions of people use the app monthly, and MS still tries to maintain backwards compatibility. Given that open APIs were a relatively late development for the app, I really don't think in the current reality of what's expected by boards of directors for the companies they oversee that _anyone_ would take years to:
a) define a spec that maintained that backwards compatibility
b) reach whatever nebulous simplicity metric today's HN article wants
c) not get whoever greenlit the project fired for taking that many engineering hours for a and b
> amounts to having political control over land use decisions
This exists in America, in ways that have generally escaped the label of "Communism". The most basic example of this most will be familiar with is zoning laws, but there is significant precedent otherwise. There will always be a gradient of control, and claiming that a singular government action in expansion is therefore communist is not intellectually honest.
s people object to zoning laws for exactly the same reason. Have Jacobs won renown for pointing out exactly how zoning laws undermined the emergent nature of cities, and destroyed value for their residents. Whatever label you call it by, the critique is the same: central planning is far worse than organic emergence.
Downtown has improved wildly since when even when I was growing up near there in the 80s/90s, but people don't realize how large Detroit is. It's nearly 140 square miles. Downtown is, charitably, 2sqmi, and that's including all the way up to Wayne State. The light rail is the People Mover loop downtown plus a trolley up Woodward, within that range.
The theft mentioned in the article occurred at 8 Mile and Wyoming, which is a 20 minute highway drive from Campus Martius in no traffic. "Clean Downtown" that happened when the city hosted the super bowl and other related efforts have very lopsidedly focused on the downtown area.
> Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.
Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?
The typical mind fallacy: amongst other things, unless it was done deliberately, it's really really hard to guess why you've upset someone, especially when they're so upset they don't talk to you any more.
Nah, if they stormed out right after you told them the salary, it's pretty obvious.
It sounds more like an example of 'cultural density' -- not wanting to realize or acknowledge something that's at odds with what your local culture desires (in this case, the desire to pay as little as possible).
This was the highest paid position in the company (30k a year) and a salary (which only their managers were paid in a salary). They thought they were offering a really good salary, not realizing it was FAR below market rate. They still hired engineers at below market rate (~60k) but I helped them find some really smart junior engineers who could maintain the existing code; and warned them that these engineers would likely leave in the next year or two, max.
They were able to become fairly profitable with full-time engineers, eventually, and ended up paying above market rate, last I heard.
What? Was everyone else at the company living in their car and relying on the food bank to feed themselves? Or was this in some strange ultra-low-CoL environment?
It was long ago, maybe 2009ish? Developer salaries were actually going down, IIRC, during this time. Likely due to companies exactly like this one and pivoting to more digital solutions. 100+k was very rare outside of SV. Adjusted for inflation, 30k is roughly equal to about 40-50k in todays dollars.
I don't pay for the Atlantic and thus am limited by paywall, but this ignores power dynamics.
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