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Wait until your manager is laid off and you're talking to them afterward.

This has happened to me twice in my career and both times its like you're talking to a whole different person.

In my cynical opinion, being that different person is the number 1 trait companies look for when selecting managers



How different were they (your managers) before and after being laid off?


This episode of Planet Money is a good demonstration of that: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/epis...

In summary: Patty McCord helped create the company culture in Netflix not ever holding on to people, if your position becomes slightly redundant or your performance falters for a bit, you're out. She apparently called herself "the queen of the good goodbyes". She says that she does not like the word "fired", that people are just "moving on" and that this is good for everyone involved. At one point in the interview, she gleefully recounts admonishing an employee she let go for crying about about it.

The twist being that she herself was eventually fired as well. The interview does not go very deep into this because "she doesn't like to talk about it", and just says that leaving Netflix was "terrible, painful and sad".


What a psycho


Being an asshole while in charge and then back to nice, empathic person once he doesn't have any power over other people any more


it's funney yeah. lack of empathy is correlated in psych studies with increase in power over others. people with less power need to be more empahtetic / in tune with other's feelings in order to get their needs met. makes sense. can realted from my childhood! :) haha


Sounds like a very bad manager.


+1 super curious


Mind that being laid off also changes them. They are also human.


The Stanford prison experiment in action


Was that ever replicated?


No it’s conclusively been disproven many times.


For real? Where is that cited? Because SPE is still mentioned a lot. How is it disproven?


Nah, man: totally agree wif dat. But even that can express differently, there's a lot of boxes for that different person to fit into!

I mean, is this impostor syndrome or is it something else?




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