How To Know If Your Manager Is Trustworthy

Thriving Technologist

Trusting people is getting tougher than ever these days, and nobody seems to have a harder time than programmers and managers. In this episode, I'll teach you how to get some hard evidence to determine whether your manager is trustworthy or not. The goal is for you to find out YES and just have a healthy relationship with your manager.

But if there are trust issues, you'll have some tough decisions to make about your software development career. This episode can help anyone who has a boss on a software project (programmer, QA, DevOps, etc.), but since there are some unique ways programmers can have their trust broken by managers - I'll focus on that.

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You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

Chapter markers / timelinks:

(0:00) Introduction (2:36) 1 WHY DON'T PROGRAMMERS TRUST MANAGERS? (2:48) 1.1 Manager Can't Do What Programmers Can (4:17) 1.2 Limited Visibility in Command and Control (6:35) 1.3 Hearsay (8:05) 1.4 Power Dynamics of Reporting to Someone (9:43) 2 WHY DON'T MANAGERS TRUST PROGRAMMERS? (9:55) 2.1 Can't Comprehend All of Their Work (11:01) 2.2 Past Bad Experiences (12:26) 2.3 Remote Visibility Problems (13:36) 2.4 Assumptions of Immaturity (15:30) 2.5 Anxiety Due to High Cost (17:26) 3 HOW TO LEARN IF YOUR MANAGER IS TRUSTWORTHY (17:41) 3.1 Micro-Commitments (19:49) 3.2 Corroborate With Coworkers (22:14) 3.3 Corroborate With "Skip Level" Boss (24:55) 3.4 Set and Track Measurable Objectives (27:48) Episode Groove

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