This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.
Man, this hits hard. I've done so much to protect my part of the org chart from the whims of others and the cost-cutting pressure of the organization at large. My team are happy. Personally, I'm burned out to the level that nothing excites me any more and it's really hard to muster the energy to even do what's needed at the job, let alone drive vision and the team forward.
My sympathies, I've been there, too. You are not alone. What helped me was to talk about my predicament with peers outside my company at face-to-face meetups. It changed my trajectory and allowed me to find purpose again.
> high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations
One of the things that I've done multiple times over my career is, to be completely open and clarify expectations on the other side / higher ups. One of the ways this manifests is that I never put my signature on something I don't believe in; I can sign up to get as far as possible, but will be explicit on not guaranteeing a destination that I'm not empowered to reach. Another is to make it clear that my execution decisions are aimed not at doing what you ask me, but doing what future you will be happy I did.
Naturally, things like that limit quite a lot the range of responsibilities that I could potentially reach, but also prevent me from going to places where I will not want to be.
I tend to do that as well. Usually starting with a clarification of the expectations.
Then I ask what budget they are prepared to allocate to meet said expectations. If the answer is "none", I ask them which other expectation shall be lowered. This may seem confrontational, but it isn't really. If you want me to do more stuff without giving me the means and time to do it, something will suffer, and that needs to be made explicit by me, because I am the person facing the consequences when this something else can't be done adequately.
I was once asked to become the responsible electrical engineer for my institution. For them this was just a position they had to fill for legal reasons (otherwise they are liable in case of damages) and I have the qualifications, so they asked me. Then I explained to them that legally my role is only seen as valid if I am given the time and the means (equipment, room, powers to stop failings, etc) to do the job properly. Otherwise they would still be liable. I then asked them if they were prepared to dedicate that amount of my work time and an extra budget to that role. Surprise, they were not. So I declined. As of now I am still not sure where that liability went.
Too often management wants to have their cake and eat it too, and pointing that out isn't rude. It is one thing to ask someone who is idling have the time to take on tasks that are close to their job. But it is a totally different thing to ask someone who is already at 110% capacity and doing the job of three people to take on yet another job.
This is bad management. It is flattering that I am apparently good enough at my job to be constantly offered new responsibilities and asked advice at projects, but that is how you lose people like me.
A very good synopsis. I recently had the chance to put myself as the intermediate member between those expectations and our technical team. It raised the expectations on me, but helped reduce the unrealistic side of those from impacting my team.
It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting the blog, but this feels like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I’ve always despised managers who’d be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but always be “part of the system” when it mattered the most. Yes it’s always good to not get into public arguments with the upper management, but this gives off a lot of “play both sides” kind of a vibe that’s not actual good management.
So what is your expert advice? A manager runs their mouth off publicly, gets fired/made redundant, and gets replaced with a manager who does buy into the company line?
What concrete differences in behaviour would you expect to see?
what's missing from the blog is the fact that these decisions that are announced publicly are made a long time before they're announced publicly. so I would have already voiced my opposition (and presumably failed to sway leadership) and talked about it with my people long before the "be part of the system" moment.
if something ever came along where I was surprised and not informed ahead of time, I'd not loudly disagree publicly until I had more info and I'd tell my people as much. but that would be an exceptional circumstance and I'd probably feel I'm on the chopping block anyway since I was out of the loop.
so I don't play both sides but if you choose to stay employed at a place you're choosing to buy into the vision of leadership. if I wasn't bought in, I'd leave. if someone under me wasn't bought in, I'd support them and keep it between us but recommend they leave. because life is short and you'll regret working for people you detest. I get there's practical considerations because a job is a life decision but that's always why I'm careful about where I commit to work at and don't just aim for best salary or TC.
> this feels like it suggest you just fall in line with the upper management while providing lip service to the plebs. As an IC I’ve always despised managers who’d be a very sympathetic ear in 1:1s but always be “part of the system” when it mattered the most
You're "part of the system" the moment you sign the employment contract for a manager position, this is literally your job to fall in line with upper management. As middle manager you can and should raise concerns to higher management, but once they take a decision, you have to apply it. Being empathetic is not playing both sides, manager's job is to apply upper management decision even if you don't fully agree. And you don't have to pretend in private to agree on everything, no one will buy that.
I saw a definition of burnout as the accumulation of thousands of tiny disappointments and it stuck me. If you're always failing to achieve anything despite effort going in, you burn out.
> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...]
If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?
I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."
Your employees won’t rat you out… Just don’t say “sucky” to those above you. If I have a cool ass manager who looks out for me and is real (I’m lucky enough to be at a MIT lab where everyone is cool as hell), I will always have their back…
If you're a manager, consider not saying that up the org chart is "sucky". Almost certainly no one on your team will go tattle, but it can leak out accidentally, such as when someone is flustered over a problem.
More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.
But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...
For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.
(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)
I think this is true 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time is really risky. The high stakes of the bad case make it wise (imo) to avoid saying your company's policy "sucks"
Even in situations where this is true, there's almost certainly a better phrasing than "this new policy sucks," which only communicates an emotion. It is imprecise. Listeners will jump to their own conclusions about why you think it sucks.
You can acknowledge the problems more directly: "I get it, we don't have enough chairs so Wednesday is likely to be a challenge." or "I know mandatory 9-5 is going to disrupt your commute."
A bonus of the more precise approach is you can follow up with "do you have other issues with the new policy that I may not know?"
Oh, MIT LL (from your HN bio) seems to be all about top serious engineering and science R&D.
Would you say it's probably a pretty different cultural environment than the established company and tech startup environments that most of HN works in?
Your balancing the relationship you have with leadership to do what you are asked to do, just as you ask IC to do things they may want to do, with doing the best you can to maintain or improve the QoL for your team.
The author is right, the correct stance is...
> “Yeah, <s>this new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.”
Then critically thirdly,
> "Lets work together to demonstrate why the new policy is a risk to the customer."
Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
To get what you want the compelling argument is to the customer.
Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but this is the level of support we can provide customers. This customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be accommodated to provide the same thing on time, I've done an estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
If you're too careful about how you phrase things, it can backfire and seem dishonest. People will interpret it similar to "you call is important to us". Technically true perhaps, but intended to deflect.
You have to mean it, and you have to follow through on your words with actions.
Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.
Maybe. Many people would react very negatively to someone down the org chart from them contradicting them to those below.
(Example: CEO says we're doing this thing because bold leadership. Manager tells their people is dumb or wrong. ICs openly grumble about CEO being a big jerky doody-head. CEO hears that and says WTF is this manager undermining bold leadership.)
Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech workplaces.
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven
The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.
I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.
> The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.
This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.
The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase profitability at the expense of all else.
> Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak
... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.
Definitely plays a huge part in expectations and burnout when the roadmap flips halfway through a quarter because suddenly we need to court VCs or trim staff or whatever the fed/gov decides.
The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams expect it more so they buy-in less.
“Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment. When acting “in public” (all-hands, department meetings, the #general channel), this is mandatory, as contradicting the bosses in a broad forum can kill the credibility you have the leadership across the wider team“
Take this advice with a grain of salt. If bad decisions can lead to very bad things and you know it you must push back even if that means getting fired. This is particularly important when the life and wellbeing of others are at stake. Just look at Boeing to see how prioritizing a job over ethics can actually kill people and destroy companies.
They are. Sometimes the managers are smart and voluntarily listen to the workers, but that isn't the same as workers having power. What should happen is that better run companies both get more value out of their employees and attract employees from the less well-run companies. But that doesn't seem to happen as much anymore with increasing consolidation and decreasing competition. At least that's how USA looks like from the outside. And this is across all sectors.
Also, the purpose or end of a country is not to produce some widget at high efficiency for a client, or to rapidly respond to the whims of a despot. It is just a structure around the essential activity of humans simply living their lives.
The article says in many more words, "pick your battles". You can't manage when you aren't the manager. Getting fired/laid off won't get you the results.
Pressure is being exerted from above, you bend (lax enforcement) and bounce back (suggest to higher ups better policies) when the time is appropriate.
The American model of hierarchical with input which combines the top down structure of many societies with the flatter get input until agreement model of others has been pretty effective all in all.
I think shareholders get a say (in private companies that's the owner), you get a salary and benefits (maybe some shares giving you some say) (and hopefully some workers protections and unionization opportunities) and the issue right now is that the wealthy control a staggering number of the shares giving them huge, outsized impacts on regular people's lives.
There is a tine to speak up. at meals with close family. At meetings with your boss. The right question at company meetings - though there are wrong question here: think long and hard before ask.
You can speak up it meetings with your team but be careful of the tone. You need to come off as overall having the companies back but this one thing you can't support. Or maybe things will change again. There are lots of options.
There have been recessions before. There will be a recovery. Leave when things get better (or you retire) and cite working conditions in the bad times in your exit interview.
unions can work, but they can force you into situation you don't want to be in.
I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
It's not a case of the manager not supporting her, it's a case of the manager putting something that could have been informal - "I'm happy with your performance and if you need to take some breaks during the workday I support it" - and made it a formal thing that is risking getting her fired.
The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.
Nope! Her manager had no concerns about her performance and has expressed regret about the situation because it has made everyone's life harder. The manager likes her and wants her to stay at the company, but because she's a "problem" for HR they want to fire her.
Readit News
One of the things that I've done multiple times over my career is, to be completely open and clarify expectations on the other side / higher ups. One of the ways this manifests is that I never put my signature on something I don't believe in; I can sign up to get as far as possible, but will be explicit on not guaranteeing a destination that I'm not empowered to reach. Another is to make it clear that my execution decisions are aimed not at doing what you ask me, but doing what future you will be happy I did.
Naturally, things like that limit quite a lot the range of responsibilities that I could potentially reach, but also prevent me from going to places where I will not want to be.
Then I ask what budget they are prepared to allocate to meet said expectations. If the answer is "none", I ask them which other expectation shall be lowered. This may seem confrontational, but it isn't really. If you want me to do more stuff without giving me the means and time to do it, something will suffer, and that needs to be made explicit by me, because I am the person facing the consequences when this something else can't be done adequately.
I was once asked to become the responsible electrical engineer for my institution. For them this was just a position they had to fill for legal reasons (otherwise they are liable in case of damages) and I have the qualifications, so they asked me. Then I explained to them that legally my role is only seen as valid if I am given the time and the means (equipment, room, powers to stop failings, etc) to do the job properly. Otherwise they would still be liable. I then asked them if they were prepared to dedicate that amount of my work time and an extra budget to that role. Surprise, they were not. So I declined. As of now I am still not sure where that liability went.
Too often management wants to have their cake and eat it too, and pointing that out isn't rude. It is one thing to ask someone who is idling have the time to take on tasks that are close to their job. But it is a totally different thing to ask someone who is already at 110% capacity and doing the job of three people to take on yet another job.
This is bad management. It is flattering that I am apparently good enough at my job to be constantly offered new responsibilities and asked advice at projects, but that is how you lose people like me.
It worked brilliantly for a while, but since things were getting done fast, well, and cheap, the expectations increased. I gave notice two weeks ago without a job lined up.
wow. real!
What concrete differences in behaviour would you expect to see?
if something ever came along where I was surprised and not informed ahead of time, I'd not loudly disagree publicly until I had more info and I'd tell my people as much. but that would be an exceptional circumstance and I'd probably feel I'm on the chopping block anyway since I was out of the loop.
so I don't play both sides but if you choose to stay employed at a place you're choosing to buy into the vision of leadership. if I wasn't bought in, I'd leave. if someone under me wasn't bought in, I'd support them and keep it between us but recommend they leave. because life is short and you'll regret working for people you detest. I get there's practical considerations because a job is a life decision but that's always why I'm careful about where I commit to work at and don't just aim for best salary or TC.
You're "part of the system" the moment you sign the employment contract for a manager position, this is literally your job to fall in line with upper management. As middle manager you can and should raise concerns to higher management, but once they take a decision, you have to apply it. Being empathetic is not playing both sides, manager's job is to apply upper management decision even if you don't fully agree. And you don't have to pretend in private to agree on everything, no one will buy that.
If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?
I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".
Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.
Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."
More likely, it will leak out indirectly, in a way, if your team starts thinking of itself a little too much as a group that has to stick together against hostile outsiders within the company, either up the chain or sideways. People outside the team will pick up on that's the tone you're promoting to the team.
But it's not just about not wanting impolitic words to come back to you...
For one thing, it's part of your job to help the team work with the company and people outside the team. Not promote a sense of hostile environment. (If there's an intractably hostile environment, then either that's getting fixed promptly, or your people should be escaping.)
A good manager should have the team's back, especially in a hostile corporate environment, but also insulate the team from a lot of noise including some of what they're being shielded from, as a team and individually. Just like personal life, if you care, you don't have to tell people all the things you do for them.
(I was fortunate to have some awesome managers, who knew when to shield and help me, who knew when to (on rare occasions) lower their voice and tell me something that a drone wouldn't, and who always came across as honest and caring. Some of it rubbed off of me despite my strong-minded personality, and I can always just ask myself what would Bill/Kathy/Nancy/Tom do, to name some of the earliest and most formative ones. All highly skilled engineers first, and later managers/mentors.)
You can acknowledge the problems more directly: "I get it, we don't have enough chairs so Wednesday is likely to be a challenge." or "I know mandatory 9-5 is going to disrupt your commute."
A bonus of the more precise approach is you can follow up with "do you have other issues with the new policy that I may not know?"
Would you say it's probably a pretty different cultural environment than the established company and tech startup environments that most of HN works in?
The author is right, the correct stance is... > “Yeah, <s>this new policy sucks</s> I don't agree with 100% of all decisions, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.”
Then critically thirdly,
> "Lets work together to demonstrate why the new policy is a risk to the customer."
Everybody drives on the same roads to the office, everybody has to wake up early, everyone has KPIs they are trying to hit.
To get what you want the compelling argument is to the customer.
Authors example, there aren't enough desks. We'll do it, but this is the level of support we can provide customers. This customers project is going to become at risk based on if we do this because of these reasons. We'll go in, but in order for us to deliver what we do at home we need to be accommodated to provide the same thing on time, I've done an estimate on what we'll need do you want me to expense it?
It's not about changes hurting you, the change hurting your team, it's how it's going to hurt the customer.
Otherwise, even if you are a good actor, to initially make people think you are being sincere, people will eventually realize you aren't being straight with them.
It won't happen but even if it did the people above you understand the role & predicament of a middle manager...
(Example: CEO says we're doing this thing because bold leadership. Manager tells their people is dumb or wrong. ICs openly grumble about CEO being a big jerky doody-head. CEO hears that and says WTF is this manager undermining bold leadership.)
That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.
The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.
I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.
I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.
This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.
The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.
... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.
Dead Comment
The snip-snapping is wreaking havoc on products and you see it everywhere from price hikes to low-quality ux and bug-filled code as teams adjust and pivot constantly.
Even worse this leads to less enthusiasm and focus as teams expect it more so they buy-in less.
Dead Comment
Take this advice with a grain of salt. If bad decisions can lead to very bad things and you know it you must push back even if that means getting fired. This is particularly important when the life and wellbeing of others are at stake. Just look at Boeing to see how prioritizing a job over ethics can actually kill people and destroy companies.
That’s why military is a dictatorship.
That’s why “design by committee” has such a bad rep.
The only problem with dictatorships is that you can’t change them. Also countries shouldn’t fail, so an orderly “change of power” process is needed.
But you can change companies, and companies can fail.
Have you ever worked in the military? I have and I don't think I have never seen a less efficient projects.
They do have very good reasons to do it that way. But my life is not in the hands of my coworkers, using the same tactics has no point.
Pressure is being exerted from above, you bend (lax enforcement) and bounce back (suggest to higher ups better policies) when the time is appropriate.
The American model of hierarchical with input which combines the top down structure of many societies with the flatter get input until agreement model of others has been pretty effective all in all.
I think shareholders get a say (in private companies that's the owner), you get a salary and benefits (maybe some shares giving you some say) (and hopefully some workers protections and unionization opportunities) and the issue right now is that the wealthy control a staggering number of the shares giving them huge, outsized impacts on regular people's lives.
The key point is: workers need to organize together for themselves. Nobody else is going to stand up for you, certainly not your boss(es).
You can speak up it meetings with your team but be careful of the tone. You need to come off as overall having the companies back but this one thing you can't support. Or maybe things will change again. There are lots of options.
There have been recessions before. There will be a recovery. Leave when things get better (or you retire) and cite working conditions in the bad times in your exit interview.
unions can work, but they can force you into situation you don't want to be in.
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.
Yeah, navigating disability leave can be a little rough
Not as rough as being PIPed out though, which was probably the other most likely path in front of your friend