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?