Question, for people who you work with it probably wouldn't be hard to trace who you are. You've said some pretty harsh things, aren't you afraid of backlash?
Ah, not really. I worried about this quite a bit at first, but there are quite a few mitigating factors.
The first is that I have an audience of a few thousand people at this point, and that's enough of a network that I will probably find work if I get laid off. And, you know, they're not going to kill me, the worst case is I've misjudged things and I'll need to enter a new industry.
The second thing is that my writing has reduced my employability at the kind of company I would hate anyway, but increased it at the truly excellent places. I've been in touch with the CEOs and directors at high-functioning organizations, and I'd rather work with them anyway. They wouldn't find work for me instantly, but they might eventually.
The only reason I remain employed at this place is that they agreed to give me a three day a week permanent contract (because they pissed the engineers off so much that four of them left in one week). It's a convenient deal, and it gives me time to focus on my own business, but I'd survive without them. I'm already looking elsewhere but don't want to land in a similarly toxic environment.
But I think, most importantly, I used to be very inauthentic at work (which is almost half my time and most of my daylight hours!), and it made me miserable. I'd rather be who I am and get forced to work at McDonald's for a bit. So I'm a little bit afraid, but I'm more afraid of what happens when I don't say what I think.
I really appreciate that! It certainly helps with a bit of the flak I catch from people with a different point-of-view when something hits Hackernews. And it's great to have team members that you can share this sort of thing with, though I hope you're commiserating about old jobs rather than the current one.
I suspect they actually meant Terry Pratchett, but David Whyte is certainly a contender. I read The Three Marriages expecting it to be awful because of the title, but came away with an unquenchable thirst for all his material.
(And I read the book after hearing him recite his poem, The Faces At Braga, which is the only piece of poetry that has ever moved me, a very level-headed and unemotional man despite my writing, to tears.)
I did mean Terry Prachett, was probably overly coy about it, but I definitely need check out David Whyte! I had to google the "gibberish" quote and was very pleasantly surprised! For those curious it is Discworld Dwarvish for:
I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy.
The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats.
On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.
I suspect that leadership is unlikely to be found in places with at will employment. That is because much of the work of leadership is learning how to lead different personalities and align people with different goals. In a company with at will employment there is no need to do that. You simply get rid of anyone who doesn't naturally fit in with your preferred personality.
Its not free, but it can be cheap as in the recent times. You fire/"RTO"/"manage out" the well paid engineers of yesterday and hire cheaper engineers while the market is flooded with them.
My company made it very clear I was being hired in an at will state when I was taking the job. They brought it up many, many times.
People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role.
A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.
If there's one thing my nearly 10 years of capitalism has taught me, it's that many businesses can handle significantly more malfunction and rot than you could possibly imagine was tenable without going under. They might not soar, certainly, but "the business still exists, so it cannot be that bad" is just simply not valid reasoning.
I get a lot of reader correspondence from the U.S, and the prevalence of this seems to be the same in places with at-will employment, with an added dose of terror keeping anyone from admitting they hate it.
I suspect you are wrong on the first part, at least for large technology companies.
I do agree with the view of what is needed in practice to be a good leader.
However, i think your assumption there is no need to do that is wrong.
Take an area like the bay area - it has about 120k software engineers. This is not a small number.
Even so, most companies the scale/size of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have, at this point, interviewed 95+% of the bay area SWE population, and most (Apple is the exception here) had done so by the time they were ~10-12 years in existence.
That is a very short time period to go through the available population, and the population does not grow that quickly.
So even if there was zero rampup time, etc, none of which were true, they can't practically afford to churn people as quickly or as randomly as you suggest because they can't replace them fast enough except at very high cost.
If you talk about something that has a much much larger available population, or companies with much smaller need it might be true.
While I agree with the author, I also don't think I want to work with this person.
People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.
This is like taking the batteries out of the fire alarm. It's not like there aren't times where maybe you should do that, but they're rare and temporary. How many situations are there where you'd rather have the fire than the alarm?
Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author."
I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.
A fire alarm is useless if it's always going off. The point of a fire alarm is that it goes off only when it's needed. Negative people are like a fire alarm that's always going off. I'm not accusing the writer of that, it's just a general comment.
There's definitely something a little weird about people who proclaim themselves a "Leader" on their LinkedIn title.
I can't even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? "Today's the day!" Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea?
Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson:
"Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king."
I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king," but I think the point still holds.
It must be being struck by the "brilliant" idea, right? The first one is too weird for me to contemplate. In either case, I don't judge people too much for this because I think it signals compliance with corporate norms. My theory is that anyone that says "Leader" on their LinkedIn title is actually saying "I'm not going to point out the emperor has no clothes as long as I'm salaried and allowed to give talks."
Some obscure company cultures demand you address everyone and yourself as "leader" in third-person, irrespective of designation and rank. So fresh grads are leaders, janitors are "sanitation leaders", SDEs are "development leaders" and so on.
For many app-entrepreneurs, app website has become embodiment of American Psycho business card, rich and expressive nonetheless how shallow app-product or app-idea actually is.
Maybe it's a bit like I heard as a kid (perhaps incorrectly), that the term sensei is one of respect, from student towards teacher. Not something one claims for oneself.
Even if I heard incorrectly, I still like the idea.
The military has an understanding here which feels lacking from modern society.
You have a rank, you get to give orders, it's a hierarchy generally.
But the difference between an experienced, senior NCO and a junior officer is well understood, and built into the structures.
Specific examples: why is there an officer's mess? Is it classist? Or is it because familiarity breeds contempt, and when you need to order someone to do something if no one respects you; everyone dies?
On the other side of it, who eats last, the enlisted or the officers? If you get that wrong you get mutiny.
Also why I think getting rid of the executive suites was a mistake.
Not only does familiarity breed contempt, but putting executives in IC tier offices lowered the standard for everyone, and now ICs have been reduced to factory floor scrubs.
> Specific examples: why is there an officer's mess? Is it classist? Or is it because familiarity breeds contempt, and when you need to order someone to do something if no one respects you; everyone dies?
I'd assume it is because the officers might be in a position where they choose to send the men (and women, in this enlightened age) to their deaths. There isn't much point eating together if that sort of politics might come into play, the power differential is too large. And it'd be harder for the officers to do that in an emergency if they see themselves as part of the same group.
Not to cast doubt on the officers, I'm sure they care very deeply about the wellbeing of their people and generally do a pretty good job of keeping people alive. But it is the military. People can die. Historically in war, some people die when their officers decide something suicidal is better than inaction.
I would say my cousin, who is a Major in the army would disagree with you. If you're not a good leader when trying to lead several hundred soldiers in a situation where they might be maimed or killed, you're not going to last very long in that job.
Being a leader is absolutely a huge part or the main part of many professions, and the truth is that the more people you are responsible for, the greater the importance of your leadership skills. That is, to be the CEO of a company requires you to be an exceptional leader as that is one of your primary responsibilities.
I think you made a huge leap from military leadership to "leadership" what the article is about. I would argue that military leadership has a good component of meritocracy, while business leadership has a good component of the opposite virtues. Like nepotism, networking, ruthlessness and inflated egos. A company with a terrible ceo can function just fine for a while if they have enough customers. I can't say the same for military in a war.
I also have been to ex military talks at my non military job, as motivational speeches. Nothing about military operations translates to civilian jobs. It's all cool how "we were under enemy fire and I had to get our team to the chopper", but no one is shooting at us, so we can just sit in our own excrements all day and the next day.
I think your cousin might agree with me that their profession is "military officer", not "leader". I agree that leadership is a valuable skill for many professions.
Self-proclaimed leaders and experts basically signal to me that they stopped bothering to upskill, leveled off, and use their new title as a form of justification or personal flattery.
I think they're trying to compete. A lot in life depends on how people first perceive you and what box they immediately pidgeonhole you into. When one goes to a new company all status and all the perceptions one has built up with people at the old company are lost.
One must make an attempt to be seen as one wants to be and it's not easy to do that without sounding arrogant but being humble doesn't work either.
I agree, and my "favorite" title is Thought Leader.
In my experience, people who call themself leaders, are often not performing very well in their main role, which usually happens to that of a people manager.
Yes, I would say so, nice observation.
I also think that many "idea guys" are doing the performative role of "the leader", i.e. the idea guys doing the corporate/business drag of the "thought leader".
>Is thought leader the next evolutionary level of the "idea guy"?
With 40 years and counting in this particular sub-field of anthropology, it's been fully confirmed that the so-called "Thought-Leader" (Ignoramus Rex) does not fall within the evolutionary branch of the now-extinct "Idea" man (Traumus Pieintheskii) whatsoever.
On the contrary, Ignoramus has now been shown to be an evolutionary dead-end that arose from lower-intelligence forms than those which gave rise to Traumus. As we have seen from intact specimens, Ignoramus is simply not capable of achieving the level of sophistication in its natural environment as Idea Man once exhibited during the brief epoch when it was thriving.
It's a horrible suggestion that everyone is going to have to pretend to agree with whatever nonsense that person has hyped themselves up on that week and they'll bully people into doing so.
Whereas Linux Torvalds is a leader by default because he had to be. There's also no need for him to say it anywhere. He just did it and was it.
In the case of Linus Torvalds and others like Guido van Rossum, I think is fine to consider them leaders, because they are leading their projects - to a certain extent these projects are not theirs (only) anymore, nonetheless they IMO they can claim or get the leader title.
I went on a hardcore training course once - four days in the mountains in Wales (UK) in winter, in the pouring rain, with ex-military trainers, competing as teams on tasks that were deliberately designed to cause tension in the teams. It was fascinating. All the guys that declared themselves the leaders at the start were practically (and literally in one case) in tears by the end, realising that nobody respected them and everyone thought they were jerks. The quiet, respectful, thoughtful ones became the leaders that everyone wanted to follow.
And then what happened on the fifth day? We all know the answer. The dream ended and everyone was back in the reality. Managers keeping workers busy, depressed and docile with scrum and jira dogshit while themselves playing game of thrones on getting the biggest comp packages.
Well, some of the people left their jobs after the course. (Employers were warned this might happen beforehand if they sent their staff on this course.)
You know, for all I agree with the post, and that leadership-as-cult is horrible, the question _why_ would someone put that in their LinkedIn title is trivial to answer:
Because they want to get the moneys! Because they want to get hired as a leader!
Because _you're_ not the audience. Their cronies are, the other cultists. They didn't come up with this themselves, they're just copying what everyone else (in their peer group / bubble) are doing... shrug
> ...when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king,"
I can't help myself but swap it with the German translation of "Leader", which is "Führer". Especially when somebody insists on calling himself a "Leader" (in English) in an otherwise German conversation, which unfortunately is quite common.
As an English person learning German, it was quite a shock to realise that the word/word fragment „Führer“ („Geschäftsführer“) really is just a normal word with a boring meaning. Also „Reich“ („Königreich“) and „Anschluss“ („Hausanschlussraum“).
> LTI demonstrates changes in the German language in most of the population. In contrast, the text also emphasizes the idea that resistance to oppression begins by questioning the constant use of buzzwords.
Sure, euphemisms are an essential component of any kind of propaganda. To some degree, this includes legitimate campaigning in democracies.
What the Nazis implemented to a unique extent was the process of (re-)defining words in a specific meaning. This happened top-down and censorship not only acted passively (disallow certain publications), but the propaganda actively pushed the terminology and narratives to use by the media.
The recurrent use of seemingly harmless words in specific ways impacted the society much longer than the Nazis were in charge. Some seemingly unpolitical narratives have lived on until today. Fortunately, the (Western) allies realized that they needed to counter this after the war, but of course the denazification has not been able to undo all the damage.
Also confusing to encounter words whose meaning changes from an inaudible capital letter („Reich“ ~= empire, realm; „reich“ = rich).
At least „die See“/„der See“ (ocean/lake) are at least both about water you can put a boat on.
„Briefkasten“ is a fun one, coming from English. Sounds like "briefcase". Same etymology, both are boxes that you put letters into, it's just that the English one is the thing you carry to work, and the German one is part of the postal system.
Its a rather old joke that when political correct speech is overdiscussed, one guy will ask: "Aber Führerschein ist schon noch erlaubt, oder?" (But drivers-licence is still a legal word, right?)
I think the answer is much more simpler. My own CEO and his immediate lackeys consider themselves "leaders". This is just to distingush themselves from lower level management. They "lead" the company, so "of course" they are "leaders".
Or to put it even shorter: leadership is reserved for the top of the org-chart.
This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don't disagree with some of the points, but the way they're conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them.
It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.
The Peter principle applies since in a lot of countries engineering is undervalued and the only way to gain anything is to become "management" to the detriment of everybody else.
> The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.
There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
> Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.
Management sucks period. As to why management sucks my friend offered a good insight:
Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want.
These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there.
As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.
That is probably true to a degree but IMO we make brutal decisions about code when we have to and get it wrong and so on. Why when it comes to organising people into some effort would we not have brutal decisions to make and get them wrong? Why expose yourself to blame when you could hide in the group?
It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.
Lol this is all a smokescreen. Let me give you an analogy. There are 3 people in a car, one driver, one navigator, one manager. The manager provides 'oversight' and 'takes responsibility'.
If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over.
In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers.
Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example).
Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success.
To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).
The car occupants clearly didn't pay Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey to come up with an optimum span of control, as they'd surely been advised a management role wasn't necessary in a 2 person team.
On the other hand, a tank with 5-8 functional roles does have the role of tank commander.
If the manager is responsible for hiring and managing the driver and the navigator, then obviously they can also be under stress, and will be held responsible for the outcome.
The manager should almost always get the blame. Why didn't they get help from another team, why didn't they supervise that dev more carefully, how did the bug get into the code in the first case and were proper test procedures followed. Has there been a history of mistakes which show a pattern that's not being managed etc etc.
Ultimately the CTO is responsible to the board for why a problem damaged the business (even if it was all the mistake of a developer somehow). And the board to the shareholders for losing money.
In reality people, of course, try as hard as possible to evade blame or lay it elsewhere but in theory a developer who makes a big mistake should not have been in a position to do that damage solo and it's a fault in the system if they were able to - and in the people responsible for the system.
'Agile' has built-in ways of shirking management responsibility. When a developer is asked to solve some eldritch problem, it often goes:
- How long will this take?
- I don't know. This is very complex and I'm not familiar with the code.
- You HAVE to know, we HAVE to plan for it.
- Okay, then 5 days.
- Hey 5 days has passed, why isn't this done yet?
- I underestimated the complexity of the task.
- Ah, so YOU estimated wrong, so it's YOUR fault!
Hard problems exist. They can only be solved by hard-work and expertise and even then solve times are unpredictable and draining to the individual and are thankless endeavors. Management tries to paper over that, but this is a fundamental invariant of life.
The fact that management makes solving these problems feel like punishment, only makes people try to avoid these problems more.
I heartily agree that the problems are hard and unpredictable things don't get made predictable by a method.
I think, however, if you're in a company with bastards who don't care they will find out how to screw agile just as they screwed the scheme before that. In the waterfall projects the example you gave is just the same.
In your example "I don't know, it's very complex" should lead to a spike where you have a chance to find out more. Then you'd give a high complexity estimate and everyone would try to think of ways to chip off a bit of the problem at a time.
You're also trying to get your whole team to think about what can be done rather than each developer facing horrible problems alone. But if you're managed by arseholes then even the most positive ideas tend to get turned into nightmares.
I'd really like to get on the same page as you, let me ask you are you a manager? Are you technical? Do you work on technically challenging topics (which I define by needing people with rare specialist skillsets)?
Because if you do you know you can't do certain kinds of stuff. You can't bring in another guy who's a cryptography expert while also having your particular domain knowledge. You can't communicate effectively upwards that you have a teethy issue.
Management is a leaky abstraction. The idea is that a manager is the person for a team who upper management can treat as a proxy for the team itself.
As for how things should work, the difference between that and how things actually work is the existence of carrot-and-stick feedback mechanisms to enforce a desired reality.
In absence of that you get a regression to the mean. Management which shifts blame. Disgruntled engineers who shirk responsibility. Stupid idealist youngsters who maybe go above and beyond once or twice, then after being burned either join the disgruntled majority or quit the company.
I became a tech lead and a line manager not too long ago. It's very difficult to keep your technical edge and also deal with the the meetings, the debates about what to do next quarter, the personal issues and yet be able to zoom back down to how the hell I'm supposed to add my bit of code into this design in a sensible way that will work...what the hell is going on with this incomprehensible bug...etc.
TLDR: the use of BLAME is not that helpful. We're all human and fallible. We don't want to get to the point of blame in the first place anyhow. We want to solve problems before they go badly wrong and blame is really just about what we try to do to make things better in future. Like, if you say "this person is the one who screwed up - they're just an idiot" that lets everyone else off the hook and lets the company not change itself at all. So I don't think that mode of searching for a scape goat is very useful. What's useful is that when there are several people and none is sure who should take on some problem then you need to clarify who is most responsible and should follow up and keep chipping away at it till it's solved.
I wrote a lot of other boring crap and deleted it to spare you the pain of reading it. Yes I'm technical but it's impossible to be technical in all areas. I do write code and I'm always struggling to keep up with the other developers on the team. I have specialist skills but they're only of limited relevance to this company and this team and skills become less and less relevant. It's very hard to deal with problems in a domain that you're not familiar with but you end up being forced to deal with things that you're not equipped for because nobody else really is and you're responsible.
The line of thinking you're showcasing is exactly of the type I've had to deal with in so many companies before, and is the real energy vampire.
Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap.
That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP.
They did not asked for platitudes nor euphemisms. They asked to reduce resentment vomit that lowers actual informational value.
If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.
Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them.
It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal.
I don't like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. That's just called being an adult.
> Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like.
A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice.
A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables.
It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.
You would terminate someone for...having an opinion? They didn't mention the company they worked for (if indeed it is their company and not some made-up example).
Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.
For long meetings I've dreamed about having a taxi style fare meter running on the screen. It would add up all the wages of the people present and give a running total for the speaker so they know the (minimum) cost of the meeting.
Normally I hate timesheets, but there is some satisfaction in putting "Company meeting: 4 hours" into a timesheet and knowing the managers will have a mild heart attack when those 4 hours are multiplied for every person across the company when they look at the end of the month report.
> Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard.
It is actually really really easy to not send your employees emails like "This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning". Shockingly easy in fact.
I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.
I agree. I should probably clarify that I only developed this urge after getting sick of seeing people get treated poorly. But I've avoided it thus far despite a few offers because almost every manager who serves as what I've heard called an "umbrella" gets terribly burned out and it affects their personal lives.
PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
What about the position of a technical team lead, who sits above 3-7 devs. working together with them but with mandate from The Powers That Be: to actually push back against the grind of moving tickets left to right ASAP, making sane architectural choices instead of "lol msft says we need this", and actually teaching people to write code instead of complexity tarpits?
Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
This can be terrible too - half of your 3-7 devs probably suck but think they're amazing and won't accept any guidance, plus you have little hiring/firing power.
From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible.
So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state.
(I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)
The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
I adore this, though I have to re-organize my brain a bit to parse it after defining management and leadership so differently. Thank you for the lovely recommendation, and I'll be sure to give the whole thing a read/listen.
The corpo leeches collectively caught on to this interpretation of manager/leader long ago, and subjugated these ideals for their own, sad, status-quo maintaining goals...
Based on what you said I think that you should change jobs. Too much toxicity and obvious incompatibility with the company preferred approach to working.
Absolutely, I'm keeping an eye out. Unfortunately, due to path dependence in jobs, it takes a while to find a better place. Plus this company culture is very typical in Australia, so you're looking at a small percentage of the market.
I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.
The reality is that most companies are dysfunctional and caputed by the professional managerial class, people with few other skills than nepotism and favour trading, and that would crawl over broken glass to avoid doing something that benefits customers, shareholders or employees.
>That level of self-regard is narcissistic to such a degree that I have screeched so far past horror that I've looped around to arrive at a grudging respect.
It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.
I can't stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There's nothing to learn from these people, they can only 'manage', they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...
"Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I've had a 1:1 with at a big company?"
I mean, it's sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as "C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering" i'm going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that
1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective
2. Big-company CTO's have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be "I probably should not have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who I ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to"
If the article said "small company CTO's", I think it would make more sense.
Extremely fair. #2 is a tricky one. On one hand, I know a few executives who genuinely have some demonstrable area of expertise that isn't related to technology. On the other hand, an executive whose area of expertise always seems to be "It's in things that are impossible for you to understand" is unfalsifiable from my viewpoint. I err on the side of caution until they do something that simply can't be explained away... like scheduling a four hour meeting to say nothing as the outcome of a six month process.
Sure, I think that is a fair view. I almost added to the comment the following, which i suspect you would agree with:
"obviously they should have some area of significant technical competence that is within an area the company cares about or works on. I just wouldn't necessarily expect it to be programming languages, and they should definitively not try to overstep their competency".
You are giving the case where either they have no area of technical competence, or one that, uh, charitably, is so far outside anything the company does/cares about that they can't explain it to you.
That one is a clear fail of this particular test :)
also obviously, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good CTO.
Another good condition would be "generally assumes the time of people 'on the ground' is the most valuable time the company has, as this is what directly leads to features/revenue/customers/etc".[1]
As such, the number of situations where such a meeting would be net positive for the company amount to something like:
1. you are about to save everyone 4.001 hours worth of work, increase per-employee revenue by 4.001 hours worth, etc, by talking at them for 4 hours.
2. The company is going under and therefore you are saving everyone 100% of their time :)
#1 is actually within the bounds of possibility, but I would certainly agree that it is much more likely that anyone who believes they are about to accomplish that is probably suffering from hubris of the highest order.
[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
Instead, i think you see managers/leaders who start by believing they exist as a net positive and think occasionally they screw it up and are only a little net positive.
On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
Yes, that's fair.
I meant it as sort of "the barest possible minimum to even start to argue it's worth it".
Most of the time, the issue is not the error bars in thinking about the quantity. They aren't thinking it needs to be worth 4.001 and it needs to be worth 6, instead, they aren't thinking about it at all.
Just wanted to say that this was one of the most thought-provoking and sensible exchanges on the post.
>To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
An unexpected side effect of starting my own business is that I can't help but view myself and my team this way. We're bootstrapped and have day jobs, but there is absolutely no avoiding the gap between how much revenue we generate and how much we'd need to work on the business full time.
>[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
I read a lot of Taleb in my early 20s, and he'd call this iatrogenics in a non-medical context, and I'd agree. One of the ex-Pivotal guys I spoke to mentioned that most of the highest-performing teams emerged from "benign neglect" from management - i.e, they got busy and left the team alone. Could be a recipe for disaster, certainly, but there's also compelling anecdata out there that it could be the grounds for great things with the right people.
>On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
I really wonder how many people would say "yes" to this. It seems like an insane thing to say, but I'm honestly not 100% sure how many people would pick up on that.
"I read a lot of Taleb in my early 20s, and he'd call this iatrogenics in a non-medical context, and I'd agree. One of the ex-Pivotal guys I spoke to mentioned that most of the highest-performing teams emerged from "benign neglect" from management - i.e, they got busy and left the team alone. Could be a recipe for disaster, certainly, but there's also compelling anecdata out there that it could be the grounds for great things with the right people."
Alan Eustace, who was Google's SVP of engineering forever, used say he would deliberately put enough on director's plates that they couldn't pay attention to everything, in the hopes that exactly this would happen.
A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute.
To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this.
Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.
In my experience it is the opposite, very few people qualify for "knowing their stuff well". Let me put it this way:
Successfully executing on something requires _both_ domain knowledge + knowledge how to execute things efficiently.
This combination is extremely rare, and I think survivorship bias that you mention mostly exists due to original business goals not being defined formally enough - i.e. people commonly valuing "execution as an activity" instead of "execution is getting from A to B". You can execute while failing many times over because you lack knowledge or understanding. You can get recognised and praised for execution because nobody bothered to validate that you actually got the result.
This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
> this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.
Leadership will eat themselves alive at the cost of valuable talent. I think leadership often needs to consider how valuable they are as a unit and work together and not build martyrs for causes. The number one problem in the failure of businesses is the ability to lead and do it effectively. Then something stirs up the dynamic the company faulters and loses that momentum. Then a divide forms where now they pit talent against each other this talent becomes a martyr for the leadership. This is a systematic problem when hirer level leadership fails to lead and creates rifts.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadThe first is that I have an audience of a few thousand people at this point, and that's enough of a network that I will probably find work if I get laid off. And, you know, they're not going to kill me, the worst case is I've misjudged things and I'll need to enter a new industry.
The second thing is that my writing has reduced my employability at the kind of company I would hate anyway, but increased it at the truly excellent places. I've been in touch with the CEOs and directors at high-functioning organizations, and I'd rather work with them anyway. They wouldn't find work for me instantly, but they might eventually.
The only reason I remain employed at this place is that they agreed to give me a three day a week permanent contract (because they pissed the engineers off so much that four of them left in one week). It's a convenient deal, and it gives me time to focus on my own business, but I'd survive without them. I'm already looking elsewhere but don't want to land in a similarly toxic environment.
But I think, most importantly, I used to be very inauthentic at work (which is almost half my time and most of my daylight hours!), and it made me miserable. I'd rather be who I am and get forced to work at McDonald's for a bit. So I'm a little bit afraid, but I'm more afraid of what happens when I don't say what I think.
(And I read the book after hearing him recite his poem, The Faces At Braga, which is the only piece of poetry that has ever moved me, a very level-headed and unemotional man despite my writing, to tears.)
> I bargain with no axe in my hand.
I make a deliberate effort to migrate away from that kind of influence in life and would rather add a dent in my résumè than stick around when a company goes scrummy.
The freedom of choice disappears, and along with it the joy of solving particular tasks. Long term planning is replaced by two-week windows, people bicker about what is a story, and what is an epic, and why can’t I move an unsolved sub-task to the next sprint. It turns the joy of coding into a march of attrition: the solution is only a multiple of two weeks from being solved if everyone marches the same way. It’s also like herding cats.
On the other hand, a company run by someone who knows what they’re doing gets to skip all of this. No need for middle managers who “know software” in the same sense anyone “knows furniture” because they also sit down.
When you're not sure if you'll be able to pay your rent or feed your family, you'll join any organization, regardless of reputation.
It's not free but it can be made very cheap. Look at Amazon literally running out of people to churn in the near future.
People are not fired every time there is a personality clash or a new leader with a different style. There is no way the company could run with that much turnover and brain drain on a regular basis. People need to learn how to work with all kids of people and personalities… especially if they are working in a leadership role. If a leader feels the need to fire everyone they don’t get along with, they have no business being in that role.
A good leader will figure out how to get the most out of each person on the team, not demand they all fit in a certain mold or get out. The boss I had who got the most out of me figured out that if I was interested in a project I would work 12 hour days on it and really go the extra mile, while if I wasn’t interested, I’d drag my feet and procrastinate. If he saw me pushing something off, or with more experience, if I didn’t immediately jump in with both feet, he’d give the project to someone else who would slog through the projects I hated, but flounder on the ones I excelled at. It’s all about resource management, and to do that, there needs to be some variety in the resources. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the leaders to align the people in a way where the strengths shine and the weaknesses are supported.
If there's one thing my nearly 10 years of capitalism has taught me, it's that many businesses can handle significantly more malfunction and rot than you could possibly imagine was tenable without going under. They might not soar, certainly, but "the business still exists, so it cannot be that bad" is just simply not valid reasoning.
However, i think your assumption there is no need to do that is wrong.
Take an area like the bay area - it has about 120k software engineers. This is not a small number. Even so, most companies the scale/size of Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have, at this point, interviewed 95+% of the bay area SWE population, and most (Apple is the exception here) had done so by the time they were ~10-12 years in existence. That is a very short time period to go through the available population, and the population does not grow that quickly.
So even if there was zero rampup time, etc, none of which were true, they can't practically afford to churn people as quickly or as randomly as you suggest because they can't replace them fast enough except at very high cost.
If you talk about something that has a much much larger available population, or companies with much smaller need it might be true.
People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.
Reducing morale or devaluing work sound bad, but they can be more descriptive (as opposed to subjective) than they may seem. The work might be poor. It's possible morale should be low. The alarm goes off because it's sensor is better than the average person's. If the alarm is broken, that's a different story, but it would suggest not "agree[ing] with the author."
I don't think you're at all alone in the preference, it just kinda reflects our relationship to work in that people opt for the fire.
I can't even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? "Today's the day!" Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea?
Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson:
"Any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king."
I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in "Product Leader" for "king," but I think the point still holds.
Even if I heard incorrectly, I still like the idea.
You have a rank, you get to give orders, it's a hierarchy generally.
But the difference between an experienced, senior NCO and a junior officer is well understood, and built into the structures.
Specific examples: why is there an officer's mess? Is it classist? Or is it because familiarity breeds contempt, and when you need to order someone to do something if no one respects you; everyone dies?
On the other side of it, who eats last, the enlisted or the officers? If you get that wrong you get mutiny.
Not only does familiarity breed contempt, but putting executives in IC tier offices lowered the standard for everyone, and now ICs have been reduced to factory floor scrubs.
I'd assume it is because the officers might be in a position where they choose to send the men (and women, in this enlightened age) to their deaths. There isn't much point eating together if that sort of politics might come into play, the power differential is too large. And it'd be harder for the officers to do that in an emergency if they see themselves as part of the same group.
Not to cast doubt on the officers, I'm sure they care very deeply about the wellbeing of their people and generally do a pretty good job of keeping people alive. But it is the military. People can die. Historically in war, some people die when their officers decide something suicidal is better than inaction.
Historically, the value of eating with your men is that the men will actually follow your orders rather than just mutinying and killing you.
That is despite the fact that post-hiring they want you to be a follower, not a leader.
It seems like 80% or more of jobs are bait and switch at worst and definitely not aligned with hiring expectations at best.
Edit: instead of responding to individual comments, I will just edit this comment.
I am just a little bit sad about the emotional responses here on this thread, just echoing a sentiment, without much critical discourse.
Being a leader is absolutely a huge part or the main part of many professions, and the truth is that the more people you are responsible for, the greater the importance of your leadership skills. That is, to be the CEO of a company requires you to be an exceptional leader as that is one of your primary responsibilities.
One must make an attempt to be seen as one wants to be and it's not easy to do that without sounding arrogant but being humble doesn't work either.
In my experience, people who call themself leaders, are often not performing very well in their main role, which usually happens to that of a people manager.
With 40 years and counting in this particular sub-field of anthropology, it's been fully confirmed that the so-called "Thought-Leader" (Ignoramus Rex) does not fall within the evolutionary branch of the now-extinct "Idea" man (Traumus Pieintheskii) whatsoever.
On the contrary, Ignoramus has now been shown to be an evolutionary dead-end that arose from lower-intelligence forms than those which gave rise to Traumus. As we have seen from intact specimens, Ignoramus is simply not capable of achieving the level of sophistication in its natural environment as Idea Man once exhibited during the brief epoch when it was thriving.
Whereas Linux Torvalds is a leader by default because he had to be. There's also no need for him to say it anywhere. He just did it and was it.
Executing them on the otherhand, that's hard, and well - it's is the only thing that matters.
"They found me after 1,5 years" lol
Odd, it's probably true. Just not what I thought.
Because they want to get the moneys! Because they want to get hired as a leader!
Because _you're_ not the audience. Their cronies are, the other cultists. They didn't come up with this themselves, they're just copying what everyone else (in their peer group / bubble) are doing... shrug
I can't help myself but swap it with the German translation of "Leader", which is "Führer". Especially when somebody insists on calling himself a "Leader" (in English) in an otherwise German conversation, which unfortunately is quite common.
https://satwcomic.com/not-a-yahtzee
If Germany acted less neurotic, they'd draw less commentary.
> LTI demonstrates changes in the German language in most of the population. In contrast, the text also emphasizes the idea that resistance to oppression begins by questioning the constant use of buzzwords.
> Verschärfte Vernehmung ("strengthened interrogation"): torture
And the prefix „Welt-“ ("world-") reminds me of British politicians repeatedly calling their policies "world-leading" or "world-class".
What the Nazis implemented to a unique extent was the process of (re-)defining words in a specific meaning. This happened top-down and censorship not only acted passively (disallow certain publications), but the propaganda actively pushed the terminology and narratives to use by the media.
The recurrent use of seemingly harmless words in specific ways impacted the society much longer than the Nazis were in charge. Some seemingly unpolitical narratives have lived on until today. Fortunately, the (Western) allies realized that they needed to counter this after the war, but of course the denazification has not been able to undo all the damage.
At least „die See“/„der See“ (ocean/lake) are at least both about water you can put a boat on.
„Briefkasten“ is a fun one, coming from English. Sounds like "briefcase". Same etymology, both are boxes that you put letters into, it's just that the English one is the thing you carry to work, and the German one is part of the postal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
Or to put it even shorter: leadership is reserved for the top of the org-chart.
It's also easy to jump on the "management sucks" bandwagon.
Ironically, he could make a great VP of "cut the horse shit"
Global warming is real, the sky is blue, etc.
>This person sounds like an energy vampire.
The only thing worse than grumpy people are the posiopaths who keep spreading through organizations.
As one other commenter put it, the emperor has no clothes. And a lot of us are _really_ tired of pretending like he does.
There are many old adages for this: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, fire doesn't beat fire, etc. Just because someone else is bad doesn't mean being bad in response is good.
Difference is, nobody forces you read an article and what a random article says has negligible impact on your quality of life. You can choose to ignore it. Situation like this at work, while it is true that it is better if one minimises the level of being affected by them, are impossible to not affect one at all in some way.
Some people crave to be winners, crave to be on top, to be above others. They will raise hell and bring down the heavens on your head if they don't get what they want. They want status, they want control and they are constantly spending every waking moment of their lives on figuring out how to achieve it, and don't care about much. These people will destroy your organization if they don't get what they want.
These are a separate breed from engineers. You can look up their CVs and I guarantee even if they started out in technical roles they didn't spend more than a year there.
As for are they viable from a societal standpoint, I'm not sure. They are essential for the functioning a certain type of highly toxic organization, just like lawyers and prosecutors are essential for a functioning legal system. Office politics is a negative sum game, but not playing is worse than playing it.
It's going to take ambition, desire, hard headedness, reward etc to make anyone do such an undesirable thing. The higher and more risky it gets the more tough people probably need to be. It's also a lot easier to be selfish and tough than caring and tough so there's a larger supply of bastards to be in charge than empathetic and kind but still somehow tough people who can take the nasty decisions.
If they crash whose fault will it be? The answer is always the drivers' You cannot be held responsible for things that you have no direct control over.
In software, if the infra goes down, who will need to fix it? Developers. If a feature is particularly tricky and technically challenging, who is responsible for getting out of a rut? The answer is the developers.
Things like fixing a tricky bug in a million line lib I didn't write (IRL example).
Managers can use the carrot and the stick, bring in more resources, communicate the developers pains upwards, but most likely they cannot do anything directly that will bring about success.
To be clear if done properly, this can be helpful, but to say that they are under more stress and responsibility than ICs is just untrue, considering they literally cannot do anything to resolve the origin of said stress (see car analogy).
On the other hand, a tank with 5-8 functional roles does have the role of tank commander.
Ultimately the CTO is responsible to the board for why a problem damaged the business (even if it was all the mistake of a developer somehow). And the board to the shareholders for losing money.
In reality people, of course, try as hard as possible to evade blame or lay it elsewhere but in theory a developer who makes a big mistake should not have been in a position to do that damage solo and it's a fault in the system if they were able to - and in the people responsible for the system.
- How long will this take?
- I don't know. This is very complex and I'm not familiar with the code.
- You HAVE to know, we HAVE to plan for it.
- Okay, then 5 days.
- Hey 5 days has passed, why isn't this done yet?
- I underestimated the complexity of the task.
- Ah, so YOU estimated wrong, so it's YOUR fault!
Hard problems exist. They can only be solved by hard-work and expertise and even then solve times are unpredictable and draining to the individual and are thankless endeavors. Management tries to paper over that, but this is a fundamental invariant of life. The fact that management makes solving these problems feel like punishment, only makes people try to avoid these problems more.
I think, however, if you're in a company with bastards who don't care they will find out how to screw agile just as they screwed the scheme before that. In the waterfall projects the example you gave is just the same.
In your example "I don't know, it's very complex" should lead to a spike where you have a chance to find out more. Then you'd give a high complexity estimate and everyone would try to think of ways to chip off a bit of the problem at a time.
You're also trying to get your whole team to think about what can be done rather than each developer facing horrible problems alone. But if you're managed by arseholes then even the most positive ideas tend to get turned into nightmares.
Because if you do you know you can't do certain kinds of stuff. You can't bring in another guy who's a cryptography expert while also having your particular domain knowledge. You can't communicate effectively upwards that you have a teethy issue.
Management is a leaky abstraction. The idea is that a manager is the person for a team who upper management can treat as a proxy for the team itself.
As for how things should work, the difference between that and how things actually work is the existence of carrot-and-stick feedback mechanisms to enforce a desired reality.
In absence of that you get a regression to the mean. Management which shifts blame. Disgruntled engineers who shirk responsibility. Stupid idealist youngsters who maybe go above and beyond once or twice, then after being burned either join the disgruntled majority or quit the company.
TLDR: the use of BLAME is not that helpful. We're all human and fallible. We don't want to get to the point of blame in the first place anyhow. We want to solve problems before they go badly wrong and blame is really just about what we try to do to make things better in future. Like, if you say "this person is the one who screwed up - they're just an idiot" that lets everyone else off the hook and lets the company not change itself at all. So I don't think that mode of searching for a scape goat is very useful. What's useful is that when there are several people and none is sure who should take on some problem then you need to clarify who is most responsible and should follow up and keep chipping away at it till it's solved.
I wrote a lot of other boring crap and deleted it to spare you the pain of reading it. Yes I'm technical but it's impossible to be technical in all areas. I do write code and I'm always struggling to keep up with the other developers on the team. I have specialist skills but they're only of limited relevance to this company and this team and skills become less and less relevant. It's very hard to deal with problems in a domain that you're not familiar with but you end up being forced to deal with things that you're not equipped for because nobody else really is and you're responsible.
Yeah, our turnover rate is 300% and people are crying in meetings, but please ensure your concerns are raised elegantly, with many euphemisms for conveying urgency, and above all, please ensure by raising your concerns you are not impacting the roadmap.
That kind of low-energy "platitudes driven" communication around issues is exactly what leads to insane dysfunctions like ones we see at Activision and every startup that failed before getting to build an MVP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwTplsSvRuI
If you exaggerate and state things in as emotionally insulting way as possible, you are not saying things as they are. You are exaggerating and burdening everyone else with need to disentangle your emotions from actual content.
Congratulations - you've made it into their compliments list: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/compliments/
Great line, and it's true outside of work too.
It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal.
I don't like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don't like. That's just called being an adult.
A mandatory four hour meeting that boils down to "do the thing" is a waste of everyone's time. It's organized by someone in love with the sound of their own voice.
A meeting like that costs thousands of dollars in person-hours. It's then a few thousand more of lost productivity as everyone scrambles to figure out what the meeting means for their deliverables.
It could be an email. Then all the employees would have an extra four hours in their week to actually get shit done.
Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.
If keeping teams of professionals aligned is hard the problem is unlikely to be in the professionals..
Terminate people you disagree with and your blindspots get.. blinder? You end up being delusional, which is far from good.
It is actually really really easy to not send your employees emails like "This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning". Shockingly easy in fact.
PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible.
So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state.
(I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76HijAoXi6k
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
— Hugh Nibley, Leaders and Managers
I also am reluctant to just outright write a post that says "find me a job" unless I'm in a dire circumstance, as that seems like an abuse of my reader's email list, so I'm doing it the old-fashioned way.
It'd be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn't also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.
I can't stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There's nothing to learn from these people, they can only 'manage', they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...
I mean, it's sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as "C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering" i'm going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that
1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective
2. Big-company CTO's have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be "I probably should not have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who I ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to"
If the article said "small company CTO's", I think it would make more sense.
You are giving the case where either they have no area of technical competence, or one that, uh, charitably, is so far outside anything the company does/cares about that they can't explain it to you.
That one is a clear fail of this particular test :)
also obviously, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be a good CTO. Another good condition would be "generally assumes the time of people 'on the ground' is the most valuable time the company has, as this is what directly leads to features/revenue/customers/etc".[1]
As such, the number of situations where such a meeting would be net positive for the company amount to something like:
1. you are about to save everyone 4.001 hours worth of work, increase per-employee revenue by 4.001 hours worth, etc, by talking at them for 4 hours.
2. The company is going under and therefore you are saving everyone 100% of their time :)
#1 is actually within the bounds of possibility, but I would certainly agree that it is much more likely that anyone who believes they are about to accomplish that is probably suffering from hubris of the highest order.
[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
Instead, i think you see managers/leaders who start by believing they exist as a net positive and think occasionally they screw it up and are only a little net positive.
On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
It’s much more than that, because of opportunity cost. If all company was doing is how to get 0.025% improvements, it would never get off the ground.
Most of the time, the issue is not the error bars in thinking about the quantity. They aren't thinking it needs to be worth 4.001 and it needs to be worth 6, instead, they aren't thinking about it at all.
>To the point of your article, I tend to believe you have to start as viewing yourself as net negative, and then trying to understand how to either lower your overhead, or generate enough value to overcome the overhead, or both.
An unexpected side effect of starting my own business is that I can't help but view myself and my team this way. We're bootstrapped and have day jobs, but there is absolutely no avoiding the gap between how much revenue we generate and how much we'd need to work on the business full time.
>[1] I tend to believe that most management is not net positive value (whether they are necessary or not for various reasons is somewhat orthogonal), and managers/leaders who generate net positive value are rarer than they should be.
I read a lot of Taleb in my early 20s, and he'd call this iatrogenics in a non-medical context, and I'd agree. One of the ex-Pivotal guys I spoke to mentioned that most of the highest-performing teams emerged from "benign neglect" from management - i.e, they got busy and left the team alone. Could be a recipe for disaster, certainly, but there's also compelling anecdata out there that it could be the grounds for great things with the right people.
>On day 1 i would give them a 1 question test that says "do you believe you are already adding net positive value to your team by being here" and send anyone who answers 'yes' to the reprogramming station.
I really wonder how many people would say "yes" to this. It seems like an insane thing to say, but I'm honestly not 100% sure how many people would pick up on that.
Alan Eustace, who was Google's SVP of engineering forever, used say he would deliberately put enough on director's plates that they couldn't pay attention to everything, in the hopes that exactly this would happen.
To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.
This might sound insane for the IT world, but this is how business often operates on a day to day basis - vague objectives with recognition for effort and process, instead of the actual result.
Which makes "knowing stuff well" an extreme modern leadership blindspot, in my opinion.
That's a good point. Perhaps, seen more in larger businesses than smaller ones. As businesses grow, they accumulate support staff. Moreover, planning horizons get longer, so it gets difficult to associate "pnl" and effort concurrently.