A startup that is firing engineers on the spot who dare to disagree probably won't last much longer anyway. Best of luck with their "critical" deadline then...?
"An example of uncertainty in business is when your CEO tells you they promised a feature to your biggest client and it needs to be built ASAP as highest priority, so all hands on deck. Then a day later they tell you another feature, completely contradictory to the first one, needs to be built as well and is also highest priority. When you tell them they both can't be highest priority, the answer is: make it happen."
At a certain point you have to just build a queue and start the next highest priority thing next. Too much WIP kills you.
Worse is when it's a salesman, not the CEO. It's infuriating.
I always wanted to tell that salesman that he got to go back to the customer and tell them that we weren't going to do it, since he was the one who promised it without finding out whether and when we could do it.
Of course, I never had the clout to force that to happen...
It's always sales it seems. We're doing stuff under the gun right now because sales promised a huge new client we had something that wasn't ready yet. They didn't bother to ask us, they just promised so they could get their commission.
Good salesmen can sell the product that we already have. Terrible ones can't, and instead sell a product we don't have and then frantically beg R&D to make that product right away.
Agreed on this. And there's also great people in the middle who keep sales people up to date with new features and deprecations if you want the system to work.
Speculatively build a feature that you know a customer somewhere would want (but maybe not the customer you have now) and then demand he find someone to buy it within a month before the AWS bills for it are due.
This was my last job, anyone in this position for any longer than necessary should be looking for another role. You're on a path to burnout or apathy, either way.
I called it "Monster of the Week", as I was watching a lot of X-Files at the time. Still like that term for it.
At one point many years ago I was Director of Engineering for a company that was planning a major new version of their product. After I'd been there a few weeks I said to the CEO that I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the scope and challenges for the new release.
The CEO said "no you don't" - which led me to ask why he thought this and he said he had thought up a new "must have" feature over the weekend - which was clearly very technically challenging. He then asserted that anything could be built in 48 hours....
Reminds me of my Director of Engineering gig where I was asked how quickly we could deliver a new feature that the CTO had thought of. After giving three different estimates on the spot and being told each was “unrealistic” and told to “try again” in a meeting with senior leadership present, I finally said “Just tell me what date you want to hear so we can pretend I said that.”
I was chastised for being unprofessional and embarrassing the department. Didn’t care then; no regrets now.
This is one of the reasons why kanban is my favorite project management methodology.
"Ah, new highest priority feature. Lets do a mini discovery session and it looks like this work can be represented with 20 sticky notes. Our historical team velocity is 10 sticky notes every two weeks. So we'll probably be done in four weeks. If we take down all the existing work in progress. Lets go to each existing sticky and you can confirm that we can stop working on it."
The stakeholders are still allowed to make decisions, but (hopefully) it forces them to be realistic and understand what they're asking the team to do.
Pivotal Tracker does something like this with release markers. You can set markers between any two stories and, optionally, set a date. Tracker does a very simple moving average projection and if the stories before the marker will take too long, it turns bright red.
I found it remarkably effective at getting business folks to actually prioritize. They don't believe you, but they'll believe the computer.
Many people misunderstand this. Just saying 'no' and being firm won't make you successful, it's not a very useful. Saying 'no' while convincing others that 'no' is actually the best strategy is a great skill.
when mysterious packages (new sandals, new animal skins, etc.) keep arriving at cave door for mrs. grug, grug not save very many shiny rock.
also, wolves and sabretooth tigers get hungry, need grooming, need vet, etc. picky about food too, want expensive organic stuff. sometimes mrs. grug buy animal skins for wolves even though they have perfectly fine pelts of their own. and don't get grug started on lil' gruglets (which this grug not have).
then no pile of shiny rock for rainy day, when shiny rock stop coming and cave mortgage is due.
shiny rock very important. get as much shiny rock as can without compromising values. happy mrs. grug = happy grug.
It site is an amazing and hilarious encapsulation of pretty much every conclusion I've come to after programming professionally for 20+ years (except maybe generics)
I remember, early in my career, being excitedly shown the "Agile Manifesto" by a bearded older dev.
I recently caught myself excitedly showing grugbrain to a younger dev, quoting the microservices section - and realized that I've come full circle, and now I'm the old bearded dev passing on some piece of thing that I found inspirational / exciting.
I have a feeling that the ability to say “no” may be one of the key abilities that good human developers have over coding AIs. Knowing how to figure out the actual business need and realistic technical solutions, as opposed to just saying “yes” to the initial request, without really understanding feasibility or the real requirements.
This is why good developers are hard to find. There aren't a whole lot of developers who have the required technical abilities while also being able to communicate with clients/leadership effectively.
The CEO is doing that because they don't understand how things work in your org. If you're the one communicating with the CEO, then its your job to be persuasive when telling them why what they're asking can't happen the way they're envisioning.
If they come back with "make it happen" then you weren't persuasive enough.
That’s not an example of uncertainty in business, it’s an example of incompetence in leadership. The problem is not one of software engineering, it’s one of rampant bad management and business practices.
>So, I will repeat it again: our greatest asset isn't the code we write. It’s us, alive, and living the life.
This is so important. Our work is an extension of us. Our state in the moment will bleed into all areas of life. There is nothing more important. As we are limitless potential. But only if we are living in the here and now.
As the founder and CEO of a two-year-old startup, seeking certainty in the direction amidst uncertainty (determining which products can bring customers and profits) should become my instinct.
I'll dump this one here as it's still annoying me a bit. So one afternoon I'm sitting there and our sales guy John came in (you know who you are if you're reading this) and described what he'd managed to sell a client. I sat there and I scribbled on bits of paper for hours, did some research and went back to him with the point that it wasn't possible from an algorithmic perspective. Basically he'd assumed that if it worked for a couple of steps in Excel it'd be fine up to a few hundred. I scribbled out the mathematics a few times, wrote some prototype code and no the scalability characteristics approached "all the energy in the universe" levels of compute pretty quickly. O(wtf!).
So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too. I was downtrodden emotionally so I sheepishly said yeah I'll have another look and went back and started at it for another couple of days. No it was impossible. At that point I was stuck in a situation. I've got unemployment on one side and I've got getting screamed at inevitably. I just sat there in a depressed little hole with no options. I was angry, isolated and had no one sympathetic around. I suspect many people end up here.
Slept really badly that night. Woke up, got in the car and drove into the office. Got half way and got distracted by a cafe and decided I'd get breakfast and think some more about it. Sitting there eating a fat sausace, something just went ping, I SMS'ed John and the CEO with "fuck you I quit". I moved back in with my parents, did fuck all for 6 months, got another job, which was 80% less shit and the company I worked for went down the shitter about a year later because they couldn't deliver it.
If you feel like shit in a job, just leave. It's not worth it.
It's good advice if you have the appropriate financial resources or support network, but plenty of us don't have the option to move back in with our parents for six months and need to adult on hard-mode.
Yeah I learned that security was pretty important after that and security means not buying nice shiny things until you have no money and having a decent buffer zone.
Sometimes you don't leave by choice and staying ahead of the layoff treadmill takes its own toll on mental health. Probably doesn't hurt to patch things up with the parents if possible.
That's the gist, with kids (and potential mortgage) the buffer is so huge, even if its there it creates its own pressures. Nobody normal likes to burn through tens of thousands if not more, so they often stave it off, for better or worse (and worse it usually is)
It was proximal routing optimisation in this case to decrease operating costs. They already had good approximation algorithms but they sold better than possible for a higher price than competitors and couldn't deliver.
Sadly, a lot of people are too nice to do this, and instead have a mental breakdown trying to solve an impossible situation. Despite the popular expression, "Never give up," sometimes it's important to know when to say fuck it and quit.
I wonder if this hits self-taught or "code boot camp" developers harder because they may not have the theoretical background to notice "oh this is the halting problem" or "oh this is TSP" before getting too far into the weeds.
For the last 20 years, employment in the software engineering field has basically been a dream scenario for the job seekers. Great wages and every company was always trying to hire.
However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now, but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to be.
While software engineers have definitely had a few good recent years (especially during the work from home boom during COVID times), I would say it was equally dire around 2009-2012 post-financial crash. And 20 years ago was 2004 - just off the heels of the dot com bust, where the job market was much much worse than today. Anecdotally, from what I hear, I would agree it's not a cake walk anymore like it was in ~2021 but it's also not quite a hopeless situation either.
> So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too.
That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation.
Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior.
In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent, etc.
Whereas in tech it's easier to fix situations like this. In one case I went home early to send out resumes and left a few months later. In the other I just sent a record of the conversation to my boss and she dealt with the issue appropriately.
A major career regret is having put up with jerks. No matter how much the customer/company pays or how interesting the work is you can find other work that pays just as well and is just as interesting except you get to spend more of your exceedingly short lifespan with kind, smart, well-adjusted people.
The Silicon Valley Machiavellian TechManager way to deal with this situation is to say "Yes, we will do this, but only if I get an up-front bonus and a team of twenty." The CEO instead gives you 6 headcount and a bonus schedule with performance milestones. You put the team together. Drag things out as long as you can, managing upwards with bullshit and a charismatic smile, faking the goals when you can, while the team is on a death march. Finally, when it's obvious that you'll never deliver, blame the team and parachute away to a different company with whatever bonus money you managed to get your hands on, where they offer you a "Director" title and $1M in stock because you were a "leader."
Haha that was a great post because I was reading from the beginning thinking "gonna follow up tell this person they don't need to take abuse from sociopaths" then got to the end. Good job. Not every employer is a psycho but many are.
This is a person that should have never been in a leadership position. I have worked under these types of people that were great engineers themselves but couldn’t lead worth shit.
No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No discussion. Backdoor discussions. Always bending to the will of management. Everything is “important”/“critical”. It’s micromanaging to the worst degree.
At the same time, I would likely fail in the same way if given the position. Albeit, to a much lesser degree. I think management often puts us in these impossible positions without any good reason other than “to look good to X.” What’s even worse if it’s was just to earn fucking brownie points with some no name mid level director.
This is why I think unions in tech would be great. To set realistic expectations, approach management from a collective point of view.
Unfortunately companies today only aim to get that VC money with a quick exit and IPO. I think the general sentiment amongst the vultures is a union would make the quick exit less of a reality.
This is one of the most counterintuitive things about leadership roles IMO.
If you get promoted there, it’s often because you got a lot of things done yourself in an IC role. And then the fewer things you do yourself, the better off you, the company, and your reports are once you’re in a leadership role.
So you have to learn that feeling idle compared to what you used to feel like isn’t a sign that you’re doing a bad job.
In addition as a leader your best use is often to be interrupted with questions from junior engineers. This means you can never (or rarely) get into a flow where you are productive, as you are getting close someone interrupts your thought with a question.
As such if you have time to work on engineering (which you should make to stay sharp) it needs to be something unimportant to the business so that you can be late. Trying to add a new warning to your static analysis tool, checking out the latest framework to see if you should switch to it in the future - and other such things that you really want and long term are good but short term won't pay the bills.
And then making sure that they're taking action when they should take action and getting help when they should be getting help. This means they are wrong sometimes but it's better for them to be wrong sometimes and learn than to be interrupting with too many questions when they should just be doing their best.
Admittedly at this point my only direct reports are bosses themselves, but they vast majority of questions they have for me go into a shared 1:1 doc that we address monthly. Everything else they take action on and report as needed.
Days are often wasted because you do that. That is at best, I'm now up to 4 different implementations of a complex protocol (at months each to build and debug) because nobody asked a question.
sure you shouldn't just ask for every problem, but don't struggle too long when someone knows the answer.
The best advice I heard about the switch from regular engineer to mgmt role was this: A software engineer works to build harmonious productive stable software systems. An engineering manager works to build harmonious productive stable people systems. The product is different.
So many people who move into management don't make this mental shift and keep their hands on the steering wheel because that's how they got there in the first place. But if you don't let others drive, you won't be able to keep the car on the road for long. If you go into that role your job is to mostly get your hands off the nuts and bolts of the software system and create people systems of motivation, trust, and organization to get your team members working well on them instead.
I've never made the transition myself but have increasingly thought about it.
Yeah this is a big point in High Output Management by Andy Grove. That to be a manager (or to do any job really) you need to understand what you're producing and how to measure the quantity and quality of that output – ideally identifying issues with output before they become costly to fix.
Much easier said than done but it was a real Aha moment for me as a boss.
>No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No discussion.
Yup, I've had a boss like this. Maybe my company was particularly dysfunctional, but I didn't have much experience with the projects and tasks I was being assigned. I definitely was not hiding it either. Then when I spent time trying to figure things out on my own, my boss would simply do the work himself and provide no feedback.
Currently have a manager like this and trying to determine how to deal with it. I’m basically just waiting for him to burn himself out from his own constant dysfunction and leave. He’s so engrained in this behavior I don’t even know how I could provide him constructive feedback to help him.
I do someting like this quite a bit. If I deem it's easier to do it myself than to instruct or supervise someone else doing it, I do it myself. This is quite often the case. I don't see how doing it the harder way would somehow help with not burning out.
Do you think it's easier for your manager that you do the things than that he does them themselves? Have you tought of ways that you would make it easier for them for you to do the things?
Lucily I'm not really manager but I do have some responsibility of projects with other people.
>I do someting like this quite a bit. If I deem it's easier to do it myself than to instruct or supervise someone else doing it, I do it myself. This is quite often the case. I don't see how doing it the harder way would somehow help with not burning out.
You will most likely always be more efficient than the people who are less senior/just starting out. So then: when do you decide it's worth it to help those less senior team members become more efficient? Will you ever want to delegate? My experience was probably unique, but this kind of management style 1) undermines my work/communicates a lack of trust, and 2) communicates that you're not willing to invest in other people. But maybe the difference is that I was being explicitly delegated work, having my boss complete it unbeknownst to me, and then just getting silence.
If it's not something urgent or someting that will not blow up on my face, I try to delegate. And delegation does work fine for many cases. I also do like to help, especially in form of pair programming or similar hands-on. There are some that don't seem to like this kind of help though.
A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate to don't say when they don't understand something or don't reach out early enough when they get stuck. I always say that come to ask if you get stuck on something for more than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most people don't even when I ask them to.
I do understand that they may think that they don't want to bother by asking. But in reality when they ask soon, it's usually very easy for me to answer but when they don't, they either don't progress at all, so I may have to do it anyway to stay in schedule, or they get into a mess that's a lot harder to fix.
And it's not really to blame them. I notice myself acting similarly when I do stuff I'm not experienced with. What I do try to consciously do is to tell when I don't understand something, although I probably fail at this too quite regularly.
> A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate to don't say when they don't understand something or don't reach out early enough when they get stuck. I always say that come to ask if you get stuck on something for more than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most people don't even when I ask them to.
I've definitely done this before, and in retrospect, having moved on to other roles, it's obvious to me now that the workplace & overall company was actually the problem. People reach out early when they're engaged and feel comfortable.
Most places that "train" just have some online courses, maybe an in-person or two. I don't know of anywhere that has some sort of real training like apprentice program.
lmao - this is what I have experienced as well. Somehow these online courses with no way to ask questions will magically contain everything you need to know!
Who knew? An MBA mindset contained inside a 1 hour mindset!1 Why did these MBA guys spend $250K!?
I'll post this only because this is an area where I'm really passionate, and you're right and that the current state most places sucks. I've tried to address it as a manager who strongly believes that engineering management needs to be viewed as a discipline. I've implemented a Lead Mentorship Program at two places; one very successfully and the other with some progress (still hustling for engagement/commitment):
This happens all the time because management is viewed as a promotion so you reward your best developers by giving them a job where they might suck and/or hate it. I think there are 2 big levers you need to address it:
1. Dual career ladders. You should recognize/reward some level of technical role (i.e. staff or similar) the same as management. Every senior person is a leader; I argue ICs have a tougher job because they don't have the "because you report to me" hammer.
2. Lead mentorship program. Potential managers need experience; you need to coach and validate. They need a chance to manage a single person over time, do a performance review cycle, 1:1s, feedback conversations,etc. Co-ops/iterns are great for this because it's a fixed time period! You need 3 conditions to promote someone into management: 1. the need, 2. the individual's desire, 3. the individual's skills & experience. An LMP gives you signal on all.
I'll add 1(b): People need to be able to move laterally between ladders. This is in everyone's best interest; having an amazing staff dev muddling through as a team lead just means they're going to quit soon.
This is a REALLY LONG way of saying I agree with the parent, but the solution is both known and doable. I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Management of course thinks that management is promotion from non-management and they manage the promotions. They are managers because they are better. How would they otherwise rationalize their higher salaries and power over other people?
Don't say "the organization has just promoted". That's taking the face off of where the blame belongs.
Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage through deadline pressure, placed into leadership someone who could be managed through deadline pressure. And who would transmit that pressure down the chain.
Why? Because the CEO believed that this is how people should be managed. Which means that a leader who refused to accept that pressure would have almost certainly resulted in the CEO replacing said leader with someone who is more compliant.
And now that we're done placing blame in the right place, can we talk about the actual problem here? Which is that people really do wind up working under too much stress and pressure. And this comes with a huge and absolutely real cost.
> Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage through deadline pressure,
I think this is a very broad principle that applies all over. For a very different example: I have seen police depts make dramatic turns - from pretty okay to dangerously awful to hugely better, entirely due to changes in sheriffs/chiefs.
Usual caveats apply. Bigger orgs take more time+effort to turn. Down is easier than up.
Sure, the buck stops with the CEO. That said, if things are so dysfunctional that your only goal is to ascribe blame—which, incidentally, is a common behavior of bad managers—then you are already fucked.
High performing teams require trust. Workers need to trust that management has a sense of what's reasonable, not take estimates out of context and generally listen to the pain points/challenges on the ground. Upper management needs to trust that teams understand the vision enough to make the right tradeoff, not sandbag every estimate or fixate on the wrong details (because ground-level details matter, but some more than others from the business perspective).
I realize many people have spent their whole career in such adversarial circumstances between workers and management that the above sounds like a fairy tail. I will say though, that it is possible, but requires a healthy understanding of the limitations of human communication, and the recognition that good intent is necessary but not sufficient to avoid dysfunction. You need a critical mass of folks spread throughout the org, able to do the necessary bridge-building, and (at times) emotional labor to work through all the challenges and differences of opinion. It's very easy to describe a problem and solution from one person's perspective, but much harder to prioritize and solve the 10 most important problems out of a group of 100 people where viewpoints differ and cooperation is needed to improve anything.
I did not see the post itself as ascribing blame. The Head of IT here was very clear that he was hearing the messaging from the CEO, but the CEO was passing along pressure coming from the client. And clients learn to do this because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen.
Turning to management, your view on management reflects what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex thought will do their best work in an environment that reduces unnecessary pressure.
But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so on.
This means that a healthy organization should have multiple styles of management in play. And that means that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push back on the rest of the organization to enable the right style for software developers.
And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management can cause mental health problems. But so can being a parent of children who are part of the current teen mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if you fix management.
What are the qualities of the best leaders you've encountered or worked for? Which ones are most effective at getting things done while keeping the team and senior leadership happy?
fifty percent of managers, manage through fear .. an industry veteran once said .. "virtue stories" will ignore this ugly fact of hierarchical commercial services
It's an oversimplification to say they "should have never been" a leader. In truth, they could have used specific training in prioritisation, delegation, and emotional intelligence. I find it's rare that this sort of training is provided. Instead, good performers are thrown into the deep end to see if they can hack it.
maybe? the worst managers I've had are expressing real substantive emotional or general dysfunction. I don't know that training is really going to help with that.
its also a big culture question. I personally view the model where the manager is 'in charge' as being fundamentally unhelpful, and alot of organizations as a whole promote this model.
that alternative being 'the supporting adult in the room that trying to help the team do their best work and make hard decisions if absolutely necessary'
My take from the linked article is that this person had the will and ability to grow but they lacked an internalised reassurance that it's okay when things don't go to plan and aren't perfect. Importantly, they were open to learning about emotional reasoning.
In my mind a good training course can provide that reassurance in the form of a statement like
> It is absolutely normal for managers to be constantly juggling a large number of nebulous demands, to finish most days without wrapping anything up, and to feel like there are a large number of unknown and uncontrolled variables. Do not work excessive overtime or refuse to delegate tasks in order to avoid this.
I have no idea where he's getting it from either. Dude seemed to just stress himself out too much. Organizations encourage it, and promote people that do it.
It's also incredibly exclusionary. If you have the slightest neuroses, never be a leader!
You'll find this is often a race to the bottom too. While presumably not applicable to him, you'd be surprised how many people and organizations have opinions about how impossible it is to hire anyone with mental health problems.
Then it becomes "just flip burgers like a loser and go to prison addicted to stimulants you useless eater, all of you people"
It also makes everyone’s life harder. Engineering leaders who agree to insane and constant deadlines doom the company to be in constant fire fighting mode (at best).
One of the most important things they do is expectations management and explaining tradeoffs to senior management
This might be true in a harm mitigation sense, but really "leadership" itself is a scam invented by the people who benefit from hierarchy. It is a way of mystifying the relationship between you and your boss (or commanding officer, or politicians, etc.), attributing an abstract quality to them that justifies their position over you, rather than the truth which is that the only thing different about them is their position in the hierarchy. It serves the same function as the divine right of kings.
Nobody should be a "leader". Maybe we can't avoid hierarchy (because societies/groups that don't use it tend to be outcompeted by those that do) but we don't have to sprinkle it with holy water and pretend it's sacred.
As I see it, there's management and there's (technical) leadership.
Management comprises:
- Performance evaluation (inc. salary negotiation, promotions etc...)
- General admin (sick days, annual leave)
- Fostering teamwork, communication, and individual learning
- General management workflow (prioritisation, goal-tracking, delegation etc...)
- Hiring and firing
Technical leadership comprises:
- Contributing vision and ideas
- Technical guidance to management (e.g. giving technical feedback on interviews or individual performance)
- Code ownership and responsibility (e.g. maintaining conceptual coherence)
With really good internal systems, you can obviate a lot of the management duties. But companies generally find it helpful to have someone who takes ownership of them for each team. You're right though, those people do not need to be framed as "special" or "higher up" than individual contributors, nor does it really make sense to give them more perks.
I was actually trying to make a larger point about how the entire concept of leadership is a scam, even "technical leadership". People are clever, or charismatic, or whatever, but leadership describes nothing in particular. It's pure propaganda, and we should all feel bad when we use it as if it were a real concept (and I'm guilty of this myself). Here, you've defined "technical leadership" as basically just "being a software engineer". We are eating from the trashcan of ideology.
> Here, you've defined "technical leadership" as basically just "being a software engineer"
I really don't think that's true. Software engineers can spend their whole career just checking off Jira cards, having no overarching ideas about the company's technical direction. And that's great. But leadership is specifically about leading others. That can mean establishing new processes, making global architectural decisions, mentoring juniors, and owning and driving an internal technical product roadmap. It also means having a general attitude of "how can I help the rest of the team succeed". If you learn something slightly obscure from a colleague, or a helpful language feature, document it on your internal knowledge base or make a post in Teams/Slack before moving on.
These are all concrete things! That's great, but to say that they constitute "leadership", as if these are the same things an Army Captain or CEO should do, does not clarify anything, but merely clouds things. If leadership means something different in every context where it arises, it doesn't mean anything at all. Anyway I don't think we're arguing, just speaking at different levels of generality. I admit this is a poor forum to make this semi-anarchist point.
Ah okay. I concede that "leadership" more generally is a nebulous concept. And that it just wouldn't apply in an ideal world because people wouldn't have had their self-confidence and internal drive trodden into the ground through years of authoritarian "education". I do sympathise with a healthy dose of anarchism. All the best.
> This is a person that should have never been in a leadership position
This is the kind of crap that stops people writing blog posts about vulnerable topics like mental health.
I mean really? Author opens up about a terrible shit show and their role in it, and your response is “yeah you suck at that, don’t do it.” I dont think that’s very constructive.
They're also making the judgement (you suck at management) from a single blog post about mental health with no other context. There just isn't enough information here to make that judgement. This is nothing short of bullying someone for talking about their mental health, I hope the author doesn't see this.
I often don't write about things I'm feeling because I can already hear the responses of everyone who will intentionally miss the point in order to draw attention to something else, as if I'm completely oblivious to that other issue.
Being able to express what we're feeling without having our thoughts dismissed or disregarded simply because of how we arrived in our current situation is very important for mental wellbeing.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the point being made above, it's just doesn't seem very helpful, as you said.
> No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves.
This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. And when coaching other would-be leaders it often is a roadblock for them as well.
As one moves into a leadership role it becomes critical that you learn to be ok with people doing things not the way you'd do them. You need to learn to accept close/good enough from your underlings. And the "enough" in close/good enough is going to be a larger delta than you think going into this learning process.
It is not just "not the way you'd do them". You were promoted for doing your work better than others. Those others did not improve because you got promoted. So you have to figure out how to get useful work out of people who are doing things in a worse way. And let them do things that way even though you already know what's wrong with it.
It is psychologically tricky to go from an engineer to a manager or lead. I also used to just feel guilty like I was offloading my work on other people who already had plenty to do. I did then later improve by managing their workloads and the long term roadmap to make sure everyone is working reasonable hours
A union wouldn't change anything for the better (in the United States).
The tech industry would just hire abroad more.
If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
I'm glad you came to the realization that we need unions. We're also overmanaged because the actual managers e.g. the C suite thinks we need to be watched over. Historically the rate of workers to managers was way lower.
You think unions would solve this problem? Adding unions would just insert a whole other parallel management team that'll tell you what you can and can't do. They're not going to simplify anything.
Unions insert a potential for improvement because they come with critically different motivation.
Workplaces suffer from compulsions by MBAs, who prioritize shareholders and exec bonuses above the welfare of employees/consumers/company. A union has an ability to raise the priority of employees in this equation - and ease MBA pressures to exploit consumers and degrade the company.
But because unions are groups of people, they are subject to the same corrupting principle that afflicts every group of people.
Nobody, anywhere wants to clean their own house.
A union can be a force for good, as long as it's leaders+members continue to fix the internals that need fixing.
I'm saddened to see such disgusting ablism at the forefront of HackerNews. More evidence that SV is filled with close minded fascists. These are people, not useless eaters.
Given my experience with HN this type of criticism is high likely to result in scrutiny by the admins. The biases on this site really need to be re-evaluated.
This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit? Why did he feel so little control?
Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
My point is that no individual you work with (again aside from perhaps HR if the company is hella annoying) needs to know if it’s a mental health day or if you have the flu or whatever. It’s not their business.
I like using Out of Office for everything not work related. It shows up when anyone tries to schedule a random meeting on me.
This is also a rare circumstance where having a disability is an advantage. Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
I wish it didn't require having a disability to be treated like a human being instead of a disposable resource on somebody's balance sheet.
> Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
Assuming you're not in the US?
In the US, companies are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabilities as part of ADA but can and (often) do ask for documentation of the disability and the specific accommodation requested.
Sorry, I didn't clarify, they can't ask why I'm taking leave for a disability. I definitely had to provide HR with documentation. That was a pain in the ass.
> You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.”
You can. I started doing this years ago and it has been an overall positive experience. Others on my team told me about their own struggles because I took the initiative to open up about mine.
one of the big companies recently replaced "sick leave" (only you can be sick to avail this, not a family member you care for) with "wellbeing leave" (you dont feel up to a day at work, take the day off - no questions asked) and doubled them from 5 days a year to 10 days a year.
I am usually cynical about big corporates and their people policies, but this is one I can applaud.
5 vs 10 days is still ridiculous imho. I've just read an overview about the us system [0], and it does seem rather absurd, when you're looking at it from a German perspective.
I’m in Australia and get 10 days. However, at my company, I could use all 10 at once without having to see a doctor. Can you do that in your company in Germany?
I'm waiting patiently for the day when I encounter the first European on an American website who understands that Europe sees the American work standard as absurdly high, that on the other hand Americans see the European wealth standard as absurdly low, and uses this information to not derail working conditions discussions with suggestions that violate the premise of sacrificing a third of their income for the last deminishing returns of the European system [0].
In Europe, you don't generally get "sick days" - you're entitled to stay at home or in hospital for as long as it takes for you to get better (even for years, if necessary). In the meantime, your salary is paid by the state, so you're not an unproductive burden for your employer. At least that's how it works in Poland.
True, but that also means you cannot take a day off because you're not feeling it. You need at a doctor to attest that you're physically incapable of working. And in Germany, the employer has the right to demand a doctor's note from day one.
You can take a day off when you're not feeling it and don't want to go to the doctor, but it will be subtracted from your paid vacations. You can do that for up to four days a year. It's not that much different than the sick days in the US, which are often bundled together with vacation days into PTO (Paid Time Off).
Are you talking about Germany? Because if you want to take a vacation day, it is subject to approval by the employer. They can deny if they have a good reason. And in many cases, like in my case, a short term absence would ruin a customer project and would thus certainly not be approved.
I don't know about German law, I was talking about Poland. In Poland, the employer cannot refuse to give you a day off (even if your request it on the very day), four times a year.
In salaried (I don't recall the proper Polish term) jobs in Poland, I understand that employees must take at least two consecutive weeks off per year. This intel is about ten years out of date though, so don't know what the situation is now.
My understanding of Germany's rules is hat a policy about needing notes from day 1 has to be in the contract, otherwise the requirement kicks in on day 3 or 4 (I forget which). And the doctor's note doesn't have to claim that you're "physically" incapable - mental health problems also qualify.
Maybe where you work but I just straight up tell them I'm not coming in. If I said this to my lead or boss they'd ask me why the hell I'm not coming in.
I used to be in (moderate) awe of young college drop-out CEOs. Then I worked for a couple of them. Now I refuse to work for startups that have 20-somethings at the top, because they really do not know how to manage or lead. They are motivated by fear of failure and having accomplished nothing so far they treat others like garbage. Avoid.
The phenomenon of showing up at Stanford and telling some 21-year-old that he's Jesus Christ and that you're going to give him millions of dollars is a wen on the American business culture matched only by corporate raiding.
It's the nerd version of college football/basketball recruiting.
It's so weird. I started to think that maybe this is intentional. It looks as though investors want to invest only in over-optimistic people who believe that we're living in some kind of utopian paradise; at the same time they avoid investing in anyone who has had so much of a faint whiff of how the sausage gets made.
It's like the entire system is desperate to keep optimists optimistic and pessimists pessimistic.
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
It sounds like an economic bubble factory. If every new person who joins elite circles is optimistic to a delusional level, then that level of optimism may be contagious and propagate delusional beliefs among the elite.
There are people in the tech sector who were very successful decades ago and are now in their 40s and still haven't come out of their highs. They have the same worldview as I had when I was 15.
Not investors: venture capital investors in tech. It's a particular kind of investment in a particular industry.
Tech VC's are in the business of selling business futures, not building mature businesses. The buyer they sell to can install a practical CEO and worry about actual operations when that time comes.
In the meantime, enthusiastic kids provide a relatively cheap, manipulable, supply of powerpoints and pizazz -- whereas sober, mature professionals often need more personal income and tend to focus more on executing the business that they have experience in (mostly irrelevant to the VC's own business) instead of matching the investment pitch for upcoming rounds (all that matters).
I mean, VC exists because they need to diversify their investments and literally can't find anywhere to put their money? I got the impression from the outside that VC money is just gambling on March Madness for the elite.
I think it's because you need a figure-head that truly has zero doubt that what they are doing is the best and most correct thing. Because it has to sell, and it can't sound like a car-salesman pitch.
It might not be in the best interest of the company, it just needs to be a hype train long enough for the VC to get theirs. The Greater Fool meets real life. The VC doesn't care one way or another if the founder benefits in the end, as long as it doesn't affect their ability to make their next play.
Using smart children who have degrees from reputable institutions like Stanford is a value signal that VC uses to get more people involved with their plays. It's borrowing legitimacy and adding to the Jobsian mythology of the company, while also getting someone who has no idea what they're doing into a position where they will listen to a board who will tell them what to do.
I think it's just that privileged 20-year olds are the best material with which elites can build the next generation to replace themselves and thus the system in which they are embedded. Young Ivy Leaguers are also the basic building material of traditional business' executive corps, the CIA, the FBI, the military officer Corp, McKensie, and so on. In past centuries, these kids would be sent to manage imperial affairs in the Raj or something.
There are good reasons for this: their parents were last season's elites and want to pass it on, their classmates will likely be good contacts in other elite institutions, and they've already been trained to please establishment figures enthusiastically (or they wouldn't be Stanford wiz kids).
Not to sound like a crank, but information technology is now (and, really, has been since it's inception) an important theater in the class war, and elites are recruiting for it the same way they always have.
All it really takes to be "an investor" is to have money or be able to get money. There is no prerequisite of intelligence, business sense, product taste, operations wisdom, or sound judgment. Although they all seem to act as if they magically have these, as if the Investor title suddenly imbued them with these traits.
The only thing stopping me from being an angel investor is that I don't have $1M burning a hole in my pocket. But if I did, suddenly I could sit down in a conference room, put a polo shirt on, dangle the money from a fishhook, and people would take what I said about their business idea seriously. It's such a joke.
The VC investors don't need a startup that accurately predicts its odds, because most startups fail. So what they need are starry-eyed kids who have a distorted view of their chances of success, and in the small chance that they actually succeed beyond anyone else's wildest dreams (but within expectation of the distorted perspective -- which is the only way you can continue executing without being overwhelmed), the VC reaps the profits.
> they avoid investing in anyone who has had so much of a faint whiff of how the sausage gets made.
Not actually the case. The average Silicon Valley founder is in their 40s. It’s just the young ones that get all the press (because they need it).
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
> Apart from the fact that pessimists are not founding companies, the answer is: narrative. There’s a ready-made place in our society for the hero’s story - the lone individual who (like ourselves) is special and has a unique vision. We have multiple millennia-old religions based off this same narrative. It works. It gets press, it gets followers. Humans naturally take any boring story and fashion it into this shape if they can. It takes the large, confusing, abstract or confusing and makes it personal.
In some ways it is similar to buying lottery tickets which a fairly large number of people indulge in. Though, in this case, there are modifiers to the base probability due to insider knowledge, knowing which fool to offload crap to before it implodes, and piling on the same startup because others are doing as well.
Are you serious? That culture is why America still has high innovation while other Western and "culturally Western" countries that do not are largely stagnant. I'm amazed at how often I see people (largely Americans I'm guessing) criticize the very things that make their country a world superpower.
I think there's too few 21 year olds being handed big investment dollars to form the majority of what causes "America to still have high innovation". The average age for founders starting successful businesses is somewhere between 35 - 45 years old: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
I'm still waiting for the USA to "innovate" on a way for everyone to get health care, although sometimes I suspect the lack of a solution there and general lack of regulation at large is part of why American has such "high innovation".
We're pretty close. Obamacare covers a lot of people and employers are required to provide it if they have over 50 employees. Any hospital is required to treat anyone who comes in, regardless of ability to pay. It's sloppy and it's expensive if you don't qualify for ACA subsidies, but if you want healthcare/health insurance in the US, you can most likely get it if you try.
Conflating health insurance with health care is a common American mistake.
Having the ability to pay every month for health insurance doesn't do much to protect you from losing everything to health-related bills. Unless, of course, you are rich enough to afford the 'Cadillac' health plans.
America is basically a cut-throat place where unchecked capitalism runs amok and you can make a fortune if you're smart and/or lucky in business. Getting everyone healthcare isn't going to improve things for people who like things the way they are. It would be a boon for many small businesses, yes (imagine if independent restaurants didn't have to worry about employee health insurance because they had government insurance), but tech giant companies don't care about that because they can afford to basically be their own insurance company, which helps them prevent competition from small upstarts.
So yes, I agree the general lack of regulation is part of why America has "high innovation", but it comes at a great cost to society, and yields a highly stratified society with a lot of losers, and this causes society to be rather dangerous, with a lot of crime, homelessness, drug abuse, etc.
I see Welchism (I assume we're talking about Jack of GE) as the opposite of lots of SV culture. They both suck, but for completely different reasons.
GE actually had real business units. Energy, aerospace, consumer, industrial, healthcare, you name it, they had a presence. Welch couldn't squeeze enough money to meet Wall Street's expectations out of these units, and didn't innovate when microcomputers were coming onto the scene in the 90s, so he cannibalized the company to boost share price at the expense of the business being able to continue long-term. Of course, he would be dead by then.
The guys in the valley are the opposite because many of them don't actually have a product, or even business, to sell - or they do, and the product itself is realizing it doesn't want to be sold. We've had social media and ad-based online services for 20+ years now and it's generally seen as a net negative for society. The subscription-based business model wouldn't work for most social media companies as it would limit the network effect and thus the TAM of the company's business. They're having to find more and more creative ways to monetize eyeballs when the eyeballs don't want to be monetized anymore.
Then you have the people who are swapping out their FLOSS licenses for proprietary ones on software offerings (looking at you Redis) because they realize if you just give stuff away for free, there is no monetization route, and dammit, they want - nay, deserve - their massive payday like the Steves and Bill and Larry got.
TL;DR Jack had a lot to sell at the expense of GE as a long-term going concern; SV has nothing to sell but wants to be a long-term going concern.
Yeah I do mean the same Jack Welch who looted GE and permanently sent American business culture into a seemingly unrecoverable decline. Maybe GE was just way too unfocused of a company to exist, but if you squint enough, you can see the trail of shit leading from his leadership at GE to places like Boeing and now Google, where employees are discarded even when you're making billions in profit every quarter and you have a near monopoly on your industry. Welch taught the American business elite to ride that horse hard until it collapses from exhaustion and you can move on to the next company to loot.
Yeah, even some of the young middle managers really grinded my gears. Not even that young.
Late 20s early 30s anxiety ridden workaholics that make life miserable for everyone. They work their ass off to move up, then figure they'll get a team full of "thems".
Yeah no. You were promoted because the "thems" were wise enough, or otherwise unwilling to damage their health.
You're better and get more money power, congrats. Now lie in your bed that everyone else pulled the sheets off of and spilled crumbs.
Let me add: you never need to be in awe of someone who treats anyone else like garbage - whether they are 20 or 60. I’m just out an experience with a 49 year old founder/CEO. Will be looking for all signs of garbage in future opportunities.
I suspect that there's no good reason that a 25 year-old can't be a great startup CEO.
I think one key tricky part is that -- even if the 25yo starts with being all-around smart, and unusually aware&humble, yet nevertheless tackling something big -- is that it's very hard to know when they should listen to team/advisors (and which), vs. when they should do a contrary thing that they think is the smart thing.
Maybe that's doable well enough, if they have all those good qualities, and happen to be exposed to a good team/advisors.
(Side note: It doesn't help that various facets of the fields are filled with bad practices/advice, as well as outright intentional deception and manipulation. If you read PG's essays early on, that was a time when you might expect a fellow techie and businessperson to have smart and well-intentioned advice, wanting you to succeed. That's absolutely not the norm anymore: you're much more likely to get bad advice today, no matter where you look, and more likely to encounter individuals and institutions trying to manipulate you. Even when you can filter that out first-hand, you're still getting a lot of it second-hand, through their influences on smart&decent people who you do let influence you.)
> I suspect that there's no good reason that a 25 year-old can't be a great startup CEO.
There's exactly one: Learning takes time.
The smartest, kindest, most level-headed 25 y/o is not going to be as good a leader as their 35 y/o self, assuming they continue to build on their leadership skills.
Now we could say, well, maybe those 25 year-old CEOs overwhelmingly exhibit degraded leadership skills by the time they're 35. That's a statistic that's possible. But I think it would point toward some seriously prevalent burnout, not an inherent benefit of being 25. It may be easier to be positive at 25, but I don't think the ceiling for positivity is higher at 25 than at 35.
There are too many good reasons that 25 year olds can't be a good startup CEO. One of them is complete lack of experience and almost complete lack of knowledge on how fatigue, stress, anxiety (or health issues in general) etc affect people. Because until 25 these doesn't even resigner on you or your body in most cases.
But yes, if you meant a "good" start CEO as in "good for the startup" then yeah I would say what you said is possible or likely.
And even then, how do you get valid data on that? My impression is that Amazon is not good to work for; no comment on Stripe, Facebook is good, but it's Facebook. Oracle is good if you want to rest and vest.
But how could we validate this assemblage of opinions about how they are to work at that I've gathered?
I think it is so important to be able to disconnect from whatever it is that we are doing, even for a very short period of time.
Go for a walk, brew a coffee or simply close your eyes and breathe.
Many times, stress is created artificially.
It hurts our performance and deteriorates our ability to think.
Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time. Apathy begins to set in after management/decision makers keep on giving these gifts we call "crunches".
To help the company and go the extra mile is something most of us have done in the past and will possibly do in the future. However, it's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if everything is urgent and every task is to be done NOW, then there are bigger issues at play.
Like everything in life, there is usually a limit/budget of money, time and effort.
By abusing these limits and tolerances, people will lose respect for the people crying wolf and will put less effort into their work.
This is the hardest lesson to learn. Sometimes you won't be afforded the ability to do it "right", either for the company or the product or the customer. Eventually, you'll decide to just show up and ask what is most important today and work on that. Then clock out completely when your work is done and go find meaning and personal satisfaction in your personal life. Go exercise or volunteer or get a hobby or be present for your family. The best way to have work/life balance is to separate them. This is also one of the reasons why I hate wfh. The drive to/from is a great separator and decompressor for me.
I think this is so hard to learn because it's counter to human nature, and only necessary due to the artificial conditions of the modern world. We're programmed to want to be useful to our tribe. But we don't live in tribes any more. Our brains get confused and burnt out because we perform and perform and perform, but we don't get love and status and security in return, we just get this abstract thing called money, which it doesn't really understand.
> Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
> After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time
In my career, none of these have ever paid off. Every time I've crunched this way on something dramatically urgent like this, it has turned out that the "if we can deliver this, this huge moonshot sale is a sure thing" turns into a no-sale
The sales person never seems to get cut loose for diverting the entire R&D towards a longshot for months and burning people out, though
And you can bet the sales person isn't putting in weeks of overtime for the duration, either
I basically refuse to do overtime anymore unless I'm working extra to make up for my own screw up. I'm not putting in extra to hit some other assholes unrealistic deadlines ever again
Agreed. Even if by some miracle you do deliver, and are considered a superstar, then what? What do superstars get? Probably just even more crunch work, since you've proven you're willing to do it.
You imagine that it will catapult you ahead in your career, your income will skyrocket, you will be respected and loved by your company and peers
But in reality no one really cares much, you'll get the same raise everyone else gets, your bonus is still gonna be capped by your contract, and you will be better off finding a new job if you want more money
Man sometimes I want out of tech so badly it hurts but I don't generally think it's better anywhere else
This reminds me of the scene in Schindler's List where the SS officer asks the enslaved factory worker to show him how fast he can assemble a particular component. The terrified worker races to assemble it in record time, anxious to please and impress the nazi -- who responds to the effect of: "if you can make them that fast, why is your daily quota so low?"
This was also a standard technique on American plantations, then adapted to the industrial economy in the form of Taylorist time-and-motion studies. If you trace modern management practice, it is basically a straight line back to chattel slavery.
The plantation thing was so horrible. They would track your personal best output, and every day you didn’t beat it you would get whipped based on how much you fell short. Of course this made you work faster, but it was like a game of 21 because you knew if you went over you would now have a higher quota to meet from then on.
Absolutely 0 had ever paid off. Probably worst was trusting too much a colleague perceived by everybody as Oracle/plsql guru, when troubleshooting vendor's abysmal performance of DB queries during some bigger migration (up to half an hour easily, for trivial 30 million rows). He didn't see any issue on DB side, pointed to useless oracle hints, crappy JDBC drivers, spring's jdbc templates, possibly my not-optimal code etc.
I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just made debugging and further changes much harder. After few hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of the time. In fact I suggested exactly same thing initially but it was quickly dismissed by him, and who questions the guru, right.
This didn't even come from management just colleague's incompetence/ego, hard deadlines, tons of pressure to deliver, and starting project already 2 months late. Closest I've been to burnout yet. I am still a bit pissed off on him, but I know it was not malice so that eases emotions quite a bit.
And to similar request coming from the top - been there, done that too, regretted that time & energy put in it. These days, 8 hours days, if I am not making it on time, I communicate early & clearly and that's it. They handle it, and if they don't, well there is always next job. Life is about priorities.
The way to get around some of this is to work on contract. I have found I am most free being a contractor. I go in to the gig knowing it has a definite end and do not care about any of the internal politics. It’s not a perfect solution but much better than being an employee where I have granted a company a monopoly on my time.
Yes. Contractors typically get more per hour. It still works out cheaper for the company as they don't have to pay for the benefits, PTO, and that sort of thing. And of course the contractor still has to pay for insurance, covering their own PTO, etc.
Did both in few parts of Europe. Initially its normally better to contract (but you need to have some chops, nobody hires juniors on contract), but not all countries make this easy or even viable. Once you want to settle, if you want to settle, permanent job under normal circumstances offers better overall package.
Maybe not outright amounts, but if you count in things like sickness, holidays, off for kids, social contributions, being treated better among colleagues, and for me personally having much more freedom whenever personal I need to do like bureaucracy (but that may be current circumstance only).
> at least where I am at, the contractor rate is more than double the FTE rate.
But the big money in tech is in your options/RSUs, not base pay. And contractors don't get options. (Usually anyway; I've been given options as a consultant once but usually don't see that.)
>This was my perfect storm in 2017 — I was trying to control all of the uncertainty around me: (...) Trying to control the looming unrealistic deadlines. Writing a lot of the code myself to ensure we uphold our promises to stakeholders and none of our developers burn out. Which led to me working more and sleeping less. Worrying about next month’s payroll and trying to control our runway. Maintaining developer velocity and tight budgets, juggling future growth and current issues. Trying to control our developer turnover and making sure our juniors grow. There were days I'd be coding non-stop or in a series of back-to-back meetings, forgetting meals, sleeping, and even what it felt like to relax.
Sounds like trying to cope at a shitty nightmare job at a shitty company, and blaming yourself.
One thing I've realized more and more over the years: it's the operational roles (infra, SRE, Devops) that are actually most stressful. Sure, if you're building product, you get deadlines, but they are predictable and they come and go.
But being oncall for a shakey infra stack? That shit is hell. No deadlines, just the threat of incidents or downtime at any time of day.
It's especially frustrating that I firmly believe operations is a solved problem, but good luck getting a company to adopt the practices that every other mature tech company has already figured out.
It's too triggering to do any more than skim the article, but having got the general gist of at least some of it, I shall write my top tip here in case it helps anyone (who manages to do it):
Early in my career, I worked with a consultant who charged time and a half after hours, and double time after midnight. Every change we did was at like 10pm, and hardly any of them ever went well. I hope to one day find a way to do what he did.
This is what psychologists call "a boundary", and there's nothing secret about how it works: you just don't do the thing your abuser is asking you to do.
What I don't get is it sounds like he accepted the CEO's edicts unquestioningly:
> This one time, for example, when our deployment crashed halfway through right before a major release. The CEO emphasized how important this project was, so we were all hands on deck, trying to get it back up, fearing the worst, that the client would go ballistic if he found out we were delaying the release. I was stressing big time, thinking we had to pull off a miracle, and of course we did.
> But you know what? After all that chaos, it turned out the relevant stakeholders were away on vacation that week, and the release wasn't even checked for many days after that.
A CTO should have some power to push back and set priorities. If you're just doing what you're told you're not really a CTO but a team lead with a fancy title.
This a general problem with young people in leadership positions. They don't have the confidence to say no as often as they should nor the perspective to identify what's really important - every setback feels cataclysmic.
> A CTO should have some power to push back and set priorities. If you're just doing what you're told you're not really a CTO but a team lead with a fancy title.
>
> This a general problem with young people in leadership positions.
Agreed wholeheartedly on both points, though I'd say a general problem with people new to leadership positions rather than make it about age. Society as it exists now (at least as I've experienced it) is very strong on rule following and it's a pretty massive shift to be the person setting the rules.
The CEO should've been empowering, too, and it might well be a symptom of the same malady: imagining the way you want things done, then pushing harder and harder until the world is that way regardless of cost. Human psychic cost is real and will cost you your best people.
Consider instead if the CEO said to the team "We definitely need this done, but I don't want you to burn yourselves out. Please keep at it as your top priority during working hours, all other goals are on pause until we have a release, and keep me up to date at the end of each day with progress until we're there. I don't want anyone working after hours. Don't worry about the client; I'll handle them." When the story unfolds from there the client doesn't even notice, the team feels supported and heard, and the work still gets done. Everyone wins.
I won't make any comments on their fitness/accomplishments/whatever. I am not in their shoes, and can only appreciate the honesty of their exposition (which they seem to be embracing and using as their platform).
> In business, there’s no place for perfection. There’s no space for having everything under control. In fact, not only can’t you influence most of the things around you, but most of the things are uncertain.
I have found this to be true for life, in general; especially when dealing with other people.
> An example of uncertainty in business is when your CEO tells you they promised a feature to your biggest client and it needs to be built ASAP as highest priority, so all hands on deck. Then a day later they tell you another feature, completely contradictory to the first one, needs to be built as well and is also highest priority. When you tell them they both can't be highest priority, the answer is: make it happen.
Hardly.
What I've found to work best in such scenarios is to always chop up the task at hand to essentials and nice-to-haves[0]. If another task comes up before you're finished, chop it up as well and ask your leadership what's more important: the essentials from this new task or nice-to-haves from that previous one.
It's never the nice-to-haves.
Also it always helps to not promise something you can't deliver - this applies to every level in the hierarchy.
[0] Sometimes, if essentials are the vast majority, you can produce versions of them which are simpler, but still workable from a business perspective, and have bringing the full-featured versions as a nice-to-have.
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[ 95.7 ms ] story [ 4162 ms ] threadWorks for me.
At a certain point you have to just build a queue and start the next highest priority thing next. Too much WIP kills you.
When they eventually switch back to the original thing they are always surprised to know it’s been completed.
Of course, I never had the clout to force that to happen...
"You're costing us a lot of money!"
It isn't just about helping sell the customer. It is also about saying no to overeager salespeople.
I called it "Monster of the Week", as I was watching a lot of X-Files at the time. Still like that term for it.
The CEO said "no you don't" - which led me to ask why he thought this and he said he had thought up a new "must have" feature over the weekend - which was clearly very technically challenging. He then asserted that anything could be built in 48 hours....
I'm amazed I lasted as long as I did in that job.
Why even have a Director of Engineering position then?
I was chastised for being unprofessional and embarrassing the department. Didn’t care then; no regrets now.
"Ah, new highest priority feature. Lets do a mini discovery session and it looks like this work can be represented with 20 sticky notes. Our historical team velocity is 10 sticky notes every two weeks. So we'll probably be done in four weeks. If we take down all the existing work in progress. Lets go to each existing sticky and you can confirm that we can stop working on it."
The stakeholders are still allowed to make decisions, but (hopefully) it forces them to be realistic and understand what they're asking the team to do.
I found it remarkably effective at getting business folks to actually prioritize. They don't believe you, but they'll believe the computer.
> best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no"
> "no, grug not build that feature"
> "no, grug not build that abstraction"
> "no, grug not put water on body every day or drink less black think juice you stop repeat ask now"
> note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice: "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in charge of large tribe of developer
> is ok: how many shiney rock grug really need anyway?
also, wolves and sabretooth tigers get hungry, need grooming, need vet, etc. picky about food too, want expensive organic stuff. sometimes mrs. grug buy animal skins for wolves even though they have perfectly fine pelts of their own. and don't get grug started on lil' gruglets (which this grug not have).
then no pile of shiny rock for rainy day, when shiny rock stop coming and cave mortgage is due.
shiny rock very important. get as much shiny rock as can without compromising values. happy mrs. grug = happy grug.
I recently caught myself excitedly showing grugbrain to a younger dev, quoting the microservices section - and realized that I've come full circle, and now I'm the old bearded dev passing on some piece of thing that I found inspirational / exciting.
The CEO is doing that because they don't understand how things work in your org. If you're the one communicating with the CEO, then its your job to be persuasive when telling them why what they're asking can't happen the way they're envisioning.
If they come back with "make it happen" then you weren't persuasive enough.
"Quality or quantity?"
"Yes"
These types are some of the most insufferable people imaginable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anPb6X-sXxI
This is so important. Our work is an extension of us. Our state in the moment will bleed into all areas of life. There is nothing more important. As we are limitless potential. But only if we are living in the here and now.
So I go back to him and he accused me of lying and went and told the CEO. The CEO, a pretty chill guy with a doctorate, I was expecting to have a rational discussion about with but not he screamed at me too. I was downtrodden emotionally so I sheepishly said yeah I'll have another look and went back and started at it for another couple of days. No it was impossible. At that point I was stuck in a situation. I've got unemployment on one side and I've got getting screamed at inevitably. I just sat there in a depressed little hole with no options. I was angry, isolated and had no one sympathetic around. I suspect many people end up here.
Slept really badly that night. Woke up, got in the car and drove into the office. Got half way and got distracted by a cafe and decided I'd get breakfast and think some more about it. Sitting there eating a fat sausace, something just went ping, I SMS'ed John and the CEO with "fuck you I quit". I moved back in with my parents, did fuck all for 6 months, got another job, which was 80% less shit and the company I worked for went down the shitter about a year later because they couldn't deliver it.
If you feel like shit in a job, just leave. It's not worth it.
However, that seems to have taken a pause. Higher interest rates mean the free money buffet is over and the FAANGs have spent the last year flooding the job market with engineers of the highest pedigree. I'm not quite job searching right now, but my understanding is that it's not the cake walk it used to be.
That's terrible, I'm so glad you got out of that situation.
Hands down the best part about working in a field like tech and building up a cushion of savings has been that I haven't had to put up with coworkers who yell, accuse each other of lying, or any other immature, boundary-pushing behavior.
In the past I worked for the military, academia, theater, etc and there were times when I felt a strong esprit de corps and others when I felt stuck because I was a cog in a large machine and had granted jerks immense power over my life -- working on a contract in a war zone, needing approval from certain professors to further my career, needing a job to pay the rent, etc.
Whereas in tech it's easier to fix situations like this. In one case I went home early to send out resumes and left a few months later. In the other I just sent a record of the conversation to my boss and she dealt with the issue appropriately.
A major career regret is having put up with jerks. No matter how much the customer/company pays or how interesting the work is you can find other work that pays just as well and is just as interesting except you get to spend more of your exceedingly short lifespan with kind, smart, well-adjusted people.
Caution though, the CEO may recognize this as a classic CEO subterfuge.
If they are impressed, or believe they can draft off of your hubris, you may still be able to pull this off.
Something someone was doing in excel scaled up to taking all the energy in the universe? That does not sound right.
No trust in the team. Always doing shit themselves. No discussion. Backdoor discussions. Always bending to the will of management. Everything is “important”/“critical”. It’s micromanaging to the worst degree.
At the same time, I would likely fail in the same way if given the position. Albeit, to a much lesser degree. I think management often puts us in these impossible positions without any good reason other than “to look good to X.” What’s even worse if it’s was just to earn fucking brownie points with some no name mid level director.
This is why I think unions in tech would be great. To set realistic expectations, approach management from a collective point of view.
Unfortunately companies today only aim to get that VC money with a quick exit and IPO. I think the general sentiment amongst the vultures is a union would make the quick exit less of a reality.
This is one of the most counterintuitive things about leadership roles IMO.
If you get promoted there, it’s often because you got a lot of things done yourself in an IC role. And then the fewer things you do yourself, the better off you, the company, and your reports are once you’re in a leadership role.
So you have to learn that feeling idle compared to what you used to feel like isn’t a sign that you’re doing a bad job.
As such if you have time to work on engineering (which you should make to stay sharp) it needs to be something unimportant to the business so that you can be late. Trying to add a new warning to your static analysis tool, checking out the latest framework to see if you should switch to it in the future - and other such things that you really want and long term are good but short term won't pay the bills.
I kinda disagree w/ this. I get better results from helping people understand this:
https://www.techtello.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/decisio...
And then making sure that they're taking action when they should take action and getting help when they should be getting help. This means they are wrong sometimes but it's better for them to be wrong sometimes and learn than to be interrupting with too many questions when they should just be doing their best.
Admittedly at this point my only direct reports are bosses themselves, but they vast majority of questions they have for me go into a shared 1:1 doc that we address monthly. Everything else they take action on and report as needed.
sure you shouldn't just ask for every problem, but don't struggle too long when someone knows the answer.
So many people who move into management don't make this mental shift and keep their hands on the steering wheel because that's how they got there in the first place. But if you don't let others drive, you won't be able to keep the car on the road for long. If you go into that role your job is to mostly get your hands off the nuts and bolts of the software system and create people systems of motivation, trust, and organization to get your team members working well on them instead.
I've never made the transition myself but have increasingly thought about it.
Much easier said than done but it was a real Aha moment for me as a boss.
Yup, I've had a boss like this. Maybe my company was particularly dysfunctional, but I didn't have much experience with the projects and tasks I was being assigned. I definitely was not hiding it either. Then when I spent time trying to figure things out on my own, my boss would simply do the work himself and provide no feedback.
Do you think it's easier for your manager that you do the things than that he does them themselves? Have you tought of ways that you would make it easier for them for you to do the things?
Lucily I'm not really manager but I do have some responsibility of projects with other people.
You will most likely always be more efficient than the people who are less senior/just starting out. So then: when do you decide it's worth it to help those less senior team members become more efficient? Will you ever want to delegate? My experience was probably unique, but this kind of management style 1) undermines my work/communicates a lack of trust, and 2) communicates that you're not willing to invest in other people. But maybe the difference is that I was being explicitly delegated work, having my boss complete it unbeknownst to me, and then just getting silence.
A major problem I encounter is that people I delegate to don't say when they don't understand something or don't reach out early enough when they get stuck. I always say that come to ask if you get stuck on something for more than a half a day or so. Unfortunately most people don't even when I ask them to.
I do understand that they may think that they don't want to bother by asking. But in reality when they ask soon, it's usually very easy for me to answer but when they don't, they either don't progress at all, so I may have to do it anyway to stay in schedule, or they get into a mess that's a lot harder to fix.
And it's not really to blame them. I notice myself acting similarly when I do stuff I'm not experienced with. What I do try to consciously do is to tell when I don't understand something, although I probably fail at this too quite regularly.
I've definitely done this before, and in retrospect, having moved on to other roles, it's obvious to me now that the workplace & overall company was actually the problem. People reach out early when they're engaged and feel comfortable.
What? The person in this scenario wouldn’t be in the union once promoted. Unions don’t do anything for manager to director dynamics.
You wouldn't expect a manager (from a non-technical background) to just start coding, so why would you expect a coder to just start managing.
Who knew? An MBA mindset contained inside a 1 hour mindset!1 Why did these MBA guys spend $250K!?
https://www.codeleadmanage.com/articles/20230919-lead_mentor...
1. Dual career ladders. You should recognize/reward some level of technical role (i.e. staff or similar) the same as management. Every senior person is a leader; I argue ICs have a tougher job because they don't have the "because you report to me" hammer.
2. Lead mentorship program. Potential managers need experience; you need to coach and validate. They need a chance to manage a single person over time, do a performance review cycle, 1:1s, feedback conversations,etc. Co-ops/iterns are great for this because it's a fixed time period! You need 3 conditions to promote someone into management: 1. the need, 2. the individual's desire, 3. the individual's skills & experience. An LMP gives you signal on all.
I'll add 1(b): People need to be able to move laterally between ladders. This is in everyone's best interest; having an amazing staff dev muddling through as a team lead just means they're going to quit soon.
This is a REALLY LONG way of saying I agree with the parent, but the solution is both known and doable. I'll get down off my soapbox now.
Say, "the CEO". The same CEO who is trying to manage through deadline pressure, placed into leadership someone who could be managed through deadline pressure. And who would transmit that pressure down the chain.
Why? Because the CEO believed that this is how people should be managed. Which means that a leader who refused to accept that pressure would have almost certainly resulted in the CEO replacing said leader with someone who is more compliant.
And now that we're done placing blame in the right place, can we talk about the actual problem here? Which is that people really do wind up working under too much stress and pressure. And this comes with a huge and absolutely real cost.
I think this is a very broad principle that applies all over. For a very different example: I have seen police depts make dramatic turns - from pretty okay to dangerously awful to hugely better, entirely due to changes in sheriffs/chiefs.
Usual caveats apply. Bigger orgs take more time+effort to turn. Down is easier than up.
High performing teams require trust. Workers need to trust that management has a sense of what's reasonable, not take estimates out of context and generally listen to the pain points/challenges on the ground. Upper management needs to trust that teams understand the vision enough to make the right tradeoff, not sandbag every estimate or fixate on the wrong details (because ground-level details matter, but some more than others from the business perspective).
I realize many people have spent their whole career in such adversarial circumstances between workers and management that the above sounds like a fairy tail. I will say though, that it is possible, but requires a healthy understanding of the limitations of human communication, and the recognition that good intent is necessary but not sufficient to avoid dysfunction. You need a critical mass of folks spread throughout the org, able to do the necessary bridge-building, and (at times) emotional labor to work through all the challenges and differences of opinion. It's very easy to describe a problem and solution from one person's perspective, but much harder to prioritize and solve the 10 most important problems out of a group of 100 people where viewpoints differ and cooperation is needed to improve anything.
So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen.
Turning to management, your view on management reflects what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex thought will do their best work in an environment that reduces unnecessary pressure.
But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so on.
This means that a healthy organization should have multiple styles of management in play. And that means that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push back on the rest of the organization to enable the right style for software developers.
And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management can cause mental health problems. But so can being a parent of children who are part of the current teen mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if you fix management.
its also a big culture question. I personally view the model where the manager is 'in charge' as being fundamentally unhelpful, and alot of organizations as a whole promote this model.
that alternative being 'the supporting adult in the room that trying to help the team do their best work and make hard decisions if absolutely necessary'
My take from the linked article is that this person had the will and ability to grow but they lacked an internalised reassurance that it's okay when things don't go to plan and aren't perfect. Importantly, they were open to learning about emotional reasoning.
In my mind a good training course can provide that reassurance in the form of a statement like
> It is absolutely normal for managers to be constantly juggling a large number of nebulous demands, to finish most days without wrapping anything up, and to feel like there are a large number of unknown and uncontrolled variables. Do not work excessive overtime or refuse to delegate tasks in order to avoid this.
It's also incredibly exclusionary. If you have the slightest neuroses, never be a leader!
You'll find this is often a race to the bottom too. While presumably not applicable to him, you'd be surprised how many people and organizations have opinions about how impossible it is to hire anyone with mental health problems.
Then it becomes "just flip burgers like a loser and go to prison addicted to stimulants you useless eater, all of you people"
Nobody should be a "leader". Maybe we can't avoid hierarchy (because societies/groups that don't use it tend to be outcompeted by those that do) but we don't have to sprinkle it with holy water and pretend it's sacred.
Management comprises:
Technical leadership comprises: With really good internal systems, you can obviate a lot of the management duties. But companies generally find it helpful to have someone who takes ownership of them for each team. You're right though, those people do not need to be framed as "special" or "higher up" than individual contributors, nor does it really make sense to give them more perks.I really don't think that's true. Software engineers can spend their whole career just checking off Jira cards, having no overarching ideas about the company's technical direction. And that's great. But leadership is specifically about leading others. That can mean establishing new processes, making global architectural decisions, mentoring juniors, and owning and driving an internal technical product roadmap. It also means having a general attitude of "how can I help the rest of the team succeed". If you learn something slightly obscure from a colleague, or a helpful language feature, document it on your internal knowledge base or make a post in Teams/Slack before moving on.
This is the kind of crap that stops people writing blog posts about vulnerable topics like mental health.
I mean really? Author opens up about a terrible shit show and their role in it, and your response is “yeah you suck at that, don’t do it.” I dont think that’s very constructive.
I often don't write about things I'm feeling because I can already hear the responses of everyone who will intentionally miss the point in order to draw attention to something else, as if I'm completely oblivious to that other issue.
Being able to express what we're feeling without having our thoughts dismissed or disregarded simply because of how we arrived in our current situation is very important for mental wellbeing.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the point being made above, it's just doesn't seem very helpful, as you said.
The toxic positivity about it is not helpful either.
This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. And when coaching other would-be leaders it often is a roadblock for them as well.
As one moves into a leadership role it becomes critical that you learn to be ok with people doing things not the way you'd do them. You need to learn to accept close/good enough from your underlings. And the "enough" in close/good enough is going to be a larger delta than you think going into this learning process.
The tech industry would just hire abroad more.
If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
Workplaces suffer from compulsions by MBAs, who prioritize shareholders and exec bonuses above the welfare of employees/consumers/company. A union has an ability to raise the priority of employees in this equation - and ease MBA pressures to exploit consumers and degrade the company.
But because unions are groups of people, they are subject to the same corrupting principle that afflicts every group of people.
Nobody, anywhere wants to clean their own house.
A union can be a force for good, as long as it's leaders+members continue to fix the internals that need fixing.
Given my experience with HN this type of criticism is high likely to result in scrutiny by the admins. The biases on this site really need to be re-evaluated.
Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
“I’m taking the day off.”
Your coworkers don’t need a reason. If your employer demands one, then that’s a different issue.
Note well: I have never had this at any other job. But if you need the day, take the day, even if it has to be vacation.
Just say you’re not going to be there.
This is also a rare circumstance where having a disability is an advantage. Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
I wish it didn't require having a disability to be treated like a human being instead of a disposable resource on somebody's balance sheet.
> Companies are legally required to allow me to prioritize my health over my job without discriminating against me. They aren't allowed to ask.
Assuming you're not in the US?
In the US, companies are required to provide reasonable accommodations for disabilities as part of ADA but can and (often) do ask for documentation of the disability and the specific accommodation requested.
You can. I started doing this years ago and it has been an overall positive experience. Others on my team told me about their own struggles because I took the initiative to open up about mine.
Yes, you can. You can say you need a mental health day. Adults will understand.
I am usually cynical about big corporates and their people policies, but this is one I can applaud.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_leave
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
You're in a bit of a bubble. This is not the case for the majority of jobs.
It's the nerd version of college football/basketball recruiting.
It's like the entire system is desperate to keep optimists optimistic and pessimists pessimistic.
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
It sounds like an economic bubble factory. If every new person who joins elite circles is optimistic to a delusional level, then that level of optimism may be contagious and propagate delusional beliefs among the elite.
There are people in the tech sector who were very successful decades ago and are now in their 40s and still haven't come out of their highs. They have the same worldview as I had when I was 15.
Tech VC's are in the business of selling business futures, not building mature businesses. The buyer they sell to can install a practical CEO and worry about actual operations when that time comes.
In the meantime, enthusiastic kids provide a relatively cheap, manipulable, supply of powerpoints and pizazz -- whereas sober, mature professionals often need more personal income and tend to focus more on executing the business that they have experience in (mostly irrelevant to the VC's own business) instead of matching the investment pitch for upcoming rounds (all that matters).
Is the company slowly declining into unprofitability? Sell it off and cash that big payout.
Can't sell it off? Scrap it for parts and scavage the remains, cash that big payout.
Did it implode in on itself in a spectacular fashion? Sue leadership to recoup your losses.
As the saying goes, the house always wins.
It might not be in the best interest of the company, it just needs to be a hype train long enough for the VC to get theirs. The Greater Fool meets real life. The VC doesn't care one way or another if the founder benefits in the end, as long as it doesn't affect their ability to make their next play.
There are good reasons for this: their parents were last season's elites and want to pass it on, their classmates will likely be good contacts in other elite institutions, and they've already been trained to please establishment figures enthusiastically (or they wouldn't be Stanford wiz kids).
Not to sound like a crank, but information technology is now (and, really, has been since it's inception) an important theater in the class war, and elites are recruiting for it the same way they always have.
The only thing stopping me from being an angel investor is that I don't have $1M burning a hole in my pocket. But if I did, suddenly I could sit down in a conference room, put a polo shirt on, dangle the money from a fishhook, and people would take what I said about their business idea seriously. It's such a joke.
Not actually the case. The average Silicon Valley founder is in their 40s. It’s just the young ones that get all the press (because they need it).
Why is it that investors actively seek out starry-eyed individuals?
> Apart from the fact that pessimists are not founding companies, the answer is: narrative. There’s a ready-made place in our society for the hero’s story - the lone individual who (like ourselves) is special and has a unique vision. We have multiple millennia-old religions based off this same narrative. It works. It gets press, it gets followers. Humans naturally take any boring story and fashion it into this shape if they can. It takes the large, confusing, abstract or confusing and makes it personal.
Having the ability to pay every month for health insurance doesn't do much to protect you from losing everything to health-related bills. Unless, of course, you are rich enough to afford the 'Cadillac' health plans.
So yes, I agree the general lack of regulation is part of why America has "high innovation", but it comes at a great cost to society, and yields a highly stratified society with a lot of losers, and this causes society to be rather dangerous, with a lot of crime, homelessness, drug abuse, etc.
GE actually had real business units. Energy, aerospace, consumer, industrial, healthcare, you name it, they had a presence. Welch couldn't squeeze enough money to meet Wall Street's expectations out of these units, and didn't innovate when microcomputers were coming onto the scene in the 90s, so he cannibalized the company to boost share price at the expense of the business being able to continue long-term. Of course, he would be dead by then.
The guys in the valley are the opposite because many of them don't actually have a product, or even business, to sell - or they do, and the product itself is realizing it doesn't want to be sold. We've had social media and ad-based online services for 20+ years now and it's generally seen as a net negative for society. The subscription-based business model wouldn't work for most social media companies as it would limit the network effect and thus the TAM of the company's business. They're having to find more and more creative ways to monetize eyeballs when the eyeballs don't want to be monetized anymore.
Then you have the people who are swapping out their FLOSS licenses for proprietary ones on software offerings (looking at you Redis) because they realize if you just give stuff away for free, there is no monetization route, and dammit, they want - nay, deserve - their massive payday like the Steves and Bill and Larry got.
TL;DR Jack had a lot to sell at the expense of GE as a long-term going concern; SV has nothing to sell but wants to be a long-term going concern.
Late 20s early 30s anxiety ridden workaholics that make life miserable for everyone. They work their ass off to move up, then figure they'll get a team full of "thems".
Yeah no. You were promoted because the "thems" were wise enough, or otherwise unwilling to damage their health.
You're better and get more money power, congrats. Now lie in your bed that everyone else pulled the sheets off of and spilled crumbs.
I think one key tricky part is that -- even if the 25yo starts with being all-around smart, and unusually aware&humble, yet nevertheless tackling something big -- is that it's very hard to know when they should listen to team/advisors (and which), vs. when they should do a contrary thing that they think is the smart thing.
Maybe that's doable well enough, if they have all those good qualities, and happen to be exposed to a good team/advisors.
(Side note: It doesn't help that various facets of the fields are filled with bad practices/advice, as well as outright intentional deception and manipulation. If you read PG's essays early on, that was a time when you might expect a fellow techie and businessperson to have smart and well-intentioned advice, wanting you to succeed. That's absolutely not the norm anymore: you're much more likely to get bad advice today, no matter where you look, and more likely to encounter individuals and institutions trying to manipulate you. Even when you can filter that out first-hand, you're still getting a lot of it second-hand, through their influences on smart&decent people who you do let influence you.)
There's exactly one: Learning takes time.
The smartest, kindest, most level-headed 25 y/o is not going to be as good a leader as their 35 y/o self, assuming they continue to build on their leadership skills.
Now we could say, well, maybe those 25 year-old CEOs overwhelmingly exhibit degraded leadership skills by the time they're 35. That's a statistic that's possible. But I think it would point toward some seriously prevalent burnout, not an inherent benefit of being 25. It may be easier to be positive at 25, but I don't think the ceiling for positivity is higher at 25 than at 35.
But yes, if you meant a "good" start CEO as in "good for the startup" then yeah I would say what you said is possible or likely.
But how could we validate this assemblage of opinions about how they are to work at that I've gathered?
Many times, stress is created artificially. It hurts our performance and deteriorates our ability to think.
Encountered numerous situations where work was "urgent" and would likely land a contract or sales for the company, and everyone would be a superstar if they delivered this "crunch".
After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time. Apathy begins to set in after management/decision makers keep on giving these gifts we call "crunches".
To help the company and go the extra mile is something most of us have done in the past and will possibly do in the future. However, it's like the story of the boy who cried wolf, if everything is urgent and every task is to be done NOW, then there are bigger issues at play.
Like everything in life, there is usually a limit/budget of money, time and effort. By abusing these limits and tolerances, people will lose respect for the people crying wolf and will put less effort into their work.
> After 2 months of pulling all-nighters and sleeping for 3/4 hours, we deliver the project ahead of time
In my career, none of these have ever paid off. Every time I've crunched this way on something dramatically urgent like this, it has turned out that the "if we can deliver this, this huge moonshot sale is a sure thing" turns into a no-sale
The sales person never seems to get cut loose for diverting the entire R&D towards a longshot for months and burning people out, though
And you can bet the sales person isn't putting in weeks of overtime for the duration, either
I basically refuse to do overtime anymore unless I'm working extra to make up for my own screw up. I'm not putting in extra to hit some other assholes unrealistic deadlines ever again
But in reality no one really cares much, you'll get the same raise everyone else gets, your bonus is still gonna be capped by your contract, and you will be better off finding a new job if you want more money
Man sometimes I want out of tech so badly it hurts but I don't generally think it's better anywhere else
I went over my head, did probably the most complex code in my life, massively parallel, over weekends and evenings. That wonderful cathedral didn't move performance a zilch, just made debugging and further changes much harder. After few hours of actual debugging afterwards he found out vendor defined responsible DB table in such an obscure and bad way way that we had to literally copy whole table to another more sane one, and perform all the work there in maybe 5% of the time. In fact I suggested exactly same thing initially but it was quickly dismissed by him, and who questions the guru, right.
This didn't even come from management just colleague's incompetence/ego, hard deadlines, tons of pressure to deliver, and starting project already 2 months late. Closest I've been to burnout yet. I am still a bit pissed off on him, but I know it was not malice so that eases emotions quite a bit.
And to similar request coming from the top - been there, done that too, regretted that time & energy put in it. These days, 8 hours days, if I am not making it on time, I communicate early & clearly and that's it. They handle it, and if they don't, well there is always next job. Life is about priorities.
in Europe it usually makes sense to contract if you only have smaller projects.
Maybe not outright amounts, but if you count in things like sickness, holidays, off for kids, social contributions, being treated better among colleagues, and for me personally having much more freedom whenever personal I need to do like bureaucracy (but that may be current circumstance only).
But the big money in tech is in your options/RSUs, not base pay. And contractors don't get options. (Usually anyway; I've been given options as a consultant once but usually don't see that.)
Sounds like trying to cope at a shitty nightmare job at a shitty company, and blaming yourself.
But being oncall for a shakey infra stack? That shit is hell. No deadlines, just the threat of incidents or downtime at any time of day.
Negotiate prohibitively high overtime rates.
> This one time, for example, when our deployment crashed halfway through right before a major release. The CEO emphasized how important this project was, so we were all hands on deck, trying to get it back up, fearing the worst, that the client would go ballistic if he found out we were delaying the release. I was stressing big time, thinking we had to pull off a miracle, and of course we did.
> But you know what? After all that chaos, it turned out the relevant stakeholders were away on vacation that week, and the release wasn't even checked for many days after that.
A CTO should have some power to push back and set priorities. If you're just doing what you're told you're not really a CTO but a team lead with a fancy title.
This a general problem with young people in leadership positions. They don't have the confidence to say no as often as they should nor the perspective to identify what's really important - every setback feels cataclysmic.
Agreed wholeheartedly on both points, though I'd say a general problem with people new to leadership positions rather than make it about age. Society as it exists now (at least as I've experienced it) is very strong on rule following and it's a pretty massive shift to be the person setting the rules.
The CEO should've been empowering, too, and it might well be a symptom of the same malady: imagining the way you want things done, then pushing harder and harder until the world is that way regardless of cost. Human psychic cost is real and will cost you your best people.
Consider instead if the CEO said to the team "We definitely need this done, but I don't want you to burn yourselves out. Please keep at it as your top priority during working hours, all other goals are on pause until we have a release, and keep me up to date at the end of each day with progress until we're there. I don't want anyone working after hours. Don't worry about the client; I'll handle them." When the story unfolds from there the client doesn't even notice, the team feels supported and heard, and the work still gets done. Everyone wins.
I won't make any comments on their fitness/accomplishments/whatever. I am not in their shoes, and can only appreciate the honesty of their exposition (which they seem to be embracing and using as their platform).
> In business, there’s no place for perfection. There’s no space for having everything under control. In fact, not only can’t you influence most of the things around you, but most of the things are uncertain.
I have found this to be true for life, in general; especially when dealing with other people.
Hardly.
What I've found to work best in such scenarios is to always chop up the task at hand to essentials and nice-to-haves[0]. If another task comes up before you're finished, chop it up as well and ask your leadership what's more important: the essentials from this new task or nice-to-haves from that previous one.
It's never the nice-to-haves.
Also it always helps to not promise something you can't deliver - this applies to every level in the hierarchy.
[0] Sometimes, if essentials are the vast majority, you can produce versions of them which are simpler, but still workable from a business perspective, and have bringing the full-featured versions as a nice-to-have.
The action item is always disappointing: some flavor of "take care of yourself."
If we were trees in a forest fire, then yes. Making ourselves more fireproof is the best we can do.
We're not trees, though, are we?
> , especially those of us who've taken on the challenge of leadership.
Nope.