I disagree, and I think this advice can be actively harmful. You shouldn’t ignore a problem when you’re in a position to help. At the same time, you also shouldn’t take on the emotional burden of other people’s projects.
If I see something heading toward failure, I let people know they may want to consider a different approach. That’s it. There’s no need to be harsh or belabor the point but it’s better to speak up than to quietly watch a train wreck unfold.
>If I see something heading toward failure, I let people know they may want to consider a different approach. That’s it. There’s no need to be harsh or belabor the point but it’s better to speak up than to quietly watch a train wreck unfold.
Yes, it seems cruel and also counter to ensuring the org succeeds. Your perceived ability as an engineer might go up if your colleagues fail, but your colleagues failing when you knew a possible way for things to go better is harmful to your org's goals and culture. It only takes a small few failures for the bar to be lowered to the point that you yourself may not want to work there.
Even sometimes when other people's projects are NOT your problem and they aren't seeking feedback, sometimes you SHOULD make their flaws your problem if it is of crucial importance to your org. Knowing when you should expend your energy on an initiative like that is in itself a mark of seniority.
I think this is the best take. If you know better speak up (assuming you don't get penalized for that). But anytime you feel the pain, refrain. Don't carry the weight of the world upon your shoulders. You spoke up and if they did not heed your advice that's not your problem.
The point the author is making is somewhat maligned by the title "... let bad projects fail".
The point the author makes is that sometimes you are not in control of those projects. Therefore "letting them fail" seems a false choice constructed by the author.
A better title "You don't know what other people are doing and you don't know why unless it is your job to do so."
It depends on the context. If you're with a small organization and you're interacting with the project early in the development, it could well be your duty to explain your misgivings and why you think they should do things differently. If you're with a large organization and the project is already underway, it's going to take a lot of time and effort to redirect the project. That's time and effort that could probably be spent more productively elsewhere.
> If I see something heading toward failure, I let people know they may want to consider a different approach.
This is what I do as well, in writing. Then I drop it. Professionalism demands that I say something. That's part of what I'm being paid to do. But experience has taught me that it's almost certainly not going to change anything, so I just do my duty and move on.
you can do your best to play it smart. perhaps following this direct advice isn't wise but something tweaked to your own understnading of it is likely the option. I agree with the post. a way id reword it is "don't get too deep into politics, take a step back instead and assess the trade-offs of being involved or not"
This clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting. One needs to have good judgement about when and how to help. A lot of people can imagine how things could go better if a bunch of other people changed their behavior in surprisingly simple ways. It's a much smaller subset of people that can correctly push the right buttons to get the other people to actually make those changes succeed at a systematic level.
In a small org it's actually not too hard for good ideas and feedback to get traction. In a larger org for broad concerns it can be fiendeshly difficult. Often the reason why a large project will fail is only truly knowable by a few senior technical people with enough experience and broad context to see the forrest for the trees. Past a certain volume of people involved you can not explain to people why it will fail fast enough to offset the army of clueless stakeholders incentivized to socialize a good-sounding narrative convincing everyone that we need to try. In these cases reductive explanations with the right counter-narrative can work, but they require significant reputational and/or hard authority to pull off.
This is why the article advocates picking your battles in a large org. Often the chance of actually helping is much lower than destroying your own reputation, even if you're right.
I was put on a project a few years back that I thought was heading in the wrong direction. I said something and was ignored. I said something again and it was made clear by the response that the new VP had surrounded himself with yes-men and there was no more room for this kind of input. Ever since I have watched train wreck and train wreck. I’m not going to fight to help people who don’t what to listen to well meaning feedback.
Funny enough, 2 years after I was told to get on board or keep my mouth shut, customers complained about the very thing I said they would complain about. I felt slightly vindicated, and they had to rearchitect the whole thing to try and accomplish it. It’s been 5 years since the project started and they still haven’t fully shipped the feature.
If you have the power (as the post mentions - like a CEO) you can suggest, direct or butcher a project and no one would see you as a negative person.
But you can get butchered when you don't have the authority to poke around your concerns.
I would prefer to see the ship sink instead of shooting myself in the foot and risking my influence and credibility - as another comment on this thread said "Sometimes, you have to let people fail".
Not your company not your problem. This article misses the point that your senior engineers often do not have the political power to push back on bad ideas at most med-large orgs.
Simple as that. You can offer people your opinion on the matter but that's it. Some people invest way too much on what is essentially someone else's business. You are a replaceable cog, never forget that.
Letting it die is the self-serving, career-optimizing, amoral take. But it's more ethical to stand up for what's right even at personal cost. A bunch of people wasting years of their life, not to mention all the resources, is a tragedy worth avoiding.
Of course, the wisdom of taking the person risk is a continuum. In some cases it is and in some it isn't. But.. To omit the ethical angle entirely seems like a bad take.
You can voice your concerns, but should not go fighting, especially at personal cost. It could be that you may be wrong in your assessment, and the project turns out to be successful, or it could be that you may have been right for the wrong reasons, or it could be that you were right all along.
In any case, you are part of a company, and that means recognizing that yours is only one of many opinions driving strategy and allocating resources. If you find your self often needing to stand up against others for your beliefs, then you are probably not in the right company.
I don't understand this point of view. Most of the people aren't wasting their time. They're getting paid for the effort. The business is taking a risk, and pays people to realize their vision. Some visions are bad.
Getting personally attached and emotionally invested in work you get paid for is a risk too. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's also nothing wrong putting your time in and churning out requirements if that's what you want.
Nah, because everyone is an expert sometimes. They don't listen and you gotta let them touch the hot stove. Sometimes there's not much you can do. Sometimes people trust in random blog posts or now AI more than the people they work with. So unless you can get through to them with an idea that isn't your own... You gotta let them touch that stove.
> In large companies, speaking up about what you see as a “bad project” is a good thing. But only in moderation. Sometimes the mark of seniority is realizing that arguing with people who won’t listen isn’t worth it; it’s better to save your counsel.
Reminds me of one of my managers who said, “Sometimes, you have to let people fail.” It does take a lot of energy to keep some people afloat. My hope has always been they learn to swim as it were, but sometimes it’s just effort better spent elsewhere.
I know one project did not have my involvement and couldn’t have succeeded without my knowledge. They were so bad they would work in questions casually to their actual work.
I started avoiding all of them when I found out management had been dumping on my team and praising theirs. It’s just such a slap in the face because they could not have done well and their implementation was horrible.
If one person thinks this way, many more do. This is typical in large organizations, especially government institutions, because expense of running entire teams at massive costs for no reason is not born by the team but by someone with a much larger budget that has more money than care or completely wrong incentives (the more people I manage, the more important I am, type of orgs). This is organizational gangrene described from the inside and partly how or why it happens. If you are leading an organization and reading this - figure out how to measure and prevent it.
I have to question the judgment of the manager talking shit about another team and its leader to a junior engineer. Going and looking at the author's LinkedIn history (it's available via his About page) makes it pretty clear that this was happening within Google.
I think it speaks poorly of their manager's professionalism, and what sort of behavior they consider to be acceptable with regard to colleagues.
Companies need ways for individuals to bet against projects and people that are likely to fail.
So much of the overhead in a large organization is from bad decisions, or people who usually make bad decisions remaining in positions of power.
Imagine if instead of having to speak up, and risk political capital, you could simply place a bet, and carry on with your work.
Leadership can see that people are betting against a project, and make updates in real time.
Good decision makers could earn significant bonuses, even if they don't have the title/role to make the decisions.
If someone makes more by betting than their manager takes home in salary, maybe it's time for an adjustment.
Such a system is clearly aligned with the interests of the shareholders, and the rank-and-file. But the stranglehold that bureaucrats have over most companies would prevent it from being put in place.
Learnt from experience that when you can foresee a project failure and you don't have any power, stay quiet and start applying for new role before the blame game, retros and political chaos. It's not worth it, you're just an employee and it's not your company.
> It’s important to point out that for much of the lifecycle of a project, whether it’s “bad” is highly subjective.
I can’t emphasize this part enough.
I’ve been part of some projects where someone external to the team went on a crusade to shut our work down because they disagreed with it. When we pushed through, shipped it, and it worked well they lost a lot of credibility.
Be careful about what you spend your reputational capital on.
Definitely a big tech thing I don’t miss. At a startup everyone is trying to make the company succeed vs pet projects, so giving advice about architectural decisions or helping fellow engineers with areas you have more expertise in is often welcomed. There are always pros and cons, but that type of culture is so much more fun. Even on hard days I love working with people who want to help each other.
Upper management agreed to geoIP blocking of the app, without consulting engineering. Why this matters is that GeoIP blocking is at best a whack-a-mole with constantly updating lists and probabilistic blocklists. And is easy to route around with VPNs.
The verbiage they approved was "geoblocking", not "best effort of geoblocking". Clients expected 100% success rate.
When that didn't work, management had to walk that back. We showed proof of what we did was reasonably doable. That finally taught upper management to at least consult before making grandiouse plans.
The problem tends to be timing. By the time you hear about a project, it's often been approved by multiple layers of management, senior engineer signed off on design, etc.
You might be able to get the engineers to tweak the design, but actually getting it canceled can be hopeless. You'll get told the CEO approved it.
The dynamics are exactly right, but I would say engineers can't "let" "politically bad" projects fail, because fixing that is, in a very real sense, above their paygrade. That responsibility lies with the executives.
The engineers' role should mostly be as technical advisors, i.e. calling out bad projects for technical reasons (UX, architecture, etc.) But even the seniormost engineers do not have the corporate standing, let alone political cachet, to call out or fix political issues (empire building, infighting between orgs, etc.) They can and should point out these conflicts to leadership (very diplomatically, of course) but should bear no responsibility for the outcomes.
However, as an engineer you should ABSOLUTELY be aware of these dynamics because they will impact your career. Like when the project is canceled with no impact delivered.
The example given of the latent turf war between the product and platform teams might have been avoided via a very clear mandate from senior leadership about who owns what exactly. This would probably have involved some horse-trading about what the org giving up its turf gets in return. (BTW if you've ever wondered "Why so many re-orgs" this is why.) That this didn't happen is a failure on the execs' part.
As an aside, I know this happens in every large company, but somehow it appears to be a lot more common at Google? Or at least Googlers are more open about it. E.g. I observed something similar on that recent post about lessions from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488819
> Your attention is finite, but the capacity for a large company to generate bad ideas is infinite. Speaking from experience, getting too involved in stopping these quickly can make you very cynical about the state of the world. And this is really not a good place to be.
This also applies to the capacity of the industry to generate bad (and evil) ideas.
Now that we're one of the biggest-money fields, there is no end of people thinking/behaving badly.
You'll wear yourself out, calling out all of it.
For example, I fled cryptocurrency entirely when it got overrun with bad faith. But I don't intend to flee AI, and so will have to ration the criticism I have for abuses there.
> The nuclear option is [...]
BTW, be careful in what context you use this idiom. It doesn't always translate well outside the US. (I realized this as soon as the words came out of my mouth, under perhaps the worst possible circumstances.)
This article resonates with me a lot, but as a senior engineer I would not share it in a big team setting. Even though it's correct, it's too cynical for big team morale. I think it would be worth sharing with peers or managers when discussing whether and how to intervene on a bad project.
I've seen another type of "let projects fail" in my career done by middle managers in a large project. Essentially it takes the form of them saying "the larger project we are working under is probably going to fail. When it does, I want our component to be useful for whatever comes next". And, the surprising thing is that this often worked. The project itself fails, but most of the work done on it still ended up being used.
Its almost never correct to rip on a project from a distance. Only two things can happen, one, you are wrong, and the project succeeds. This is a personal catastrophe for your career at that company. Two, you are correct and the project fails. Its rare this will get you enough credibility to make the risk worth it. There are always others that will show up and dogpile as if they "knew" the entire time themselves. You need to be consistently correct about failure to get truly noticed, but then it asks a lot of questions. Why are you still working there? Why don't you have enough influence to prevent it in the first place? "I told you so" rarely accomplishes anything good.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 83.9 ms ] threadIf I see something heading toward failure, I let people know they may want to consider a different approach. That’s it. There’s no need to be harsh or belabor the point but it’s better to speak up than to quietly watch a train wreck unfold.
Yes, it seems cruel and also counter to ensuring the org succeeds. Your perceived ability as an engineer might go up if your colleagues fail, but your colleagues failing when you knew a possible way for things to go better is harmful to your org's goals and culture. It only takes a small few failures for the bar to be lowered to the point that you yourself may not want to work there.
Even sometimes when other people's projects are NOT your problem and they aren't seeking feedback, sometimes you SHOULD make their flaws your problem if it is of crucial importance to your org. Knowing when you should expend your energy on an initiative like that is in itself a mark of seniority.
The blog itself mentions this a bit.
The point the author makes is that sometimes you are not in control of those projects. Therefore "letting them fail" seems a false choice constructed by the author.
A better title "You don't know what other people are doing and you don't know why unless it is your job to do so."
I think you both are right in different ways.
This is what I do as well, in writing. Then I drop it. Professionalism demands that I say something. That's part of what I'm being paid to do. But experience has taught me that it's almost certainly not going to change anything, so I just do my duty and move on.
This clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting. One needs to have good judgement about when and how to help. A lot of people can imagine how things could go better if a bunch of other people changed their behavior in surprisingly simple ways. It's a much smaller subset of people that can correctly push the right buttons to get the other people to actually make those changes succeed at a systematic level.
In a small org it's actually not too hard for good ideas and feedback to get traction. In a larger org for broad concerns it can be fiendeshly difficult. Often the reason why a large project will fail is only truly knowable by a few senior technical people with enough experience and broad context to see the forrest for the trees. Past a certain volume of people involved you can not explain to people why it will fail fast enough to offset the army of clueless stakeholders incentivized to socialize a good-sounding narrative convincing everyone that we need to try. In these cases reductive explanations with the right counter-narrative can work, but they require significant reputational and/or hard authority to pull off.
This is why the article advocates picking your battles in a large org. Often the chance of actually helping is much lower than destroying your own reputation, even if you're right.
Funny enough, 2 years after I was told to get on board or keep my mouth shut, customers complained about the very thing I said they would complain about. I felt slightly vindicated, and they had to rearchitect the whole thing to try and accomplish it. It’s been 5 years since the project started and they still haven’t fully shipped the feature.
If you have the power (as the post mentions - like a CEO) you can suggest, direct or butcher a project and no one would see you as a negative person.
But you can get butchered when you don't have the authority to poke around your concerns.
I would prefer to see the ship sink instead of shooting myself in the foot and risking my influence and credibility - as another comment on this thread said "Sometimes, you have to let people fail".
Simple as that. You can offer people your opinion on the matter but that's it. Some people invest way too much on what is essentially someone else's business. You are a replaceable cog, never forget that.
Of course, the wisdom of taking the person risk is a continuum. In some cases it is and in some it isn't. But.. To omit the ethical angle entirely seems like a bad take.
Employment is a business transaction not a transaction based on ethics viewpoints
Is it? We live in a world in which social safety nets are eroding; an economically-divided one in which the middle class is rapidly disappearing.
These things (e.g. bullshit projects/jobs) are a form of "white collar welfare", no?
That's not bad. It's not like we're actually going to fix the underlying problem.
Perhaps another bored patent clerk will use his downtime to change the world.
Getting personally attached and emotionally invested in work you get paid for is a risk too. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's also nothing wrong putting your time in and churning out requirements if that's what you want.
I know one project did not have my involvement and couldn’t have succeeded without my knowledge. They were so bad they would work in questions casually to their actual work.
I started avoiding all of them when I found out management had been dumping on my team and praising theirs. It’s just such a slap in the face because they could not have done well and their implementation was horrible.
I think it speaks poorly of their manager's professionalism, and what sort of behavior they consider to be acceptable with regard to colleagues.
In any other setting you can't afford to watch money and motivation burn just to stay 'politically solvent'.
(Lalit is very good at fitting complex corporate dynamics in a single blog post though.)
* Know your audience. Saying things they are unable to hear is a waste of energy.
* Choose your battles carefully.
The flip side:
* Trust your gut
* Speak authentically and with an aim to help (not convince)
* Don’t be overly invested or dependent on the actions and reactions of others (can be hard to do if someone has power over you)
Balancing these things is something I’m learning about…
Imagine if instead of having to speak up, and risk political capital, you could simply place a bet, and carry on with your work. Leadership can see that people are betting against a project, and make updates in real time. Good decision makers could earn significant bonuses, even if they don't have the title/role to make the decisions. If someone makes more by betting than their manager takes home in salary, maybe it's time for an adjustment.
Such a system is clearly aligned with the interests of the shareholders, and the rank-and-file. But the stranglehold that bureaucrats have over most companies would prevent it from being put in place.
I often use the term "social capital." You have to be careful with how you spend it.
I can’t emphasize this part enough.
I’ve been part of some projects where someone external to the team went on a crusade to shut our work down because they disagreed with it. When we pushed through, shipped it, and it worked well they lost a lot of credibility.
Be careful about what you spend your reputational capital on.
Upper management agreed to geoIP blocking of the app, without consulting engineering. Why this matters is that GeoIP blocking is at best a whack-a-mole with constantly updating lists and probabilistic blocklists. And is easy to route around with VPNs.
The verbiage they approved was "geoblocking", not "best effort of geoblocking". Clients expected 100% success rate.
When that didn't work, management had to walk that back. We showed proof of what we did was reasonably doable. That finally taught upper management to at least consult before making grandiouse plans.
You might be able to get the engineers to tweak the design, but actually getting it canceled can be hopeless. You'll get told the CEO approved it.
The engineers' role should mostly be as technical advisors, i.e. calling out bad projects for technical reasons (UX, architecture, etc.) But even the seniormost engineers do not have the corporate standing, let alone political cachet, to call out or fix political issues (empire building, infighting between orgs, etc.) They can and should point out these conflicts to leadership (very diplomatically, of course) but should bear no responsibility for the outcomes.
However, as an engineer you should ABSOLUTELY be aware of these dynamics because they will impact your career. Like when the project is canceled with no impact delivered.
The example given of the latent turf war between the product and platform teams might have been avoided via a very clear mandate from senior leadership about who owns what exactly. This would probably have involved some horse-trading about what the org giving up its turf gets in return. (BTW if you've ever wondered "Why so many re-orgs" this is why.) That this didn't happen is a failure on the execs' part.
As an aside, I know this happens in every large company, but somehow it appears to be a lot more common at Google? Or at least Googlers are more open about it. E.g. I observed something similar on that recent post about lessions from Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488819
This also applies to the capacity of the industry to generate bad (and evil) ideas.
Now that we're one of the biggest-money fields, there is no end of people thinking/behaving badly.
You'll wear yourself out, calling out all of it.
For example, I fled cryptocurrency entirely when it got overrun with bad faith. But I don't intend to flee AI, and so will have to ration the criticism I have for abuses there.
> The nuclear option is [...]
BTW, be careful in what context you use this idiom. It doesn't always translate well outside the US. (I realized this as soon as the words came out of my mouth, under perhaps the worst possible circumstances.)