[HN Gopher] Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)
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Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)
Author : p4lindromica
Score : 176 points
Date : 2021-03-19 15:23 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (hyperbo.la)
| whateveracct wrote:
| "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber.
|
| I've recently joined a BigCo (as a senior+ engineer), and the
| culture here isn't building consensus (out of authentic building
| blocks) - it's a toxic "we must be consensus after every
| meeting."
|
| There's always a "champion" idea (but you can bring a
| "challenger" idea so people feel heard), there's always a need to
| "be in alignment" after every 45 min chunk of time, etc.
|
| Consensus is clearly an end in itself, not a means by which we
| solve problems.
|
| I'll just slither around in it though. Talk the talk so no one
| gets wise $_$
| zemo wrote:
| > "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber.
|
| ^ the words of a person that builds things that nobody asked
| for and then gets mad when people don't use them.
| whateveracct wrote:
| i'm doing fine :)
|
| did my fun pejorative phrase offend you?
|
| also - i & millions others just "use" some software service i
| built years ago at a previous job ;) i have no trouble
| getting things in production, making and saving money.
| anonytrary wrote:
| As someone who used to work at LittleBigCo, I think this beats
| having great ideas and then having them given to people who are
| in the inner circle with the founders. At least BigCo isn't
| super fratty like LittleBigCo tends to be. Or I could be wrong,
| please tell me if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. Lots of
| LittleBigCo's these days are pushing overhyped products and are
| mostly just having fun with corporate money.
| whateveracct wrote:
| oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to
| get paid more to do less at BigCo.
|
| BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be
| professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite
| prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year
| in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're
| remote.
|
| Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's
| a single small tree. There's no equilibrium in the org chart.
| So a couple bad actors can easily ruin it all. And they did
| at every startup I was at.
|
| My play is to collect checks and eventually make art with my
| computer science experience for the rest of my life.
| redisman wrote:
| What do you mean by BigCo? Fortune 500 non-tech? Faang?
| whateveracct wrote:
| That fits the bill without giving me away, yeah :)
| anonytrary wrote:
| You sound like me. Cheers. I hope it works out for us.
| [deleted]
| whateveracct wrote:
| > Cheers
|
| You too! Let this be a lucrative but minor (ergo
| efficient) period of our lives :beers:
| atypicbiped wrote:
| Same here. Does anyone you work with know your plan? If
| not, how do you deal with the loneliness?
| whateveracct wrote:
| I'm married and have pets :shrug:
|
| Use your free time post-covid to build up something
| worthwhile. A cat is a good start!
|
| Love for its own sake is more than enough. But it takes a
| suspension of disbelief that modernity may have beat out
| of you.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > Use your free time post-covid to build up something
| worthwhile. A cat is a good start!
|
| And to take it further, even if you're one of those
| (many) people who thinks the sky is constantly falling
| with COVID...there is still no reason to wait until
| "post-COVID". If you want to build a skillset start
| working towards that now, not tomorrow
| whateveracct wrote:
| you're right. idk why i said post-covid at all. i know
| i'm not waiting!
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting."
|
| What are the consequences of failure to establish consensus?
| whateveracct wrote:
| hours of extra meetings on my calendar
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I mean this constructively, but it sounds like you're rather
| jaded from your past experiences.
|
| I've personally experienced 4 flavors of work environments:
| high stress low wisdom politics (big stakes student project);
| High stress high wisdom politics (SpaceX); low stress high
| wisdom politics (Google X); and my current project, low stress
| high wisdom no-politics (Zipline).
|
| Each different environment required me to adapt my own behavior
| appropriately to work productively with coworkers. Notably, the
| only environment that consistently lead me to feeling jaded and
| burnt out in the long term was the low-stress BigCo
| environment. I see a lot of truth in what you describe about
| your current experiences, although I never got quite that
| pessimistic. If you're happy slithering around the politics and
| are able to find fulfillment in your personal life, good on ya.
| That reminds me of a coworker at SpaceX who, a month or two
| before getting let go, admitted to spending 8 years at a
| defense contractor doing crossword puzzles at his desk all day,
| every day.
|
| Building consensus around long term architecture is something
| like 80% of my current job, and over the years while the org
| chart has gone from 1 layer to something like 5 layers, I've
| successfully remained at the bottom. The folk at the top of the
| org chart are completely approachable, and in a lot of ways are
| there to serve me, solving the problems that would otherwise
| prevent me from getting my work done.
| antonvs wrote:
| > "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber.
|
| Not necessarily. You want to convince your team or other teams
| to adopt a new tool or practice? You need to build consensus.
|
| It's a good skill to have if you want to be able to shape your
| workplace to your liking. It doesn't necessarily have to
| involve org chart climbing at all.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The point being, most of the time people say "build
| consensus", what they mean is either
|
| "let's have an endless, design by committee approach where
| the backend dev with no knowledge on UI decides how the UI
| should look rather than letting the UI designer create a few
| samples and iterate and everyone else giving feedback like a
| user would"
|
| or
|
| "we already decided this is going to happen, but for the sake
| of formality we want you to agree with it so we can feel good
| about ourselves bullshitting one another into believing
| everyone has a say, so give us the ok or we'll pester you
| until you do"
|
| It also stimulates the idea that disagreements are inherently
| wrong and nothing should happen while a disagreement is in
| place. Sometimes, it's ok to disagree with someone else and
| see what happens. Some might call this a form of consensus,
| though I've had managers get uncomfortable when I didn't
| vehemently agree with the plan, but was willing to keep my
| nose out of it and focus on my own things so others _could_
| take the risk.
| xyzelement wrote:
| There's a third thing they could mean: we want this to
| succeed in the organization which means we need to both
| hear people out to reflect their real needs in the plan,
| and that we need to communicate to them in a way that they
| buy in. So that it can work.
|
| In fact this is really the only way to get anything done
| regardless of what you call it.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| Yes, this. It's funny seeing so many people being cynical
| about this - sure, there's plenty of ways for it go to
| badly, but far more importantly, there are a couple of
| ways it can go right.
|
| As general commentary - if you're smart and good at
| identifying problems with things, use your ability to
| identify problems to avoid those problems, not as an
| excuse to avoid doing stuff. Being cynical about
| everything isn't a terrible strategy, as long as you
| remember that you need to be cynical about your own
| cynicism, too.
| douglaswlance wrote:
| [Disagree and
| commit](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disagree_and_commit) is a
| common management methodology and one that the most effective
| teams utilize successfully.
|
| What is the issue?
| whateveracct wrote:
| haha i have worked at amazon, where disagree and commit is
| one of their laminated leadership principles
|
| except it isn't
|
| the principle is "have backbone; disagree and commit"
|
| there's checks and balances in the principle's words
| themself. every leader i've had who has "disagree and commit"
| as their guiding light has just been an autocrat. they never
| mention on the "have backbone" part.
|
| i had a VPE from BigCos come into a LittleBigCo. he was all
| about "disagree and commit"
|
| really, he had a nose for dissent. he went around managers
| who disagreed with him to corral their engineers to his side.
| he put near-founding engineers on bad projects to force them
| out.
|
| i tried to have backbone with this guy once. i thought one of
| his tech decisions was bad (and in reality it was politically
| motivated to force people out.) i wasn't rude or anything. he
| had a 1-on-1 call with me, and acted like i was being
| irrational. i stood my ground and made fact-based arguments.
| he was losing the 1-on-1 debate, so how did he close it?
|
| "look whateveracct..i just have this crystal ball in my
| stomach, and it's usually right"
|
| disagree and commit? more like stfu i'm the boss
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| > i thought one of his tech decisions was bad (and in
| reality it was politically motivated to force people out.)
|
| Let's say you were right: It was a bad technical decision
| and it was politically motivated. What outcome can you
| expect from arguing with him on technical grounds? He knows
| what you're saying is right, but he already knew that
| before making the decision. What you need to do is convince
| him not to act in bad faith. Try to figure out how to do
| that, and acknowledge if it's not feasible.
|
| Not to call you out in particular, but I see this as a
| common mistake by people arriving in a big company. Things
| are not as you wish, everything is too complicated,
| motivations are subtle and usually hidden. The trick is to
| get past frustration that reality does not match your
| mental model. (People aren't being honest! How can I even
| work with people who don't tell the truth!?) Abandon your
| mental model, acknowledge reality for what it is, choose
| goals that are achievable, choose actions that make
| progress toward your goals.
| whateveracct wrote:
| this guy was VPE - there was no way to sway his
| autocratic decisions.
|
| i knew he was arguing in bad faith. there was no way to
| win politically - he was making the decision to shape the
| company in his own image. so the best i could do was
| visibly disagree, document his various bad actor
| behaviors, and share my understanding with other
| engineers who didn't feel comfortable speaking up.
|
| i just thought the guy was a dick so i felt like stirring
| the pot a bit. myself and plenty of other respected
| engineers left one-by-one (he didn't even announce i
| resigned. people were surprised. he was trying to save
| some face i think.)
|
| the VPE left shortly after. people blamed the engineering
| turnover on him haha.
|
| overall i feel pretty good about my short tenure there. i
| negotiated a nice salary bump when i joined and use it to
| anchor my new BigCo salary.
| gkop wrote:
| I was just looking at Amazon's principles this week, and
| found the on-its-face ridiculous "Are Right, A Lot", which
| more or less directly invites the behavior you describe,
| xyzelement wrote:
| In my understanding - "are right a lot" is a
| retrospective thing - it's asking whether the leader's
| past instincts and decisions had lead to good things.
| It's not measuring how many meetings you walk out of
| having gotten your way.
|
| For example, if a leader had an idea X,and Bob talked him
| into idea Y which worked out, then the leader was still
| 'right' because listening to Bob was the right thing.
| syastrov wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but as the article notes, Stripe is using AWS.
| Could someone share their experiences with AWS versus Google
| Cloud for a smallish business using mostly compute plus managed
| Postgres? The pricing differences shouldn't be an issue, it's
| more a question of whether they make a lot of breaking changes,
| have too many limitations, or have a bad UI, or too much
| complexity.
|
| If a company was starting fresh, which would you choose?
| hn_asker wrote:
| Agreed. How consensus is achieved varies. As an engineer, I am
| biased towards numbers because numbers are easy to compare. Use
| data to guide you on what the desired state is and getting to it.
| zemo wrote:
| clicked through to this not expecting anything new, didn't find
| anything new, this stuff is all obvious and should be clear to
| everyone. Clicked through to see the comments and ... the amount
| of pushback in the comments is very weird. All this is saying is
| "you should make sure that people want something before you build
| it" and the replies seem to be "how DARE anyone else affect what
| I build", from a bunch of adult children that think they are
| solitary geniuses. Every single person mad at the idea that
| building consensus is an important process is annoying to work
| with, full stop.
| ggm wrote:
| Sometimes consensus is impossible. You have to move on without
| it. Either you get stasis, or gradual change, or revolution or
| fracture/fork and no matter what you get dissent, consequences
| and cost.
|
| Consensus doesn't always exist. Its great to build it and its
| great to seek it.
| victor9000 wrote:
| I don't think consensus needs to be unanimously affirmative in
| order to make progress. Even dissent can be a form of
| consensus, in that everyone in this group acknowledges the
| proposed course of action, and have formed their positions
| relative to it.
| ggm wrote:
| That's ietf rough consensus. Harder in a dev team i think.
| But you may be right.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| 10x engineers get it done without others even knowing about it.
| robjan wrote:
| Engineers who do things without other people knowing about it
| are a liability, not an asset. It results in a bus factor of 1.
|
| There is a big difference from asking for forgiveness, which is
| often required to get things moving, vs. working in an entirely
| opaque way.
| anonytrary wrote:
| And this is how you end up with an entire engineering team that
| has no idea what the hell is going on. Don't be a "10x
| engineer". Empower 10 other people around you. That's what the
| real 10x engineers are doing.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Talk is cheap, but I know that won't stop you.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| When I joined my current company, I was the only software
| engineer working on embedded firmware (with plenty of help
| from folk with non-software backgrounds.) I had about a year
| and a half of frantic coding to set the foundation in place,
| and now almost 5 years in we have an embedded team of over a
| dozen people. I'm not particularly interested in management,
| and there has been no pressure for me to go that route, so
| I've successfully remained a leaf in the org chart. My
| current manager is the third person we hired to the embedded
| team, just a year or two out of school at the time, and he's
| doing an awesome job. I feel like I probably have a lot of
| political power within the organization, but I can't really
| say because I never need to use it. I'm lucky enough to
| generally like everyone I work with.
|
| New folk in other parts of the company ask me what I do, and
| the best way I can describe it these days is meta-
| engineering. Rather than take long term ownership of any part
| of the system, I take temporary ownership of the scary parts
| that need the most attention, refactor them until they're as
| boring as I can using a suitably large sledgehammer, and then
| release them back into the wild to (hopefully never) be
| someone else's problem again. When I'm not doing that, entire
| weeks go by just reviewing coworkers' PRs, writing
| architecture documents, and interviewing job candidates. I'm
| widely known for bluntly (but hopefully respectfully) giving
| my opinion when weighing in on technical subjects I think I
| know about, and it seems to be well received. Pretty much all
| direct and indirect feedback I get is to keep doing that
| more. Many coworkers even send me their designs and PRs with
| an explicit request to mercilessly tear it apart.
|
| I've been addicted to watching episodes of "Kitchen
| Nightmares" this past month, and I just realized that it's
| sorta like what I do at work, but with less swearing and the
| undercooked chicken is lack of regression test coverage.
| Also, the restaurant doors haven't closed up 6 months later
| yet!
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I know exactly the archetype of engineer you're talking
| about and they are hands down some of the most valuable
| engineers you'll find.
|
| It's possible to have a 10x multiplier in "individual
| output" or whatever you want to call it, but 9 times out of
| 10 the most valuable engineer is the one who can provide
| detailed, actionable feedback on patches, architectural
| change proposals etc but is also willing to get their hands
| dirty when it makes sense. That, IMO, is what I consider a
| 'true' 10x engineer to be
| lklset wrote:
| It is not easy to find a team that wants to be "empowered" by
| a 10x engineer. Usually the 1x engineers focus on irrelevant
| or counterproductive issues, inundate the 10x with non-
| feasible suggestions and play office politics.
|
| Upon which the 10x moves to inner emigration and gets work
| done. For which the "team" gets the credit.
|
| Where are those teams that you speak of? At which companies?
| trulyme wrote:
| My experience is different. True 10x engineers are always
| well received by their peers because they make the problems
| go away. However 10x wannabes... That's a different story
| entirely. They voice their opinion when not asked, want to
| take credit for everything, make dubious decisions outside
| their capabilities... Worst of all, eventually they move to
| "inner emigration" and create some monstrosity that nobody
| asked for, let alone wants to maintain. :shrug:
| jart wrote:
| One can use Nemawashi to lay the foundation for consensus. An
| even more powerful technique is to use Numerology to identify the
| consensus that already exists. See
| https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s...
| and https://justine.lol/ape.html
| jonahss wrote:
| Is this spam?
| agstewart wrote:
| I think it's humour, that magic numbers can be used to
| "create consensus" among operating systems, enabling portable
| binaries.
|
| See discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117
| baby wrote:
| Is this a case of survivor bias / took the path less taken? As
| in, I just had a win so it must be that I was using the right
| techniques.
| andrewem wrote:
| I used to work with an engineer who would have a loud negative
| emotional reaction the first time they were told about some new
| thing that would be happening at our company, and after a little
| bit would be totally fine with it. After one or two instances of
| this pattern, the manager learned to talk to the engineer ahead
| of time, so the upset reaction wouldn't happen in a big meeting.
| I suspect that more of us are like this than would like to admit
| to it.
|
| The manager's new tactic seems to me both more effective and
| kinder, because it takes into account the engineer's need to
| process a change outside of a public setting.
| thu2111 wrote:
| This seems like an instance of a common tactic (or problem,
| depending on your perspective) that is especially common at
| software firms where management learn to work around employees'
| problems instead of challenging them to improve.
|
| The engineer in this case had an emotional control issue: they
| reacted badly to anything new, even if they had no rational
| reason to do so (they were fine with it later). This could have
| been tackled by working with the employee to get them to
| understand that this type of loud public reaction is causing
| problems for everyone, including the perception of their own
| skills, and that they need to learn how to take a deep breath
| when a new change is announced - maybe wait a few minutes to
| write down what they wanted to say and then wait a few days
| before hitting the send button. Lots of approaches. Instead
| everyone else adjusted their behaviour to avoid tackling the
| underlying problem.
|
| _The manager's new tactic seems to me both more effective and
| kinder_
|
| Maybe I'm just some asshole manager but I never saw it that
| way. You externalised one person's problem onto the whole team,
| who now all have to be aware of this special exception. Most
| obviously it makes it difficult to have brainstorming sessions,
| or if someone comes up with a new idea half way through a
| meeting unexpectedly, they can't raise it there and then, they
| have to wait for the meeting to end, pre-brief this one guy,
| let him/her get over it, then raise it with the rest of the
| team.
|
| So whilst it may have been kinder to that one specific person,
| I'm not sure it was kinder to everyone else, let alone more
| effective. Especially because once such a culture is embedded,
| sooner or later half the team has some weird quirk that
| everyone is expected to work around or ignore.
| scsilver wrote:
| Is the cost of kid gloves out weight the cost of bringing in
| a new engineer that you don't know their failings at all. The
| devil you know is manageable, the devil you dont is a gamble.
| How much upside is in that gamble.
| thu2111 wrote:
| It's definitely related to the cost of hiring and the cost
| of the employees. But it can work against the employees in
| the long run because they learn they can get away with bad
| behaviour and it gets normalised. Then it's hard to
| genuinely improve, so acts as an invisible barrier to their
| career growth (or worse, doesn't, and that demotivates the
| others).
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Sounds like me at work last year when I had to take high dose
| steroids!
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Presumably you're referring to corticosteroids which are not
| anabolic steroids. Or just making a tired joke, I couldn't
| tell which :P
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Prednisone, and it definitely altered my personality
| significantly. I also ordered $400 worth of RC quadcopter
| parts, and spent 8 hours straight sanding off and re-
| polishing the top surface of my eyeglass lenses to get rid
| of the anti-reflective coating that was cracked and pitted.
|
| In the month leading up to that, interactions at work were
| also giving me anxiety bordering on panic attacks, like a
| visceral fight-or-flight response. That turned out to be my
| atrioventricular nerves progressively failing, such that my
| heart ventricles were beating slower and asynchronously
| from my natural pulse rate. I got down to 21 beats per
| minute at one point, and everyone at the hospital was
| amazed I was walking around and smiling rather than on the
| ground unconsciouss.
|
| I'm pretty much back to 100% now, and as an embedded
| software engineer, I am horrified to be able to say that
| I'm bluetooth enabled.
| cunac wrote:
| wait for next software update to patch security :) , you
| made my day
| andrewem wrote:
| I knew someone who was on prednisone for 3 days. They got
| 6 days worth of things done in those 3 days, then spent
| the next 3 days of withdrawal in bed unable to do
| anything.
|
| Also: this is wildly off topic, but did your 8 hours of
| sanding off cracked anti-reflective coating work? What
| equipment did you need? I had a similar issue and it
| never occurred to me that it might be fixable at home.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Yeah, it worked pretty well for my purpose. The only
| downside is that the edges got a bit rounded off, leading
| to more distortion than ideal in my peripheral vision. It
| was definitely an improvement overall, in that I was less
| steroid-aggro while wearing them afterward. My brain had
| no trouble filtering out the increased distortion, vs.
| the visual artifacts (starbursting) from the worn out
| coatings.
|
| I sanded the lenses by hand with 200 grit, then 400 grit,
| then 800 grit wet sand paper. There was the AR coating,
| but then under that there was some sort of underlying
| "toughness" coating that I had to completely sand through
| to get down to polycarbonate. That's what took the
| longest, since I didn't really know how far I needed to
| go with it, and it was fairly resistant to the abrasion.
| I tried soaking the lenses in isopropyl alcohol to soften
| the coatings, but I don't think it helped at all vs. just
| applying elbow grease. Once the surfaces were uniformly
| smooth but frosty looking, I polished them with Novus
| plastic polish #3, then #2, then #1. It wasn't perfect
| like a new lens, but the center was optically clear
| without any starburst reflections. With all the coatings
| gone, the polycarbonate quickly picks up little scratches
| just from cleaning, but it's quick to polish out again.
|
| It was worth it to keep me from going completely insane
| for the next month it took me to get an eye exam and
| order new glasses.
|
| Taking corticosteroids briefly then stopping cold turkey
| like that is pretty rough on your endocrine system. I had
| to be on the high dose for many weeks to get the desired
| effect, and my doctor had me slowly taper off over the
| course of a few months to keep from crashing like that.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I personally will react negatively for about 5 to 15 minutes to
| any new large change idea so I just work to make sure I don't
| make judgments during that window. It does however let me get
| into real issues with the idea pretty quickly.
|
| I will often just tell people okay that's a big change give me
| time to go through the five stages of grieving and I think
| we'll be good
| xyzelement wrote:
| That's awesome - sounds like you have an amazing degree of
| introspection: you understand what you are like and you know
| how to manage through that.
|
| Btw one reason companies ask interviewees about their
| weaknesses is not because the answer matters but because it
| shows whether a person thinks about what they are like, or
| not. Eg if someone ever said what you said "one of my
| weaknesses is that I freak out in the first 5 mins but I
| learned to work around that" - a real green flag that you are
| an excellent person to work with.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I obviously don't know why this engineer reacts the way they
| do, but I can see myself reacting that way not because of the
| change itself but because there was no advance warning or
| discussion.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > because there was no advance warning or discussion.
|
| As a manager I learned to keep my senior engineer pre-
| informed the hard way. Personally, when I was an IC, I was
| totally fine not being kept in the loop because I was
| impervious to such news or changes. So I just assumed that's
| how it's with everyone. Clearly I was wrong.
|
| That said, it is important to release that pre-information in
| an informal fashion lest they start acting on it before it's
| formally announced. Especially ones that impact the immediate
| peer teams such as re-org.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Are you really impervious to changes though? You're almost
| certainly going to be affected in some way.
|
| Also, I don't really see the point in hiring supposedly
| intelligent engineers and then cutting them out of the
| decision making process.
|
| Btw I'm not even a senior engineer, I'm a _junior_.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| I've always felt the same way, I absolutely _detest_ the
| whole farce of a manager claiming they're "shielding the
| team" when really they're just making critical decisions
| without informing their own team / gathering [real]
| consenshs.
|
| To be explicit, there is absolutely a place to "shield
| the team", but I'm talking about a pattern I've observed
| that many managers will use that as a pretext to avoid
| keeping people in the loop and essentially get to boost
| their own career by holding others back. Real shielding
| is when you politely tell team Y that their proposal is
| going to require your team to have to own and operate a
| net new production service, not when you make critical
| decisions without consulting some of the biggest
| stakeholders - your own team.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > I absolutely detest the whole farce of a manager
| claiming they're "shielding the team" when really they're
| just making critical decisions without informing their
| own team / gathering [real] consenshs.
|
| That's clearly not done. What I referred to was decisions
| that were taken outside the control of the line manager;
| such as re-org, change in promo process. The line manager
| will _not_ be part of such decision making process they
| are mostly taken at director level or above. The line
| manager though will be kept informed /warned of such
| changes about a few weeks in advance which is when I
| would start warning senior engineers in my team.
|
| You will be surprised to learn that line managers have
| very little influence or say in most of the critical
| decisions taken. One of their responsibilities is to keep
| the team pacified i.e., to ensure the "shield" works both
| ways ;-)
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I was impacted by some of those decisions for sure but I
| didn't let that affect me one bit is what meant to say by
| impervious.
|
| In a biggish company you will come to learn that ICs's
| opinions doesn't matter; at best they will be heard to be
| ignored later. So as an IC the best thing for me was to
| focus my energy and skill to create the value the best
| way I could i.e., shipping software and helping my
| immediate neighbours unblock their work whichever way I
| could. Once my line manager noticed that I was indeed
| creating value through my primary skill he began seeking
| my opinion once in a while and I could see that it did
| have a bearing in his final decision.
|
| There were a few vocal engineers who would regularly vent
| out their frustration over mailing lists, lunch tables
| etc., But as far as I could see it wasn't very useful in
| the sense it wasn't actionable. It takes quite a bit of
| energy and time to influence an outcome in a meaningful
| manner. You first need to build up sufficient social
| capital and then start pushing your opinion either
| directly or through others (i.e., "influence the
| influencers" as they say). Obviously it is a useful skill
| that can be acquired, the question is will you enjoy this
| in the long run.
| brailsafe wrote:
| This is incredibly insightful, and could have helped my
| career a lot to hear and actually follow.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Oh I've already experienced my opinion not mattering at
| all. I haven't been put off trying to be involved just
| yet though.
|
| I'm also more interested in understanding and being
| involved than simply being frustrated and venting.
| brailsafe wrote:
| That's what I thought, until I never understood and was
| way more emotionally involved than I actually was
| involved. How will you handle that frustration?
|
| I didn't realize it at the time, but everyone of the same
| seniority level, but a few years older, already realized
| not to give a single fuck about anything beyond their
| immediate sphere of influence. They had already learned
| that the work truly did not matter, and at a moment's
| notice they'd be tossed aside as person if given enough
| reason.
|
| So, don't hope for much if you can't really control it,
| or spend your time gaining control, as in agency, over
| decisions that are actionable. Otherwise, burnout is on
| the horizon, because your expectations and devotion are
| way higher than you might get out of it, but the stress
| is maxxed out.
|
| The parent here is perfectly on the money.
|
| I'd also extend this to other areas of life. Probably try
| not to involve yourself too much with things that you
| can't influence, or things that you think people should
| care about but really don't. Not that they aren't
| inherently good, but you'll grind yourself down trying
| for nothing specific.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Caring too much results in burnout, but I think not
| caring at all is just as damaging. I would rather
| experience some frustration than feel completely
| disconnected from my work.
|
| I'm not quite foolish enough to think that I will be able
| to control how things work no matter whether I'm a junior
| or senior. Even if my involvement was limited to
| observing, that would still be a win to me though.
|
| > _Probably try not to involve yourself too much with
| things that you can 't influence, or things that you
| think people should care about but really don't_
|
| I appreciate the warning, though I think that I've
| already cultivated this type of attitude. I have a
| healthy amount of cynicism towards certain things thanks
| to reading about other people's experiences.
|
| By the way, I'm curious what sort of companies you have
| worked in. Non-tech companies, tech companies, FAANG,
| etc?
| brailsafe wrote:
| I've worked in a variety of companies, but the one that
| this comment is mostly based on was a large non-tech
| auction company.
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| You can't prevent yourself from getting worn away by pre-
| emptively crushing yourself.
|
| Your advice is contradictory: you're just immediately
| causing future pain.
| brailsafe wrote:
| In retrospect, my comment sounds more dramatic than I
| intend. I'm not recommending that, I'm just saying it's
| not worth letting yourself get too invested in a company
| or role that you really don't have much agency over. Your
| personal investment should be commensurate with your
| control and influence.
| apabepa wrote:
| What is an IC? I don't recognize the acronym in this
| context
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Individual Contributor. i.e., those who don't manage
| people.
| davidhowlett wrote:
| Individual contributor. A programmer who does not manage
| others.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-unive...
|
| _Wadge's Law (of Meetings).
|
| Before every formal meeting there's a smaller, more exclusive,
| less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
|
| This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends'
| experience in industry and government. Sometimes there's an even
| smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all
| the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre
| pre meeting ... until you reach some guy deciding everything in
| the shower._
| zaphirplane wrote:
| That's called an oligarchy in politics. Can't say it's a great
| operational model
| bww wrote:
| You've probably noticed that there aren't really any
| successful companies that are run as democracies. There are
| good reasons for that.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| There still is a semi-democratic process (barring large-
| scale network effects for the sake of discussion): whether
| a given person chooses to become (or stay) a customer.
| People vote for or against a company's products/services
| with their money.
| alexashka wrote:
| You can't get to a better future by demanding that it have
| existed in the past.
|
| That doesn't make any sense.
|
| Now I'd really like to hear these 'good reasons' and what
| makes them 'good'. Before you list them, please try and
| apply them to 'why should we abandon slavery'. If your
| arguments work for both instances, please explain why we
| ever abandoned slavery, since clearly there are 'good
| reasons' for owning slaves, so much so that Americans
| fought a civil war over it last I checked.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| A word of advice, injecting such topics needlessly
| distracts from the actual point you're trying to make.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| Unless the discussion is about slavery, in which case,
| fair enough.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| Co-ops?
| rakoo wrote:
| I don't know enough about co-ops but it seems to me they
| not only redefine the power structure, they also redefine
| what success (for themselves) is and the means to reach
| it. Unfortunately ou can't directly compare the two.
| nunie123 wrote:
| Co-ops are usually a republic, not a democracy. People
| still have specific roles, and those roles have authority
| to make specific decisions without getting a majority
| vote for that decision.
| matwood wrote:
| You're assuming it's the small group of people who make the
| final decision without additional input. Just because a
| smaller group of people refine and vet an idea, doesn't mean
| they force it on everyone else.
|
| The problem being solved is that most ideas are not good, so
| any single person with an idea looks to vet it among a
| trusted group of advisors/peers. If this group is too large,
| it's hard to deal with the noise, too small and it may kill
| or ok an idea when it shouldn't be.
|
| After refinement with the smaller group, an idea now has
| enough substance to bring to the larger group _and_ hopefully
| not waste their time.
|
| A simple example this process helps avoid would be pulling
| together the full group, presenting an idea, and then legal
| killing it with their first comment. Everyones time was just
| wasted since the idea as presented had legal issues and
| needed more refinement.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It makes sense where you have a lot of stakeholders. Would
| you ever debate an approach to doing something in front of a
| customer?
|
| Likewise, if a meeting is where you adjudicate something, you
| need consensus to focus on the key issue, whatever that is.
| Otherwise, you're likely to head into some rabbit hole that
| results in no decision.
| sarakayakomzin wrote:
| >Would you ever debate an approach to doing something in
| front of a customer? the dumbest take i've ever seen in
| economics
| zaphirplane wrote:
| No, We've already discussed this and we think your approach
| is wrong
| tootie wrote:
| I'm a boss type guy and I absolutely do this intentionally but
| not because it's not really me setting policy as much as I'm
| focus group testing. I run it past peers or a few influential
| people who could be receptive. Get them to to think about it
| and give some feedback. When I bring it up to the group it's
| because it's been well-received and the other influencers are
| ready to back it. Similar to how this article explains it.
| jghn wrote:
| For me that is a huge part of it - a combination of focus
| grouping while I'm refining my thoughts as well as getting
| people used to the idea. That way, even when things are
| presented as options, I'm confident that they'll choose the
| option I want.
|
| The other key aspect is that it's just far more efficient. My
| last few jobs have espoused being highly collaborative, but
| in practice what that means is that everyone winds up in the
| proverbial room. Chaos ensues, nothing ever gets decided.
| nullsense wrote:
| I feel like everyone savvy just does this because they
| understand the consequences of not doing it and the clueless
| people always just bitch about there being so much office
| politics. In my experience it's just the communication
| protocol that works.
| victor9000 wrote:
| It's not so much politics as it is the fact that no one
| likes surprises, particularly not your boss or your boss's
| boss. Almost every major people-problem I've had to sort
| out in the past year has been a result of someone not
| getting buy-in from their team or superiors before
| proclaiming a major change. Change is good, everyone wants
| you to make your awesome improvements, but you're not a
| cowboy. You have to engage the people who will be affected
| by this change, collect feedback, and address any concerns
| that are surfaced.
| Nowado wrote:
| What about 1) false negatives (when they receive it poorly),
| 2) various consequences of priming, 3) false positives (where
| they receive it well and everyone in main group wrongly
| assumes they are alone in their doubts)?
|
| You can totally run things in authoritarian manner, gathering
| consent in instrumental way and use outside sources (like
| sales) for validation. But downsides/side effects/intentional
| features not said out loud are well known and researched to
| the point where one has to intentionally choose to remain
| ignorant of them to sustain a different narrative.
| tootie wrote:
| I do lean on my own instincts. I won't just give up on an
| idea because someone doesn't like it. They need to convince
| me. I'm just open to being convinced. But I'm also just
| wrong sometimes anyway. It's not a science.
| cle wrote:
| Yep exactly. If you go into a meeting and you haven't talked
| to at least a few of the people there about the topic
| beforehand, IME it's not going to be a productive meeting. I
| usually start with getting feedback from one or two subject
| matter experts, building consensus with them, and then slowly
| expand my circle of people I get feedback from, until we have
| "the big meeting". Having a "big meeting" with no pre-
| established context usually wastes everyone's time.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Also known as: consensus driven decision making
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Meetings should be about consensus. Not hashing things out.
| Senior folk have experience, and that reduces options to a few.
| Pre-meeting helps narrow that down further.
|
| So at the meeting, only hitches to the (expected) plan are
| expected. Not building a plan from scratch. Its more like a
| standup than a bull session.
| kvark wrote:
| So this behavior has a name... I'm sick of this nemawashi thing
| used by people as an instrument (in the context of cross-company
| working groups).
|
| It's not about building consensus together, it's about sneaking
| your "consensus" into the group by the means of divide-and-
| conquire. It's very hard to build a solid alternative consensus
| (or a defense strategy) if all the opposing points have been
| voiced independently, and whatever one you can think of ends up
| with "oh, we discussed this with the other party, and it wouldn't
| work".
|
| Please respect your team and don't use nemawashi. If you are on
| the other side, learn to recognize it and call it out.
|
| TL;DR: nemawashi considered harmful
| benlwalker wrote:
| I think, as with anything, it can be used in bad faith. By
| taking advantage of the fact that many of the stakeholders are
| only able to give an idea some basic consideration due to time
| constraints, it's often possible to build consensus around an
| idea that isn't actually the best one. And by the time someone
| with a better idea comes around, the idea that has already
| built consensus can use that power to squash it.
|
| But that assumes the person using this process is acting in bad
| faith to begin with (they're not pursuing the best idea, but
| rather their idea). If this technique is used in good faith
| with an open mind, it's one of the most effective ways to deal
| with large organizations.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Whenever I think I'm making an arbitrary decision that isn't
| necessarily the obvious best one, I try to explicitly point
| that out to my coworkers. "I really like this idea over the
| others, but I am definitely biased for x, y, z reasons. Since
| I'll likely be the one doing the work, I'd obviously prefer
| to do it that way. Is that foolish in this case, or would
| folk generally be okay with it? I'd love it if somebody tried
| to change my mind."
|
| Half the time I end up getting mind changed, and the final
| result, while still arbitrary, is better than any of the
| original plans would have been.
| kvark wrote:
| Good faith is hard to define. If I genuinely think my
| proposal is the way to go, hence I use this technique to push
| it through, is this good faith? Or if I'm tired of
| discussions on a difficult topic and just want to move
| forward with anything, does this count as good faith?
|
| It would be nice to have a workflow for group discussions
| that is robust against the faith differences. Just like we
| have specific workflow on voting in politics, doing it
| independently and resisting some of the human crowd
| instincts.
| an0nn0na wrote:
| Thanks for calling this out. It's good to be able to spot this
| tactic and when you are on the wrong side of it. It's
| emotionally difficult for someone who cares about the craft to
| engage in good faith working groups, only to realize that no
| one takes you seriously and that their actions are diversionary
| and performative while the decisions get made elsewhere.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Is this not kind of intuitive to people?
|
| If you rock up and go, "we're doing this big thing tomorrow and
| oops sorry we didn't mention it before" of course you're going to
| encounter more push back.
|
| On the other hand, if you get people on your team before doing
| something then they will trust you and possibly even become
| advocates!
| hn_asker wrote:
| Yes, this is what backlog grooming and sprint planning are for.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| This is politics! Politics is quite literally the development
| of consensus (whether it's corporate politics, national
| politics, etc.). Without consensus (agreement, buy-in), large-
| scale things do not get done. Politicking - which includes
| relationship building, framing, vision setting, leadership,
| debate and empathy, among many other things - is not
| necessarily intuitive. It is a skill like any other.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I think there's negative connotations about "politics" that
| people are implying within the context of corporate work
| environments. Specifically: arbitrary beurocracy, fragile
| personalities, back-channel communication, ego stroking,
| chest thumping and back-stabbing.
|
| From a pure textbook definition of politics, yeah there's
| politics everywhere, and folk need to learn how to interact
| with coworkers in a healthy, productive manner. For folk
| going into engineering, I really like competitive student
| projects as a way to learn those skills.
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