[HN Gopher] CEO Shadow Program
___________________________________________________________________
CEO Shadow Program
Author : romanzubenko
Score : 378 points
Date : 2022-08-12 23:29 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Pretty much how Jamie Dimon and Andy Jassy got their starts.
| targetinglewood wrote:
| Does gitlab have any hidden pages on the handbook? That is
| accessible to select few?
| sytse wrote:
| Yes, there is an internal handbook for things that can't be
| public. Also see our confidentiality level classification
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/confidential...
| targetinglewood wrote:
| This is awesome! I love the way you have done this. Plus
| amazingly transparent.
| jzig wrote:
| nabakin wrote:
| I don't get why people are downvoting you either so here's an
| upvote to counteract
| jzig wrote:
| Thanks buddy. I didn't even say much. It's very weird.
| dang wrote:
| > Edit: if you are going to downvote, at least don't be a
| coward and provide feedback
|
| I know downvotes can be frustrating, but please don't give in
| to the temptation to add things like that last bit. It's
| against the site guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because, as
| they say, it never does any good and makes for boring reading.
| It also just attracts more downvotes.
| jzig wrote:
| Agreed. Thank you, just frustrating. I will remove "coward"
| ;)
| skissane wrote:
| Have you ever thought about a rule, that you can only
| downvote a comment if it has at least one reply (by anybody,
| not necessarily the downvoter)? That would discourage the
| demoralising situation where someone gets downvoted but is
| left guessing why.
|
| Of course, there will be some comments which do not merit a
| reply (non-substantive contributions or blatant trolling) -
| but, those comments should be flagged anyway. Maybe count
| flags as downvotes (if they aren't already), so you could
| still downvote reply-less comments by flagging them.
| jzig wrote:
| That's a great idea! Or something like it.
| dang wrote:
| The downvoted commenter would still have no way to tell
| whether the downvote was related to the reply, since those
| would most often be coming from different users.
| pvg wrote:
| _That would discourage the demoralising situation where
| someone gets downvoted but is left guessing why._
|
| It encourages replying to bad comments which is already a
| bigger problem than the sting of an unexpounded-upon
| downvote. 'No receipts required for downvotes' makes HN
| better.
| jzig wrote:
| Strongly disagree. Maybe most people don't receive
| feedback. But I believe there is at least a minority that
| does and can be influenced by feedback. Similar to US
| politics.
|
| Edit: Notice how I upvoted you rather than downvoted out
| of disagreement
| tptacek wrote:
| He doesn't notice that, because votes at the margin are
| random, and 4 times out of 5 people complaining about
| voting can just wait and whatever's bothering them will
| be rectified organically.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| do you ever pause and wonder why that number is of so
| importance? I noticed my eyes were constantly zooming up and to
| the right to read the number and after unpacking this I have
| since removed it from view using a firefox plugin.
|
| Downvote me all you want, it won't silence my thoughts.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| For reference for anyone that wants to do this, you can use
| uBlock Matrix or whatever it's called now to block individual
| elements on certain websites.
| jzig wrote:
| I don't care so much about the upper right total (at least
| not that I have now achieved everything there is to be had by
| it). But I do sometimes notice individual comments when
| active in the discourse.
| jdmarble wrote:
| I was surprised by the volume of the handbook material that
| applies to the role of CEO shadow. To me it implied a high level
| of formality and expectation of rigid adherence. Then I found
| this:
|
| > CEO shadows label the handbook MRs they create with the ceo-
| shadow label. It's a point of competition between CEO shadows to
| try to best the previous shadows' number of merge requests.
|
| I am no longer surprised by the length of this section of the
| handbook.
| lbotos wrote:
| As a shadow, you would contribute anywhere, not just on the CEO
| Shadow process.
|
| I see them often on slack updating various random pages:
|
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...
| ben_jones wrote:
| We talk about leading by example but this is actual leadership by
| example.
| monkpit wrote:
| This is so cringey. Instructions on how/where/when to pet the
| cat.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| It's a small part of the document. What's wrong with a little
| levity? Not everything has to be super serious all the time,
| even for a corporation.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Gitlab sums up the problems with GIT and the culture around GIT.
| Do things as complicated as possible. Gitlab mainly solves all
| the problems it created.
|
| I think this role is good though. We have similar staff that been
| included in all the things and they got up to speed fast.
| nickhalfasleep wrote:
| I keep thinking for fiduciary responsibility, CEO's and
| executives should wear a chest mounted camera like police. For
| shareholder value.
| [deleted]
| theboonies wrote:
| This is the plot of the book "The Circle" but it was more
| expansive than just for CEOs
| [deleted]
| drc500free wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to spend about 18 months as staff
| assistant to my CEO, including access to their email and
| basically all meetings. This was a PE-backed roll-up that was in
| the midst of acquiring several smaller companies, and then
| pursuing an exit.
|
| The experience really opened my eyes about the requirements for
| the job. The amount of code-switching required to communicate
| well with ownership, the other C-levels, employees, customers,
| and potential acquirers could make my head swim. The breadth and
| depth of technical, financial, and human expertise necessary to
| verify all the parts of the business and smell out where issues
| might be hiding. All of that before even getting to (in this
| case) integrating several businesses into a whole, identifying
| up-and-coming leaders, and keeping the employees happy; let alone
| actually having a strategy, getting buy-in, and implementing it.
| And then spending most evenings networking with the elite class
| that you need to know to have access to capital. You can never
| have a bad day. Ever.
|
| This was for an org that was comfortably under 1000 employees,
| all located in the US, where none of the VPs were the kind of
| political operators you get in meatier companies.
|
| I walked away thinking that there can't be even 100k people in
| the country with the ability to do even a non-laughable job as
| the CEO of a 500ish employee company. Not even do a good job,
| just do a job that doesn't look like one of those 80s child-
| parent-bodyswap movies where the kid tries to work in an office.
|
| I still think CEO pay is out of control, but I understand better
| why boards end up paying what they do. Any weakness in any of
| these skills is an existential threat, and you don't know for
| sure what will hit you this year.
| mhb wrote:
| Competent Elites
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
| geysersam wrote:
| I'm sure it's an incredibly difficult job. Interesting it's
| still such a common way to run organizations. Sounds like it'd
| be better, more scalable, cheaper, safer etc. to not depend on
| a single person with extremely unusual skills for the company
| to function.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, in a way you're simply describing the job of the C
| Suite minus the CEO -- the CFO, CTO, CSO, and so on.
|
| But each of the C Suite members can't spend all their time
| staying up-to-date and coordinated on everything each other
| is doing, and they'll also often disagree.
|
| So you need somebody to manage the C Suite, understand and
| integrate and make decisions... and that's the CEO.
|
| At the end of the day, _somebody_ has to be in charge, or
| else it 's either a) anarchy or b) incredibly inefficient as
| too much time is taken up in NxN communication and lengthy
| group debating and decision-making.
|
| And somebody who's capable of managing every C Suite member
| effectively, whose areas span the entire company... that's
| going to be an inherently fiendishly difficult and complex
| job.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even just co-CEO organizations have usually been a disaster.
| Companies can and do delegate decision-making--even to the
| point of having relatively autonomous divisions. This can
| work reasonably well. It can also mean that the CEO is mostly
| involved in financial engineering (GE, private equity much of
| the time) or you end with warring fiefdoms competing with
| each other (Ballmer-era Microsoft).
|
| Large companies can accomplish things that smaller companies
| cannot but keeping the ship reasonably on course is a really
| hard organizational problem. When I was an analyst and spent
| a fair bit of time with senior execs at tech companies, I
| often saw how much fragmentation and lack of coordination
| there was among different groups. But my wonder wasn't that
| this existed but that the companies were able to function at
| all.
| refurb wrote:
| Yup, I had a similar experience and what CEOs spend their time
| doing was vastly different than what I expected.
|
| - Their calendar is often broken up into 15 minute meetings
|
| - Lots of external meetings because a big part of the job is
| "being the face of the company"
|
| - The 15 minute meetings are often just a final "sign off" on
| some important decision; CEO bring the company-level
| perspective and can highlight key issues identified by the
| board
|
| - What a department might spend 3 months working on, the CEO
| often has to understand and make a decision on in 10 min (see
| prior HN post "how to communicate to executives")
|
| - What people presenting to the CEO thought was important was
| often very different than what CEO thought was important (e.g.
| team thought product launch price was critical while CEO was
| worried about a $500M supplier contract that was in the final
| stages of negotiation and if this product launch could be
| leveraged to close the deal and save the company millions)
|
| - The political side was very important; HN likes to think raw
| intellectual horsepower matters, but ability to communicate and
| "get people on your side" is at least 50% of a CEOs job; your
| idea might be brilliant but if you can't convince the sales
| team of it, your idea is worthless
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of individual contributors probably don't appreciate
| just how massively scheduled the days of CEOs and other
| senior executives are. Want an hour to work something in
| private? It's going to have to be on a calendar. Traveling?
| Your meals are probably be mostly scheduled with customers,
| etc.
|
| Many CEOs are, of course, very well compensated. But, whether
| or not you think it's extraordinarily _difficult_ , it's
| certainly very demanding in terms of time and schedule.
| refurb wrote:
| In terms of quality, I mean, how many people have bad
| bosses who can't even manage a team of 5? In my experience,
| it's not always easy to find qualified people for those
| roles.
|
| Now imagine some large company and I'm not that shocked
| that the pool of people who can effectively lead large
| (>10,000 employee) organizations is relatively small. It's
| basically a small subset of those who can lead small
| organizations.
|
| And not to say unqualified people don't end up in those
| roles, they do. But generally I'd argue the qualifications
| of a CEO are likely as scarce as say the qualifications of
| a neurosurgeon or some other hyper-specialized technical
| role.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > but ability to communicate and "get people on your side" is
| at least 50% of a CEOs job;
|
| It's gotta be 50% of every job. Heck, even on open source
| projects, you need to be lucid and explain what you are
| doing.
|
| Look no further than for example, the ANTS project, which has
| done some very cool work in the plan9 space but hasn't always
| gotten a good reception due to the author being somewhere
| between Terry A. Davis and a normal programmer. And it's in
| the communication that's key.
| refurb wrote:
| Very true, but instead of trying to sell your idea to a
| dozen team mates who understand the technical side, try and
| sell it to a 10,000 person company of sales, finance,
| marketing, plus board of directors and shareholders.
|
| And many of these aren't people who will shy away from
| telling you "no, if you do that I'll just undermine your
| idea so my idea prevails".
| bjacobt wrote:
| > prior HN post "how to communicate to executives"
|
| Can you share a link?
| john_cogs wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409842
| [deleted]
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > but I understand better why boards end up paying what they
| do.
|
| maybe simple supply and demand?
| mbesto wrote:
| Super interesting insight and generally agree with the gist of
| what you are saying.
|
| > Any weakness in any of these skills is an existential threat,
| and you don't know for sure what will hit you this year.
|
| Hard disagree with this conclusion. I regularly work with
| businesses from 100~1000 employees and at a certain scale
| (number of employees might not be a great proxy), the engine of
| the company simply takes over - good or bad CEO.
|
| There are great CEOs that can do ALL of the things you mention,
| but I've also sat in board meetings with some pretty terrible
| CEOs of $100M revenue businesses. To the point where I would
| seriously question how the company still was operating, but
| alas, it chugged along.
|
| It's actually incredible to me how many businesses that do have
| poor leadership that continually survive. Once you've built a
| brand, a reputation, a network of clients and a somewhat steady
| book of business, it's surprisingly hard for most businesses to
| fail.
|
| Note - tech companies on a VC track are a bit of an exception
| to this, but thats usually because they are spending more than
| they earn, so they literally strangle themselves. It's
| important to remember in the grand scheme the number of VC
| backed companies is greatly dwarfed by the number of businesses
| that exist.
| drc500free wrote:
| I love this comment. It gets to a fundamental question of
| what the role is for, what the value is, and what investors
| think they are paying for when they hire one.
|
| In my experience the CEO does three things uniquely that
| other roles don't:
|
| 1. They are the ultimate authority in tradeoffs between
| internal interests; 2. they are the interface between
| ownership and the company; and 3. they are the driver of
| strategic change.
|
| When the whole company is aligned and rolling downhill with
| product-market fit around a single offering, those functions
| aren't as necessary. It just works. When you start branching
| out, you need a final referee that can determine the exchange
| rate between the desires of internal kingdoms.
|
| But it's the second and third functions that IMO drive the
| executive compensation bubble. Our economy is kind of
| hourglass-shaped, with an economy of wealthy asset owners
| barely joined to an economy of consumers. The thing that is
| supposed to tie everything together is that the value of the
| assets owned in one of the bulbs is tied to DCFs of the money
| circulating in the other bulb. The CEO is at the narrow
| opening between the bulbs, mediating between the investors in
| the equity-class-relationships economy and the actual
| operating business in the actual-humans-buying-things
| economy.
|
| There has always been a "strategic" layer that insists upon
| its own inevitability, the BCG/Bain mindset that says that
| things can't just run on autopilot and someone needs to be
| looking Towards The Future. For any given company there's
| going to be someone out there who has an investment thesis
| for how that company could make more money with some changes,
| using whatever that decade's version of the Cash
| Cows/Dogs/Stars matrix is.
|
| What's different (IMO) is the massive amount of inflation we
| had only amongst the asset owners, that hasn't until recently
| been matched by inflation in consumer sectors. Valuations
| have gone up simply because there is so much money to invest,
| and investors have been given basically two options: keep
| your money in cash because equity is over-valued, or believe
| someone with a thesis of how a company with a NPV of $300M
| can actually be worth $1B with a few changes. The CEO's job
| is to prevent the uninflated DCF from fully decoupling from
| the inflated company valuation.
|
| So we get all sorts of businesses that are doing fine for
| what they are, but not doing fine enough to justify their new
| valuation. At a macro level it's driven by QE2 and other Fed
| schemes, but for this one particular company it's an
| intriguing and reasonable idea. Now the investors put the CEO
| to work implementing the thesis that will will justify the
| valuation premium. I think that's the driver behind a lot of
| the exec comp and the flailing about.
| aynsof wrote:
| I've had experiences of senior executives joining
| organisations and completely ruining them in 1-2 years.
|
| One exec in particular:
|
| - Made power grabs for other execs' areas, forcing those
| execs out to other organisations.
|
| - Continually shifted goal posts for key technical staff. In
| the words of one of these people, this was the primary cause
| of their mental breakdown.
|
| - Filled positions with his own cohort of sycophants and yes-
| men from previous organisations.
|
| - Defunded major projects, turning them from promising
| potential businesses into graveyards.
|
| After just a couple of years, the organisation was a shell of
| its former self.
| hakre wrote:
| Sounds like this was the job. And also well executed, 1-2
| years is relatively short for that.
| geysersam wrote:
| Lol imagine having the job of ruining a business as ceo.
| Waking up every morning, pondering your next destructive
| act over coffe. What would you do?
| teekert wrote:
| Punish people for taking responsibility?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If he brought all his old buddies from Pune, India to join
| him, I think I worked for him too.
| lupire wrote:
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly a well-established company can probably already
| tick along reasonably well with a so-so CEO who isn't
| actively bad in some way. After all, it's not like the wheels
| come off the bus if the CEO takes a vacation.
| remus wrote:
| > It's actually incredible to me how many businesses that do
| have poor leadership that continually survive. Once you've
| built a brand, a reputation, a network of clients and a
| somewhat steady book of business, it's surprisingly hard for
| most businesses to fail.
|
| I suspect this is the case when there are competent people at
| other levels in the org. It seems like the rest of the
| company is often aware when leadership is bad and each push
| back against poor decisions in their own little way to try
| and keep their parts of the business running smoothly.
| sawyna wrote:
| This actually happens at all levels of organisation.
| Incompetent people trying to lead the teams often shifts
| the burden to individuals.
|
| P.S: I'm one of those individuals.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > weakness in any of these skills is an existential threat
|
| Feigned/false strength might be much more disastrous.
|
| I can think of a few household name companies whose CEO was
| widely lauded during the time, but might have fared better had
| a tree trunk was there instead.
| jdkee wrote:
| Jack Welch comes to mind.
|
| "The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote
| in 2017, "Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role
| model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at
| G.E. -- that with strict discipline, you could successfully
| manage any business as long as your market share was first or
| second -- has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the
| United States."
|
| The financial crisis of 2008 delivered a blow to G.E.'s
| fortunes. In the years before the crisis, the company had
| built sprawling lending operations that helped drive its
| growth. But the finance businesses became a crippling
| liability when, during the crisis, credit markets froze and
| borrowers struggled to pay back their loans.
|
| G.E., like many large banks, tapped emergency government
| loans to help it get through the upheaval. In the years
| following the crisis, G.E. sold off most of its lending
| businesses, but other problems emerged, some of which were in
| its large power unit.
|
| G.E.'s stock price now trades roughly 80 percent below the
| high it hit in 2000. The company has significantly lower
| revenue than it did that year. Last year, G.E. reported a
| loss of $5.4 billion."
|
| See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/business/jack-welch-
| died....
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a number of CEOs--Mark Hurd at HP is another--who
| seemed for a time to really be delivering, especially prior
| to predecessors. But it turned out to be mostly about
| selling off the seed corn and otherwise doing financial
| engineering than streamlining and preparing the business
| for the long haul.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Short termisms that spreads through the traditional
| businesses are now causing them to die off.
|
| Whether it's rank and yank, diversification into the
| hottest financial markets, throwing away manufacturing
| because those weren't making a lot of money, killing of R&D
| because they are a cost center. You'll see so many
| "capable" CEOs who could handle the day to day gracefully
| but manage like this, and lead the companies to their doom.
|
| It's not about appearances.
| CPLX wrote:
| Worth noticing that in Jack Welch's case it's now a known
| fact that he was actively falsifying information about the
| company's financial performance.
| jbellis wrote:
| Completely agree. I've had about as much visibility as possible
| into the job of tech startup CEO from zero to 500+ employees,
| across two successful CEO transitions, and it's a very, very
| demanding role. Very few people have the skill and the
| experience to do it successfully, and they can make or break
| the company.
|
| (Corollary: I also have a ton of respect for technical people
| who become successful CEOs, like Jay Kreps, Peter Zaitsev,
| Aaron Skonnard. I have a high opinion of my own abilities and I
| don't think I could do it.)
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| I think you're right about the number of people who could
| effectively do those things. I think you're missing a key skill
| that a CEO can have that can make them effective if they're
| lacking in one or two key areas _if_ the company is big enough:
| delegation.
|
| I'm a generalist and have some leadership skills (nothing like
| what would be needed to CEO a company of a thousand employees,
| but I could do a decent job with a dozen or two), and one of
| the first things I do in team situations is figure out who in
| the group is good at things I am weakest in and whether or not
| I can trust their judgement/work ethic/etc. For example, if I'm
| working on/helping to manage a tech project, it's probably not
| a good use of my time to do get into the technical weeds even
| though I can do so, because that is something that a good,
| trustworthy CTO can do for me, and it's easier to find someone
| with technical acumen whose judgement I trust than to find
| someone with communication acumen whose judgment I trust.
|
| Team and bench-building is a key component to managing big
| companies well, particularly given part of reducing risk is
| reducing single points of failure, including making the company
| overly reliant on one person to function.
|
| This is also why somebody's network/reputation is a big deal -
| it signals what 'bench' they might have available if you choose
| them as a leader.
|
| So while it's very true few people can solo lead, there are a
| decent amount of people with ~80% of the skills needed _and_ a
| network that can cover the 20%, so it 's not completely dire.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I'm constantly in awe of Gitlab's radical transparency approach.
| I have no idea if this is actually a good idea (surely every
| competitor of Gitlab has a huge amount of assymetrical
| information about Gitlab that Gitlab does not have in return) -
| but I am fascinated by it and truly grateful for them for daring
| to go out on a limb and do this experiment. My fingers are
| crossed that this brings them amazing success as I wish all
| companies worked this way.
| swyx wrote:
| well, if you drown your competitors with more information per
| day than they can consume per day, do they really have any
| information :)
| vasco wrote:
| If you're sprinting in a race, the fact that the others can see
| how you run makes no difference. Most people worry too much
| about looking to the side, and if the others are looking at
| you, rather than with the running speed. Gitlab seems to be
| focused on running.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I've come across so many cases where information wasn't
| properly shared within a company (much because information was
| only disseminated on a need-to-know basis or some vague fear of
| leaking information), and that hurt the company in some way or
| another. Usually useless work done that needed rework, employee
| frustration, decisions not being made because of missing
| information.
|
| I could well imagine that avoiding this one pitfall raises
| productivity enough to make up for any potential advantage that
| competitors have.
| stonlyb wrote:
| CEO shadow as a service would be a great startup.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Who is the customer? Why would CEOs sign up? How to prevent
| abuse (glucose guardian seeking)?
| urthor wrote:
| GitLab is a company I've always felt hasn't quite found product
| market fit.
|
| However, its "open source internal practices" model is the gold
| plated standard for a 21st Business.
|
| If you're any kind of manager of anything, do this.
|
| See: http://blog.idonethis.com/managers-write/ for more.
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| As a recent publicly traded company, I would read their annual
| report[1] as Gitlab describes their product fit well, even
| stating their product "is available to any company, regardless
| of the size, scope, and complexity" and their CEO saying in
| their earnings release[1] they "are seeing continued strong
| momentum for customers adopting our DevOps platform, as revenue
| increased 69% year-over-year"
|
| [1] https://last10k.com/sec-filings/gtlb
| urthor wrote:
| Oh, my view is given the size of the opportunity they are
| underachieving.
|
| In terms of the actually forming a business product market
| fit, they definitely have.
|
| However, they're seen as a cut price second supplier to
| GitHub Enterprise + Atlassian. Not an ideal situation.
|
| In terms of "maybe we should become more user friendly
| instead of going all in on enterprise features," not so much.
| And that's _important_.
| tasuki wrote:
| > However, they're seen as a cut price second supplier to
| GitHub Enterprise + Atlassian.
|
| Citation needed? Perhaps you see them that way, I don't...
|
| Atlassian is seen as a true nightmare.
| nextos wrote:
| > However, its "open source internal practices" model is the
| gold plated standard for a 21st Business.
|
| I hope some small national or regional government takes the
| lead and also adopts similar openness practices, whenever
| possible.
| geysersam wrote:
| Yes that would be fantastic.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Wouldn't we need to see it done, at a company that _has_ found
| product market fit, before we can decide that it is clearly
| "the gold plated standard for a 21st (century) business"?
| lmeyerov wrote:
| They are fast follow / undercutting by bundling ideas innovated
| by GitHub and CI/CD etc co's and boost marketing via OSS. Fuel
| rapid sprawling dev by offshoring and VC. It's a financial
| innovation, not tech. New tech may appear as a side-effect of
| ^^^^.
|
| It's pretty darn cynical bc market fit is pre-established. Must
| be frustrating for folks coming from the technical innovation
| side of their market.
| tibbar wrote:
| It's surprising to me that a CEO can allow all of their meetings
| to be shadowed by a (relatively low-level) employee -- surely
| there must be highly confidential information, performance
| feedback, sensitive legal matters, etc that can only be attended
| by specific executives?
| sheerun wrote:
| I guess your life is over, legally speaking, after you take the
| position
| sytse wrote:
| It is about 80% of my meetings that they can join, some are no
| shadows.
|
| And in quarter of the meetings they do join they are asked to
| leave towards the end so that there can be a short closed
| session.
|
| We also have extra confidentiality restrictions for the
| shadows.
| swyx wrote:
| you are one of my heroes, but i just have to say i cannot
| imagine how you aren't absolutely _exhausted_ after having to
| be so transparent 24 /7 for like a decade. i'm a pretty
| transparent guy, but having to have my meetings streamed on
| youtube and someone shadowing me 80% of the time seeing me at
| my worst, i can't imagine. hats off but also i would like
| your secret to eternal youth, internal consistency and
| unlimited energy.
| perfmode wrote:
| in my experience, it's not the transparency that is
| exhausting. it's the hiding of things.
|
| when i approach life with truthfulness and transparency, i
| feel light as a feather.
| mgfist wrote:
| It's not the hiding/transparency aspect, it's the
| scrutiny. I wouldn't like having people just sit there
| judging my every move.
| vasco wrote:
| Their judging of you happens in your head, not theirs.
| mattwad wrote:
| As CEO, you get to decide if you have to hide things or
| not. And if you do, everyone underneath you will also
| hide things, and then everyone has to come to you for
| anything. I call this "hub and spoke" leadership. It's
| extremely tiring, but some people love the attention, or
| just don't know any better, or maybe just want the job
| security.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _" hub and spoke" leadership_
|
| I will have to remember that phrase. I once worked for
| someone like that. It was awful.
|
| * The leader was the sole and absolute authority on
| everything the team did.
|
| * If a team member came up with an idea of our own, we
| were not allowed to write a ticket to open it up for
| discussion. We were expected to have a _private_
| discussion with the leader first, and they would decide
| if it was worth pursuing.
|
| * Heaven help you if you ever wrote a balanced comment
| citing the pros and cons of any particular approach to a
| problem. The leader would quote you out of context in a
| team meeting, reading aloud only the parts of your
| comment that supported their position.
|
| * Secrecy was important. For major new projects, the
| leader would convene a private working group with hand-
| picked team members who would follow their lead,
| excluding anyone with more experience who might have
| insights or even disagreement on the development
| approach.
|
| * If you ever made a mistake that caused problems in
| production, you would get called out for it in front of
| the team. If the leader made a mistake and you tried to
| respectfully help shore up the problem, they would dig in
| their heels and argue against your fix. The leader does
| not make mistakes.
|
| * In that latter case where the leader made a mistake
| that caused problems in production, they would never
| acknowledge it or apologize for it. Apologies are a sign
| of weakness.
|
| Never going back there again.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| Did we work at the same organization?
|
| My previous boss did exactly that plus a bunch more
| psychopathic stuff like:
|
| - Praise someone in public before they leave, then block
| them from coming back - Promote the incompetent to
| further solidify their power position - Lie to customer,
| stakeholders, etc. Everything must present a good
| "image". The work or actual results were barely relevant
| - Have scapegoat at every level in case of failure. -
| Refuse to join status update meetings so that he could
| claim not to be involved with things that weren't going
| well and sacrifice a scapegoat
| brainzap wrote:
| This makes me think of the book Working backwards, shadow of
| bezos
| sheerun wrote:
| George Orwell's 1984 vibes
|
| Edit: So you're downvoting this comment? Some feedback? How is it
| not surveillance with extra steps?
| noirbot wrote:
| Because the point of it decidedly isn't sinister? Having
| someone watching you and learning from you shouldn't be creepy,
| it should be exactly what people in a high-pressure job should
| be trying to foster.
|
| Just because someone is watching you doesn't mean they're
| surveilling you. When I mentor coworkers by letting them watch
| me do a task, it's not chilling me or oppressing me.
|
| People are downing you because you're making a rather absurd
| conflation between "they aren't working in total secrecy" and
| "now it's an oppressive police state"
| throwthere wrote:
| I think you're missing what this program actually is in a big
| way, but it's hard to know where you're coming from exactly
| because that post is pretty terse--
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_shadow
| marcinzm wrote:
| >So you're downvoting this comment?
|
| You made a snide comment without enough content in it to fuel a
| decent discussion. If you want a discussion then it's on you to
| initiate it properly.
| m00n wrote:
| If you are interested in this kind of role, it is usually called
| Executive Assistant in the corporate world. Had the fortune to
| support my CEO and attend e.g. all board meetings (because I did
| the minutes). This is at a >10$ bn revenue established company.
| Very rewarding, but experience depends very much on the style of
| your boss.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I think the reverse would be equally as informative if not more.
| (Which has been the subject of a tv show)
|
| CEO shadows an employee all day. Get a feel for how the peons
| live.
|
| Understand why it is so hard to get things done in the company.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| A CEO taking a day out of their schedule to shadow "an
| employee" makes for viewer counts on TV, but it can't give them
| any insight they can personally action on, and it can't give
| them the several different perspectives they need to properly
| action on without doing _lots_ of shadowing of various
| employees in various positions: so this is why there's a
| management and feedback structure. If there are things the CEO
| should learn, they should be able to rely on their executive
| team to bring that up.
|
| If you're not a CEO, you can learn a lot from shadowing your
| CEO, without impacting the viability of your company. But if
| you're the CEO, all you can learn is "how something seems to
| work at a level you are not supposed to have control over."
| Unless your company has an incredibly flat org, without a board
| that the CEO is accountable to, and where the CEO is actually
| makes direct hiring, product, etc decisions, realistically
| having the CEO shadow employees means that they're not being
| the CEO. The larger the org, the more people they'd need to
| shadow to get meaningful insight, and the more the board will
| go "we need you to be the CEO of this multi-hundred-million
| dollar company, so if you want insights: you should already
| have a team in place for that."
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| It has been the case with most companies I have consulted
| with, as a management consultant that this is rarely the
| case.
|
| The CEO and his favorite executives and VPs salesmen live
| inside their own little bubble with little real knowledge of
| the problems and challenges that the company is facing
| internally.
|
| This is why I made good money.
|
| It is easy to see this when management sends out decrees on
| how to improve performance or throughput .. etc that does not
| contain any mention of, nor solutions to the problems that is
| keeping the performance / throughput /(or whatever fitting
| metrics are for the company)
|
| I might have a bias in that I have mostly worked with
| companies that hired us to help them. It is possible that the
| pool I have been exposed to is different than the majority
| but I do not think so.
|
| I know of companies that are run in a more sane way but they
| are usually smaller, at least in number of employees and thus
| leadership is more aware of how things work.
| quartz wrote:
| The "What it's like" posts are really cool. Especially enjoyed
| this account[1] from a content writer who shadowed the CEO during
| a half-day meeting with a major investor and got to see the
| impact of their work in a context they never expected:
|
| > Next we met with Vinod, Bruce, and investment partners Brian
| Byun and Sven Strohband for a company brief and brainstorm
| session. Sid began with an update on the financials, and detailed
| our massive growth and expansion both in terms of people and
| product. There were no slides presented. Instead, Sid used our
| website as a visual aid. Nearly every question or discussion
| point was first addressed with a Google search to pull up the
| appropriate GitLab web page to reference.
|
| [...]
|
| > I've been working at GitLab for two and a half years as a
| content writer on our marketing team and at times have been
| extremely frustrated with our marketing website--the content on
| it, how it's organized, what we're presenting, etc. It doesn't
| look or operate in a way I'm familiar with so my instinct was to
| not trust it. But nothing we do at GitLab is "normal," and
| witnessing our CEO use the website as a single source of public
| truth to inform our investors is just one example of what it
| means to be a transparent company.
|
| [1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/04/08/khosla-ventures-
| git...
| Swizec wrote:
| And if the CEO needed to use Google to find every page, maybe
| the navigation needs some work
| reidjs wrote:
| Disagree, it makes sense for the nav on gitlab to be
| code/repo focused. It makes sense for these articles to be
| more easily found through Google IMO
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I don't think that necessarily follows.
| aasasd wrote:
| If you know what you want, text search is much faster than
| leafing through a list of items. It's what every touch-typist
| discovers in the first months with their newfound power,
| especially if they have decent software available--like
| Spotlight or Alfred.
| atonse wrote:
| Whenever spotlight's index gets corrupted (about once every
| couple weeks), my productivity probably goes down 30%.
|
| Because I find it faster to switch by just spotlight + app
| name, in many cases even faster than command + tab, because
| it's kind of an O(1) switch, vs an O(n) switch to cycle
| through many open apps.
| aasasd wrote:
| A more important factor in the app-switching use-case,
| imo, is that Spotlight or Alfred require just static
| unchanging input, so you can bash it out without second
| thought, and usually without looking at the displayed
| result (after learning the necessary text to trigger the
| app selection). When cmd-tabbing, you have to look at
| which app is under the highlight 'cursor' and where is
| the one you want, then position the cursor on the desired
| app--this all keeps visual recognition engaged and
| requires conscious choice at many steps.
|
| This is also the reason why both mouse-clicking and
| touch-tapping are slow compared to keyboard typing: you
| likewise need to look at what is where on the screen,
| then aim with the mouse or the thumb, instead of just
| jerking the fingers to keys that are in muscle memory.
| atonse wrote:
| You're absolutely right about not even having to look.
| When my spotlight index gets corrupted and I command
| space, type "safari" or "tower" or "iterm" and then hit
| enter without thinking, it doesn't find the app but then
| opens safari with a google search for whatever app. It is
| always jarring cuz I'm not paying attention to what
| matched, and instead it opens safari instead of the app
| window I expected.
|
| To make things worse, I tried switching back to Alfred
| but it it seems to just piggyback off spotlight for
| finding apps.
|
| Otherwise I would switch back to Alfred if it just had a
| "my index doesn't get corrupted like spotlight" as a
| feature.
| aasasd wrote:
| IIRC in Alfred particular folders can be added, to be
| searched for apps. If this works separately from main
| search, it might help--you'll probably need to create a
| folder and dump symlinks to the apps in there.
|
| Otherwise, apps can conceivably be added as keywords or
| something. Rather annoying since it won't pick up new
| apps automatically, but oh well. Myself, I prefer Alfred
| anyway since Spotlight doesn't do too much aside from
| launching apps, converting currencies and occasionally
| looking for files (the latter is not so useful when there
| are thousands of third-party code files on the machine,
| and Finder is not my IDE anyway).
|
| P.S. Also btw, at least with Alfred, I don't need even a
| full word for most apps--just two to four letters: i.e.
| 'fi' is Firefox, and 'do' is Double Commander. Alfred
| quickly ranks results higher if they were invoked
| previously for the same input, so the desired app pops up
| in the results just after a few letters, and this
| behavior sticks around without perturbation from re-
| indexing. This also means that at first it pays to enter
| those couple letters and select the app with the arrow
| keys, since Alfred distinguishes between inputs of
| various length--i.e. might learn for 'firefox' but not
| for 'fi'.
| spiddy wrote:
| From the investor's perspective starting from Google is a lot
| better, and I bet this was done deliberately. It provides him
| the insight he doesn't need the CEO to find the articles.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Be index-able should be a motto of every website on the net.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Hm not precisely. Users are not seeking to navigate to them
| sequentially. But they are seeking to find what they want, a
| morsel at a time.
| evansmidwa wrote:
| so true
| yalogin wrote:
| This is great! I would love to shadow the CEO like this and
| understand what they do and how they do it. However I fail to
| understand how this gives the CEO nay feedback about their own
| job as mentioned in the post.
| basileafe wrote:
| Couple of years ago the idea of CEO Shadowing was mentioned on
| Kernal. https://kern.al/idea/shadow-a-ceo-lessons-courses-
| programs
|
| Since then no one picked it up, not sure why. But I'm interested
| and want to make a real living application for CEO and who want
| to be CEO Shadow. Is it worth it?
| skatanski wrote:
| I'd recommend anyone who finds this interesting to give a listen
| to Matt Mullenweg's Distributed podcast episode with gitlab's
| CEO. An abridged version of various different initiatives, which
| make gitlab different:
| https://distributed.blog/2021/05/20/episode-27-leading-with-...
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| Looks like a great program that will yield insight, especially
| being able to travel with the CEO. Anyone aware of other
| companies doing this or something similar?
| prteja11 wrote:
| Amazon.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| > Anyone aware of other companies doing this or something
| similar?
|
| Samsung Austin Semiconductor used to have an "eat lunch with
| the president" program where groups of four or five from each
| department would each lunch with the president at least once a
| year. Obviously nowhere near as immersive as this program, but
| still having the opportunity to ask several off-the-cuff
| questions like, "Why did Samsung choose Austin?" definitely
| added value for me.
| georgyo wrote:
| I have been at several lunches with executives type events at
| different places. The groups are small so it makes more
| casual back and forth questions much easier, which is useful.
|
| From my perspective, the real value of the lunches was
| strictly building rapport across the company. At some places
| high level employees (doesn't necessarily have to be
| management) often feel unapproachable and they feel more
| abstract concepts than people. Having lunch with them re-
| enforces they are also people, people you may even get along
| with.
|
| Other companies I've been at only do Q&A sessions with large
| groups of employees, and this is still useful, but the format
| doesn't help the culture. The answers you get are often the
| company line, and you cannot dig deeper. The people answering
| the questions are still abstract identities that appear to
| tout that company line, with no real personality.
| hackernewds wrote:
| I know of a small-ish company where the exec was seeking to
| have lunch info sessions. But only with the women's group. It
| was shady to say the least
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| That does sound shady, but just to play DA here, there is a
| strong push in some areas for women to be "included" in
| leadership. It _could_ be for that reason.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I habe been to several of similar lunches and every time it
| quickly turned into a long monologue by the executive.
| swyx wrote:
| andy jassy was famously a Bezos shadow before they landed on
| the idea for AWS (no idea how true this is just repeating what
| i heard)
| chaboud wrote:
| We have TA's at Amazon for L12 (Jassy) and L11 (SVP).
|
| However, being a TA also involves active advising and
| commenting first on document reviews (a lot of executive
| communication at Amazon is via written documents and review
| meetings that begin with a doc read). Many of our executives
| were former TA's.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Stupid question here, what does TA spell out?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I believe it means _Technical Assistant_.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Thanks! That was my first guess, but a quick search for
| _amazon technical assistant_ wasn't very helpful.
| ranman wrote:
| FWIW there's a lot of politics in this process. Existing
| talent in SEA is far more likely to get selected for these
| roles rather than offering global top talent a 2 year stint
| in SEA to see if it fits. The people that receive these TA
| positions are purposefully selected and groomed for future
| exec roles. The program does have a good track record of
| success but they made a few bad bets as well.
| nixgeek wrote:
| Elaine isn't based in Seattle and got picked to be the UC
| TA (and she isn't the only TA in the last few years to not
| be Seattle) so you're not wrong, but "far more likely"
| seems a stretch.
| voydik wrote:
| Looks like this was from March 2021
| jononomo wrote:
| My first impression of this idea is that it is fantastic, and
| maybe the US government should pass a regulation requiring this
| of all companies.
| sharmin123 wrote:
| basileafe wrote:
| I really like this idea and want to see if it is possible to come
| t live as an online service where CEO finds the right CEO shadow.
|
| Couple of years ago the idea of CEO Shadowing was mentioned on
| Kernal. https://kern.al/idea/shadow-a-ceo-lessons-courses-
| programs Since then no one picked it up, not sure why. But I'm
| interested and want to make a real living application for CEO and
| who want to be CEO Shadow.
|
| Is it worth it?
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