[HN Gopher] Teams are becoming smaller
___________________________________________________________________
Teams are becoming smaller
Author : pmoriarty
Score : 83 points
Date : 2023-02-20 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Don't get pushed to the brink.
|
| Just be clear to 'leadership' that things take time or money.
| Clearly communicate much longer timelines, and don't stress
| yourself out too much.
| zucked wrote:
| This. Leadership may very well ignore or overlook your
| perspective, but make sure that your concerns are documented as
| risks or assumptions somewhere. Businesses almost always CYA,
| you should, too.
| jarjoura wrote:
| This is something I learned late in my career. Leadership has
| to constantly justify their priorities and expenses. The goals
| they set and expect from their teams is also built from the
| feedback they receive from their teams.
|
| What can they realistically build given the resources they have
| and teams in the time they need to deliver something? It's not
| magic and too often people fear if they don't commit to
| aggressive deadlines that they will be punished for it. Yes,
| this is a tug-of-war, leadership pushes to maximize and the
| teams push back to minimize until there is an agreement.
|
| However, the important take-away, be open and honest about
| risks, and blockers. Give early and often reports to upper
| management about the state of things. As long as you're giving
| visibility to things you help leadership plan and realign on
| expectations so they can make course corrections if needed.
|
| Too often I see things fall apart on the ground and another
| engineer tries to pick up the slack doing extra work.
| Leadership is never informed and so believe things are going as
| expected. They just see the work getting done, even if the team
| on the ground feels overworked and understaffed and so yea,
| it's not healthy.
| hgsgm wrote:
| That only works when you have an alternative job offer, or you
| are confident your boss is bluffing.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Or you have savings.
|
| Getting trapped in stressful bullshit that takes years off
| your life is an unseen price of many purchases; beware
| people.
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| This is much harder to do when you 1) have dependents, 2) are
| bad at interviewing, 3) don't have time to interview, 4) don't
| have in-demand skills and/or 5) are not financially stable.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > and/or 5) are not financially stable
|
| which many people - even senior developers - aren't because
| housing and other CoL expenses eat up wages everywhere, and
| companies exploit that as they wish.
|
| Additionally, at least in the US and parts of the EU, the
| complications of legalized slavery aka H1B / other work visas
| make protesting against bad conditions much harder.
| adra wrote:
| Don't talk about legalized slavery in regards to these
| programs. They have the right to walk away at any time, and
| that's their choice. Spend some time to read about kafala
| if you want to learn about modern slavery.
| grugagag wrote:
| They have the right but in reality can't find another job
| within the short timespan and after which they become
| illegal immigrants and have to go back home. Sure, it's
| not impossible but on average it's very hard to break the
| shackles of the H1B visas. Often these people put up high
| stakes to obtain these jobs and going back leaves them in
| debt. It's a system designed to exploit
| yeahbutiguess wrote:
| Both can be true. Just because one is worse does not make
| the other ok.
|
| A worse situation does not trivialize a bad situation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Oh I'm aware of that. The thing is, modern forms of
| slavery are varied in forms. Some are based on laws but
| still criticized as inhumane (e.g. US prison labor,
| kafala in Arab nations), some are based on laws but
| widely accepted (H1B, conscription in militaries), and
| some are completely illegal (e.g. human trafficking for
| sexual and agricultural exploitation).
| hgsgm wrote:
| Being sent back home is absolutely not slavery.
|
| Not everything bad related to work is slavery.
| jonfw wrote:
| For any high cost of living area where a senior developer
| works, there are plenty of non-developer workers doing the
| same 9-5s in the same office buildings on a fraction of
| their salary.
|
| Maybe try a longer commute or a roommate before whining
| about your cost of living
|
| W.r.t. immigration- you're certainly right. I would be
| terrified to rock the boat if my employer could put me at
| risk of deportation
| moneywoes wrote:
| Given teams are shrinking, wages are decreasing etc is it better
| to be a business owner in this macro environment
| overgard wrote:
| I think layoffs tend to always look good to management and
| investors because of the pareto principle (80% of the work being
| done by 20% of the people). You certainly get a short term cost
| saving. The downside though is that other 20% is not necessarily
| stuff you want your best performers working on, and there's
| always going to be another 20%.
| asdff wrote:
| Its always nice how management uses easy-to-remember
| mathematical principles without considering the shape of their
| data or the proportion of variance explained by these factors,
| and if that principle would even be applicable.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| And, unfortunately, most companies are _terrible_ at
| identifying that useful 20%.
| yeahbutiguess wrote:
| Workers, maybe it's time we started collectively pushing back?
|
| I don't care if it's unions, or work stoppages, or guilds, or
| industrial action, or what.
|
| But they've been squeezing workers too hard.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think what's needed are more along the lines of worker
| protections on an government level. It should be significantly
| more difficult to drop 10% of your staff because of market
| performance, or there should be enforced consequences which are
| expensive. Several months severance, executive pay clawbacks,
| stock and options payouts, those sorts of things.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I question if the ruling class has broken the system enough
| that this doesn't work...
|
| Old days: People stop working. Company stops making money.
| (A|B) Company hires pinkertons to kill off the opposition |
| Company concedes and gives better working conditions.
|
| Today?: People stop working. Companies beg government to give
| them money because they're too big to fail. Individuals lose
| their livelihood/homes/next meal long before company has a deep
| financial impact.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Today: people automate out many low level processes and
| offshore the rest to India / Mexico City / PI
| flappyeagle wrote:
| There was a large tech company I know of which had a practice of
| laying people off a giving everyone else a raise. I don't know if
| it helped any but it seemed quirky and interesting at the time
| petsfed wrote:
| That lays bare the economics of the layoff in a very easy-to-
| understand way, provided the raises don't eat up all the
| savings from the layoffs.
|
| Using nice round numbers, the following would need to be true
| for the layoffs to make sense: You have a team of 20, each
| making 100k/year, but a lot of downtime for all of them. At
| your current clip, you can only afford 1.5M/year total for your
| team. You have enough work for maybe 13 at a reasonable pace
| for your wages, or 10 at a higher pace. So you could let 7 go
| and risk morale problems with the unchanged wages, or you let
| 10 go, give 30% raises to match the raised demands, and your
| payroll is still less than what you can afford. If all of that
| was explained, alongside copious expressions of ownership on
| the part of the people responsible for not driving enough
| business in, I would gladly work again for the people laying me
| off.
| asdff wrote:
| That's like a general fixing a lack of rations by taking on
| heavy losses in the next battle. I'm sure morale was high at
| that org.
| mindvirus wrote:
| I went through some pretty bizarre layoffs.
|
| A huge chunk of the ICs got laid off - so managers that had teams
| of 8-10 now had teams of 3-6. The product org was hit, but
| proportionally not as heavily. No projects got descoped.
|
| The end result was that the engineers were basically in meetings
| throughout the day every day, as they'd each suddenly have twice
| as many projects on their plate. Then because things inevitably
| were moving more slowly, more meetings got added to track
| progress more closely. This was earlier in the pandemic, so a
| bunch of engineers just left for greener pastures.
|
| And as you can imagine, the whole thing ground to a halt.
|
| The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for leadership -
| whether product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank
| priorities. It's hard to blame them, the past decade has been one
| of abundance. There were always more resources around the next
| corner, and so having to deal with less wasn't a skill that
| anyone had developed.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _> The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for
| leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no..._
|
| I really respected my manager at my last job for frequently
| saying no, for good reasons that he articulated so well that
| the other managers who he said no to actually agreed and
| accepted his decisions.
|
| That's a rare quality in managers that I haven't seen before or
| since. Most are pushovers who usually agree to do almost
| anything asked of them, no matter how ridiculous and
| unrealistic.
| FrontierPsych wrote:
| >I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether
| product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank
| priorities. I
|
| I can't speak for other people, but personally, I always speak
| my mind. I don't care what level the person above me is. I
| don't do it in a dickish way, but I will say my say. I always
| feel that is my duty, to let people above me know what the
| situation on the ground is, because they just don't know. And
| usually, in a new job, I'll start out small and work my way up
| to bigger things as I get to know the system and
| services/products better. And I've never had any kind of weird
| shit happen to me, like have someone blow up that I contradict
| them in the slightest way. Especially in knowledge work. Every
| boss I've ever had has been good with my feedback and has taken
| it very seriously. Very often they change their decisions with
| my input. Often I'll say, "No, can't be done, nope" and explain
| why, unless they know something I don't know which they always
| let me know if that is the case.
|
| It's all of our jobs to tell our bosses if something can't be
| done and be very clear about it, or to have them prioritize
| work, and also give feedback on that as well.
|
| If you have a boss that is a dick and won't listen - time to
| move jobs.
|
| Resources are finite, even during flush times, companies go out
| of business due to squandering of resources.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You need clever middle management to navigate that. The
| solution is to play the fiefdoms against each other.
|
| One way I navigated a team through this is that we just halted
| work on critical stuff and we doubled down as rockstars for
| politically important critical stuff. As each other team
| complained, we let the people up the chain kill each other, and
| eventually got relief from the crazy.
| hypothesis wrote:
| Spectacular! Can we get a show out of this short story? Name
| it DevCrowd or smth.
| pc86 wrote:
| Having a line manager or director who can play the VPs and
| SVPs against each other is invaluable for an IC on a critical
| team, and honestly a pretty good indicator of who the next
| director or VP might be.
| brettermeier wrote:
| VP, SVP, IC?
| artimaeis wrote:
| Vice President, Senior Vice President, Individual
| Contributor.
| cheschire wrote:
| There's a whole book about this sort of thing called The
| Phoenix Project that you may be interested in reading. A lot of
| what you're saying falls under "the first way" which covers
| systems thinking and the flow of work.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| I enjoyed the book, but after looking at the situation from a
| querying theory pov, I became skeptical of some of the
| authors claims
| hgsgm wrote:
| Kind of a non- statement. The book is fiction, and an
| extended advertisement for the author's management
| consulting business. Its "claims" are barely hypotheses.
| episteme wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| treeman79 wrote:
| Learning to say no to management was one of the hardest things
| for me in my career. It has also been the one of the best
| things.
| esel2k wrote:
| And how did you actually do it? Any good advice/books on
| this.
|
| I know my management has clear ideas what they want so even
| if I am told - it's my job to figure it out they say what
| needs to happen (not accepting a No).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Boundaries are crucial, but one must derisk their downside to
| effectively enforce them.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| People are rewarded highly at the top with the assumption they
| are valuable contributing intelligent leaders who can do the
| job better than the people getting paid poorly. They have boats
| and vacation homes and generational wealth, I find it VERY easy
| to blame them for their poor leadership. We should blame them
| much more often, they don't face any blame because there aren't
| enough people above them to enforce it. Shareholders aren't
| close enough to structure incentives in a way that require
| leaders to face any blame. You want to be rich and say it's
| because you earned it? Then earn it.
| eshack94 wrote:
| I agree with the core sentiment expressed here, though I
| think your statements come off as absolutist. I think there
| are plenty of people in management (though maybe not the
| majority) that don't come from generational wealth. I think
| the boats + vacation homes + generational wealth statements
| you brought up are irrelevant to the main point you're
| making, which is that leaders should be held accountable
| (which I fully agree with).
|
| Take care not to let cynicism, spite, or resentment
| overshadow a strong core argument.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes, that is true. The other thing that is true is complete
| lack of accountability for managers.
|
| They can lack social skill, be rude, be incompetent, slow
| the project to and make it ineffective. And many still keep
| failing upwards.
|
| There are good managers, it is not they don't exist. But
| bad ones are way more frequent then should be. People
| completely unsuitable for leadership keep staying managers
| despite destruction they cause.
| andrepd wrote:
| Of course, the more obvious answer is that they _don 't_ earn
| what they earn because of performance, but because of broken
| market incentives.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you in principle but I
| still have no idea how this comment relates whatsoever to the
| parent comment.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that layoffs
| are hitting non-management harder than management.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Teams being shrunk to smaller sizes implies that
| layoffs are hitting non-management harder than
| management.
|
| It implies that layoffs are hitting non-supervisory non-
| managers more than line supervisors; but "management"
| includes non-supervisory specialist managers, and middle
| and upper management above the line level, all of which
| could be hit more than line supervisors and those they
| supervise. (Ideally, not enough to really make a
| difference in this effect - but an overload of non-line,
| particularly middle and specialist, management is not an
| uncommon organizational disease.)
| simon_o wrote:
| What kind of dystopian bullshit is this?
|
| Occurrences of phrases like "better pay"/"higher wages"/"more
| benefits" in this BBC article: 0
|
| Creative descriptions for intentionally burning people out: I
| stopped counting, but "maximise their potential" is certainly my
| favorite euphemism.
| 0xfeba wrote:
| I've had 2 previous companies do something similar. Team of 5 or
| so develop a product. It's realeased and they move / layoff all
| but one or two devs including me. I get overburdened; ask for a
| raise. The first company that did this, the boss literally
| scoffed at me. I was gone within a couple months.
|
| The second company recognized my value and gave me a very
| generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got
| an offer I couldn't refuse.
| hgsgm wrote:
| > The second company recognized my value and gave me a very
| generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I
| got an offer I couldn't refuse.
|
| So they only recognized a portion of your value.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Or the mafia went after them
| 0xfeba wrote:
| Considering it was government contracting, it was as good as
| it was going to get. The offer I got was from a near-tech
| company.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the
| standard of living. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to
| afford a decent place to live, a vacation, and then putting away
| a few thousand in savings. This idea that we live in this
| meritocracy and you get paid for the value you create is
| completely bunk. Were all basically accepting a livable wage like
| cattle being farmed for value by rich people.
| hgsgm wrote:
| This comment shows an extremely privileged perspective.
|
| Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a
| [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then
| putting away a few thousand in savings].
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| This is a complete fallacy too. We are working harder now
| than people did before the industrial revolution.
| eouwt wrote:
| 1) [citation needed]
|
| 2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying
| in our 30s and have things like running water?
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Productivity has gone way up in the last few decades, and
| people can afford fewer and fewer children. It used to be
| common to afford 8 children on one income. Wake up dude
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Having fewer children should be celebrated not looked
| upon as a failure. The world doesn't need everyone having
| six kids anymore.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I'm not arguing for having that many children, just that
| its a basic way to benchmark how expensive being alive
| is. Clearly these people having so many children werent
| just randomly taking on impoverished hardship. Things
| were tight, but they had reasonable economic security
| with so many children. This points to a dramatic drop in
| wages in the last 50 years
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| No one is saying we need 8, but many aren't having 1.
|
| And the people who are crapping out kids may not be the
| ones you'd like to be carrying the torch forward into the
| next century.
|
| Who are you building this future for if not for your
| children and those of your friends and family?
|
| Tell me that the Quiverfull types who are having 10 kids
| are the ones who will appreciate your new app and I'll
| tell you you're full of crap.
| developerburner wrote:
| Hey now. I was one of eight myself, am now a highly
| educated (Washington & Lee, Oxford University) and
| successful (team lead) software developer, and fully
| intend on having a large family myself. Don't make
| insulting generalizations like that.
| gruez wrote:
| >Productivity has gone way up in the last few years, and
| people can afford fewer and fewer children.
|
| That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend
| since the industrial revolution.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Isn't it "only the poorest can afford children"
| situation?
| gruez wrote:
| >The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the
| standard of living.
|
| this is basically guaranteed to be the case because in urban
| areas, the biggest expense is housing, which is inherently a
| positional good. Paying more wouldn't help, because everyone
| would just bid up the prices on housing and negate any nominal
| increase.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Right, but its like no matter the field, the standard
| deviation between the pay is pretty low. Sales, programming,
| project management, manager, account manager. For the average
| outcome, they all make +-50k with a 150k median. The wages
| are not being set by economic value except on the top end for
| programming/executive/higher management. Its being set by the
| employer based on a base standard of living.
|
| The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth
| created
| gruez wrote:
| >The wages are not being set by economic value except on
| the top end for programming/executive/higher management.
| Its being set by the employer based on a base standard of
| living.
|
| The fallacy here is thinking that prices was ever or should
| be set by "economic value". It plays a role, but only as an
| upper bound; you can't price something that's higher than
| the value it provides. Many goods/services (eg. food or
| healthcare) arguably provides infinite value to the
| purchaser, given that they're required for survival, but I
| doubt you'd come out to argue that we should reprice them
| according to their "economic value".
|
| >The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth
| created
|
| This feels like a tautology to me, because you're defining
| "excess wealth" as (economic value generated) -
| (wages/expenses paid), which is just a roundabout way of
| saying "profits".
| 8note wrote:
| That's one factoring. A different factoring is that the
| excess wealth is (economic value) - (expenses paid)
|
| And that there's a ratio of profit vs wages taken out of
| that. That ratio can be larger or smaller. If that ratio
| is 1, there is no wages, and if it's 0, there is no
| profit.
|
| The comment is that that ratio is too close to 1.
| gruez wrote:
| > That's one factoring. A different factoring is that the
| excess wealth is (economic value) - (expenses paid)
|
| That factoring wouldn't make sense in the context of the
| original comment, because it also claims that "The
| capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth
| created", which clearly isn't the case because we're not
| paying everyone $0 in wages.
| treis wrote:
| The standard of living rises with wages because we spend those
| wages on our standard of living. There's some segments like
| education and health care that are just broken vampires sucking
| up resources. In some places housing gets added to that list
| due to zoning. But for the most part people are getting better
| things for the same effort of working than they used to.
| kosmos1337 wrote:
| Is there really that much to standard of living after you
| exclude education, health care, and housing? What's left?
| Eating out and electronics?
| adra wrote:
| Pre-COVID my first management job was working for a company that
| was chronically understaffed and I ended up spending a good 20%
| of my time dealing just with hiring for the couple years I was
| there.
|
| Near the end, I could only dedicate about 5% of my time to dev
| and < 30% to support my largely junior team. The rest of it was
| wasted on bureaucratic processes that were a vampire of my time.
| In the end, I didn't think I could honestly protect the team
| through what was surely to be a painful slide into mediocrity, so
| opted out. I felt terrible leaving them to whatever came next,
| but once you realize you're unable to make positive change, it's
| time to go.
| 317070 wrote:
| What is "meteocracy"?
| [deleted]
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Post-impact constitutional crisis
| yeahbutiguess wrote:
| A misspelling of mediocrity, I'd assume?
| adra wrote:
| Autocorrect gone wrong
| rsynnott wrote:
| Rule by weather forecasters.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| By the weather gods themselves.
| potatoinexhaust wrote:
| Result of a meteocre spellchecker
| lucidguppy wrote:
| I wonder if XP helps through pair programming. Managers get to
| code and also get to mentor juniors at the same time.
| jonfw wrote:
| Mentorship down the chain of command sounds nice, but for
| most juniors that's just going to cause anxiety.
|
| The most impactful mentors I've had personally were senior
| developer / tech lead types. My managers were great, but it's
| just easier to have the "is this a stupid idea" conversation
| with somebody who doesn't sign your paycheck
| zx8080 wrote:
| Does this happen anywhere? I've never seen any manager
| personally mentoring juniors.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Definitely. I'm an engineering manager (admittedly at a
| startup) and I pair program with my team all of the time.
| justinclift wrote:
| Not sure about managers, but (more) senior technical staff
| and team leaders are supposed to mentor the less
| experienced technical staff.
|
| Whether or not it happens seems to depend on the team.
| Personally, I like teaching people new stuff so it would
| often fall to me, on the teams I worked in. ;)
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| Definitely. I'm a team lead (duties: mix of team
| management, project management, and some IC development),
| and my mentor is on the management team, and I mentor a
| junior dev. One of my prior mentors (as a junior dev back
| then) was the company founder/CEO twenty-five years senior
| to me.
|
| Of course, that founder was one of the originators of XP
| practice, and ran our company on those principles--pairing,
| fast feedback loops, and mentorship for all (he's since
| handed over the company to his #2 who he mentored for a
| decade, and who is continuing those practices).
| kradroy wrote:
| This was my experience at my last company, except compressed
| into 1 year.
|
| Once I joined I learned that 30% of my time would be dedicated
| to hiring. The company had a pooled hiring process, and I came
| to hate it. I spent several hours a week reading resumes,
| interviewing, reading interviewers' feedback, sitting in
| roundtables, strategizing with recruiters, and if all that went
| well, pitching candidates to the hiring committee. Then I would
| sit back, with no control over the comp, and watch the
| candidate choose another team, largely because my team wasn't a
| "sexy" team; very critical to business, but not sexy.
|
| In the handful of cases where my team was the only option, the
| candidates would turn down the offer due to "insufficient
| compensation". The company had a "no negotiation" stance on
| offers. So once the offer went out, that was that. In my first
| performance review my manager put "hiring" as an area of
| improvement. I felt this was a trap and would be used to let me
| go eventually, in spite of the fact my team grew from 3 to 10
| engineers from internal transfers and we were hitting all our
| deliverables.
|
| Between hiring and navigating the terribly siloed corporate
| structure to build cross-functional teams I had almost no time
| outside of 1:1s to spend with my own team. It was a really
| disappointing experience and I felt really bad when I left,
| because my team and stakeholders were all delightful and
| capable people. Like you, I felt I couldn't protect them and
| keep my mental health intact at the same time.
| strontian wrote:
| You seem like a great manager/employee - sad that this is the
| situation you faced at this company
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