[HN Gopher] What Do We Owe Our Teams?
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What Do We Owe Our Teams?
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-07-02 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mironov.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mironov.com)
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree with all of this, but it's really depressing to me that
| even somebody like Mironov just takes this as a given:
| "Companies, especially executive teams, can generate a lot of
| chaos: 'small' interrupts, sudden shifts, cross-functional blame,
| budget jousting".
|
| Like, I get that the toddler executive is the predominant worker
| experience under managerialist capitalism. And I get that is the
| consequence of entrenched ideologies and power structures. But I
| would like for more people to start leavening their "here is how
| you survive in a terrible system" advice with at least an
| occasional suggestion that this how things are in this historical
| moment. And ideally some ideas on how to start tilting things
| toward some saner future.
| richmironov1 wrote:
| My experience is that some execs, some of the time, can reduce
| the chaos and give teams the running room/decision authority
| needed to do great work. (I've both failed and succeeded at
| it.) Part of this post was to encourage my peers to step up.
| Depending on ICs to push cultural change _up_ through the org
| isn 't IMHO a reasonable strategy.
| wpietri wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. Yes, I agree that some execs can
| occasionally do better. I have even sometimes been that
| executive. I also agree with this as stated:
|
| > Depending on ICs to push cultural change _up_ through the
| org isn 't IMHO a reasonable strategy.
|
| But I think the world is bigger than that. My point is there
| are more possibilities than "hope for an exec who works in
| contradiction to the dominant paradigm" and "expect lone ICs
| to change things". Just as an example, those weren't big
| factors in getting us the 40-hour work week.
| richmironov1 wrote:
| thanks for reposting... - Rich
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| You owe me a paycheck. That's it.
| wpietri wrote:
| That can be it for you. But that's demonstrably not true for
| everybody.
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| zinodaur wrote:
| Man, I wish we had this guy leading our org. The higher up the
| chain you go in my company, the more grasping and inhuman the
| people become.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| My question is whether he would actually be that way in a
| company. As there are substantial incentives against this.
|
| I am not a manager, but at an IC level, why would I prevent my
| manager from doing something stupid that wrecks the project?
| Better to just go along with it and make sure I have someone to
| blame as it is a lot easier.
| caminante wrote:
| This author's advice is predicated on tremendous job security
| and self-awareness, which don't come easy.
|
| Take the 1:1 advice with direct reports:
|
| _> First, an honest closed-door conversation about her real
| concerns or goals. Is she unhappy with the company?
| Frustrated by my management style?..._
|
| Admirable intent, but there are so many written and un-
| written rules working against this.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| The incentives against speaking up to people up the chain are
| very strong, and sometimes management does illogical things
| for logical reasons.
|
| I worked on a POC of a vendor product that, frankly, sucked.
| No one wanted to buy the thing but few would speak up to say
| so. No one could understand where we would use it or why. UI
| was 20 years out of date, it used an esoteric OOP scripting
| language instead of SQL, it was slower than our existing
| system, and no one had ever heard of the thing before.
| Basically it repeated all the existing complaints about our
| current stack, worse.
|
| CTO was IN LOVE and it was clearly not a POC but a matter of
| finding an excuse to buy it & tech lead to own it.
|
| My teammate and I were two of the few tech guys DGAF enough
| to clearly communicated it was a bad product, to which the
| response was that it was getting bought and they really
| wanted us to run the project, lol. No thanks. We both left
| within a year.
|
| So why? After I left I found out. The CTO was rather on the
| outs with our major business side stakeholder, and that guy
| had told him his buddy had this product we should really
| check out. So CTO saw it as - let me score some quick points
| by doing what the stakeholder says, and just minimize the
| blast radius of wherever we integrate it.
| caminante wrote:
| _> sometimes management does illogical things for logical
| reasons._
|
| It's the principal-agent problem.
|
| Sounds like you sniffed out some blatant nepotism. And the
| CTO was feeling vulnerable/replaceable whereas you had
| leverage.
|
| Hopefully, it worked out for you, but most people have
| motivating factors that point to shutting up! :-)
| wpietri wrote:
| I think this depends a lot on how sensitive to incentives one
| is.
|
| Obviously, there are plenty of people who are. But there are
| also plenty who aren't.
|
| I think at root we have twin problems. The very common
| ideology that personal financial incentives are the beginning
| and end of things. And the way people who hold that ideology
| (and those values) occupy so many positions of power.
|
| But these are not universals throughout space and time.
| Paradigms change. And they change in part when we decide we
| want something else in the world.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Usually making your manager look good to their manager is a
| way of increasing the influence and reach of your team. Being
| part of a team with influence and reach typically gets you
| more reward and better work.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My last company was started by two non technical brothers who
| got funding and hired a consulting company to build an MVP,
| find product market fit and got a few customers (B2B).
|
| After that, they hired a CTO to bring talent in house. The
| CTO wanted to be cloud native and microservice based to sell
| access to the services to large health care providers for
| their own websites and mobile apps.
|
| I was one of his first hires. I barely knew how to spell
| cloud then. But as we talked during the interview, he liked
| my ideas and hired me and said I seem like a smart guy and
| could figure it out.
|
| We were once talking and he was going out of his way to be
| nice and give me feedback. He was in his late 40s. I finally
| just stopped him and told him that I'm a big boy, we have a
| lot to do and I don't need a "shit sandwhich". If I'm doing
| something wrong or have a stupid idea, just give it to me
| straight.
|
| After about six months, we trusted each other to be honest. I
| could tell him "you know in your heart of hearts that won't
| work and that's a dumb idea". He would tell me, "why are you
| coming to me with this." He said I had admin access to our
| AWS account, the phone number to all of our vendors, etc and
| to come up with a design, a POC a budget and let him know.
|
| I was an IC.
|
| We got a lot of things done and buy the time Covid hit in
| April 2020, our site traffic increased by 400% and our
| scaling didn't miss a step.
|
| The company exited at 10x revenue 8 months after I left based
| partially on the impression their "agility" and scalability
| based on my designs working with my CTO.
|
| It's amazing what happens when you have a manager who can
| check his ego at the door and listen to their reports.
|
| But that was at a 60 person company. I don't say shit at
| BigTech. Like Kosh said "once the avalanche has started, the
| pebbles don't have a vote."
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I was literally just thinking about Rich Mironov and how I hadn't
| read anything by him recently (I admit I hadn't had my eyes out
| for it). Great to see new and relevant-as-ever content, his tips
| helped me a lot on the journey of switching from engineering to
| product management.
| richmironov1 wrote:
| not to be self-promoting, but new posts are always at
| mironov.com
| johannessjoberg wrote:
| Heads-up, I tried subscribing for your newsletter but it
| failed for an unknown reason.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I have had two managers that stood out among many others due to
| one main quality (they had many other qualities): they were
| umbrellas, not funnels. They basically tended to the team like a
| gardener, handling each plant differently in a way that makes it
| most productive, shielded them from external pressures (though
| not to the point of mollycoddling), exposed the good work done
| via publicity and once all that was necessary was done, stepped
| back to let the plants be fruitful instead of blocking the growth
| by micromanaging.
|
| It is a very rare quality and few can pull it off - if you find a
| boss like that, consider yourself lucky.
| zgluck wrote:
| About 15 years ago I found myself in charge of
| building/growing/running a team in response to a product that
| was growing insanely. That growth went on for a decade.
|
| I did the gardener thing, handling "each plant" differently,
| shielded them from external pressures, adjusted the level of
| management individually and let those that demonstrated the
| capability to make sane design decisions solve large problem
| areas on their own, etc.
|
| I did not expose good work via publicity. I did express it to
| them personally and via salary increases etc. It was kind of
| made clear via osmosis in the team, but not outside of it.
| There was never that kind of culture in that company. It was
| also in egalitarian northern Europe.
|
| Your comment made me think about whether I should have
| attempted to introduce it or not. I think I really should have.
| Sudden big regret.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| My best managers have been umbrellas, but with transparency. If
| something was happening in the company we would be informed,
| but could rest assured that our manager would do their best to
| work the issue for us while keeping us informed.
|
| The worst managers I've had were umbrellas, but to such an
| extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from
| the rest of the company. We didn't know what was going on in
| the company and had no chance to integrate that content into
| our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that
| the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they
| could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any
| possibility of us competing with them among management. The
| last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise
| us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right
| up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like
| everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like
| the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us
| isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full
| control).
|
| Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts
| on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| What I want from my employer is them to fund a better build
| system.
| rolandog wrote:
| I've long felt that working under people who practice this
| management style make people feel like they can hang their hats,
| stop focusing on the rat race, and really strive for bringing
| creative solutions to their teams.
|
| It may sound silly, but I think of it like being a hobbit that
| really wants to stay at Bombadil's place. Eventually, you know
| you'll need to leave... but the respite from merciless
| backstabbing that happens elsewhere feels humanizing.
| mud_dauber wrote:
| Great advice as long as you're in a medium-to-large org.
| Otherwise you might as well start shopping for a new job.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| In a large org, this guy would work with people so high up the
| food chain that the average IC will never see or talk to. As
| one of the latter, I've seen a lot of meaningless initiatives
| spawned by executive-level advice or "coaching" like this.
| Here's an "Employees are our top priority" poster or "Pick a
| $20 gift certificate to your favorite national chain store from
| the company we hired to run the program."
|
| Despair.com nailed it: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying
| are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy
| job. The kind robots will be doing soon."[0]
|
| [0]
| https://despair.com/collections/posters/products/motivation?...
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(page generated 2023-07-02 23:00 UTC)