[HN Gopher] Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tec...
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Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
Author : pseudolus
Score : 233 points
Date : 2023-07-10 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| cdavid wrote:
| Middle management (above first line manager) in large
| organizations is hard to do well. I think it is difficult to
| understand if you have never done it, and it is even difficult to
| articulate why. I find it much much harder than working as an
| engineer or Eng Mgr.
|
| Fundamentally, I think it is an incentive and systematic issue:
| what is expected of middle managers, and incentivized, requires
| almost complete dedication to managing up and laterally. People
| who spend time w/ their reports are the exceptions because there
| is close to 0 correlation with getting promoted. Caring about
| your report either require crazy number of hours, or ignoring
| what people above you will expect. The latter will ultimately
| affect their report.
|
| Many people in that line of work do the minimum ? Yes, I can
| believe this. But the odds are stacked against you. I used to
| joke "as a middle manager, doing above average work requires
| extraordinary dedication".
|
| 1. Lack of agency: once you are above first line management (EM),
| you actually have much less agency. As an EM, you can tweak
| processes, and improve things. You only are accountable to your
| manager, and maybe 2-3 other people. Once you are above that, the
| number of stakeholders explodes, and any perception of failure
| will get at you. You can't say no to many useless meetings
| because you have to be there. If you don't go, and something goes
| wrong, guess whose teams/projects will be slashed next time.
|
| 2. Corollary: spooky action at a distance. Once you're middle
| manager, you will get random people with random level of
| competence ask you things you don't even understand. I regularly
| encountered "You have not done X yet, and this is slowing down
| other teams", and that was the first time I heard of X. Everybody
| knows you can't do half of what you are asked, but you better not
| be perceived as not doing all of it.
|
| 3. Solitude: As an EM, you can foster your team. Above, you just
| have a bunch of individuals who very much don't work as a team.
| Very difficult to keep some cohesion.
|
| 4. You need to own shit you are not responsible for: You have to
| explain often nonsensical decisions you had no authority on, but
| you also cannot say "sorry guys, this is coming from above".
|
| 5. Outside of exceptions, doing a good job is completely
| unrelated to how you will be evaluated. There are many things you
| know in your heart will negatively impact your team that you
| absolutely have to do. The best middle managers are the ones who
| manage to balance the kafkaiesque and still maintain good
| environment in their report line. This requires an enormous
| amount of time that you can only do for so long, most burn out
| quickly.
|
| It is slightly over cynical, but I think avoiding what spakhm
| describers on his blog is impossible to escape above a certain
| size: https://www.spakhm.com/p/how-to-get-promoted
| CSMastermind wrote:
| As a middle manager I found that you traffic in clarity.
|
| Figuring out what ground truth is at the team level and
| effectively summarizing it to communicate up and sideways.
|
| Figuring out what's happening around the company and
| identifying any connections to what your teams are working on
| then communicating that up and down.
|
| Figuring out what's happening in the company at large then
| effectively communicating then identifying anyway your teams'
| work might be out of line with the directions things are
| moving.
|
| In other words ensuring alignment, doing that efficiently
| (don't waste people's time).
|
| That is something that is something that is totally in your
| control.
| avidiax wrote:
| What is the gestalt of middle management that makes things
| worse?
|
| It seems like there's a negative synergy that develops whenever
| a company grows large enough to need 2-3 layers of middle
| management.
|
| I expect that it has multiple causes, but several of them are
| various kinds of lack of accountability. Imbalances where risk
| of action or inaction rewards/punishes a manager individually,
| while the negative consequences socialize to the team or the
| company. Lack of accountability (both positive and negative) if
| something isn't changed. Lower rewards for positive synergy
| (i.e. cooperating with other teams) than for defecting (working
| on your own thing only).
| devjab wrote:
| Having spent a few decades in Enteprise digitalisation, both in
| the public and in the private sector I think this issue is sort
| of unsolvable. I'm not convinced it's fully down to managers, but
| this is obviously the anecdotal and non-tech organisation point
| of view, because they manage people. What I mean by this is that
| I've had excellent managers who didn't know half their staff
| wasn't doing anything remotely useful. That may sound off to you,
| but I think the culprit is that a lot of process and management
| people actually think what they are doing is creating value,
| despite it being a load of nonsense. I even sort of get why that
| is, because sometimes the business processes are actually helpful
| and other times they aren't, and it's really hard for non-
| business-value producers to tell the difference because of how
| the systems work.
|
| Say you bill clients by the hour and work this directly into your
| Atlassian ticket system all the way down to the developer level.
| You can do that, and you can even have a lot of business
| intelligence to show that you're doing great, meanwhile if you
| ask any actual developer off the record they are likely going to
| tell you that it's terrible. They will tell you things like how
| they game the systems instead of producing the best code. They'll
| tell you how the senior developers don't want to help the junior
| developers, because every minute they spend on non-billable tasks
| is a minute that will make them look worse on the performance
| matrix. Now something like that can work, and if can even involve
| a bunch of process/management people (as well as the BI people)
| who all feel what they do is useful and have data to show that it
| is, meanwhile the actual software development is an absolute shit
| show compared to what it could be if the processes didn't get in
| the way. Obviously the flip side is having too little
| process/management and then having people cruise along doing
| whatever they want. Though to be fair, in my anecdotal experience
| you still get more value from a developer department that does
| this than one that tracks issues by the hour.
|
| Anyway, I've never seen anyone come anywhere close to solving it.
| Personally I tend to try to work in the places that suck the
| least, and shift if the process part of development becomes too
| tedious for me. Exploiting that it's not so easy to find a senior
| developer. But I've honestly given up trying to impact the
| process/management side of things, and now just flee the ones I
| dislike.
| bena wrote:
| That's still a problem with management. The entire system is
| designed to incentivize this behavior. If your people's
| individual compensation is tied to their personal billable
| hours, your people will maximize for personable billable hours.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Fake work exists because of VC-driven hiring. After taking VC
| funding, usually the easiest way to show some results is via a
| hiring spree. However, usually the current product suite or
| customer base does not need such a large support staff. Then
| follows the fake work.
| notShabu wrote:
| I heard this theory once that one of the biggest jumps in
| cellular complexity was when cells started to use mitochondria
| for energy production. This created so much abundance that
| organisms could afford to diversify into all kinds of shapes and
| sizes and ways of life.
|
| Software similarly isn't like farming where the margins are so
| thin that processes become homogenized. Software companies
| traditionally have had so much "fat" that the structures built
| around this cashflow are arbitrary.
|
| Some build temples and monasteries, some create a monarchies or
| dictatorship, some are anarchist libertarian experiments, etc...
|
| What is common among them though is that the hierarchy revolves
| around _culture_ rather than pure meritocratic ability.
|
| E.g. if a foreigner goes to work in Japan, he/she might think
| that it's all fake work meant to keep fax machine companies alive
| but it's not "fake" when viewed from the perspective of keeping a
| culture alive. In any institution, there will always be founders
| and traditionalists who need the culture to stay alive to support
| their position. This "support" exists in the form of followers
| which make up the bulk of the org body.
|
| Engineering is an outlier because it's more mercenary, the skills
| are transferable so there isn't a need to compound loyalty and
| connections at one single place.
|
| That is... traditional companies are like a national army. Even
| in times of peace it is held together by nationalism or
| peacekeeping. Tech companies are like mercenary armies, they are
| only held together when there is Something to Do.
| braza wrote:
| I have been in such a position in a Tech Mid-Cap (400 million
| MAU, 11B market value) and it was personally the best job that I
| had in my life in terms of cushiness and low pressure; but
| retrospectively it has almost thrown me into the oblivion of
| technical obsolescence.
|
| Fast forward, most of the days were 1 hour and half meetings to
| decide things like where we would spend company money in the next
| team event or how we would consume the credits from GCP in
| endless PoCs, and I came to a point where I started to do pro
| bono work just to keep my skills up to date.
|
| My manager at that time wasn't technical at all, and he barely
| understood what we were doing. In more than 4 months of work, we
| had less than 2 hours of 1:1 conversations; and he was one of the
| most active people on the RSU channel to get clarifications about
| taxes and so on.
|
| After 4 months I saw that I was lacking some 'real work' and
| moved to another position in a less capitalized company, but with
| some technical problems to solve.
|
| The sad thing about it is that several folks that worked with me
| are now trapped in this company and inwards they know that if
| they go to the market it will be tough to find something so good
| on the personal level.
| falloutx wrote:
| This article itself represents fake work. Remember what keeps you
| employed, if we only did necessary things, none of us would be
| employed.
| manicennui wrote:
| Doesn't this point to a fundamental problem with our economic
| systems? It is only going to get worse over time as more jobs
| can be automated. I also don't think that most people would
| choose to do "work".
| moffkalast wrote:
| That is assuming anyone able to fire you actually knows the
| things you do are unnecessary.
| meristem wrote:
| TL; DR: the perception of "ghost work" can also appear when
| employees work in functions where failure doesn't immediately
| break the company. The work may have value, but the contributions
| support longer tails, look not needed. ------- I used to ask
| direct reports "how does what you are doing map to company
| strategies?" And if they could not do so we'd talk about what
| they were working on, how 'mapping' might work, and then decide
| if the work was worth it/ how to learn more about the company so
| their tactical was also strategic.
|
| This was significantly easier in roles the company publicly
| supported. For roles where our team failure would destabilize
| things in a longer timeline, it was extremely easy to not be able
| to directly map to success, or feel fungible within the company.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Why do we expect to have good managers when we promote based on
| technical competency rather than leadership ability? Sure, a
| certain basic level of technical competency is needed, but after
| that management and development require different skills.
| watwut wrote:
| I did not seen all that much promotions based on technical
| competency. We promote based on impressions of upper management
| that have zero to do with technical competency and zero to do
| with leadership ability.
|
| Also, pretty much all non technical lower level managers were
| disaster. And issue was not just their lack of tech knowledge
| in pure form, but their insecurity, inferiority complexes and
| what not everybody else had to deal with. And profound not
| understanding of culture around tech just lead to completely
| unnecessary misunderstanding.
|
| Lack of technical knowledge in the context of managing
| technical people imply that you will fail in social aspect too.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm finding many companies are learning that technical ability
| and leadership ability are entirely different functions.
|
| I consider myself highly technically competent, but if you
| asked me to lead a team, delegate, etc., I would crash and
| burn. I just don't have the interpersonal and communication
| skills to set expectations.
|
| Could I learn those skills? Oh, certainly. But why? The work
| doesn't interest me. The more I'd go up the management chain,
| the more I'd get disconnected from the technical work that I
| actually find interesting, and my day is spent in bullshit
| meetings where we'd rehash the same bullshit plans on a weekly
| basis.
| screye wrote:
| First, it's ego.
|
| Engineers are a deeply opinionated species that will not heed
| the advice of a man they deem to be inferior to them in
| technical ability. Technical competency based promotion is
| about managing hubris and egos.
|
| For the second, I have a hot-take: "All problems in tech are
| work estimation problems."
|
| And so too is who gets to be manager. Nothing annoys an
| engineer more than a manager who estimates arbitrary times to
| tasks. Similarly, nothing annoys a manager than being unable to
| establish accountability for work effectiveness of an employee.
| So non-technical managers set up metrics (LOC, Hours worked,
| tickets moved) for accountability. Average Metrics are bad and
| bad metrics are disastrous. Metrics are exploited by the
| politically savvy, set up micromanagement structures and
| discourage those who are actually well aligned with product
| success. A good engineer makes work-estimation easier, avoiding
| the need for some of these toxic structures.
| bensonperry wrote:
| agree, but agree with another reply that it doesn't even seem
| like technical competency is the skill used outside of
| potentially engineering. feels like optimizing for "managing
| up" (which is code for "making people above you happy" and
| doesn't necessarily correlate with delivering any type of
| value) is what these managers do. in other R&D roles (design,
| product) most managers i've met aren't actually gifted at
| executing in an IC context
| i_k_k wrote:
| Another problem is that much of the industry sees getting into
| management as a promotion.
|
| This is something that Microsoft tried, at least, to get right:
| pay/rank was mostly divorced from job function.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Facebook and Google also have parallel tracks up to very
| senior levels.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I mean yeah, theoretically. It's nonsense though. Just
| count the number of individual contributors vs managers at
| a director level and it quickly becomes apparent that one
| of the parallel tracks is much, much larger than the other.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Do we?
|
| I was under the impression that we promote based on who games
| the promotion system best.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's easy to over-focus on gaming the promotion system
| because that's the part that's under your control. If someone
| comes to ask me for advice on how to get promoted, I can't
| exactly say "try being smarter and delivering results
| faster", even though those factors have a lot more impact
| than micro-optimizing the promotion review committees.
| greatpostman wrote:
| The older I get the more appalled I am at what managers are
| bringing to the table versus senior engineers.
| wnolens wrote:
| Same. In my experience about 1 in 5 has been _some_ help to the
| team (the rest hinder or contribute neutrally), but even they
| have an easier /less stressful job and work far less hours and
| apply far less mental bandwidth to each task. I'm convinced
| becoming a manager should mean a pay cut.
| shitpostbot wrote:
| [dead]
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I appreciate a good manager, but not really middle managers. I
| moved to DevOps and I report directly to a VP and it is a game-
| changer compared to when I reported to a middle-manager in
| Support.
|
| However, the Principal (senior) Engineer I work with can be a
| bit of an angry ass sometimes and I am unsure he would make a
| good manager.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| As a senior engineer I don't really agree. I've had good and
| bad managers over time, and the presence of good managers has
| been key when I've had more success and satisfaction.
|
| For me, the good ones help me do the work that I am usually bad
| at or don't want to do: the nitty gritty of task
| prioritization, keeping track of the a bunch of the higher
| level details, parsing leadership's emanation for product
| direction, etc. That, and acting like a shield to deflect any
| badness that might come down from above.
|
| I like _contributing_ opinions and so on to all that, but I don
| 't want to be the person attending all those meetings and being
| the final arbiter -- at least not right now. So I'm very happy
| to have someone there doing that, so I can operate more at the
| technical level.
|
| I guess I'm a bit ADHD, but a lot of what managers do doesn't
| motivate me, sorry. So, yes, please to having someone fill
| those shoes. If they're good.
|
| But a bad manager, yes... a problem. Luckily it's a competitive
| job market, and my skills such as they are can be used
| elsewhere, with better management.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > what managers are bringing to the table
|
| What I noticed in my org, are the senior managers are the ones
| who get to talk to the business people and get to muddle the
| waters and do a lot of repetitive work.
|
| Sometimes things do not get done until a project manager or
| senior dev actually talks to the business person and gets the
| correct requirements out.
|
| I don't know why it is this way at my org, but the IT director
| does not want to talk to PMs, Devs, or Analysts. He would
| rather have a top level circle of senior managers who insulate
| him from the actual work.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > I don't know why it is this way at my org, but the IT
| director does not want to talk to PMs, Devs, or Analysts. He
| would rather have a top level circle of senior managers who
| insulate him from the actual work.
|
| To me this makes...sense. A general doesn't meet each
| individual field soldier, it's not feasible and doesn't
| scale.
|
| Not sure what kind of firms people on here work for, but most
| of my managers all the way up have 0 life at all. They're
| constantly working dealing with millions of little details
| where they have to make an instant decision. It honestly
| looks like hell.
| rs999gti wrote:
| It makes sense to me with 3/5 senior managers. They came
| from working IT backgrounds as developers, network admins,
| or SAP developers/senior admins.
|
| 2/5 of these senior managers have zero IT experience either
| in role or outside of this company. Yet they make very
| technical decisions, which either need to be corrected or
| clarified.
|
| Complaints to the director about this have fallen on deaf
| ears.
| cornercasechase wrote:
| Is there really a "debate" over "fake work", or is that just some
| made up term a clueless and unethical VC tweeted?
|
| There's been a hard push from capital to put pressure on labor.
| All these fantasy stories about "fake work", "people working two
| jobs"... are all just cover stories for capital and execs to ramp
| up the pressure and punitive actions. I'm sure BusinessInsider is
| more than happy to play along. While this article may look pro-
| labor in the surface, it's trying to legitimize concepts that are
| very much pro-capital.
| oneayy4 wrote:
| its definitely not the billionaires faults, its those damn
| greedy middle class americans
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his
| performance plan and string out his employment, he was told.
| Graham left Amazon soon after."
|
| Working as intended - make them quit rather than fire them.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Ultimately "fake work" is work disconnected from the bottom line
| or profit goals of the company, since this is capitalism and
| that's the ultimate measure and purpose of a corporation.
|
| It's not much of a surprise that Google, Meta, etc. are full of
| this kind of thing, because they have embarrassing quantities of
| ad revenue, and yet also a burning "need" to employ in areas
| almost entirely disconnected from ads (for now).
|
| I won't dispute that these companies can and should do these
| speculative or non-revenue-bound things. But you can see how they
| go off the rails very easily, and this is what ultimately ties
| back to the article's main point about lazy management.
|
| In the end responsibility, shared vision, and clear goals are
| key. And I'm not entirely convinced that those things "scale up"
| to the organization size and sheer insane revenue-firehose of
| FAANG type companies.
| threadweaver34 wrote:
| > In one viral TikTok video, Brit Levy, Meta's former diversity,
| equity, and inclusion policy analyst, said she had to "basically
| fight to find work"
|
| The only surprising thing here is that people who work in the DEI
| space have deluded themselves into thinking there's that much
| work to do.
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly. It is hilarious but true. A ton of bullshit jobs like
| DEI Analysts, AI Ethicists and so on, are essentially product
| of zero-interest rate phenomena. However, it has led to some
| really believing that they are carrying the weight of earth on
| their shoulders.
| diego_moita wrote:
| > But based on conversations with over 30 people involved in the
| tech industry, including current and former tech employees,
|
| I do accept the writer hypothesis that there are lazy managers
| but "30 people said so" as an evidence of anything is just very
| lazy.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| > We have a good leader, which makes all the difference.
|
| I think this is the trick right here. Our paycheck might come
| from such-and-such company, but really we work for the people in
| our management chain. I'm currently at Amazon, and I've been
| pretty lucky with having good leaders, but part of that is
| because I've had the luxury of being selective (my first director
| in my time at Amazon was someone I had worked with previously,
| and when I switched teams I joined to work with someone I knew).
| cs702 wrote:
| The real culprit is actually _make-busy work_ , the main use of
| human labor in _bullshit jobs_ :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job
|
| Producing new documents that get passed around in enterprises but
| which no human being reads may well be the most suitable
| application for LLMs.
|
| If you feel like you're drowning in corporate bullshit, I hate to
| tell you: It looks like it's going to get worse.
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| It's not just tech. It's everywhere. If pay X dollars to got to
| college/warehousing and there isn't a job at the other end then
| the Ponzi scheme falls over. I didn't know you could go to
| college and get a job planning pizza parties but at my last job
| there was someone who that was their only job.
| sokoloff wrote:
| https://archive.is/3MbI7 (the site blocks ad-blockers, so ad-
| blocker users might find this URL helpful)
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I have been getting this error from archive.is for two days
| now, I am unsure if this is on my end or what:
|
| > An error occurred during a connection to archive.is. Cannot
| communicate securely with peer: no common encryption
| algorithm(s).
|
| > Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP
| anonym29 wrote:
| try archive.today || archive.ph
| ohthatsnotright wrote:
| I get it too, in Firefox 114 on Linux.
| treis wrote:
| IMHO the real culprit is the monopolistic nature of the tech
| industry. Roughly, the companies are all mono/duopolies or trying
| to get there. It's all Golden Gooses and everyone is doing
| anything and everything they can to get/keep theirs.
|
| For companies like FAANGs it's no problem to waste 95 out of
| every 100 million they spend because that one team that hits on
| something might increase the market cap by half a billion. The
| scale is lower for smaller companies but the math is essentially
| the same.
|
| And once you accept waste as an acceptable cost of doing business
| it explodes. Because it's very hard to tell the difference
| between a reasonable idea that didn't work and one that never had
| any shot or was poorly executed.
| krickkrack wrote:
| [flagged]
| petermcneeley wrote:
| You can live your dream now
| https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
|
| Also note as you suggest the article in question does not
| appear on frontpage
| krickkrack wrote:
| _thumbs up_
|
| Also it does not appear on the front page _any longer_ (but
| that is where I saw it).
| eysquared wrote:
| I'm seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line
| management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience,
| I've seen a lot more "fake work" come from listless leadership
| that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to
| Product Managers that can't prioritize features and don't really
| understand what they're building or why. Ultimately this leads to
| engineers and members of the team working on things they don't
| believe in or that don't actually move the needle and are
| scrapped.
|
| In places like this the engineers and managers closest to the
| product and customers tend to have a better feel for what to work
| on, but in a large enough org it's impossible to align those
| priorities across teams to get things done. This leads engineers
| to either POC ideas that aren't possible in production yet or to
| focus on smaller features that don't have dependencies.
|
| The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership who often
| care more about org size than output.
|
| I'm tired of the messaging around "lazy workers" pointing the
| finger where it doesn't belong. Gut from the top if you want to
| get rid of the problem. It's not the L5 engineer or the first
| line manager that's holding any product back. These people tend
| to be the most invested in building something in my experience.
| endtime wrote:
| Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level.
| The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell
| - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more
| or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but
| eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real
| opinion.
|
| Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and
| there was nothing he could have done about it.
| potatolicious wrote:
| +1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time
| as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out
| of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO
| Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership.
|
| Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of
| abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their
| own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only
| dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only
| concerned with the people-management side of the org. There
| was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team
| composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of
| anything about the products we owned.
|
| Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with
| on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about
| the products they own. What a breath of fresh air.
|
| The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of
| features ourselves with little guidance from upper
| management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because
| senior management changed their minds about some overarching
| strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't
| help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe
| the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get
| promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere.
| Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader.
|
| Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came
| to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea
| past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product
| process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that
| didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently
| just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google
| kills so many projects - it demands _insane_ metrics to
| approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said
| ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts
| it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close,
| and whole projects die as a result.
|
| I feel _very_ firmly that Google as a company needs a
| reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that
| has any product credibility.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Having worked under a Google-bred product leader in the
| past... this explains a lot about the way they ran things.
|
| By the time they left our org, our products were in the
| same shape (or perhaps slightly worse) as they'd been
| before this person came aboard. All of the PMs they'd hired
| ended up leaving not long after, in part because they were
| essentially yes-men and had no one to say yes to anymore.
| danaris wrote:
| The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there--
| senior management being primarily concerned with making the
| organization work well for the people in it, with the
| people further down the ladder being the ones directly in
| charge of the products--is inherently a bad or unworkable
| one.
|
| It just requires the senior leadership to openly
| acknowledge that it means _they don 't own the products_,
| and shouldn't be the ones making decisions on them, at
| least not without extensive discussion with the people in
| the organization that _do_ own the products. That includes
| decisions to kill off a product, for any reason other than
| a dire emergency.
|
| The problem, as is so depressingly common, is that being
| higher up in the org chart makes them believe they are
| better, smarter people, who always know best. So they make
| decisions without getting the right information, and very
| frequently for the wrong reasons.
| potatolicious wrote:
| I pretty fundamentally disagree, though of course I don't
| think your argument is unreasonable for a smaller
| product.
|
| For companies where products are relatively small and
| largely disconnected from one another I think your
| approach can work - senior leadership is largely
| concerned about maintaining the _organization_ while
| explicitly delegating product ownership to team leads
| below.
|
| The problem is that this falls part _really_ quickly once
| the products reach a certain feature scale, and in fact
| _attempts_ to do this is IMO responsible for a lot of the
| product incoherency in a company like Google.
|
| For example, when I was there, there were multiple
| features that launched on Android Maps but never on iOS
| Maps. This was an example of shipping the org chart - the
| Android Maps team came up with the feature and shipped
| it, and the iOS team was separate and uninvolved.
|
| Of course shipping one's org chart is not an exclusively
| Google problem and is very common - but it's a
| fundamental consequence of delegating product ownership
| downwards. The ownership of the Android and iOS apps were
| necessarily separate because of the sheer size of these
| products and their teams, and there is no effective way
| to coordinate between them.
|
| Sure, theoretically everyone can play nicely and talk to
| each other and sell each other on how great of a feature
| it is - but realistically that just doesn't work. The
| coordination overhead between teams _when there is no
| high-level forcing function_ is extreme and grinds work
| to a halt. In reality what you need is a VP or Director-
| level to say "we need this on both OSes, prioritize
| shipping this feature on both ends".
|
| And that... definitionally breaks the notion of downward
| product delegation.
| danaris wrote:
| Mmm, I'm not saying I entirely disagree--I haven't worked
| at Google, or any organization of that size--but it seems
| to me that part of the problem here is not simply
| "shipping the org chart", but rather the fact that the
| org chart is poorly, well...organized.
|
| Why should Google Maps be _completely separate products_
| for Android and iOS (and, potentially, web)? If you have
| one product, with...I dunno, something like multiple
| release teams? handling the different platforms, surely
| that helps to pool knowledge and maintain (rough) feature
| parity?
|
| And honestly, I think think this focus on each product
| being its own entirely separate island is a big part of
| what's wrong with Google in general--it seems like it
| contributes to the pointless proliferation of mediocre
| messenger apps, for one thing.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" Why should Google Maps be completely separate
| products for Android and iOS (and, potentially, web)?"_
|
| There are multiple reasons for this, but the most
| important one for this discussion is pretty simple:
| because of the number of people required to staff it.
|
| You need to carve team boundaries _somewhere_ - there are
| inherent limits to how many people a manager can manage,
| and how big of a team a single tech lead can effectively
| run. You can 't have a standup with 50 people, and
| there's no coherent way for a single leader to track
| tasks across 100 people, but that's the kind of staffing
| required for products of this size.
|
| A product like Maps is expansive - it covers anything
| from searching for places, walking directions, real-time
| driving directions, data ingestion, data quality,
| reviews, busyness indicators, recommendations, photos,
| street view, transit statuses, indoor navigation, etc
| etc. And that's a _very_ cursory overview of what the app
| does. It naturally requires a _very_ large number of
| engineers to create and maintain.
|
| So out of sheer scale you _must_ divide the team into
| some kind of structure. A floating pool of hundreds of
| engineers is clearly not feasible. So the question is
| how?
|
| There are multiple schools of thought here: dividing by
| frontend platform is one way. Other companies divide
| functionally (i.e., the street view team owns street view
| across all platforms), but while there are pros and cons
| to each of these approaches, you can't escape the same
| fundamental premise: you have a lot of separate teams
| that need to coordinate.
|
| And _how_ those teams communicate, coordinate, and ship
| together _is_ the job of the Director and VPs.
|
| > _" I think think this focus on each product being its
| own entirely separate island is a big part of what's
| wrong with Google in general"_
|
| Agreed! But this is another reason why you need to have
| Directors/VPs that are actively engaged in product (and
| in fact whose _primary duty_ is to product) - they are
| the right level of abstraction where inter-product
| integration is decided. They are the ones responsible for
| making sure these products work coherently together and
| do not appear (or function) as islands unto themselves.
| hyperliner wrote:
| [dead]
| fatnoah wrote:
| Interesting. I spent time at another FAANG, and the product
| teams were very, very, very strong...among the best I've
| worked with. It was the Engineering leadership that was
| essentially invisible. I managed a team of 12. They knew
| the names and faces of every PM that intersected with our
| work (including the Director & VP), but none could name
| anyone in the Engineering hierarchy beyond my skip level.
| In my case, the above description of VP levels applied
| (IMHO) to the Engineering leadership, much to the same
| detriment.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective
| review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor,
| only to be immediately removed.
| disqard wrote:
| If you're willing to share, how long ago did you quit?
| endtime wrote:
| April 2022, after 10.5 years there.
| pinewurst wrote:
| My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer
| imported from Google. They don't even know the area the
| (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking
| game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of
| the Ol' Goog.
| asielen wrote:
| My current place is like this but with Salesforce
| leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far
| removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce
| about the old days.
|
| Their first inclination is always to try to implement
| whatever they were doing there. But this is a very
| different industry and marke. Every few months we end up
| rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.
| Spivak wrote:
| Seconded and thirded. Nothing is more soul draining then doing
| nothing for 8 hours a day, the idea that devs are lazy and
| don't want to code is like the antithesis of our whole
| profession. Most of us do it in our free time. When you
| actually have a real actionable thing to work on that gives the
| line workers meaningful "wins" the management pyramid flips and
| they all become "servant managers" trying to direct the
| excitement of the team to the most valuable stuff.
|
| Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not
| mattering. If you find yourself imposing artificial deadlines
| as motivation then maybe what you're doing isn't all that
| important.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing
| not mattering_
|
| There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way
| less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling
| take it?
| cratermoon wrote:
| For the same reason lots of people don't move and change
| jobs at the drop of a hat: responsibilities outside work.
| Kids in school, a mortgage, debts, friends, community
| participation. Once your lifestyle has lined up with a
| certain pay scale, cutting back is difficult. Upending the
| lives of your family to go for a more meaningful job that
| pays ways less? It happens. It's not pretty.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I wasn't only referring to just people who are tied down
| to one place and one lifestyle. There's plenty of tech
| people who are in a stage of their lives when they are
| easily mobile and still live a frugal lifestyle, yet
| almost everyone chooses the same wealthy and least
| ethical companies, while complaining their jobs are
| boring and unethical.
|
| Not judging people who take well paying jobs at unethical
| companies, but they should at least stop moaning about
| it. Some people I know would suck d*ck behind a Wendy's
| to get paid FAANG money and be bored for 8h/day instead
| of do backbreaking work for peanuts.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > yet almost everyone chooses the same wealthy and least
| ethical companies, while complaining their jobs are
| boring and unethical.
|
| I'd like to see some empirical data for that. I don't see
| how that squares with the numbers of people working for
| FAANG money vs the numbers working in all of the rest of
| the tech jobs in the US and world. If I were to take your
| statement literally, then all the companies paying FAANG
| money would have tens of millions of employees, when in
| fact their total headcount is ~2 million out of the ~12
| million working in tech in the US.
| pawelduda wrote:
| The projects I've enjoyed the most is where I felt I was
| building something meaningful, as in something I believed would
| help the company grow. And asking questions that challenged the
| point of specific thing was encouraged - when I voiced concerns
| that RoI isn't there, it was at least considered and sometimes
| changed the plan. I don't expect my suggestions to be right,
| because I see only part of the picture, but I assume so does
| upper management, leadership, etc. It's just impossible to
| grasp the entire thing. Like you can't be just dev and not
| think about how customers will be using what you release. For
| me working like that feels more fulfilling and I like to think
| it helps to mend these perspectives.
|
| On the contrary, worst time I had was when I was just receiving
| roadmaps to crunch through, that were "set in stone", came from
| "up there" and suggestions or personal findings weren't part of
| development. Yes, the technical challenge was there but that
| alone doesn't cut it. So it felt like I'm just a cog in a
| machine and after some time the mood just drops and burnout
| starts creeping in... I find it very consistent.
| throwaway1492 wrote:
| > Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It's
| not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that's holding
| any product back.
|
| I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers
| to their own devices. I know this will be downvoted, but
| software engineers are the worst at planning their own work.
| The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want.
| There really has to be guard rails to keep an organization sane
| and somewhat focused.
|
| But this post is spot on, productivety is a business problem.
| Software engineers will work, probably more than anyone else in
| the org, typically.
| shusson wrote:
| > software engineers are the worst at planning their own
| work. The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they
| want
|
| There are successful companies that have senior engineers
| managing/leading teams and still coding. This idea that
| software engineers need managers and that somehow being a
| software engineer means only coding (IC) is a pattern that
| early American tech companies went with. Originally I imagine
| it was to reward and empower engineers, these days I feel
| like more and more companies use it to control and manipulate
| engineers.
| foldr wrote:
| >I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving
| engineers to their own devices. [...] The vast majority will
| just go off and do wtf ever they want.
|
| I think in larger organizations this is true of pretty much
| everyone but in different ways. No-one's career success is
| very directly tied to the overall success of the company, so
| everyone is trying to get something for themselves out of any
| given project. For software engineers that might be pointless
| code/devops complexity or unnecessary use of esoteric and
| interesting technologies. But PMs, designers etc. are equally
| adept at coming up with pet projects that contribute little
| to the fundamental success of the business. There are lots of
| PM-driven dev teams 'urgently' working to complete features
| that are completely unnecessary or even counterproductive.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| >The vast majority
|
| I really don't think this is the case. I think there are a
| lot of less-experienced developers who will be very
| sidetracked, yes. But anyone even close to senior should have
| developed an intuition of when it is time to build carefully
| and when it is time to "just ship". (this isn't just "go slow
| at first and then haul ass to hit deadline", you can switch
| between these two mindsets several times even within a single
| PR.).
|
| And at a higher level - I expect senior and staff-type
| engineers to have at least a decent amount of product sense.
| Their job may not be to do product management, but they
| should be able to reasonably-accurately judge what product
| work will be more business impact vs less.
| manicennui wrote:
| Senior engineers are often good at turning boring problems
| into more interesting problems (to them) by doing
| unnecessary rewrites or introducing new technology.
| cratermoon wrote:
| These days the title "senior engineer" is handed out like
| candy. Anyone with three years experience is now "Senior"
| in title. In the US, doctors fresh out of med school have
| a minimum of three years ahead before they can even begin
| to practice independently. For programming, and pretty
| much any other profession, senior doesn't really begin
| until nearing 10 years of work experience.
|
| At that point, that itch to turn boring problems into
| interesting problems takes on a different form: What
| becomes "interesting" is doing things within constraints,
| including the constraint of staying with existing
| technology, when it's solving the problem.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving
| engineers to their own devices."_
|
| Agree with this concern but that's a false dichotomy no?
| "Upper management is bad" isn't necessarily proposing that
| engineers be left to their own devices, it's to cycle out
| upper management with more competent replacements.
|
| I tend to agree with your overall point: companies where the
| culture encourages individual front-line teams to self-
| organize and ship independently tend to end up with
| incoherent products (see: Google). There's a lot of product
| velocity but almost none of it matters. You have teams
| shipping features because they feel like it and personally
| like the features, not because they offer some business value
| or strategic advantage.
|
| You really, really need high-competence upper management to
| wrangle this energy into something coherent.
| darkerside wrote:
| > it's to cycle out upper management with more competent
| replacements
|
| This is a wildly optimistic statement
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team
| working on things they don't believe in or that don't actually
| move the needle and are scrapped.
|
| Or the engineers are incentivized to mind-read leadership,
| since they can only beg leadership for answers to questions so
| many times in a sitting, which results in engineering time
| being wasted when it turns out said leadership didn't want a
| thing after all.
|
| Trying to understand what the owners of a product actually want
| is of course part of the occupation of an engineer, but it's
| another thing when owners and leadership are of little help and
| fail to actually provide the company with a real direction. Too
| often, they are high on their own supply, and they may even
| rationalize turnover as just a fact of the business.
| bragr wrote:
| Yeah those managers aren't any more lazy than those idle
| employees. Everyone is just going through the motions. The fish
| rots from the head.
| throwaway298420 wrote:
| > In my own anecdotal experience, I've seen a lot more "fake
| work" come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision
| for the product.
|
| Since an acquisition at a company I used to work for full-time
| and remained on call as a contractor with for some time after,
| I have seen this happen in a very impressive way.
|
| Critical tech debt has gone unpaid as site performance degrades
| to the point of outages, but the new staff don't seem to know
| how to do anything except throw more hardware at the problem.
|
| Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I got an inquiry from them about
| "administrator passwords" for a list of a dozen or so programs
| in use on their developer machines, including 7-zip and
| Notepad++.
|
| There were around a dozen items and all of them but some IDEs
| were completely open-source software. All of them were only
| deployed and run locally, with no administrative passwords or
| commercial licensing purchased. This inquiry came many months
| after I had left, including an extensive and agonizing
| knowledge transfer process.
|
| There's no way the person asking me was such an idiot that he
| didn't realize that Notepad++ has no administrative passwords.
| But he asked me anyway. I can only assume this is because some
| wrathful idiot asked him to do this, and he knew that
| performing the ceremony of asking me as he was directed to do
| would be easier to deal with than just answering the inquiry
| directly with the parts he knew himself.
|
| Once you have somebody generating fake work like that at the
| top, where can things possibly go other than down?
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, I can't say I'm hoping for the LLM/AI replacement to
| start at the top, but it often seems like that's the best "bang
| for the buck". There's a lot of gibberish spewed and arbitrary
| dice-roll decision making in upper level management. They
| certainly aren't expecting it!
|
| But then we'll be working for the AI... stickin' it to the Man.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think there's also an issue that execs can create the
| appearance of being busy (and may indeed spend a ridiculous
| number of hours in meetings) but it can be hard to see if
| they're contributing anything valuable. I was at a startup
| which over a period of years repeatedly had new execs come in,
| claim that something was wrong with our planning or goal-
| setting process, "restart" the whole thing in a way which was
| virtually identical except with new exemplar docs, tracking
| spreadsheets, meetings etc -- and then pat themselves on the
| back. So far as I can tell, this is only because creating the
| appearance of change allows them to take credit for any later
| success. I asked one once what they found problematic about our
| prior process, and the answer was roughly "I don't know about
| your prior process so I cannot comment."
| antipaul wrote:
| "It can be hard to see if they're contributing anything
| valuable"
|
| Indeed. It's easier to evaluate "the appearance of change"
| than actual value or improvement.
|
| When I consider this problem, my current belief is that only
| long-term discipline from senior leadership can change this
| system.
| lanstin wrote:
| Things that management knows about and worries about
| consistently, like 5 years and still going strong, do
| trickle down and make a difference, and eventually build a
| culture. Things that management changes every year end up
| making even the most good-hearted employees get cynical and
| uninvolved in those things.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I was thinking about all this recently and came up with the
| question:
|
| In the event that someone fails, is it possible for it to
| be you?
|
| There are people who cannot fail at their jobs. I want one
| of those jobs. An upper manager who attends meetings and
| "makes decisions" and is personal friends with the CEO
| often cannot fail. If the product stops selling, it will be
| considered a failure of those below the upper manager and
| the team will be laid off, the upper manager cannot fail.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I worked at a place where they had an entire division of
| people basically filled the role of Tom Smykowski from Office
| Space.
|
| It was both pitiful and amazing. They didn't really produce
| any valuable output, but by scheduling meetings and
| debriefings and briefings, etc they were able to engage at
| high levels. The dude in charge somehow took over project
| managers, and they literally started building these colored
| briefing binders inspired by some History channel documentary
| the featured the President's daily briefing by the CIA.
|
| At the end, I started losing talented engineers to folks
| getting significant promotions to attend meetings with
| bigshots. The rationale was that in order to deliver the "CIA
| briefing" to the VP of Custodial Services, you had to be a
| Director or something.
| kimburgess wrote:
| That failure mode is not isolated to tech, and predates
| modern org structures too. See Chesterton's Fence
| (https://simple.industries/notes/chesterton's-fence.html).
| kimburgess wrote:
| Unborked link:
| https://simple.industries/notes/chesterton's-fence.html
|
| Looks like the single quote doesn't play nicely with the
| auto-linker.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| It's always a good sign when an exec comes in and lists
| things that are working well at the moment.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| This is how you do high quality skip levels:
|
| 1. What is going well?
|
| 2. What is not going well?
|
| 3. What can be done to improve?
|
| Pretty much know what's going on. Anyone who BSes the
| second question needs to be layered or leave.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Speaking truth to power is rarely easy. Some leaders can
| take genuine feedback others cannot. Until you have a
| good pulse on the situation, is it really surprising most
| people default to inauthentic critiques?
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is why I'm very skeptical on the use of 1-on-1
| meetings with management as a means to keep a finger on
| what's going well or badly in an organization.
|
| If someone is OK with telling management things they
| don't want to hear, they'll tell management those things
| regardless of 1-on-1s.
| alwaysbeconsing wrote:
| Isn't the necessity of skip meetings itself a
| pathological sign? The only thing you legitimately need
| to talk to your manager's manager about is things your
| manager can't handle -- i.e. mostly problems with and/or
| praise for your manager. Everything else should go
| through your manager, or what are they there for?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Depends on the org and the situation. Sometimes the guy a
| level up has a broader perspective.
|
| Like anything, ymmv. If it's setup as a way to rat out
| your boss in a deep org, that's stupid. If it's a way for
| the director to establish relationships with some of the
| ICs, that can be productive.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| When communicating through a middleman you always lose
| information or it gets distorted. There is definitely
| value in talking to upper levels directly.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| How do you know that your direct reports are doing their
| jobs well if you never talk with the people they're
| managing? Just take their word for it?
|
| "Yes boss, all my subordinates are happy and think I'm
| doing a stellar job at managing this team."
| freetinker wrote:
| Exactly matches my anecdotal experience as well. Thanks for
| sharing.
| flashgordon wrote:
| So spot on. You see tons of articles and "thought leadership"
| on Managers vs Leaders as if managers are holding a company
| back through incompetence or malice. Oh man. Reality is
| leadership sets processes because they believe the "last ounce
| of juice" hasnt been squeezed. I can point you to a whole bunch
| of leadership rubriks (at faang/maangs) that is all about
| showing "impact" vs getting actual work down - and they all get
| vocalized a lot more during perf/calibration seasons. I am
| pretty sure someone who is a "Leader" will just say true work
| always equates to quantifiable impact (north star metrics etc)
| all the while ignoring the fact that collaboration needs a lot
| of political skills - ie convincing why we should do what
| leadership wanted to begin with - but without their ack. "I
| trust you will sort this all out instead of depending on us
| leaders".
|
| I know i know. I really apologize for sounding angry there. I
| have seen so many smart and well meaning people getting
| demotivated (and giving up) because the modern corp is built
| around "preventing" work getting done than channeling all this
| passion and then execs are surprised at why people are "
| _saying_ they are burnt out " or not being productive.
| [deleted]
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| " The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership "
|
| Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have
| never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs
| never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always "on" as
| well. But VPs can't do everything, they can't peer into
| everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I
| think you want something superhuman from them.
|
| The problem in tech, such that it is, is that the perf process
| is somewhat broken. But that's a discussion for another day,
| and is likely intractable.
| antipaul wrote:
| Were they "working hard" on individual-contributor-style
| work, or on management?
|
| "They can't peer into everyday lives of the lower levels" -
| I'd imagine this is exactly what management should work "hard
| at".
|
| If you're not keen to do that, then maybe be a high-level IC?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| An example is the recent sale of Google Domains to
| Squarespace. Seems like it was a profitable product, why get
| rid of it? I'm sure they worked very hard on selling Google
| Domains, doesn't seem like it actually benefited Google as a
| company in the long term. Working hard isn't helpful if you
| don't have a solid vision for what you're working toward.
|
| In fact working slower with a more coherent vision is often
| better, since you actually get closer to a goal rather than
| just bouncing around between undefined local maxima as fast
| as you can.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Working hard doesn't necessarily mean working on the right
| things.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Senior leadership has many important functions, and more
| demands on their time than hours in the day, but their number
| one job is communicating a vision to the org. There's
| basically nothing else with similarly high impact as this is
| what blocks or unblocks the productivity of the entire
| organization.
|
| I've watched 1,000 person orgs rot because the senior leader
| could not settle on a vision. He was "always on", smart,
| articulate, all those good adjectives. None of it mattered
| without the vision.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Product managers are at risk of yesterday's business analysts.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
| penjelly wrote:
| same in my experience as well so youre not alone.
|
| i dont see a solution though, its not like upper management is
| going to fire themselves.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Why there needs to be a solution? As long as shareholders and
| the board are happy...
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Great employees facilitate bad managers by simply being
| themselves and doing great work. Managers just collect the karma
| for being there. They also interview for other positions staking
| a claim to work they had nothing to do with. They play great
| politics, though, with peers and upward.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Nothing for an engineer is more satisfying than seeing your code
| be used to solve real problems for customers. Positive (and
| negative) feedback from people actually using the product you
| built is the lifeblood of those who really care about making a
| difference.
|
| Conversely, there is nothing more 'soul-sucking' than to realize
| that something you have devoted months or years of work, effort,
| and thought into is thrown in the dustbin because there was just
| no business support for it. This can happen when your company is
| bought out by a competitor just so they could kill your project.
| This can happen because a SVP decided on a whim to suddenly
| change the whole direction of the company. It can happen because
| someone in the management chain just doesn't have a clue what
| they are doing.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| This article reminds me of this:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-en...
| somsak2 wrote:
| >Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished
| project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't
| see the light of day.
|
| are you kidding? I've worked on projects way longer that ended up
| getting scrapped, and multiple times at different FAANGs. this
| guy must be quite inexperienced to be "stunned" by this.
|
| if you don't want this risk, go to a smaller company. it's really
| that simple
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| [dead]
| ngvrnd wrote:
| Managers are a form of government; that is to say, a necessary
| evil. Companies should spend as much energy reducing the number
| of managers as they spend worrying about useless employees. But
| it never seems to be that way.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> What do these people actually do? They go to meetings.
|
| This is the biggest problem in industry: pointless meetings with
| no agenda and no action items. There is a watershed moment for
| anyone however. Once your calendar is even 40% filled
| (particularly if meetings are randomly distributed), flow state
| is pretty hard to achieve. Therefore one is better off to book
| even more meetings so everyone knows that you can't possibly do
| any actual work. Then your day is naturally completely void of
| meaning but you simply clock in at 9am and out at 4pm. Once the
| day ends you don't have to think about work at all since your
| work literally is meetings.
|
| If you want to have a pointless meeting, be sure to book it in
| the evening or weekend so that you pay the same price as people
| that are actually doing real work.
| taeric wrote:
| Odds are silly high that this will be a ton of talking past each
| other in experiences.
|
| Good management is almost certainly situation specific. Such that
| for a good manager, you also need a good organization. And for
| that organization, you likely need a certain kind of worker.
|
| Tech work is an odd one as we can't decide if we are general
| contractors, artists, or line workers. Each will have different
| quirks on how they work. And, annoyingly, all could probably work
| at any given task. Especially if the full team and organization
| is aligned with those quirks.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| > for a good manager, you also need a good organization
|
| False. Being a good manager is aligned with being a good
| leader, which is 100% down to the person who is the manager.
| Sure you may not have an "effective team" without a good
| organization, but as a manager your job is to make the team
| succeed, and if you're following the laws of leadership, it has
| nothing to do with your organization.
| noirbot wrote:
| The difficulty becomes that, in a bad organization, a good
| manager can easily get stuck unable to both be a good leader
| to their team and be a good manager as seen by the
| organization. I've had multiple managers fired/reassigned
| because they were leading the team well in a fractured
| organization, but because they weren't prioritizing the
| things that upper management wanted over the objections of
| their teams.
|
| If what the team wants to do to succeed is at odds with what
| the organization thinks it wants, the manager often can't
| square that circle.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| No doubt. This is the dichotomy of leadership. The
| alternative is don't become a manager in a bad
| organization. But barring that solution, your only
| alternative is to grind on both sides of the wall until
| you've either got breakthrough... or you get fired.
|
| It's not a good answer, but it lines up with the reality
| I've experienced.
| noirbot wrote:
| Oh for sure, but I think the GP's "you can't really be a
| good manager in a bad org" is generally true on the long
| term. Either the org crushes you into being a bad
| manager, or you're pushed out. The odds are that a
| single, or even a few, good managers aren't enough to
| turn the ship of a bad org for the better.
| taeric wrote:
| Ah, that was a poor word choice on mine. I meant "for a good
| manager, you need an appropriate organization."
|
| That said, I somewhat reject the idea of "laws of
| leadership." Too situational and way too much "had the best
| people working for them" involved in so many of the success
| stories out there.
| yboris wrote:
| Probably very related: _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory_ by David Graeber
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| I subscribe to that. I left my previous job just after two months
| because I was put into a chair as a developer and then ...
| nothing for two months. I literally got paid to do nothing.
|
| Manager? Product Manager? Team leader? They were all pretending
| that newly hired people does not exist. But they went great
| lengths to poach me from a previous job, to do nothing? I am
| perplexed by this behavior until today. I have quit and set up my
| own company where I have less money but at least I am working on
| something.
| arbitrage wrote:
| I got poached from a job once to a) punish a manager in a
| different department, and to b) serve as a check on someone
| else who the new manager didn't trust. People can just use you
| and discard you. Our industry is awful right now.
|
| I'm glad you got out and started your own company. Good for
| you.
| JamesHinnek wrote:
| Just a reminder that lazy managers are the source of burnout for
| those who are under them. As a manager I can say, there is no
| easier job than just forwarding requests from directors directly
| to developers, not planning, and promising crazy deadlines to
| avoid conflict with higher management.
|
| If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more, I
| have seen so many people becoming managers just to actually avoid
| work, or thinking that tech is too hard and too much to study. So
| they instead go to a whole different area where most of your
| previous knowledge won't be required anymore, and they don't
| think that they are starting from zero, so they just don't study
| and read 2 blog articles and think that they got how is to work
| with people.
| RankingMember wrote:
| > If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more
|
| In my experience, pay rarely has any kind of correlation to the
| amount of work being done. I see it merely as a pay for
| responsibility for the work of those under you or, more
| succinctly, "being paid to throw yourself under the bus in lieu
| of anyone you're managing".
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Managers usually fire team members rather than take the fall
| for the team.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't dispute the existence of those
| managers- I'm thankful to have had some good managers who
| go to bat for their direct reports.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You had managers who "took the fall" for the team? The
| thread is about accepting blame and sacrifice, not about
| advocating for people under you
| RankingMember wrote:
| > You had managers who "took the fall" for the team?
|
| Correct. In addition, sometimes advocating for those
| under you is a sacrificial act, because you're putting
| your reputation on the line.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Sounds performative rather than anything real at stake.
| Managers are expected to lay down rhetoric about
| accountability and contextualizing their team's failure.
| RankingMember wrote:
| > Managers are expected to lay down rhetoric about
| accountability and contextualizing their team's failure.
|
| It sounds like the management philosophies at our
| respective orgs are very different.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Bad managers do that. Good managers accept accountability
| for the failures of their teams. Delegation makes a leader
| more accountable, not less.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| If you need your job to live, and taking accountability
| means any non-zero probability of losing your job, would
| you take accountability? Of course it is easy to answer
| an hypothetical.
| codesnik wrote:
| I'd love to see an example of such an accepted
| accountability at least once in my life.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I'd love to see an example of such an accepted
| accountability at least once in my life.
|
| I think that's the point, you wouldn't see it. If a good
| manager gets unreasonably or unfairly reamed by his boss,
| he's probably not gonna tell his team about it, because
| it would be a blow to morale. If it was indeed the team's
| dysfunction, he'd try to improve it.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Next time there's a re-org, look around for managers who
| net lost reports, or even "decided to move on".
| cratermoon wrote:
| When I "decided to move on", that included deciding that
| management was likely not in the cards for me again.
| Companies that have IC staff+ roles are what attract me
| now.
| arbitrage wrote:
| I've seen it before. After that manager stepped in to
| help me, I would've stepped in front of a bus for him.
| That is the one time I had a manager like that in my
| entire career.
|
| It's rare, but it does happen.
| eganist wrote:
| Pay is generally correlated with accountability, not so much
| work.
|
| To your point: lazy managers would suffer an accountability hit
| if something goes wrong with their teams (burnout etc), so
| that's the incentive for them to manage their teams properly.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Work more means what?
|
| It's about efficiency in terms of performance metrics.
| ntfAX wrote:
| [dead]
| antipaul wrote:
| "Management" definitely seems easier, than having to do
| technical work, without proper accountability.
|
| But it seems it's hard to hold management accountable.
|
| For an IC such as an engineer, if you don't deliver code for
| the deadline or check-in, it's clear you haven't delivered.
|
| But how do you judge the performance of managers? Oh, right, by
| the size of the "empire"...
| policepost wrote:
| As a former engineer and now manager, it's not easier. It's
| different.
|
| Like, yes I write much less code, but I also have to show
| much more empathy and be able to communicate with different
| people differently. Helping every engineer on the team
| advance their careers is tough, because everyone heard
| feedback differently.
|
| Combine that with the one on ones where someone tells you
| about how shitty their life has been recently and how that's
| impacting their work. It's tough to go from roadmap planning
| to someone crying at you over a medical diagnosis to jumping
| directly to status updates to telling your boss no. It's an
| emotional whiplash not present in the engineer world.
|
| Like I said, not harder or easier. Different.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm glad you made this comment. I've had multiple people
| lay out very personal and severe problems to me during one-
| on-ones. I'm in no way qualified nor did I sign up to have
| someone's life literally in my hands (suicidal people).
| It's disturbing.
| danaris wrote:
| Unfortunately, the belief of many is that if you are paid more,
| _you are a more valuable person_ , and thus get to look down on
| those who make less than you.
|
| This very frequently manifests in believing that it is the
| Lower People who have to do actual work, while your job as a
| Higher Person is just to make sure they are doing their work
| (in the simplest way possible--butt in seat == working), and
| not doing things above their station. Like thinking, or trying
| to understand why it is that their job, which can be done
| entirely on any computer with an internet connection, must be
| done in the office, or questioning why, when the business loses
| money, the execs still get fat bonuses.
| sanp wrote:
| > If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more
| Why? Companies don't pay more for more work. They will try to
| get away with the least they can pay. Workers should do the
| same.
| screye wrote:
| > If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more
|
| Given the number of new grads out of college working 60+ hr
| weeks, I am not sure there is much leeway left for managers to
| 'work more'.
|
| With a manager's job, time invested and outcome is even less
| correlated than a code-monkey (no offense, I am one too) who at
| least has a slightly-less-than-linear relationship with
| work/time.
|
| Find yourself a good manager. Don't think too much about how
| long the manager (or any other coworker) chooses to work. A
| good manager will find a way to accommodate different
| lifestyles without disrupting the unity or drive of the
| individual members of the team.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Working more because you're paid more is a dumb metric and
| sounds like a puritan minded threat. It's working effectively
| using the skills you are paid to use to help your
| project/team do well at whatever it is you're targeting.
| pc86 wrote:
| Not sure I'd consider someone not pulling their weight on a
| team a "different lifestyle." I've worked for taskmasters
| before and it's not fun but if everyone on the team is
| working a full 40 hour week, and one person is working 25 or
| 30, it will become apparent over time and should be handled
| quickly.
| screye wrote:
| Different people have different priorities and bring
| different things to the team.
|
| Someone who does not want to be promoted, and is happy with
| average rewards will put in different efforts than someone
| who puts in a lot more and wants to rise up the ranks
| quickly. Differences in effort and outcome need to be
| differently rewarded. Not everyone wants to rise up an
| infinite corporate ladder.
|
| Someone who knows the product inside out and has a great
| rapport with the team, is worth keeping around. Just don't
| reward them disproportionally for their contributions.
|
| Somehow, Tech people find a way to be the most stressed out
| people on a job, while simultaneously working on the least
| significant part of human lives. No one cares if social
| media, ads or TV streaming have an incident that last a few
| extra hours. No one cares if your feature that makes
| streaming/ads/social-media 5% better releases 2 weeks late.
|
| Legally, your colleague does not have a direct relationship
| with you. Both you and your colleague have a relationship
| with the company through your manager, and that's it. If
| your colleague has a hand-shake agreement for working 30
| hours a week for average returns, and you have negotiated a
| promotion in return for a feature.......then the colleague
| does not owe you extra work so you get promoted. If your
| career progression needs others to work more than they've
| signed up for, then that's the fault of your manager for
| misallocating funding.
|
| It's at will employment. If your the company doesn't like
| them, they fire them. The American employment agreement is
| deeply transactional. You owe only as much to your company
| as won't get you fired.
| jonfw wrote:
| Why would a different number of hours constitute a problem
| which needs to be solved?
|
| It could obviously lead to a problem, if that person is
| under performing as a result, but it's not obvious that
| there is a linear relationship between hours worked and
| performance.
| golergka wrote:
| > If someone is being paid more, this person has to work more
|
| No, they should deliver more value.
|
| Best managers I had didn't have that much tasks scheduled.
| They:
|
| 1. Made important decisions right.
|
| 2. Processed all incoming requests, both from their reports and
| from outside, swiftly and with full attention.
|
| 3. Had enough psychological stamina to say "no" when it's
| necessary and defend their team from pressure and anxiety.
|
| None of these things require working a lot of hours. Actually,
| lazy people are better suited to do it properly.
| trgn wrote:
| > lazy people are better suited to do it properly.
|
| ha, have you heard of this quote from an officer from the
| german military?
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Who hasn't? The real question is, is there a single
| historical figure who hasn't had this quote attributed to
| them at some point?
| rmilejczz wrote:
| I think all industries in general fall victim to this sort of
| fallacy, and I advocate for a stronger push towards goal
| driven work. Not how much did you work but how much did you
| accomplish. In some fields these are closer to a 1:1
| relationship but definitely not in development.
| smugma wrote:
| I've never heard anyone from Netflix or Apple describe this
| phenomenon.
|
| Netflix loves to fire people and Apple likes to starve its teams
| of headcount to force efficient use of people resources.
| evo_9 wrote:
| Even the laziest manager is 10 times more useful and effective
| than a scrum master.
|
| They are the biggest BS jobs in the tech industry by a mile.
| geodel wrote:
| I feel this whole _Agile_ industry is to distribute tech riches
| to wider group of people who otherwise have no interest or
| skill to work in IT industry. A nice benefit to companies are
| improved diversity numbers.
| starbugs wrote:
| Had to smile a little bit when I read this.
|
| I think most scrum masters are employed to virtue signal some
| kind of agility and organizational potential for change. Which
| then never results in anything tangible.
|
| It's quite sad.
|
| If you really care and do what you are supposed to as an SM,
| you are very likely to get into trouble, because upper
| management usually isn't interested the least bit in real
| change.
|
| Real change is hard and will only happen if the pain is already
| too strong.
|
| Real change might involve talking to your customer and changing
| the processes they are used to, which is usually not beneficial
| to the "management" level.
|
| It's really not about scrum as such, but about the incentive
| structure that's present in most medium to big sized companies.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Are there success stories of companies that have grown to a
| respectable level w/o management of any kind? Perhaps Valve?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| This is sloppy and lazy in its generalizations from Google and
| Amazon to "tech companies" in general. They should really say
| something like "monopolistic tech behemoths that are in the top
| 10 of the S&P 500".
|
| I've worked in tech before, during, and after the hiring boom;
| but not for any of these companies. I have seen very little of
| the sort of make-work that is described in the article. Sure,
| there is no guarantee that research efforts will be utilized, but
| making that the goal _from the start_ for political reasons is so
| terrible that it 's likely that only FAANG bureaucracy is bloated
| enough to sustain it.
| arbitrage wrote:
| I too have worked in tech before, during, and after the hiring
| boom; but not for any of these companies. I have seen very much
| of the sort of make-work that is described in the article.
|
| It seems our anecdotes might cancel each other out.
| snide wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing a core piece from this article, but it leaves
| out quite a bit of agency from the employee. I never understand
| pieces like this that rail against employers, but also seem to
| cast the employees in such a helpless light.
|
| If you're stuck in a situation where you're not getting great
| feedback on what to work on, that seems like a great time to just
| build things and experiment on your own. Do it within the rails
| of the corporate environment you're in, or hell do it outside and
| put that energy into something else. Just because someone doesn't
| provide a map, doesn't mean you can't escape the labyrinth and
| get creative.
| matrix_overload wrote:
| Tried that. Your colleagues, and some managers, will
| immediately see you as a threat (how dare you have something to
| show when we don't) and will start treating you as a personal
| enemy. Sabotaging every thing you are trying to do, trying to
| blame you for every failure, and overloading you with
| completely useless work.
|
| Nope, fish rots from the head. If everyone around you is
| useless, there are good reasons for it, and best you can do is
| find another place where these reasons won't apply.
| arbitrage wrote:
| You are narrating my life back to me right now, and it's
| creepy and weird.
|
| I'm sorry that you've experienced this horrible treadmill of
| despair, as well. It doesn't get better.
| matrix_overload wrote:
| Nah, I'm a tough and a cynical dude. I used my time at
| BigCo to practice the skill sets I needed, saved some money
| and jumped ship to running my own business. It's hard, but
| it's infinitely more rewarding than the rat race.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That doesn't always (or usually) work in some of these
| BigCorps. It's not that they don't give you freedom to go ...
| do stuff -- they often do -- but there are also are often very
| concrete boundaries about who is allowed to actually have the
| stuff they do go into any kind of production codebase. And very
| rigorous review processes, etc. and often the first question in
| a code review on something exotic and new at a place like
| Google is: Where is the PRD / design doc for this? (aka who
| approved this)..
|
| They are often not environments promoting spontaneous
| contributions, especially not not at the L3/L4/L5 aka lower
| part of the promotion ladder.
|
| That and corporate survival / promo at these places really
| depends on "demonstrating impact", which, well, at the lower
| levels... can come down to sticking with doing what someone
| more senior than you expected you to do, taking ownership of
| it, and etc etc.
|
| The reality is that many of the people spinning their wheels
| like this _should just leave and go find a new job_. But that
| 's awfully hard to do when you are making sometimes twice as
| much as what a more "meaningful" job in e.g. a startup or small
| company can offer. Or when you're on an H1B, or you need
| certain medical care, etc. etc. etc.
| snide wrote:
| I appreciate your comment and think it's very truthful
| (speaking as someone who has worked in a bunch of different
| environments). I think your last point though is the most
| important. There's still personal agency in the situation
| (though you do give realistic outliers when it can be tough).
|
| I think it's mostly the tone I don't like about this article.
| It speaks to a defeastism that feels infectious at the
| moment. It feels very contrary to the normal spirit of
| communities like HN, which overall I've witnessed being
| someone positive.
| marcelr wrote:
| You must see that this is _a ton_ more work, that could easily
| conflict with other team interests. Let alone the more typical
| experience of getting a scolding for not sticking to the agenda
| (which I've experienced many times).
|
| All this work that could be better directed by someone who has
| a bigger picture view & vision for how teams should work
| together -- good management.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > If you're stuck in a situation where you're not getting great
| feedback on what to work on, that seems like a great time to
| just build things and experiment on your own.
|
| Such projects could certainly lead to all sorts of career
| successes... if someone high above you recognizes the value of
| the project as measured my immediate marketability and profit.
| But in the other 99.99% of cases, it just looks bad.
|
| "The rest of everyone is over here doing real work, but snide's
| over in the corner fucking around with someone no one told him
| to work on. Does he think he's better than everyone else?"
|
| With rare exception, it's just not a good look.
|
| To even begin to guess which projects might be that 0.01% that
| would get you noticed in a good way often requires having
| worked there years anyway, wheedling yourself into
| conversations your pay grade has no right to be in. And if you
| can do that, why work on the project at all? Wheedling itself
| is a far more certain path to career success than Thomas-
| Edison-ing some killer app.
| Gorbzel wrote:
| > it leaves out quite a bit of agency from the employee
|
| Good catch. Of course it does, as the easiest and most lazy
| trend in software engineering thinkpieces is to blame middle
| management.
|
| Keep in mind that 90% of the article (itself "fake work" as
| another commenter pointed out) has nothing to do with managers.
| The only substantiated mention there is from a gaggle of
| "strategic" academics at overpriced universities, i.e. those
| part of what is currently the biggest scam industry of them
| all.
|
| Nonetheless, the causes here are so glaringly obvious that the
| article somehow still calls out 1) overhiring endorsed from the
| very top and 2) infantile responses from engineers who take
| absolutely no responsibility for their circumstances or trying
| to make things better.
|
| And yet, there's absolutely no accountability for either of
| those groups. C-suite is rewarded by the market, fueled by
| culture that fetishes misguided views of developers.
|
| Nowhere is this worse than HN, where engineers can do no wrong.
| Yet speaking of make work, completely pointless arguements and
| "Show HN"s building a CRUD API client app for the thousandth
| time predominate. These (lazy/pointless) projects are then
| evidence that these super talented minds deserve $200k+ jobs
| where, yet again, managers have to deal with their egos and
| it's the manager's fault when shockingly these "individual
| contributors" have no idea how to contribute value to a project
| or in many cases even act like an adult.
| intelVISA wrote:
| You don't pay someone $200k to churn out CRUD - there's
| plenty of lowcode solutions like Flask for that!
|
| I somewhat agree, though, the core issue with "paying for
| business value" is how difficult it is to really define that
| across an org.
| ProfMeowsworth wrote:
| I'd expect from someone making 300kUSD a year to come up with
| their own ideas instead of spinning their wheels. Reading the
| article and some of the comments here, that seems to be an
| unpopular opinion, at least in tech.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It can be pretty stifling on giant teams to make any actual
| change.
|
| Sure it sounds romantic to sit down with a cup of coffee and
| write some amazing code that makes things better. The reality
| is writing documents, hunting down code owners and
| stakeholders, organizing meetings and running into tons of
| adversity just so you can attempt something very risky as it
| is impossible to have full context on everything.
| arbitrage wrote:
| One doesn't get paid $300k/year to fuck around and choose
| what you work on yourself. Very often you will get punished
| for making management decisions above your pay grade at this
| level.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Consider that companies like these can afford to pay $300k
| USD precisely to just spin their wheels, because they simply
| don't want them going elsewhere where they might compete...
| ticviking wrote:
| That's been my theory for a long time now.
|
| They don't care what devs do as long as nobody else can
| hire them
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This equation changed this year, I think. The pendulum is
| swinging the other way. I suspect we'll see a lot more
| PIPs at Google.
|
| So glad I got out of there before it got ugly.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Sounds to me like they aren't paying enough for talent if
| they can afford to leave it unused. Very similar to
| landlords being able to afford leaving a property empty
| rather than lowering the rent.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| I guess the employee raising the concern may risk having their
| role made redundant by going to management. I guess the only
| option really is switching teams.
|
| The other problem is that often they have too many people
| already. That's why layoffs had basically no impact.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I thought this article might have been on bullshit jobs in the
| tech industry but it's not. Are their bullshit jobs in the tech
| industry?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Adtech
| pharrington wrote:
| I might be completely wrong here as I've never worked in
| adtech, but the field seems like a really weird mix of
| bullshit jobs (the kind David Graeber wrote about), snakeoil,
| adtech that actually works as advertised, but still feels bad
| to work on because it's mostly harmful to society, and adtech
| that's actually legit and ethically neutral.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah, building POCs to make people above you look good to their
| seniors.
| bombolo wrote:
| Plenty of it.
|
| Who do you think is writing all the comments about how copilot
| can easily make them redundant, for example.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| This kind of finger pointing / blaming is not helpful. Basically,
| the reason why big organizations are a lot less efficient than
| smaller ones is the communication overhead; and the resulting
| miscommunication.
|
| Small groups of people don't even need managers because they can
| figure out between themselves what needs doing and in what order.
| Management is introduced when small groups become larger and
| point to point communication breaks down.
|
| Point to point communication works great with 3 people, a lot
| less with 30. Forget about it with 300 or 3000. And so on. Big
| hierarchical organizations get bogged down in management
| structures and there's a lot of communication that starts
| happening via multiple hops. So, a lot gets lost in translation.
| That kind of collective stupidity is very hard to deal with. Add
| politics to the mix and now you get intentional miscommunication,
| selective communication, and very biased communication as well
| where people work against each other. All that result in a lot of
| wasted effort, unnecessary meetings, and other non productive
| work. It's not fake. But also not all that valuable.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Also, the communications overhead of large corporate
| hierarchies often serves and sometimes incentivizes the
| reduction of work. Most people are not driven by a vision of a
| great product, a desire to create real value, or a desire to
| improve one's own value; there is a reason this is the
| exception, not the rule. Most people want to skate by on the
| absolute minimum required of them, and large hierarchies have
| all the leaky cracks that create opportunities to avoid, defer,
| delay, delegate, and generally abstain from work.
|
| In my own personal experience, if your desire is to work on
| something that has value or if you'd like to increase your own
| value, you should probably work at a small company, where the
| hierarchy is relatively flat and where you are as directly
| responsible and answerable for tasks and projects as possible.
| iceflinger wrote:
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...
| getmeinrn wrote:
| Now let's talk about how this extrapolates to the rest of
| society.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Having worked in finance for many years at various types of firms
| (banks, hedge funds, fintech startups) and hired many FAANG
| folks, this breakdown from a former FAANG hire put it best:
|
| "At FAANG, there were always more people than work to do. This
| led to lots of infighting for the best projects.
|
| In finance, there is always more work than people so the fighting
| is more about trying to make multiple stakeholders happy with
| limited resources."
|
| Another ex-FAANG colleague called it "cookie licking" since
| everyone wanted to make sure a cool project was theirs before
| anyone else took it away.
|
| I can only imagine that this all happened due to the economic
| effects of being monopolies and therefore being able to just hire
| all of the best talent without necessarily having something for
| that talent to do.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > In finance, there is always more work than people
|
| It would seem the general theme is: If the work is "cool" or
| "new", there isn't much of it to go around. If it is "legacy"
| or "profitable", no one wants to be in the same building as it.
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