[HN Gopher] Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works
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Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 19 points
Date : 2024-12-16 10:09 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nilam.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (nilam.ca)
| janice1999 wrote:
| Coming from an old school engineering company, this article
| frankly reads as a little insane to me. I assumed "Code Yellow"
| was a catastrophe on par with a tornado hitting a factory or a
| massive security breach. Instead the examples are not hitting
| artificial growth metrics and needing to launch advertising. It's
| bad enough to blow up teams planned work but this is what you
| demand employees (not founders mind you) sacrifice their personal
| life for (i.e. get paid less per hour and not see their
| families)? The author not only acknowledges the time he is
| stealing from employees but that stressing them out is the point.
| If you're 8 years into a company and lurching from (artificial)
| crisis to crisis to "sweat the teams" something is seriously
| wrong.
| monkeydreams wrote:
| I work in public health so our outages are critical to safe
| treatment of our patients.
|
| We have the concept of a Major Incident/Major Event (because
| the term Code Yellow is already co-opted to mean any
| administrative fault across a hospital which might impact the
| flow of patients).
|
| These are all-hands-on-deck moments. They may be called by any
| member of staff who discovers an event which will impact our
| service, though it will be ratified by a Major Incident Manager
| (MIM). While the event is underway the MIM is God; except when
| it affects staff welfare. If a member of staff says that they
| cannot attend a war room for whatever reason, then the MIM will
| move onto the next person up the chain, even calling in
| directors if they feel it is required.
|
| What is being described above is tech-bro shittery. Calling a
| major event because you haven't hit a sales target should keep
| the C-Suite up at night, sure, but calling in techs and devs
| and 'sacrificing the L and the B in Work Life Balance'? The
| C-Suite should be making the strategic decisions to reverse the
| decline, not suddenly drag everyone into a meeting to fix their
| lack of foresight and working towards an end that the average
| tech/dev cannot influence.
| cbsmith wrote:
| It's not called a Code Red.
|
| Not all catastrophes are immediate in nature. Most
| organizations have incident response protocol which works well
| enough for an immediate catastrophe. Non-immediate, gradual
| threats can represent a much greater risk, because there's no
| inflection point (beyond "way too late") where the threat
| becomes so imminent as to trigger that response. Code Yellows
| are a mechanism to artificially force that inflection point
| before it is too late.
| Lammy wrote:
| > It's not called a Code Red.
|
| The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow
| or yes-Yellow. See Stephen Levy's _In The Plex_ (2011) pg186:
|
| "A Code Yellow is named after a tank top of that color owned
| by engineering director Wayne Rosing. During Code Yellow a
| leader is given the shirt and can tap anyone at Google and
| force him or her to drop a current project to help out.
| Often, the Code Yellow leader escalates the emergency into a
| war room situation and pulls people out of their offices and
| into a conference room for a more extended struggle."
| cbsmith wrote:
| [delayed]
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's definitely a "delusions of grandeur" thing that happens
| with some startups. "Come join our incredible journey to change
| the world by micro-optimizing ad placement on image boards."
| nottorp wrote:
| Is this an article about the virtues of mandatory overtime?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| It's from a manager / founder so yes, implicitly it is
| bawolff wrote:
| This feels like a blunt instrument to solve management failures.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Any time military language gets used like seen in this blog
| (eg. "War room"), it's usually alongside management failure to
| be addressed by crunch of some sort.
| Lammy wrote:
| > 2019: Building our fourth senior executive team in six years
| to lead us to the next plateau of scale.
|
| Sounds like nobody was sticking around long enough to even find
| out.
| cbsmith wrote:
| That seems about right. That's actually helpful. When you have
| a management failure, trying to solving it by "getting better
| at management" isn't really a solution.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > It is alluring because it allows for existing plans to be
| deprioritized, removes any/all ambiguity around what is most
| important at the moment, and strongly encourages the team to
| sacrifice the 'L' and 'B' from Work-Life-Balance.
|
| When I read this, I understand that when management fails, and
| wants something to be get done, because reasons, they can just
| pull all stops and declare temporary slavery until the problem is
| solved.
|
| This should be normally a "once in a decade" event. Not "once in
| a year" instrument. Being proud of removing "life" and "balance"
| from employees' reality reads like the worst power trip ever.
|
| I worked in similar environments. Never again. We have our "code
| yellow"s in my current job, but we know when it's going to come,
| and prepare ourselves and our lives. Go through it, pat ourselves
| on the back for the good job, learn our lessons for the things we
| fail along the way, and continue our journey.
| andrewjf wrote:
| Also the line about sending this email while on the weekend to
| his staff at his son's tae kwon do is particularly absurd.
| mtrovo wrote:
| I've experienced a Code Yellow myself and can definitely see its
| value. In large companies, you sometimes need that top-to-bottom
| rallying cry to overcome the bystander effect when big problems
| emerge.
|
| After ChatGPT's initial release, Google famously sounded the
| alarm and brought Larry Page back into the mix, showing how this
| kind of all-hands effort can quickly organize everyone around a
| single goal.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Brought Larry Page back to do what? Google is worse than ever,
| Gemini is just one more piece of clutter ruining what used to
| be a useful tool.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > It is alluring because it allows for existing plans to be
| deprioritized, removes any/all ambiguity around what is most
| important at the moment, and strongly encourages the team to
| sacrifice the 'L' and 'B' from Work-Life-Balance.
|
| Why would anyone go along with this unless it came with a FAT
| bonus?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I also accept PTO credits as payment for voluntary overtime
| fn-mote wrote:
| Except not as a 1:1 trade!
| gregors wrote:
| The idea is that you put in the extra work and he keeps the
| extra profit. Sounds like a sweet deal.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| When you're on your deathbed, I'm sure you will be glad that you
| spent your kid's taekwondo tournament writing an email so that an
| e-commerce company could make line go up.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Some of these people don't understand that they won't see that
| tournament again, and they won't be able to make their
| relationship "line go up" if they don't build the foundations
| when their children are still children.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > Some of these people don't understand that they won't see
| that tournament again
|
| Just as many don't care or see it as an inconvenience to be
| there. They might do less damage to their families by just
| being honest and skipping.
| bayindirh wrote:
| If you don't care about your child's development and be
| there to support them, then you can just skip having
| children in the first place, or building a family
| altogether.
|
| There's no shame in being honest to _yourself_ and others,
| as you said.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > At Beacon, we are not going to wait for the next crisis to
| sweat our biggest challenges; we will build a culture that makes
| Sweating The Problem our default.
|
| Brilliant! I love it. It's Code Yellow all the time. If it worked
| once a year at Instacart, and Google made so much progress with
| it, we'll just turn "the Yellow" on all day, every day.
|
| Then maybe they can have a Code Red for when it's super-duper
| important to "sweat" the problem.
|
| > you walk away with the confidence that you can handle whatever
| comes next.
|
| You don't even need a bonus, just enjoy your new found sense of
| accomplishment. And maybe a subscription to the jelly-of-the-
| month club [1]
|
| [1] https://kitchychristmas.com/jelly-of-the-month/
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Person who closes the most tickets gets a car
|
| Second place gets a set of steak knives
|
| Third place is you're fired
|
| Always Be (C)losing
| munchbunny wrote:
| If thing A is important enough to declare a "code yellow" in
| order to ignore things B, C, and D to focus on A, then were B, C,
| and D really that important? Could you have focused your team on
| A from the start, making a "code yellow" unnecessary? (Hint: yes,
| you could have, so the question should be why you didn't, and
| whether you could have seen it coming.)
|
| I've seen this happen a lot with mediocre leaders. "Code Yellow"
| equivalents happen because they weren't able to understand that A
| was really the most important thing, typically because B, C, and
| D were important for optics or politics, but not genuinely
| important to the customer or the problem at hand.
|
| A "Code Yellow" is a useful political tool to move an
| organization to focus a bit more on problem solving by saying "I
| don't care about your politics, your org charts, whatever, just
| solve the damn problem." In that sense, it really does work.
| aftbit wrote:
| Wow what a toxic attitude. The worst part is acting like this
| constant crunch time is a normal and reasonable expectations.
| I'll also call out the derision towards "keeping the lights on"
| because, of course, keeping the damn lights on is a prerequisite
| to any kind of growth. Code Yellow doesn't tell people "hey it's
| not important that the site stay up, just focus on growth
| instead". It tells people "what you are doing 9-5 to keep the
| site up is not enough, spend your 5-9 working on this other
| initiative as well". Evil.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It doesn't feel like it means the same thing to OP as it does
| to the rest of us:
|
| > _The biggest constraint I have seen teams imposing
| unconsciously is the 'keeping the lights on' fallacy. This
| manifests as the project team giving the project /goal 25-50%
| of their attention (although saying it is their main priority)
| because they feel that they need to continue 'keeping the
| lights on' with other work activities or projects._
|
| It sounds like "keeping the lights on" means ... working on
| other things as well? It doesn't specify that it's to make sure
| those other things _keep working_. Maybe it 's implied? I have
| no idea.
| gregors wrote:
| This guy is bad at his job.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Well, he may be bad at his job, but at least it also sounds
| like he's bad at being a father.
| nasseri wrote:
| Is this satire?
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. I don't
| understand why so many managers fail to grasp this.
|
| It's the same with prioritization. I've literally had
| conversations that go:
|
| Manager: I need you to drop everything and do X right now, it's
| top priority
|
| Me: Ok, well I'm currently doing Y, which was top priority this
| morning. Which is more important, X or Y?
|
| Manager: Well, they're both equally important!
|
| Me: OK, sure. I can't work on both, which one would you like me
| to do first?
|
| Manager: [uncomfortable thinking noises]
|
| Manager: Are you sure you can't do both at once?
|
| Me: Yes
|
| Manager: [Pause] Keep going with Y. I'll see if someone else can
| do X
|
| sigh
| nine_zeros wrote:
| This dilbert-style management has become very normalized in
| tech - to the detriment of everyone.
|
| It fundamentally comes from a place where there are too many
| layers of managers, none of who want to make crucial decisions
| that can bite them back.
|
| Aka leadership only in org chart but not in setting direction,
| leading from the front, or accepting tradeoffs.
|
| Ultimately it all boils down to org chart leadership. If
| managers could be voted out of the org chart by people below
| them in the chart, they'd have no choice but to show more spine
| and help the people below.
|
| But this is not going to happen in corporations. So the best
| thing to do is quiet quitting. There is a reason this exists.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| IME this is much more prevalent in organizations that hire
| "nontechnical managers". I personally will never work in such
| companies again, the experience of having your boss have
| literally no clue what it is you do for a job is not one I'll
| sign up for again.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > strongly encourages the team to sacrifice the 'L' and 'B' from
| Work-Life-Balance.
|
| And what is the incentive for the rank and file to do this? Execs
| get millions of dollars worth of stock every 3 months. The rank
| and file isn't getting this. Why would the sacrifice their L and
| B?
|
| To keep their jobs? Naw. For this, they will cut corners and lie.
|
| Management practices have become so terrible in tech. It is no
| wonder that the best people keep switching jobs every few years.
| There is zero incentive to work under such poor management
| practices.
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