> "The turning point in my life was the day I realized to run great engineering teams I didn’t need to be the best engineer in the world, I needed to get good at advertising my people and their stories up the chain of command. I needed to improve their observability so that we can keep bureaucracy at bay by maintaining a high level of trust."
Poof. Another Big Tech middle manager got their wings.
This cynical surrendering is not keeping bureaucracy at bay, at all. It's joining the bureaucracy and increasing its size. It is the bureaucracy.
At companies that have competent managers up and down the hierarchy, it doesn't have to be like this. Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. There are companies, mostly smaller, that work like this.
It seems to reliably fail as companies scale, but for each company it might fail at a different point. The longer competent management can be maintained, the better chance of the company succeeding in a big way.
But all it takes is one good manager hiring a bad manager and the whole thing can start to fall apart. Once the company culture starts to reward people for playing bureaucratic games more than doing good work, it becomes broken and dysfunctional. Diseased.
Everyone quickly realizes that the dynamic has shifted. That good work isn't rewarded any better than bad work that is well marketed internally.
And so the best people, who have the most confidence and ability, go to smaller/better companies that know how to reward the people that do the best work. The other people stay and settle in for long-term escalating bureaucratic warfare.
And these broken companies are left to fail or ride out the momentum generated before they were broken. All the while being miserable places to work.
“Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse”
Incredibly great advice. Especially when trying to resolve an already broken situation.
> Security and reliability are more likely to go wrong in the seams between components. That means literal integrations, but it also means organization seams.
Elon said the best part is no part. Parts between systems, interfaces/valves/pumps/APIs/whatever, are often modelled not after what makes the most sense for the final system or product but often follows the organisational structure of the people making the system. So it makes sense that these interface parts are often what creates problems.
This feels more like engineering-manager advice, not advice for engineers. And, surprise surprise, people are the same even in non-technical fields.
I feel it's a similar reason books like Peopleware can still be so relevant - we've massively upgraded our computers, but the wetware is still the same as it was in the late 80s.
Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839
"because they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work."
so true
Do you guys think that managers should have some tech background so they could assess any situation and get better decisions. I've been involved in a few projects were the lead senior developer was having difficult times with the manager. Any thoughts?
> Know what people are asking you to be an expert in
I read this as “leave it to the experts and please realise that sometime it’s not you” which is something that is sometimes quite hard for micromanaging delivery leads or business stakeholders when it comes to implementation details. Worst is when there are endless progress update meetings about some some irrelevant detail that then holds up the whole project.
Similarly it is quite difficult for developers to realise that leaving design decisions to user researchers and ux designers is a good thing!
A couple of my favourites include:
"There's no such thing as a stupid question." "Design things for the person who's going to maintain it. It may be you."
Inadvertent best line: ”Hadn’t thought I was making decisions based on imposture syndrome, but did feel completely out of place.”
Another grandiose self important reflective “memoir” preaching All Of The Mistakes I Learned From ™
Pretty much falls in line neatly with the All Of My Hard Work linkedin posts
Not posting on Medium might be missing from the list, but consistent with all the points made.
To read this story please login. Yea.
Wassup with paywalls on medium these days? Lately, most articles are behind paywall for me. I though blogs were for free exchange of information!
Is anyone else getting sick of women "giving advice" about things they don't understand.
Women seem to think they are actually as smart as men or something, it's hilarious and horrible at the same time.
tl;dr preview -
1. “People like us make our money in the seams of things”
2. “Know what people are asking you to be an expert in”
3. “Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse”
4. “To go left, turn right”
5. “Thinking is also work”
Kind advice to everyone willing to share their write ups: avoid Medium.
I can’t read the article because of the signup wall. It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain.