5 ms·

What wonderful utopian companies did you work for? In the last round of layoffs in my company, I saw good, experienced, developers get pushed out because they

What wonderful utopian companies did you work for? In the last round of layoffs in my company, I saw good, experienced, developers get pushed out because they promoted good ideas and tried to stop bad ideas from happening. Now everyone keeps their head down and projects are always in panic mode.

ryandrake 10y ago
Unfortunately the places you describe far outnumber the places I describe. My "utopian" companies both degenerated into into "head down panic mode" places and I bailed.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  I've seen that happen, too. A place has realistic, sane management... until it doesn't. If you are at a place with sane management, though, don't be in a great hurry to leave...
  - nine_k 10y ago
    When an engineer makes a stupid decision, there are peers who point at it during code review. What is the equivalent in management? Does it exist?
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Every profession contains at least some form of feedback: From your manager, from your peers, and/or from your subordinates.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      No, not as far as I know. Management is very different from engineering because there is no objective right or wrong, it is all subjective and all about the feelings of the people around you. Management is essentially a babysitting exercise. If you keep your people from throwing tantrums, having meltdowns, and going against the grain, you succeeded, and if you didn't, you failed. Peer criticism is thus inherently orthogonal to management because very few people can maturely handle even a mild quantity of criticism. Keeping colleagues and superiors in a good emotional state is even more important for career development than executing your job description in a non-disastrous way. Directing a business is much different from management, even if some management is required, but even then it's difficult to pinpoint cause and effect because there are so many externalities. You'd think this would mean that good people who can deftly juggle a ton of variables are attracted to such positions, but in practice it seems that people who are bad at things and depend on having many ambiguous potential causes to diffuse fault over take them instead. That's definitely the case in management; people who are incapable fall into those positions because their performance can't be definitely measured.
      - samnwa 10y ago
        That's not true. Managers are measured on delivery, customer satisfaction, and revenue or profitability. These measures are directly related to ability to manage inputs (engineering resource) to outputs (finished code that drives those measures).
        cookiecaper 10y ago
        You can see types of results at a high-level, sure, but you can't see cause and effect. Because management is about managing employee feelings, whenever an objection is raised, Bob can say "Well, Alice and Dan were having a really serious issue, which I can't discuss with peers due to confidentiality concerns, and we really had to dedicate a lot of effort to defusing that and retaining them in order to keep our mindshare and minimize legal risk". That's a legitimate managerial effort. Unless you're also in a position to intimately know the issue with Alice and Dan (and if you are then why does this manager exist?), you can't really say "That was an incorrect way to solve the issue." Human emotions create a drag on productivity, can't get around that. A manager's job is to minimize, defuse, and de-escalate that drag. You can sort of say "Bob, your team always has the most problems, you clearly can't keep them under control", but it really depends on a lot of variables, and unlike software engineering, you can't directly quantify the impact of most actions/tradeoffs. It's very non-scientific. If you know of a management culture that facilitates this kind of peer feedback, please let me know. My personal experience is that successful management types are extremely emotionally aware and well-polished, and know that providing criticism to anyone only serves to generate hostility. They will try to manage their reports indirectly, attempting to curb behaviors and get results without having to directly criticize.
        samnwa 10y ago
        All fair points. Thanks for taking the time to expand.
- alexvoda 10y ago
  Let me guess, one of the places was VmWare?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes, this is critical. 99% of companies are run by cogs. It really takes a committed visionary at the top to set the tone for the culture, and at some point, those visionaries have to go away due to retirement, death, etc. There is a 99% likelihood that they will be replaced with another cog when this happens. We must not become overly committed to a company, because a company is only as good as its people, and people come in and out all the time.

ryandrake 10y ago

Unfortunately the places you describe far outnumber the places I describe. My "utopian" companies both degenerated into into "head down panic mode" places and I bailed.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
I've seen that happen, too. A place has realistic, sane management... until it doesn't. If you are at a place with sane management, though, don't be in a great hurry to leave...
- nine_k 10y ago
  When an engineer makes a stupid decision, there are peers who point at it during code review. What is the equivalent in management? Does it exist?
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Every profession contains at least some form of feedback: From your manager, from your peers, and/or from your subordinates.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    No, not as far as I know. Management is very different from engineering because there is no objective right or wrong, it is all subjective and all about the feelings of the people around you. Management is essentially a babysitting exercise. If you keep your people from throwing tantrums, having meltdowns, and going against the grain, you succeeded, and if you didn't, you failed. Peer criticism is thus inherently orthogonal to management because very few people can maturely handle even a mild quantity of criticism. Keeping colleagues and superiors in a good emotional state is even more important for career development than executing your job description in a non-disastrous way. Directing a business is much different from management, even if some management is required, but even then it's difficult to pinpoint cause and effect because there are so many externalities. You'd think this would mean that good people who can deftly juggle a ton of variables are attracted to such positions, but in practice it seems that people who are bad at things and depend on having many ambiguous potential causes to diffuse fault over take them instead. That's definitely the case in management; people who are incapable fall into those positions because their performance can't be definitely measured.
    - samnwa 10y ago
      That's not true. Managers are measured on delivery, customer satisfaction, and revenue or profitability. These measures are directly related to ability to manage inputs (engineering resource) to outputs (finished code that drives those measures).
      - cookiecaper 10y ago
        You can see types of results at a high-level, sure, but you can't see cause and effect. Because management is about managing employee feelings, whenever an objection is raised, Bob can say "Well, Alice and Dan were having a really serious issue, which I can't discuss with peers due to confidentiality concerns, and we really had to dedicate a lot of effort to defusing that and retaining them in order to keep our mindshare and minimize legal risk". That's a legitimate managerial effort. Unless you're also in a position to intimately know the issue with Alice and Dan (and if you are then why does this manager exist?), you can't really say "That was an incorrect way to solve the issue." Human emotions create a drag on productivity, can't get around that. A manager's job is to minimize, defuse, and de-escalate that drag. You can sort of say "Bob, your team always has the most problems, you clearly can't keep them under control", but it really depends on a lot of variables, and unlike software engineering, you can't directly quantify the impact of most actions/tradeoffs. It's very non-scientific. If you know of a management culture that facilitates this kind of peer feedback, please let me know. My personal experience is that successful management types are extremely emotionally aware and well-polished, and know that providing criticism to anyone only serves to generate hostility. They will try to manage their reports indirectly, attempting to curb behaviors and get results without having to directly criticize.
        samnwa 10y ago
        All fair points. Thanks for taking the time to expand.
alexvoda 10y ago
Let me guess, one of the places was VmWare?
cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes, this is critical. 99% of companies are run by cogs. It really takes a committed visionary at the top to set the tone for the culture, and at some point, those visionaries have to go away due to retirement, death, etc. There is a 99% likelihood that they will be replaced with another cog when this happens. We must not become overly committed to a company, because a company is only as good as its people, and people come in and out all the time.