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his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us bac

his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. An irritating “I told you so” sentiment plagued his comments and feedback. The easily missed point here is that Jamie, on some level, still cares. The ones this author doesn't recognize are the ones who don't give any outward sign of annoyance, because they genuinely don't care. They'll participate in your "chaos is a process" and roll with your shifting requirements by doing the bare minimum at all times. Maybe they'll throw in some stuff occasionally to wow everyone, usually not. They'll just plug along, keeping their ideas and improvements to themselvse, watching you fail. Because they've seen this all before. Rare is the organization that knows what they want, and have structures in place to effectively build and grow products. I've personally seen it exactly once.

scruple 9y ago
> I've personally seen it exactly once. I've seen it twice. I left the first company where I saw it (I stayed for 6 years and learned more here than everywhere else else combined, despite the other problems) because despite having all of these brilliant people and alignment with front-line managers and other teams and strong process and strong product guidance the company was ruled over by a tyrant in the CEO and CFO. The CFO only cared about the bottom line and the CEO, too, but he cared more about taking full credit for all of our engineering successes. The folks I kept in contact with say not much has changed but that they've brought in some MBA types in the form of senior managers and things have been doing downhill since. The second time, I came in to the organization and it wasn't great but things worked and we were solving real problems for real people and for some reason it clicked well between the different groups/departments. Then the CEO and board, in their eternal quest to go IPO, disrupted the Engineering upper management chain, and we went through 3 different CTOs in the span of about 16 months. Suffice it to say, the magic was lost. That company is _still trying_ to go IPO, of course, and _still thinks_ they'll achieve it by bringing in different executive management players, last I heard.
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scruple 9y ago

> I've personally seen it exactly once. I've seen it twice. I left the first company where I saw it (I stayed for 6 years and learned more here than everywhere else else combined, despite the other problems) because despite having all of these brilliant people and alignment with front-line managers and other teams and strong process and strong product guidance the company was ruled over by a tyrant in the CEO and CFO. The CFO only cared about the bottom line and the CEO, too, but he cared more about taking full credit for all of our engineering successes. The folks I kept in contact with say not much has changed but that they've brought in some MBA types in the form of senior managers and things have been doing downhill since. The second time, I came in to the organization and it wasn't great but things worked and we were solving real problems for real people and for some reason it clicked well between the different groups/departments. Then the CEO and board, in their eternal quest to go IPO, disrupted the Engineering upper management chain, and we went through 3 different CTOs in the span of about 16 months. Suffice it to say, the magic was lost. That company is _still trying_ to go IPO, of course, and _still thinks_ they'll achieve it by bringing in different executive management players, last I heard.

deleted 9y ago
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