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The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence. No car company would
by bittcto 8y ago
The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence.
No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars.
But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engineering.
I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at:
At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was borderline computer illiterate.
After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management, right?
Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management skills were still getting paid more!)
At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.)
Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar” in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!
- seanf 8y agoAmazon is getting close to a $1T market cap which makes this look more like an argument for hiring non-technical managers. You didn't provide any examples of poor management by the prison guard or DMV manager, other than some jealously about salary. Other than the bad feelings, did they get results? When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? If not, did it really negatively affect the bottom line? Did whatever you instead had to work on in October help the bottom line more than the Thanksgiving bug?
- blindwatchmaker 8y ago> When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? This is the kind of line of thinking often pursued by poor managers.
- smhinsey 8y agoYeah, I think there is a certain mindset for whom "going ballistic" seems like a smart power move that you can use to get results, but in day to day reality, I see it as the ultimate failure to maintain control over the situation. Guys like Bezos can get away with it, but that doesn't make it smart.
- blindwatchmaker 8y agoIt's not even the going ballistic part that gets me, but the sequence of events. Management refused to allocate the time to fix tech debt/bugs, this decision comes back to bite them in the ass, GP takes the typical tack that tries to deflect blame away from shitty management decisions. "Could you, the devs, have fixed this bug under severe time pressure just before a critical sales period instead of when you first identified it?" -> if yes, no problem. Spiritus sancti, management is absolved of their sins.
- bittcto 8y agoThe fix was a hacknand as for “on time”, no we were already three Sadat’s into the heavyvsakes week, literally hours before thanksgiving when Bezos decided to cancel everyone’s thanksgiving because of his own incompetence. I call it incompetence because prioritizing a new feature over a bug fix is almost always wrong. And Bezos surrounds himself with yes men so if he under estimated the bugs impact because a yesman was saving face that’s still on Bezos.
- russdpale 8y agoWhen Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time? But see, here in lies the problem. Its his own fault for stopping his engineers from working on the issue ahead of time. He had no reason to yell at anyone and it makes him look totally unprofessional. That is not someone I would want to work for, and I would never treat my employees that way.
- pascalxus 8y agoI worked at a company where the CEO was an engineer, and most of the managers and VC in the engineering dept were engineers, but things weren't necessarily any better.