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> it is important to be aware of what projects employees work on (with much less detail) In my experience, employees get told which project to work on by manag

> it is important to be aware of what projects employees work on (with much less detail) In my experience, employees get told which project to work on by management, usually through a formal budget / roadmap process which allocates resources to the initiatives being pushed by different stakeholders such as marketing, sales, IT (e.g. for maintenance projects), etc. So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in. What makes it through these different sieves depends on the company culture and what is considered the "right" level of information. In the worst cases, bad news will be edulcorated, then removed, until every line on the dashboard is green. In more result-driven companies, what makes it to the top is what is susceptible to impact business, so it's going to be the project delays and other bad news. But this process is like the "auto-summarize" feature in Word: a lot of nuance gets lost in the different layers and there's alsways a risk of ending up with nonsense. There's also a lot of mediation being done by middle management. The closest I've come to direct feedback from the junior employees to the execs at large (>10k FTE) companies is when execs tour the office and come take a look at the grunts in the trenches (this will happen once or twice a year). Inevitably there's an awkward roundtable with a chosen team (usually the one working on the most visible project) where the exec asks each person in the room "what is blocking you and what can I do to help you" while that person's boss and grand-boss glare at them from the back of the room, silently promising retribution to anyone who raises any actual issue.

yvp 7y ago
>So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in. I agree this seems to be a common pattern. You do run into multiple issues with it (though there is no perfect solution) - some of which already described by pg in one of his essays (http://paulgraham.com/boss.html http://paulgraham.com/boss.html). I tend to think the quality of information is maybe inversely proportional to the levels it has to go through to reach the intended recipient as each layer will inevitably add noise/distortion.
- laurentl 7y ago
  > the quality of information is maybe inversely proportional to the levels it has to go through I think that each level distorts the message to bring it more in line with company culture (e.g. make it look better, or highlight blocking points, or focus on financial topics, etc.). It follows that the quality of the information doesn’t necessarily have to decrease - in theory, the right company culture will ensure that only the most relevant information is kept (and I’m pretty sure you can tie this to successful company traits) More generally, I think that in this context you can’t treat information quality as a purely objective measure. Here quality is (at least partly) in the eye of the beholder, so you could argue that making the reporting more in line with the expectations of you higher-ups actually increase quality.

yvp 7y ago

>So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in. I agree this seems to be a common pattern. You do run into multiple issues with it (though there is no perfect solution) - some of which already described by pg in one of his essays (http://paulgraham.com/boss.html http://paulgraham.com/boss.html). I tend to think the quality of information is maybe inversely proportional to the levels it has to go through to reach the intended recipient as each layer will inevitably add noise/distortion.

laurentl 7y ago
> the quality of information is maybe inversely proportional to the levels it has to go through I think that each level distorts the message to bring it more in line with company culture (e.g. make it look better, or highlight blocking points, or focus on financial topics, etc.). It follows that the quality of the information doesn’t necessarily have to decrease - in theory, the right company culture will ensure that only the most relevant information is kept (and I’m pretty sure you can tie this to successful company traits) More generally, I think that in this context you can’t treat information quality as a purely objective measure. Here quality is (at least partly) in the eye of the beholder, so you could argue that making the reporting more in line with the expectations of you higher-ups actually increase quality.