6 ms·

It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. That also might be the C-Suite attitude, that if they select only for what they think is

by basch 7y ago

It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. That also might be the C-Suite attitude, that if they select only for what they think is performant, they lose diversity of ideas. Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. I'ts a cultural failure to keep people that only try and make people (they self select as competent) better. In the case of the op story. It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. It's evaluating the idea too quickly. It's rowing upstream, when they are asking everyone else to row down. When they are looking for momentum, and the details come later, that person can derail the process. The reason they started working in secret, where everybody in the company but op knew, is that op was disruptive to the culture of trying. They were too pragmatic, too literal, too technical. Sit down, listen to what management is asking for, then go work on a pitch, where your delivery is "we can deliver what you are asking for (and also reuse most of our old work, saving you time and money!) Be on their team, not in opposition to it. Replace but with yes, and at the beginning of sentences.

kvark 7y ago
Well said! At the same time, it's sad to live in the world were being honest and straightforward pays off so poorly.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  One person's straightforward is another person's rude. Delivery matters!
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    If we're talking about what's best for the company, then only the relevance of the facts should matter. Up to a certain point, of course. But all this talk of how to deliver information so the recipient feels nice about receiving bad feedback (shit sandwiches and such) shouldn't matter.
    - Joe-Z 7y ago
      If you find a company that‘s run by robots instead of people you might get what you advocate for
    - basch 7y ago
      Its very possible for one person in a meeting to be ahead of everyone else, and that they need to sit back and let the rest of the room organically catch up. Sometimes it feels like its your place to either "get everyone on the same page" or "move forward because we are stuck in a rut" but actually youre just being disruptive to everyone elses learning. Nothing at all to do with feelings.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    To a point. While any given speaker should always endeavor to deliver their point for maximum effectiveness, by the same token, discounting or outright ignoring feedback simply because it's worded poorly or timed poorly is like rejecting your paycheck because it's printed on green paper instead of white. The money is still there, and it's still usable, and you're only hurting yourself because it didn't come how you thought it should. Frankly, as someone who leads a team myself, yeah I've had to take colleagues aside and say "this isn't how we do things" but I certainly wouldn't just bin their entire point without consideration to save "face."
ryandrake 7y ago
I don’t know—“culture of trying” sounds too much like “reality distortion field.” Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. I’ve seen far more half-baked money pit projects than risks that paid off in my career. In tech in general there is way too much optimism and ignoring inconvenient facts/constraints until disaster is clear. Someone who can EFFECTIVELY steer teams away from horrible decisions is worth their weight in gold. In the OP’s case, he simply couldn’t effectively communicate this, and failed to notice the rampant nepotism up his management chain, but his heart was in the right place.
- basch 7y ago
  >Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. Absolutely. And not just crazy ideas, but maybe we'll intended ideas that are misaligned with each other or the overall goals and strategic roadmap. Too many autonomous silos that are all high functioning tend to not like a skeptic saying, "this is great in isolation but the sum of these parts don't fit coherently." They also don't like "this works, but it's an MVP at best, and isn't sustainable." Skeptics cognizant of technical debt, may meet unwelcomness in an org not willing to acknowledge it.
FussyZeus 7y ago
> It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. This is entirely possible but in the case of OP, and in the larger scope, it's irrelevant. If you have a product manager, for example, who's job it is to oversee the development of a product, they can be the best damn communicator, they could be the nicest person, they could be financially minded and have great marketing skills, they could have excellent personal hygiene and be fantastic husbands. All of that means precisely nothing if they are so bad at managing the product that they cannot deliver that product. I'm not saying that everybody like OP's boss here should be fired, per se, there's probably a place in the organization for them. But once they become entrenched in a place they don't belong in the organization, again, it's cancer. And it's fatal. > Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. Except this assumes a rising tide. If the tide falls, perhaps because your captain is not good at gauging tides, you're beached. > It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. Or it's recognizing that the problem management is trying to solve has already been solved. This can mean one of many things, but the two that spring immediately to mind is that a competitor (or competitors) have already solved this problem, and that management just wants a slice of that pie too, failing to consider that simply offering isn't enough, you need to have a differentiator. See, for example, all the game developers who chased the various trends like Battle Royale, and before that Military Shooters, and before that MMO's, and all the failed businesses that those trends left in their wake. Alternately, and this seems to be the situation where OP was, their own business had already solved this need; this is a good place to be, and wanting to increase revenue by providing a new product is a damn hard, borderline arcana level task to do without either A) alienating existing customers or B) cannibalizing the users of an existing product. I don't think management is by default full of shit, and must prove themselves wrong. That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees. If I have questions you're damn right I'm going to ask them, and I want answers commensurate with a level of respect that I'm sure my given boss would expect from me. And if your answer is to out me as a nonbeliever, I'm sending out resumes. I have no interest in finding out how this place is going down.
- 7y ago
staticassertion 7y ago
In the case of the story the project was a total failure, so it's moot - in hindsight it is simply a fact (trusting the narrator of course) that the manager was incompetent.
- basch 7y ago
  This doesnt need to be a tribal either or. It could be both incompetent management and tactlessness and strategic ineptitude on the tech leads part.
dTal 7y ago
If your technical lead doesn't understand your "vision" or perceives that it has major problems, or has deep concerns about process and attrition rate and doesn't feel they can communicate them because the last time they tried you "literally ran away", then that is unquestionably a failure of management. Don't blame the subordinate calling foul for being "too pragmatic". That's not how hierarchical management works.
- basch 7y ago
  The self appointed technical lead, while management was announcing a new project, stood up and said "this project is a bad idea." It probably wasnt the time and the place, even if the technical person was correct. The entire company moved forward and left this person out. There were other better ways to handle dissent.

by basch 7y ago

kvark 7y ago

Well said! At the same time, it's sad to live in the world were being honest and straightforward pays off so poorly.

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
One person's straightforward is another person's rude. Delivery matters!
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  If we're talking about what's best for the company, then only the relevance of the facts should matter. Up to a certain point, of course. But all this talk of how to deliver information so the recipient feels nice about receiving bad feedback (shit sandwiches and such) shouldn't matter.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    If you find a company that‘s run by robots instead of people you might get what you advocate for
  - basch 7y ago
    Its very possible for one person in a meeting to be ahead of everyone else, and that they need to sit back and let the rest of the room organically catch up. Sometimes it feels like its your place to either "get everyone on the same page" or "move forward because we are stuck in a rut" but actually youre just being disruptive to everyone elses learning. Nothing at all to do with feelings.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  To a point. While any given speaker should always endeavor to deliver their point for maximum effectiveness, by the same token, discounting or outright ignoring feedback simply because it's worded poorly or timed poorly is like rejecting your paycheck because it's printed on green paper instead of white. The money is still there, and it's still usable, and you're only hurting yourself because it didn't come how you thought it should. Frankly, as someone who leads a team myself, yeah I've had to take colleagues aside and say "this isn't how we do things" but I certainly wouldn't just bin their entire point without consideration to save "face."

ryandrake 7y ago

I don’t know—“culture of trying” sounds too much like “reality distortion field.” Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. I’ve seen far more half-baked money pit projects than risks that paid off in my career. In tech in general there is way too much optimism and ignoring inconvenient facts/constraints until disaster is clear. Someone who can EFFECTIVELY steer teams away from horrible decisions is worth their weight in gold. In the OP’s case, he simply couldn’t effectively communicate this, and failed to notice the rampant nepotism up his management chain, but his heart was in the right place.

basch 7y ago
>Companies need a few skeptics around to put the brakes on crazy ideas. Absolutely. And not just crazy ideas, but maybe we'll intended ideas that are misaligned with each other or the overall goals and strategic roadmap. Too many autonomous silos that are all high functioning tend to not like a skeptic saying, "this is great in isolation but the sum of these parts don't fit coherently." They also don't like "this works, but it's an MVP at best, and isn't sustainable." Skeptics cognizant of technical debt, may meet unwelcomness in an org not willing to acknowledge it.

FussyZeus 7y ago

> It's very possible they are good at something youre not perceptive to. This is entirely possible but in the case of OP, and in the larger scope, it's irrelevant. If you have a product manager, for example, who's job it is to oversee the development of a product, they can be the best damn communicator, they could be the nicest person, they could be financially minded and have great marketing skills, they could have excellent personal hygiene and be fantastic husbands. All of that means precisely nothing if they are so bad at managing the product that they cannot deliver that product. I'm not saying that everybody like OP's boss here should be fired, per se, there's probably a place in the organization for them. But once they become entrenched in a place they don't belong in the organization, again, it's cancer. And it's fatal. > Too often, the response to perceiving someones incompetence is the perceiver shutting down, instead of taking a rising-tide-raises-all-boats attitude. Except this assumes a rising tide. If the tide falls, perhaps because your captain is not good at gauging tides, you're beached. > It was clear management, maybe the business, not technical leadership, asked for a new product. Saying "our old product does that" is missing the forest for the trees. Or it's recognizing that the problem management is trying to solve has already been solved. This can mean one of many things, but the two that spring immediately to mind is that a competitor (or competitors) have already solved this problem, and that management just wants a slice of that pie too, failing to consider that simply offering isn't enough, you need to have a differentiator. See, for example, all the game developers who chased the various trends like Battle Royale, and before that Military Shooters, and before that MMO's, and all the failed businesses that those trends left in their wake. Alternately, and this seems to be the situation where OP was, their own business had already solved this need; this is a good place to be, and wanting to increase revenue by providing a new product is a damn hard, borderline arcana level task to do without either A) alienating existing customers or B) cannibalizing the users of an existing product. I don't think management is by default full of shit, and must prove themselves wrong. That said, I have never seen a healthy business that stays afloat long term where the response to criticism of decisions being made is to simply ostracize employees. If I have questions you're damn right I'm going to ask them, and I want answers commensurate with a level of respect that I'm sure my given boss would expect from me. And if your answer is to out me as a nonbeliever, I'm sending out resumes. I have no interest in finding out how this place is going down.

7y ago

staticassertion 7y ago

In the case of the story the project was a total failure, so it's moot - in hindsight it is simply a fact (trusting the narrator of course) that the manager was incompetent.

basch 7y ago
This doesnt need to be a tribal either or. It could be both incompetent management and tactlessness and strategic ineptitude on the tech leads part.

dTal 7y ago

If your technical lead doesn't understand your "vision" or perceives that it has major problems, or has deep concerns about process and attrition rate and doesn't feel they can communicate them because the last time they tried you "literally ran away", then that is unquestionably a failure of management. Don't blame the subordinate calling foul for being "too pragmatic". That's not how hierarchical management works.

basch 7y ago
The self appointed technical lead, while management was announcing a new project, stood up and said "this project is a bad idea." It probably wasnt the time and the place, even if the technical person was correct. The entire company moved forward and left this person out. There were other better ways to handle dissent.