15 ms·

Why are CEOs failing software engineers?

245 points by kag0 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago
Interesting but weird. CEO's aren't failing software engineers, no more than software engineers are failing the cafeteria crew by using too much ketchup. If they are failing, they are failing the business. There's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. That has nothing to do with software engineers. Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no.
- acidbaseextract 6y ago
  There's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. Dead on. I've seen boards of directors ask for fried ice: Management: We haven't put adequate time into building a sales training program. Board: Focus only on revenue this quarter. It's the only thing that matters! Then next quarter: Board: Why aren't your new sales guys producing?! They need to drive revenue! Management: Uh... you told us not to spend time on training.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Indeed. Ultimately it's the (specific incarnation of the) shareholder model of capitalism that's at fault. Shareholders have ultimate control of companies, and their incentives are aligned all wrong (to the short term).
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > Shareholders have ultimate control of companies, and their incentives are aligned all wrong (to the short term). This is actually not true of individual shareholders; most individual shareholders are investing for the long term, because most individual shareholders are investing for a long-term goal, like retirement. The problem is that most shares in most companies are no longer owned by individual shareholders, but mutual funds, and from the standpoint of an individual stock, a mutual fund does have short-term incentives, since if the stock's performance goes down the fund will just sell it and buy something else. The individual investors whose assets are held by the mutual fund, and who have a longer time horizon (most mutual fund accounts are retirement accounts), don't care about which individual stocks the fund holds or how often it trades them. So the longer time horizon of the actual individual investors is masked and only the short term incentives are visible to the individual companies.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        I agree with basically everything you've said. I'd add: the system is such that mutual funds are able to make greater profits from the system by playing things in this way. This means that over the long-term, capital accumulates in these funds, further skewing the proportion of investment that is driven through these vehicles.
        d0mine 6y ago
        It is not obvious why trading more often (quarter-scale) would lead to greater profits long-term. Do any mutual funds ever beat the market? (on the "retirement" decades time scale)
    - frenchy 6y ago
      Ultimately, "long-sighted" shareholders should be able to outperform the short-sited ones, as long as they can retain control of the company. I wonder if there's any way to form a sort of shareholders union to maintain the control of an organization by shareholders who plain to keep stock for a long time.
      - Jolter 6y ago
        The sibling comments by pdonis and nicoburns, about mutual funds, explain pretty well why the short-term investors will increase over time.
      - cbhl 6y ago
        The two-class stock structure (ala Facebook and Google) is one experiment in this, but being able to establish such a structure depends on investors' appetite for it during IPO-time.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Such an incentive problem is easy to fix. Simply put the people who do the work at the company in charge. Their incentives are aligned to doing the work well, keeping the business stable, and developing a healthy culture.
      - ll931110 6y ago
        Nope, not that easy. Look at Scuderia Ferrari F1 team. In 2014 - 2018 the team principal was a business guy (Maurizio Arrivabene), whom was pushed out to make room for a technical guy (Mattia Binotto), whom led the technical work to bring Ferrari challenging the F1 title. And look at what happens now: they went backward from the 2nd best team to shared 5th-6th, burning a budget of $400M for a car that was a lot slower than their own version last year.
        philjohn 6y ago
        And yet when they put a technical guy in charge during the Schumacher years they flourished. I don't think the problem is either Arrivabene or Binotto - it was Marchionne and it's going to take a long time to fix.
        ll931110 6y ago
        Right, but Ross Brawn was hardly alone. He worked well with Jean Todt whom did the negotiation and business handling. For all the credits to Binotto, he's not a good negotiator.
- csours 6y ago
  > "Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no." I've worked construction and at a manufacturing plant, and tech is a genuinely different business, with a different mindset than other businesses. Yes, they are failing the business, but they are failing the business in a new and interesting way, which is what this post is about. Tech is the engine that accelerates business. Acceleration used to be slow. If you don't have an engine that accelerates quickly now, and you don't have a HUGE moat, you won't survive.
  - noahl 6y ago
    Can you give some examples of the mindset of construction and manufacturing businesses? It would be interesting to me, and I think to other people here too.
    - csours 6y ago
      Construction and manufacturing are very much about following defined instructions and processes and not updating or deviating from them without good reason. (Obviously there's a lot of Get Stuff Done too, where people ignore the above rules). Manufacturing Management is also all about metrics and counting productivity. Trying to apply similar metrics to tech leads to things like counting developers lines of code or defects. --- Edit: another aspect of manufacturing is limiting waste. In Toyota Production system this is called Muda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) Waste of overproduction (largest waste) Waste of time on hand (waiting) Waste of transportation Waste of processing itself Waste of excess inventory Waste of movement Waste of making defective products Waste of underutilized workers You can look at the other goals of TPS and see how they may or may not apply to software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System I'm not saying these are bad ideas or don't apply to software engineering, but I am saying that they don't apply in the same way.
      - ci5er 6y ago
        Well, for one, TPS is attempting to optimize the manufacturing of a fixed design. With software the design-made-code, where software is what in automotive would be considered the design process is 100% of the cost, the shipping of bits is 0%. In automotive, it is more like 5% design vs 95% building the car, goes the other way. When people apply manufacturing methodologies to design practices, it rarely works out. "Design" is messy, but people expect to be able to apply a manufacturing-like "LEAN" process to it. They are mixing goslings and goats.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  > If they are failing, they are failing the business. And the business includes the employees.
nickff 6y ago
This post is atrociously bad. It seems like the author(s) are trying to come up with original ideas, but Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen have written much better works on this subject.
- supercanuck 6y ago
  Do you have anything to add other than an ad-hominem?
  - ponker 6y ago
    This is not an ad hominem.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I agree it is poorly presented, which is why having others read and critique something is always helpful. That said, I don't believe it rises to the level of 'atrociously bad' :-). The authors will come by and read this and dismiss it out of hand when you have a chance to help them get better at what they do (they recognize that failing to do something, in this case present their case clearly, can teach new skills) So let's be a bit more proactive in the feedback okay? The post bounces between background/foundation material and new material too rapidly. It can be over expository in background which may prevent the reader from connecting what background material/situation is being addressed by the new material. It fails to present a cogent summary of its thesis statement in the first paragraph, that comes in paragraph 3. Paragraphs 1 & 2 are nominally a problem statement in what reads as an obtuse jargon. Now some of that is that the entire article feels like it is written for someone who has read all of their other articles and so there are many unexplained phrases which clearly have specific meanings. Statements like "I promise you, in its entirety, the following is something you’ve never heard before, and the ramifications of ignoring the advice herein most assuredly leads to unhappy software engineers." exhibit a certain hubris that can be off putting to engineers and that isn't a great place to start.
- csours 6y ago
  Why are you so angry about a blog post? Digesting ideas from thought leaders and re-stating them with a different angle is what blog posts are for. I've read Christensen's work, along with other authors and came to the same conclusions that this author writes about, but I've never taken the time to put it into words like this.
phaemon 6y ago
Well, what else is a failing software engineer to do?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Pit them against each other to get raises?
jedberg 6y ago
I'm surprised they didn't look at Walt Disney for how to run a successful creative company. His ideas apply equally well to software as they do to the arts. I've been watching the documentaries on Disney+, particularly The Imagineering Story (great doc BTW). They talk about the history of the creative side of Disneyland. What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build" they thrive. When a CFO type gets involved with Disney, suddenly their output drops, because that CEO is asking what the ROI is for everything they do. A lot of what they do fails and has no ROI, and the people that work there start to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working. When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again. I think this is applicable to software. When an engineer isn't asked to think about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel innovations. But if they know they will be judged on ROI, they will take fewer risks. This of course is all predicated on being a profitable company. You have to already have a good cashflow to have the freedom to say "just go create".
- deepakhj 6y ago
  My friend at Pixar says they've slowly dismantled all the good things and benefits at Pixar after Disney bought them. Disney+ was built by the acquisition of BAMTech I believe. Maybe they have more autonomy like AWS does inside of Amazon.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    D+ was literally built by BAMTech using the same tech that powers HBOGo and MLB streaming. I think the Pixar thing has more to do with their management, namely John Lassater, moving south to head up Disney Animation, which did extremely well when he took over. Apparently they're doing even better under Jennifer Lee, who took over for him when he left/was ousted.
- hitsurume 6y ago
  What's the documentary called?
  - 6y ago
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m23khan 6y ago
I don't know solution for the entire IT industry but can suggest something for Corporate IT: New IT staff should be given grounding in Business Curriculum relevant to the Corporate's business / Team's mandate - this ought to organized by upper level of IT management. Software Developers / Engineers working in Corporate IT tend to stagnate in terms of their careers once they hit the wall (wall = business knowledge). E.g., take an investment firm and within it, say IT Department XYZ Supports the firm's Private Equity investment team. It is easy for Software Engineers in the team to code up and provide Tech. solutions however for complex business cases where advanced Private Equity knowledge is required, the Software Engineers have to rely on the Business Analysts or the clients themselves to do hand-holding. I have only seen something like 1 in 10 Software Developers in Corporate IT willing to pick up Business knowledge beyond the basic business terminology. And this is why I believe the value of Software Engineers at Corporate IT takes a serious hit - from CEO / Board / Upper layers of Finance, it looks like the drivers of revenue are basically their finance folks (CFAs, CPAs, Investors) whereas IT are just a cost center to enable the finance folks to do their work (which is a very bad vision but that is how it looks like from their POV). In these cases, the only group from IT that benefits somewhat are the top IT management who act as the guardians of the IT division. Another thing that works against IT folks in Corporate IT is self-criticism (critical of current IT culture, constant itch to reinvent self), constant need to associate with low-paid/ low-educated professions (factory line worker analogy, plumber mentality) and appearing far too casual. Sure, jeans and T-shirts and having eccentric/artistic personality is the culture spawned from Tech stalwarts based in Silicon Valley, but that mentality does not translate into rest of the World. Even if the Corporate's HR policies allows for dress-down environment, guess what - the HR and Finance People typically appear well polished in their appearance - they rather have nice office lunch rather than pizza and pop chow-downs and you can't deny that as humans (especially if the CEO and top Execs are non-IT), it doesn't leave a very favorable opinion about the IT staff.
- dpeck 6y ago
  It’s not just software, it’s like that for every industry. There are some, usually large, group of people whether in sales/marketing/operations/etc who aren’t particularly interested in the industry of their business but prefer to focus on the details of their task. It’s not wrong or bad at all, but it does tend to be compensated less.
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YesThatTom2 6y ago
Yes, CEOs are. That's why I wrote: The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-top-10-things-executives-should-know-about-software/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-top-10-thin...
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Executives are shockingly idiotic about software development, and considering their business sinks or swims on the success of software in very very many cases, it is a major failing of MBA factories. I actually consider software / IT management to be more important than accounting, and every MBA person takes finance/accounting.
opportune 6y ago
I don’t really like the idea that Need, Belief, Opportunity, and Anticipation are the drivers of engineering as opposed to money and personal growth. I’m not surprised though because these guys appear to be Scrum Consultants who want to tell software orgs they can improve productivity by paying them for “training” rather than paying employees more for work. Ultimately what I want as a software engineer employee is my own personal success. I actually identify a lot more with their “Business Management” step: I want incentives to be aligned and I will be motivated to do great work if I feel like I can share in that success. Yes it’s easier to get up in the morning if I’m working on something that’s overall successful, but that would be negated if I couldn’t get a piece of that. This seems to fit into the more common trope that engineers are easily fooled into working for less pay than they should be getting through bullshit like “vision”. Even if I’m working on something cool I’m not going to be happy to just make someone else rich. If I only cared about solving a problem I would just write OSS.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  It's a continuum. I would just write OSS but for the need of a paycheck. I'm not fooled, I just don't care about money as much as I care about software, and so I put my time and effort into learning about how to optimize software, not money.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  "Financial Management" step also solved an incentive alignment problem: it created a way for investors to cooperate with the organization. But these two steps are different: the second one aligned the organization with its workers, but the first one aligned the organization with investors. Assuming this trend will continue, the third step will align the organization with some other group.
- devdas 6y ago
  Your personal motivation appears to be entirely extrinsic. For a lot of people, the motivation is intrinsic. After a certain amount of money, more money wouldn't bring me joy. Money is a floor, not a ceiling.
ausjke 6y ago
that made me recall what I heard often: "mediocre engineers turn into managers" :)
thesumofall 6y ago
I think this goes two ways. Yes, management is failing to manage creative work. But in too many companies (and I’m not talking about startups full of youngsters straight out of college) staff has also lost the ability to be creative, take ownership, and push their own ideas. It is very easy to fall into a “I wasn’t told to do so” routine. This is obviously a reinforcing circle
demadog 6y ago
Does anyone know what this phenomenon is called: “This phenomenon is due, in no small part, to how our brains, in response to the thrill of successfully completing a rewarded task, releases euphoric chemicals that strongly reinforce the behavior that led to success.”
- phonethrowaway 6y ago
  amygdala, dopamine reward. it's a feedback loop of reinforcement.
known 6y ago
Heads I Win; Tails You Lose;
danesparza 6y ago
Classically trained CEO's don't use the language of makers. They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. They are accountants at heart (who are beholden to shareholders -- not their employees). Just look at the language used to describe a successful CEO 'sprinter' by Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-according-to-a-10-year-study https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-acco...) : "In his late twenties, “James” was hired in a strategy and business development role inside a multibillion-dollar marketing and communications business. Early in his career, he was offered the chance to build out one of the new businesses. It felt like a demotion, or at best a lateral move, to be handed a blank org chart and a highly uncertain future. “It was zero revenue when I stepped in, and we built that business to $250 million,” he says. By building a new business from scratch, he picked up essential management skills, such as running a P&L, managing a budget, and setting a strategic vision — all critical prerequisites to becoming a CEO (over 90% of the CEOs we studied had general management experience). Thirteen years later, he found himself the CEO of a $1.5 billion education and training business."
- otoburb 6y ago
  >>They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. Without such language and understanding, founders will have a harder time sustaining their endeavours. Such concepts apply whether you're bootstrapping, taking investor funds, or just an indie builder.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  > They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. If you want to have an actual company that can continue paying your salary, somebody better have a good handle on those things.
compumike 6y ago
I enjoyed this article very much. I'd add that if you truly want the freedom to be creative, you may have to opt out of being an employee and choose the founder path instead. This nicely compliments pg's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
- zomglings 6y ago
  I opted out of being an employee and chose the founder path. I have very little time to be creative (the way I was, for example, when I was in graduate school or at Google). For me, a large part of thinking creatively is about exposing myself to ideas outside of what I am actively supposed to be doing and then letting those ideas permeate through my thinking when I am working on what I am actively supposed to be doing. Between talking to users, talking to customers, talking to investors, and perpetual catch-up on my product, I rarely find the space to think about things other than my business. That said, we have definitely had dark moments that we came out of because of very creative ideas. It's just that creativity is nowhere near the top virtue required of a founder.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    I know Bill Gates had his "think week", where he would block off an entire week every year to just read books and think. Maybe you could do something similar? I'm sure you are very busy, but so was he.
    - zomglings 6y ago
      Thanks for the suggestion, didn't know about think weeks. Love the idea, and reading is the thing that I miss most - used to read a LOT before moving to the Bay Area. These days, not so much. At the very least, a think weekend. :)
lkrubner 6y ago
This article focuses on work-processes and thought-processes that can be thought of as clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented. That's an important topic, and I found the article interesting, if a little long. They define Creative Management like this: "Creative management is one of three dominant forms of value management. Its purpose is to establish a system of management that enables and motivates creative staff, such as software engineers, writers, designers and artists, to discover and realize new works of value." It's an interesting thesis, but there a subtle nuance here, I think, which I would put like this: For every clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented form of management, there are degenerate irrational forms, and Creative Management is more vulnerable to degenerate irrational forms than other forms of management. Over the years, many of my blogs posts have gotten a lot of discussion on Hacker News, so some of you might remember my focus on irrational, destructive forms of management. In my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup ( https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo... ) I give details about two different startups that go off the rails because of the ego-driven nature of the decision making by top leaders. But the point I'd like to make now is, compared to older management systems, which were somewhat more amenable to data modeling and feedback analysis, Creative Management opens the door to creativity, but also wish-fulfillment fantasy. (As a point of comparison, think about W. Edwards Deming and his very methodical statistical approach to reducing errors in a factory, and compare that to much more open ended process of inventing, say for instance, a sui generis interface.) Please note, I'm not saying Creative Management is a bad concept, but I am saying it has large pitfalls for which we do not yet have standard answers. Having said all that, there are some good books that have really looked at failures in the world of software, and ways the process can be improved. The books of Robert Glass are excellent, and I've posted a long excerpt of one of my favorite of his stories here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-project-failure-ever http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-proj...
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  As an aside, I read your book some time back and found it compelling.
russdpale 6y ago
Is this the dumbest question ever asked?
ChipSkylark 6y ago
Large corporations like Amazon offset tax liability with tax credits from huge R&D expenditures [1], and those can be "moonshots" or highly innovative products that change the world. The famous CEOs quoted in this article take full advantage of this and there is definitely room to get creative with how that money is spent. A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing about the existence of the other team(s). Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale. These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process? [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-rd https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-develo...
deltron3030 6y ago
CEOs can't really communicate with developers or designers if they have no practical experience with development or design. Lack of mutual respect can make it very hard to find a balance between giving enough creative freedom and setting deadlines. They may either give too much creative freedom to avoid problems (expensive in the short term), or don't give enough to play safe (toxic & expensive in the long term).
alexashka 6y ago
There is no reason to have a happy workforce when an unhappy workforce will do. It's hard work keeping people engaged, everyone wants a different carrot. Everyone understands and fears the stick and it's easy to hire for - can you threaten people with a stick? Yes? Hired :) We live in a wage slavery society with fewer jobs than there are people, on purpose. It's not that CEOs are failing software engineers, it's that the current system of beliefs humans hold in sum, seems to be failing humanity as a whole (but then again, if we think this way, has it ever not failed humanity?). Consider children digging through trash for food while billionaires fine dine discussing AI and space travel. I don't know what them rich folks believe, but it's inconsiderate of most of humanity's pain it seems.
Kinrany 6y ago
After reading this, I wonder if it's possible to document in a searchable way all the broken solutions that we try before we find the one that works. Subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Bill Gates was actually quite a capable software engineer (I would argue he was a pretty rotten CEO though - successful but unethical). And Steve Jobs too. He wrote games for Atari. Not a good CEO from the start but during Next and Pixar he really learned the job.
paulie_a 6y ago
I think it's the other way around. Software engineers rarely "get it" and are more concerned about the technical challenges
kevstev 6y ago
As someone with 3/4 of their foot in management and one foot in the hands-on world, I am often surprised at how my viewpoint changes when thinking about the bigger picture. As an example, one of the things I personally own still as an individual is essentially our kafka platform- that means our actual brokers operations, our automation, monitoring, client availability, etc. We provided a really nice walkthrough to get you going as a quickstart. The whole point was originally to keep it simple so that you have to be thoughtful about the settings and tradeoffs you make in terms of reliability vs performance. I didn't want to be overly prescriptive in what and how teams use functionality like transactions and idempotence. But we find, time and again, people get this wrong. They don't look at things like delivery reports, they don't set timeouts that make sense, they often don't even think about their replication factor. I pushed against full fledged client examples because there really isn't a one size fits all and I didn't want people to copy and paste without thinking about what they are doing. The reality is, I am fighting a war on drugs. People want things to Just Work, and don't have the time to sit down for a day or two and read a book on kafka concepts (which we provide for free) and just want to get things done. We will repeatedly be involved in "outages" because clients could not tolerate a broker restarting and they did not configure their apps to be resilient. On a more topical note, a guy on my team wanted to rewrite a python app we have in kotlin about 2 years ago, because it was the hot thing for about 5 minutes and our little POC python app was getting unwieldy for the scale it was growing into and its complexity. But we had no one in the firm who knew this, no support network for this, and I kind of saw that this was likely to be a flash in the pan kind of thing. I had to say no, and he was all pissy and was like but JVM! and arguments like that. I am really glad we didn't go that route, because kotlin is all but dead, and that guy left after about a year, and we would have been left high and dry. My larger point is- what seems like such a cut and dried correct answer when its just from your viewpoint, can look very wrong when put in context of an organization, but unfortunately the end perception is often "my boss doesn't get it."
- Hates_ 6y ago
  As a side topic, what leads you to say Kotlin is all but dead?
gtallen1187 6y ago
Interesting perspective. Note to author: it might be worth moving the "How are CEOs failing software engineers?" section to the beginning of the article. With a title like "Why are CEOs failing software engineers?", the first thing i want to know is how the CEOs are failing. Only afterwards do i care about the why. This felt a bit like i was thrown head-first into a new framework for classifying types of management before I could figure out whether or not I wanted to learn about it. Aside from the structure, really interesting piece!
doonesbury 6y ago
To borrow a line from "Pulp Fiction" let's not start sucking each other's _?_?s just yet. "How do you best motivate software engineers? You attract them to significant, life changing work by elevating the need, the thing that's missing from life or society, a problem that needs to be solved, and extending a personal, creative opportunity to solve that problem. Software Engineers are motivated to solve epic problems with solutions that people love." Let's not try to manage better by making software engineers out to be poor, misunderstood Giants of Action who are just trying to fight the good fight if only the business people would pull their share of the load. Doctors, lawyers (think family law), and plenty of others are well motivated too. I've done 30+ years of software dev. Software like any other industry attracts a diversity of people ... lots of exemplary but also good doses of risible dumb-asses that no management will ever fix. OP continues: "The best way to motivate creative staff is to attract them to meaningful work through the use of strong attractors." This is where the article just goes stupid and never recovers. Only a moron believes that the employee is somehow unconsciously enabled for greatness but otherwise an empty vessel if ONLY management would fill our need for meaning and direction with something preferably a solid budget, a five year plan, and a goal of staggering goodness. So then what are software devs? The genius of Oppenheimer (smart and good manager?) Linus T? Dirac? Or in fact blank, useless slates that the mommy corporation needs to imprint to get anything out of? Like 99.9% of all Sunday school lectures this article talks about what without how. So it's largely useless day to day. We're reminded ad nauseam about bad thoughts, bad actions and its consequences but not how --- how to do something better in the day to day. Let's remind readers of few things: - Broadly speaking in his "Business Management" phase he forgot to mention that many companies lacked SPC i.e. how to do the day to day and to get away from articles like this that throw around another 10,000 maxims. These same companies weren't customer focused (be customer in not supplier out) ... on and on ... the managements phases he mention forget to mention that even the best corporations in their respective phases waste a ton of money, and a ton of talent not because of high flung issues like motivation and meaning but because of more basic issues like customer focus. Creative management by then is a distraction. - A major problem at large corporations is not that management fails to play the role of a fundamentalist Baptist selling the good news door to door tirelessly saving us programmer-sinners, it's lack of openness (corporate speak BS), and silos. Those two issues defeat a lot of great guys and gals who already come equipped with meaning, and direction, and a desire to change but who eventually learn the unwritten corporate culture: we aren't gonna change; and if you have a great idea X but aren't in the X department well then it's not for you. Creative management isn't going to fix this; it will make it worse. The whole arc of the OP's story just wholly misses vast swathes of what really goes on in corporations that lower productivity and potential. In particular, the creative management approach fails to admit control battles exist. - The creative culture sounds nice. Maybe. Or maybe it's a quite different thing. The perpetual ever always need for revolution is necessary to make and perpetuate frivolous consumerism. If there's always something new then there's always something new to buy. Related, there's a vaguely idealistic perhaps anachronistic impulse that any relation in society is a business target: bust it and make money "revolutionizing it". - Meaning and quality is everybody's problem. You can have superb management and bad engineers or vice versa but if you think engineers are gonna make management enlightened or vice versa you have a lot, lot more to learn. We're here to help each other but also pull our own weight and learn ourselves and not always with the immediate result of gratification, orgasmic release, or profit.

245 points by kag0 6y ago

Interesting but weird. CEO's aren't failing software engineers, no more than software engineers are failing the cafeteria crew by using too much ketchup. If they are failing, they are failing the business. There's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. That has nothing to do with software engineers. Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no.

acidbaseextract 6y ago
There's evidence of significant problems in business/management philosophy, as the consensus is that you need to optimize for now, and later is somebody else's problem. Dead on. I've seen boards of directors ask for fried ice: Management: We haven't put adequate time into building a sales training program. Board: Focus only on revenue this quarter. It's the only thing that matters! Then next quarter: Board: Why aren't your new sales guys producing?! They need to drive revenue! Management: Uh... you told us not to spend time on training.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Indeed. Ultimately it's the (specific incarnation of the) shareholder model of capitalism that's at fault. Shareholders have ultimate control of companies, and their incentives are aligned all wrong (to the short term).
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Shareholders have ultimate control of companies, and their incentives are aligned all wrong (to the short term). This is actually not true of individual shareholders; most individual shareholders are investing for the long term, because most individual shareholders are investing for a long-term goal, like retirement. The problem is that most shares in most companies are no longer owned by individual shareholders, but mutual funds, and from the standpoint of an individual stock, a mutual fund does have short-term incentives, since if the stock's performance goes down the fund will just sell it and buy something else. The individual investors whose assets are held by the mutual fund, and who have a longer time horizon (most mutual fund accounts are retirement accounts), don't care about which individual stocks the fund holds or how often it trades them. So the longer time horizon of the actual individual investors is masked and only the short term incentives are visible to the individual companies.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I agree with basically everything you've said. I'd add: the system is such that mutual funds are able to make greater profits from the system by playing things in this way. This means that over the long-term, capital accumulates in these funds, further skewing the proportion of investment that is driven through these vehicles.
      - d0mine 6y ago
        It is not obvious why trading more often (quarter-scale) would lead to greater profits long-term. Do any mutual funds ever beat the market? (on the "retirement" decades time scale)
  - frenchy 6y ago
    Ultimately, "long-sighted" shareholders should be able to outperform the short-sited ones, as long as they can retain control of the company. I wonder if there's any way to form a sort of shareholders union to maintain the control of an organization by shareholders who plain to keep stock for a long time.
    - Jolter 6y ago
      The sibling comments by pdonis and nicoburns, about mutual funds, explain pretty well why the short-term investors will increase over time.
    - cbhl 6y ago
      The two-class stock structure (ala Facebook and Google) is one experiment in this, but being able to establish such a structure depends on investors' appetite for it during IPO-time.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Such an incentive problem is easy to fix. Simply put the people who do the work at the company in charge. Their incentives are aligned to doing the work well, keeping the business stable, and developing a healthy culture.
    - ll931110 6y ago
      Nope, not that easy. Look at Scuderia Ferrari F1 team. In 2014 - 2018 the team principal was a business guy (Maurizio Arrivabene), whom was pushed out to make room for a technical guy (Mattia Binotto), whom led the technical work to bring Ferrari challenging the F1 title. And look at what happens now: they went backward from the 2nd best team to shared 5th-6th, burning a budget of $400M for a car that was a lot slower than their own version last year.
      - philjohn 6y ago
        And yet when they put a technical guy in charge during the Schumacher years they flourished. I don't think the problem is either Arrivabene or Binotto - it was Marchionne and it's going to take a long time to fix.
        ll931110 6y ago
        Right, but Ross Brawn was hardly alone. He worked well with Jean Todt whom did the negotiation and business handling. For all the credits to Binotto, he's not a good negotiator.
csours 6y ago
> "Technology people sometimes get this worldview that they are the sun, and the universe revolves around them. Hate to break the news, but no." I've worked construction and at a manufacturing plant, and tech is a genuinely different business, with a different mindset than other businesses. Yes, they are failing the business, but they are failing the business in a new and interesting way, which is what this post is about. Tech is the engine that accelerates business. Acceleration used to be slow. If you don't have an engine that accelerates quickly now, and you don't have a HUGE moat, you won't survive.
- noahl 6y ago
  Can you give some examples of the mindset of construction and manufacturing businesses? It would be interesting to me, and I think to other people here too.
  - csours 6y ago
    Construction and manufacturing are very much about following defined instructions and processes and not updating or deviating from them without good reason. (Obviously there's a lot of Get Stuff Done too, where people ignore the above rules). Manufacturing Management is also all about metrics and counting productivity. Trying to apply similar metrics to tech leads to things like counting developers lines of code or defects. --- Edit: another aspect of manufacturing is limiting waste. In Toyota Production system this is called Muda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) Waste of overproduction (largest waste) Waste of time on hand (waiting) Waste of transportation Waste of processing itself Waste of excess inventory Waste of movement Waste of making defective products Waste of underutilized workers You can look at the other goals of TPS and see how they may or may not apply to software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System I'm not saying these are bad ideas or don't apply to software engineering, but I am saying that they don't apply in the same way.
    - ci5er 6y ago
      Well, for one, TPS is attempting to optimize the manufacturing of a fixed design. With software the design-made-code, where software is what in automotive would be considered the design process is 100% of the cost, the shipping of bits is 0%. In automotive, it is more like 5% design vs 95% building the car, goes the other way. When people apply manufacturing methodologies to design practices, it rarely works out. "Design" is messy, but people expect to be able to apply a manufacturing-like "LEAN" process to it. They are mixing goslings and goats.
jimbokun 6y ago
> If they are failing, they are failing the business. And the business includes the employees.

nickff 6y ago

This post is atrociously bad. It seems like the author(s) are trying to come up with original ideas, but Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen have written much better works on this subject.

supercanuck 6y ago
Do you have anything to add other than an ad-hominem?
- ponker 6y ago
  This is not an ad hominem.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I agree it is poorly presented, which is why having others read and critique something is always helpful. That said, I don't believe it rises to the level of 'atrociously bad' :-). The authors will come by and read this and dismiss it out of hand when you have a chance to help them get better at what they do (they recognize that failing to do something, in this case present their case clearly, can teach new skills) So let's be a bit more proactive in the feedback okay? The post bounces between background/foundation material and new material too rapidly. It can be over expository in background which may prevent the reader from connecting what background material/situation is being addressed by the new material. It fails to present a cogent summary of its thesis statement in the first paragraph, that comes in paragraph 3. Paragraphs 1 & 2 are nominally a problem statement in what reads as an obtuse jargon. Now some of that is that the entire article feels like it is written for someone who has read all of their other articles and so there are many unexplained phrases which clearly have specific meanings. Statements like "I promise you, in its entirety, the following is something you’ve never heard before, and the ramifications of ignoring the advice herein most assuredly leads to unhappy software engineers." exhibit a certain hubris that can be off putting to engineers and that isn't a great place to start.
csours 6y ago
Why are you so angry about a blog post? Digesting ideas from thought leaders and re-stating them with a different angle is what blog posts are for. I've read Christensen's work, along with other authors and came to the same conclusions that this author writes about, but I've never taken the time to put it into words like this.

phaemon 6y ago

Well, what else is a failing software engineer to do?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Pit them against each other to get raises?

jedberg 6y ago

I'm surprised they didn't look at Walt Disney for how to run a successful creative company. His ideas apply equally well to software as they do to the arts. I've been watching the documentaries on Disney+, particularly The Imagineering Story (great doc BTW). They talk about the history of the creative side of Disneyland. What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build" they thrive. When a CFO type gets involved with Disney, suddenly their output drops, because that CEO is asking what the ROI is for everything they do. A lot of what they do fails and has no ROI, and the people that work there start to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working. When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again. I think this is applicable to software. When an engineer isn't asked to think about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel innovations. But if they know they will be judged on ROI, they will take fewer risks. This of course is all predicated on being a profitable company. You have to already have a good cashflow to have the freedom to say "just go create".

deepakhj 6y ago
My friend at Pixar says they've slowly dismantled all the good things and benefits at Pixar after Disney bought them. Disney+ was built by the acquisition of BAMTech I believe. Maybe they have more autonomy like AWS does inside of Amazon.
- jedberg 6y ago
  D+ was literally built by BAMTech using the same tech that powers HBOGo and MLB streaming. I think the Pixar thing has more to do with their management, namely John Lassater, moving south to head up Disney Animation, which did extremely well when he took over. Apparently they're doing even better under Jennifer Lee, who took over for him when he left/was ousted.
hitsurume 6y ago
What's the documentary called?
- 6y ago

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m23khan 6y ago

I don't know solution for the entire IT industry but can suggest something for Corporate IT: New IT staff should be given grounding in Business Curriculum relevant to the Corporate's business / Team's mandate - this ought to organized by upper level of IT management. Software Developers / Engineers working in Corporate IT tend to stagnate in terms of their careers once they hit the wall (wall = business knowledge). E.g., take an investment firm and within it, say IT Department XYZ Supports the firm's Private Equity investment team. It is easy for Software Engineers in the team to code up and provide Tech. solutions however for complex business cases where advanced Private Equity knowledge is required, the Software Engineers have to rely on the Business Analysts or the clients themselves to do hand-holding. I have only seen something like 1 in 10 Software Developers in Corporate IT willing to pick up Business knowledge beyond the basic business terminology. And this is why I believe the value of Software Engineers at Corporate IT takes a serious hit - from CEO / Board / Upper layers of Finance, it looks like the drivers of revenue are basically their finance folks (CFAs, CPAs, Investors) whereas IT are just a cost center to enable the finance folks to do their work (which is a very bad vision but that is how it looks like from their POV). In these cases, the only group from IT that benefits somewhat are the top IT management who act as the guardians of the IT division. Another thing that works against IT folks in Corporate IT is self-criticism (critical of current IT culture, constant itch to reinvent self), constant need to associate with low-paid/ low-educated professions (factory line worker analogy, plumber mentality) and appearing far too casual. Sure, jeans and T-shirts and having eccentric/artistic personality is the culture spawned from Tech stalwarts based in Silicon Valley, but that mentality does not translate into rest of the World. Even if the Corporate's HR policies allows for dress-down environment, guess what - the HR and Finance People typically appear well polished in their appearance - they rather have nice office lunch rather than pizza and pop chow-downs and you can't deny that as humans (especially if the CEO and top Execs are non-IT), it doesn't leave a very favorable opinion about the IT staff.

dpeck 6y ago
It’s not just software, it’s like that for every industry. There are some, usually large, group of people whether in sales/marketing/operations/etc who aren’t particularly interested in the industry of their business but prefer to focus on the details of their task. It’s not wrong or bad at all, but it does tend to be compensated less.

deleted 6y ago

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YesThatTom2 6y ago

Yes, CEOs are. That's why I wrote: The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-top-10-things-executives-should-know-about-software/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/7/237712-the-top-10-thin...

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Executives are shockingly idiotic about software development, and considering their business sinks or swims on the success of software in very very many cases, it is a major failing of MBA factories. I actually consider software / IT management to be more important than accounting, and every MBA person takes finance/accounting.

opportune 6y ago

I don’t really like the idea that Need, Belief, Opportunity, and Anticipation are the drivers of engineering as opposed to money and personal growth. I’m not surprised though because these guys appear to be Scrum Consultants who want to tell software orgs they can improve productivity by paying them for “training” rather than paying employees more for work. Ultimately what I want as a software engineer employee is my own personal success. I actually identify a lot more with their “Business Management” step: I want incentives to be aligned and I will be motivated to do great work if I feel like I can share in that success. Yes it’s easier to get up in the morning if I’m working on something that’s overall successful, but that would be negated if I couldn’t get a piece of that. This seems to fit into the more common trope that engineers are easily fooled into working for less pay than they should be getting through bullshit like “vision”. Even if I’m working on something cool I’m not going to be happy to just make someone else rich. If I only cared about solving a problem I would just write OSS.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
It's a continuum. I would just write OSS but for the need of a paycheck. I'm not fooled, I just don't care about money as much as I care about software, and so I put my time and effort into learning about how to optimize software, not money.
Kinrany 6y ago
"Financial Management" step also solved an incentive alignment problem: it created a way for investors to cooperate with the organization. But these two steps are different: the second one aligned the organization with its workers, but the first one aligned the organization with investors. Assuming this trend will continue, the third step will align the organization with some other group.
devdas 6y ago
Your personal motivation appears to be entirely extrinsic. For a lot of people, the motivation is intrinsic. After a certain amount of money, more money wouldn't bring me joy. Money is a floor, not a ceiling.

ausjke 6y ago

that made me recall what I heard often: "mediocre engineers turn into managers" :)

thesumofall 6y ago

I think this goes two ways. Yes, management is failing to manage creative work. But in too many companies (and I’m not talking about startups full of youngsters straight out of college) staff has also lost the ability to be creative, take ownership, and push their own ideas. It is very easy to fall into a “I wasn’t told to do so” routine. This is obviously a reinforcing circle

demadog 6y ago

Does anyone know what this phenomenon is called: “This phenomenon is due, in no small part, to how our brains, in response to the thrill of successfully completing a rewarded task, releases euphoric chemicals that strongly reinforce the behavior that led to success.”

phonethrowaway 6y ago
amygdala, dopamine reward. it's a feedback loop of reinforcement.

known 6y ago

Heads I Win; Tails You Lose;

danesparza 6y ago

Classically trained CEO's don't use the language of makers. They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. They are accountants at heart (who are beholden to shareholders -- not their employees). Just look at the language used to describe a successful CEO 'sprinter' by Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-according-to-a-10-year-study https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-fastest-path-to-the-ceo-job-acco...) : "In his late twenties, “James” was hired in a strategy and business development role inside a multibillion-dollar marketing and communications business. Early in his career, he was offered the chance to build out one of the new businesses. It felt like a demotion, or at best a lateral move, to be handed a blank org chart and a highly uncertain future. “It was zero revenue when I stepped in, and we built that business to $250 million,” he says. By building a new business from scratch, he picked up essential management skills, such as running a P&L, managing a budget, and setting a strategic vision — all critical prerequisites to becoming a CEO (over 90% of the CEOs we studied had general management experience). Thirteen years later, he found himself the CEO of a $1.5 billion education and training business."

otoburb 6y ago
>>They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. Without such language and understanding, founders will have a harder time sustaining their endeavours. Such concepts apply whether you're bootstrapping, taking investor funds, or just an indie builder.
jimbokun 6y ago
> They use language that describes cashflow, savings, and debt. If you want to have an actual company that can continue paying your salary, somebody better have a good handle on those things.

compumike 6y ago

I enjoyed this article very much. I'd add that if you truly want the freedom to be creative, you may have to opt out of being an employee and choose the founder path instead. This nicely compliments pg's "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

zomglings 6y ago
I opted out of being an employee and chose the founder path. I have very little time to be creative (the way I was, for example, when I was in graduate school or at Google). For me, a large part of thinking creatively is about exposing myself to ideas outside of what I am actively supposed to be doing and then letting those ideas permeate through my thinking when I am working on what I am actively supposed to be doing. Between talking to users, talking to customers, talking to investors, and perpetual catch-up on my product, I rarely find the space to think about things other than my business. That said, we have definitely had dark moments that we came out of because of very creative ideas. It's just that creativity is nowhere near the top virtue required of a founder.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  I know Bill Gates had his "think week", where he would block off an entire week every year to just read books and think. Maybe you could do something similar? I'm sure you are very busy, but so was he.
  - zomglings 6y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, didn't know about think weeks. Love the idea, and reading is the thing that I miss most - used to read a LOT before moving to the Bay Area. These days, not so much. At the very least, a think weekend. :)

lkrubner 6y ago

This article focuses on work-processes and thought-processes that can be thought of as clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented. That's an important topic, and I found the article interesting, if a little long. They define Creative Management like this: "Creative management is one of three dominant forms of value management. Its purpose is to establish a system of management that enables and motivates creative staff, such as software engineers, writers, designers and artists, to discover and realize new works of value." It's an interesting thesis, but there a subtle nuance here, I think, which I would put like this: For every clear, explicit, rational, and goal-oriented form of management, there are degenerate irrational forms, and Creative Management is more vulnerable to degenerate irrational forms than other forms of management. Over the years, many of my blogs posts have gotten a lot of discussion on Hacker News, so some of you might remember my focus on irrational, destructive forms of management. In my book How To Destroy A Tech Startup ( https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo... ) I give details about two different startups that go off the rails because of the ego-driven nature of the decision making by top leaders. But the point I'd like to make now is, compared to older management systems, which were somewhat more amenable to data modeling and feedback analysis, Creative Management opens the door to creativity, but also wish-fulfillment fantasy. (As a point of comparison, think about W. Edwards Deming and his very methodical statistical approach to reducing errors in a factory, and compare that to much more open ended process of inventing, say for instance, a sui generis interface.) Please note, I'm not saying Creative Management is a bad concept, but I am saying it has large pitfalls for which we do not yet have standard answers. Having said all that, there are some good books that have really looked at failures in the world of software, and ways the process can be improved. The books of Robert Glass are excellent, and I've posted a long excerpt of one of my favorite of his stories here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-project-failure-ever http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-proj...

jacques_chester 6y ago
As an aside, I read your book some time back and found it compelling.

russdpale 6y ago

Is this the dumbest question ever asked?

ChipSkylark 6y ago

Large corporations like Amazon offset tax liability with tax credits from huge R&D expenditures [1], and those can be "moonshots" or highly innovative products that change the world. The famous CEOs quoted in this article take full advantage of this and there is definitely room to get creative with how that money is spent. A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing about the existence of the other team(s). Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale. These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process? [1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-development-rd https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-develo...

deltron3030 6y ago

CEOs can't really communicate with developers or designers if they have no practical experience with development or design. Lack of mutual respect can make it very hard to find a balance between giving enough creative freedom and setting deadlines. They may either give too much creative freedom to avoid problems (expensive in the short term), or don't give enough to play safe (toxic & expensive in the long term).

alexashka 6y ago

There is no reason to have a happy workforce when an unhappy workforce will do. It's hard work keeping people engaged, everyone wants a different carrot. Everyone understands and fears the stick and it's easy to hire for - can you threaten people with a stick? Yes? Hired :) We live in a wage slavery society with fewer jobs than there are people, on purpose. It's not that CEOs are failing software engineers, it's that the current system of beliefs humans hold in sum, seems to be failing humanity as a whole (but then again, if we think this way, has it ever not failed humanity?). Consider children digging through trash for food while billionaires fine dine discussing AI and space travel. I don't know what them rich folks believe, but it's inconsiderate of most of humanity's pain it seems.

Kinrany 6y ago

After reading this, I wonder if it's possible to document in a searchable way all the broken solutions that we try before we find the one that works. Subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875261

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Bill Gates was actually quite a capable software engineer (I would argue he was a pretty rotten CEO though - successful but unethical). And Steve Jobs too. He wrote games for Atari. Not a good CEO from the start but during Next and Pixar he really learned the job.

paulie_a 6y ago

I think it's the other way around. Software engineers rarely "get it" and are more concerned about the technical challenges

kevstev 6y ago

As someone with 3/4 of their foot in management and one foot in the hands-on world, I am often surprised at how my viewpoint changes when thinking about the bigger picture. As an example, one of the things I personally own still as an individual is essentially our kafka platform- that means our actual brokers operations, our automation, monitoring, client availability, etc. We provided a really nice walkthrough to get you going as a quickstart. The whole point was originally to keep it simple so that you have to be thoughtful about the settings and tradeoffs you make in terms of reliability vs performance. I didn't want to be overly prescriptive in what and how teams use functionality like transactions and idempotence. But we find, time and again, people get this wrong. They don't look at things like delivery reports, they don't set timeouts that make sense, they often don't even think about their replication factor. I pushed against full fledged client examples because there really isn't a one size fits all and I didn't want people to copy and paste without thinking about what they are doing. The reality is, I am fighting a war on drugs. People want things to Just Work, and don't have the time to sit down for a day or two and read a book on kafka concepts (which we provide for free) and just want to get things done. We will repeatedly be involved in "outages" because clients could not tolerate a broker restarting and they did not configure their apps to be resilient. On a more topical note, a guy on my team wanted to rewrite a python app we have in kotlin about 2 years ago, because it was the hot thing for about 5 minutes and our little POC python app was getting unwieldy for the scale it was growing into and its complexity. But we had no one in the firm who knew this, no support network for this, and I kind of saw that this was likely to be a flash in the pan kind of thing. I had to say no, and he was all pissy and was like but JVM! and arguments like that. I am really glad we didn't go that route, because kotlin is all but dead, and that guy left after about a year, and we would have been left high and dry. My larger point is- what seems like such a cut and dried correct answer when its just from your viewpoint, can look very wrong when put in context of an organization, but unfortunately the end perception is often "my boss doesn't get it."

Hates_ 6y ago
As a side topic, what leads you to say Kotlin is all but dead?

gtallen1187 6y ago

Interesting perspective. Note to author: it might be worth moving the "How are CEOs failing software engineers?" section to the beginning of the article. With a title like "Why are CEOs failing software engineers?", the first thing i want to know is how the CEOs are failing. Only afterwards do i care about the why. This felt a bit like i was thrown head-first into a new framework for classifying types of management before I could figure out whether or not I wanted to learn about it. Aside from the structure, really interesting piece!

doonesbury 6y ago

To borrow a line from "Pulp Fiction" let's not start sucking each other's _?_?s just yet. "How do you best motivate software engineers? You attract them to significant, life changing work by elevating the need, the thing that's missing from life or society, a problem that needs to be solved, and extending a personal, creative opportunity to solve that problem. Software Engineers are motivated to solve epic problems with solutions that people love." Let's not try to manage better by making software engineers out to be poor, misunderstood Giants of Action who are just trying to fight the good fight if only the business people would pull their share of the load. Doctors, lawyers (think family law), and plenty of others are well motivated too. I've done 30+ years of software dev. Software like any other industry attracts a diversity of people ... lots of exemplary but also good doses of risible dumb-asses that no management will ever fix. OP continues: "The best way to motivate creative staff is to attract them to meaningful work through the use of strong attractors." This is where the article just goes stupid and never recovers. Only a moron believes that the employee is somehow unconsciously enabled for greatness but otherwise an empty vessel if ONLY management would fill our need for meaning and direction with something preferably a solid budget, a five year plan, and a goal of staggering goodness. So then what are software devs? The genius of Oppenheimer (smart and good manager?) Linus T? Dirac? Or in fact blank, useless slates that the mommy corporation needs to imprint to get anything out of? Like 99.9% of all Sunday school lectures this article talks about what without how. So it's largely useless day to day. We're reminded ad nauseam about bad thoughts, bad actions and its consequences but not how --- how to do something better in the day to day. Let's remind readers of few things: - Broadly speaking in his "Business Management" phase he forgot to mention that many companies lacked SPC i.e. how to do the day to day and to get away from articles like this that throw around another 10,000 maxims. These same companies weren't customer focused (be customer in not supplier out) ... on and on ... the managements phases he mention forget to mention that even the best corporations in their respective phases waste a ton of money, and a ton of talent not because of high flung issues like motivation and meaning but because of more basic issues like customer focus. Creative management by then is a distraction. - A major problem at large corporations is not that management fails to play the role of a fundamentalist Baptist selling the good news door to door tirelessly saving us programmer-sinners, it's lack of openness (corporate speak BS), and silos. Those two issues defeat a lot of great guys and gals who already come equipped with meaning, and direction, and a desire to change but who eventually learn the unwritten corporate culture: we aren't gonna change; and if you have a great idea X but aren't in the X department well then it's not for you. Creative management isn't going to fix this; it will make it worse. The whole arc of the OP's story just wholly misses vast swathes of what really goes on in corporations that lower productivity and potential. In particular, the creative management approach fails to admit control battles exist. - The creative culture sounds nice. Maybe. Or maybe it's a quite different thing. The perpetual ever always need for revolution is necessary to make and perpetuate frivolous consumerism. If there's always something new then there's always something new to buy. Related, there's a vaguely idealistic perhaps anachronistic impulse that any relation in society is a business target: bust it and make money "revolutionizing it". - Meaning and quality is everybody's problem. You can have superb management and bad engineers or vice versa but if you think engineers are gonna make management enlightened or vice versa you have a lot, lot more to learn. We're here to help each other but also pull our own weight and learn ourselves and not always with the immediate result of gratification, orgasmic release, or profit.