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Here's a summary that combines the two sections: She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning si

Here's a summary that combines the two sections: She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with. She sees herself as someone who enjoys the trappings of a job well done and doesn't mind her slow progress of ladder-climbing because she's brave and takes risks that her superiors won't reward with promotions. I liked and identified with the writing in the second half, and it sounds like she had a good scenario to act as a substrate for her thoughts, but I don't think she did a good job merging the two. Like you said, they feel like two distinct pieces which got bolted together. I found myself with the scroll bar near the bottom and wondered how she was going to tie back in to the original story, and was disappointed to see that she never did.

pdonis 6y ago
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with. I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way. What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.
- keenmaster 6y ago
  She’s probably holding back for various reasons, despite the sensational title. You have to read between the lines.
  - irontinkerer 6y ago
    Holding back? She names her employer and her boss yet doesn’t give anything concrete, but feels okay to call him an “idiot” in the title?
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      She never actually outright called her boss an idiot. The most literal interpretation of the title is "if you feel this way about your boss, then here is why you may feel that way." I certainly hope that was her intended meaning, because the counterfactual is very risque. I did think the title was unnecessary though, and the naming.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on. Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Ah. That makes sense.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    ...the team she just called federal law enforcement on. That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.
archgoon 6y ago
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with. I seriously doubt that it was the intent of the author to accuse Matt Cutts as someone who spun blame onto others and avoided responsibility.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Yeah, it's not clear unless one understands what USDS does. USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them. I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).
zaroth 6y ago
To bait a story with such a spectacular plot, the author could have us reading tenuous managerial pontification for pages on end, just to get the juicy revelation at the end. That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read! I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.
sfifs 6y ago
> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-officially-resigns-google-267801/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts

pdonis 6y ago

> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with. I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way. What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.

keenmaster 6y ago
She’s probably holding back for various reasons, despite the sensational title. You have to read between the lines.
- irontinkerer 6y ago
  Holding back? She names her employer and her boss yet doesn’t give anything concrete, but feels okay to call him an “idiot” in the title?
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    She never actually outright called her boss an idiot. The most literal interpretation of the title is "if you feel this way about your boss, then here is why you may feel that way." I certainly hope that was her intended meaning, because the counterfactual is very risque. I did think the title was unnecessary though, and the naming.
shadowgovt 6y ago
The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on. Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
- pdonis 6y ago
  > The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Ah. That makes sense.
- phkahler 6y ago
  ...the team she just called federal law enforcement on. That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.

archgoon 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago
Yeah, it's not clear unless one understands what USDS does. USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them. I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).

zaroth 6y ago

To bait a story with such a spectacular plot, the author could have us reading tenuous managerial pontification for pages on end, just to get the juicy revelation at the end. That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read! I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.

sfifs 6y ago

> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts-officially-resigns-google-267801/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Cutts