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“What did I do for the customer today” is often in principle not answerable within megacorps. If you’re the person who fixes a new employee’s password issues, y

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

“What did I do for the customer today” is often in principle not answerable within megacorps. If you’re the person who fixes a new employee’s password issues, you have to do mental gymnastics like “I helped X fix their password, then X created a new Jira ticket for Y, Y helped scope and plan the ticket in Z’s sprint, Z gathered requirements and assigned it to A, A paired with B and they wrote code that removed extraneous serifs from the new widget font, C reviewed their code, D took the new deployment to the mobile team who QA tested it, then E stamped approval on a new rollout of the app, and now users of iOS 13.6.9 who also specifically only use Firefox Focus won’t see extraneous serifs in the font on the widget tab in their account page. Let’s crack the champagne everyone!” The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome. And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs? Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting. Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I think you're violently agreeing with the author. In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup having the managers ask "what did we do for the users today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp it's a useless platitude.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  No, I’m not agreeing at all. The author is asserting that you should always be in the start-up situation of not having incremental work where your ultimate impact on customers comes through long chained sequences of tiny tweaks or accumulated effects. It’s perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large company where your value add is not immediately clarified and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most net benefit to consumers occurs this way. It’s also fine if you want to work in the start-up manner, but it’s not “better” or “more correct” or anything. The author is taking it to a deeply unreasonable extreme that shows more about the author’s arrogance than about any sincere or earnest desire to help customers.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I didn't read it like that. I think the author knows that that's impossible in a megacorp, but he wanted to continue thinking like that even though he'd become part of a megacorp. He seemed to understand the reality of megacorp politics - the whole spiel about "this is how you get promoted" - but didn't want that for himself, or his team (which I agree is unrealistic). It's very difficult to change perspective once you've worked in one paradigm for a while (at least I find it so - I'm a terrible employee because I've been a freelancer and co-founder for so long). I agree, one is not objectively "better" or "more correct", but that can be a subjective opinion of a blog article author.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I think you're violently agreeing with the author. In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup having the managers ask "what did we do for the users today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp it's a useless platitude.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
No, I’m not agreeing at all. The author is asserting that you should always be in the start-up situation of not having incremental work where your ultimate impact on customers comes through long chained sequences of tiny tweaks or accumulated effects. It’s perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large company where your value add is not immediately clarified and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most net benefit to consumers occurs this way. It’s also fine if you want to work in the start-up manner, but it’s not “better” or “more correct” or anything. The author is taking it to a deeply unreasonable extreme that shows more about the author’s arrogance than about any sincere or earnest desire to help customers.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I didn't read it like that. I think the author knows that that's impossible in a megacorp, but he wanted to continue thinking like that even though he'd become part of a megacorp. He seemed to understand the reality of megacorp politics - the whole spiel about "this is how you get promoted" - but didn't want that for himself, or his team (which I agree is unrealistic). It's very difficult to change perspective once you've worked in one paradigm for a while (at least I find it so - I'm a terrible employee because I've been a freelancer and co-founder for so long). I agree, one is not objectively "better" or "more correct", but that can be a subjective opinion of a blog article author.