6 ms·

"Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. I've recently joined a BigCo (as a senior+ engineer), and the culture here isn't building consensus

"Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. I've recently joined a BigCo (as a senior+ engineer), and the culture here isn't building consensus (out of authentic building blocks) - it's a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting." There's always a "champion" idea (but you can bring a "challenger" idea so people feel heard), there's always a need to "be in alignment" after every 45 min chunk of time, etc. Consensus is clearly an end in itself, not a means by which we solve problems. I'll just slither around in it though. Talk the talk so no one gets wise $_$

AlexCoventry 6y ago
> a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting." What are the consequences of failure to establish consensus?
- whateveracct 6y ago
  hours of extra meetings on my calendar
- rleigh 6y ago
  An organisation where decisions are not arrived at, and where people work at cross-purposes to the disadvantage of the organisation as a whole. In a previous position, a failure to commit to certain key decisions led to over a decade of drifting in some aspects because they were unwilling to draw a conclusion and get on with development. For some of these, the cost of actually designing and implementing the solution was far, far less, than the total cost of all the meetings we had about them, not to mention the lost time. I'm not even slightly joking. It's a management failure at the highest level in not considering medium- to long-term issues, by focussing only upon short-term needs. I would also put some blame, in part, upon Agile as practiced by some organisations. Consensus is important because you have to have the whole team, or whole organisation, on the same page. Even those who don't fully agree with the decision. You have to have everyone commit to following the decision, even the naysayers. That is to say, the organisation as a whole has committed to a certain action. Which is not to say it can't be revisited or re-evaluated down the line, but that right here and right now, we will all follow the plan.
anonytrary 6y ago
As someone who used to work at LittleBigCo, I think this beats having great ideas and then having them given to people who are in the inner circle with the founders. At least BigCo isn't super fratty like LittleBigCo tends to be. Or I could be wrong, please tell me if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. Lots of LittleBigCo's these days are pushing overhyped products and are mostly just having fun with corporate money.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree. There's no equilibrium in the org chart. So a couple bad actors can easily ruin it all. And they did at every startup I was at. My play is to collect checks and eventually make art with my computer science experience for the rest of my life.
  - redisman 6y ago
    What do you mean by BigCo? Fortune 500 non-tech? Faang?
    - whateveracct 6y ago
      That fits the bill without giving me away, yeah :)
      - dbancajas 6y ago
        can you say how much salary? base/yearly RSU/bonus?
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    You sound like me. Cheers. I hope it works out for us.
antonvs 6y ago
> "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. Not necessarily. You want to convince your team or other teams to adopt a new tool or practice? You need to build consensus. It's a good skill to have if you want to be able to shape your workplace to your liking. It doesn't necessarily have to involve org chart climbing at all.
- BlargMcLarg 6y ago
  The point being, most of the time people say "build consensus", what they mean is either "let's have an endless, design by committee approach where the backend dev with no knowledge on UI decides how the UI should look rather than letting the UI designer create a few samples and iterate and everyone else giving feedback like a user would" or "we already decided this is going to happen, but for the sake of formality we want you to agree with it so we can feel good about ourselves bullshitting one another into believing everyone has a say, so give us the ok or we'll pester you until you do" It also stimulates the idea that disagreements are inherently wrong and nothing should happen while a disagreement is in place. Sometimes, it's ok to disagree with someone else and see what happens. Some might call this a form of consensus, though I've had managers get uncomfortable when I didn't vehemently agree with the plan, but was willing to keep my nose out of it and focus on my own things so others could take the risk.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    There's a third thing they could mean: we want this to succeed in the organization which means we need to both hear people out to reflect their real needs in the plan, and that we need to communicate to them in a way that they buy in. So that it can work. In fact this is really the only way to get anything done regardless of what you call it.
    - roflc0ptic 6y ago
      Yes, this. It's funny seeing so many people being cynical about this - sure, there's plenty of ways for it go to badly, but far more importantly, there are a couple of ways it can go right. As general commentary - if you're smart and good at identifying problems with things, use your ability to identify problems to avoid those problems, not as an excuse to avoid doing stuff. Being cynical about everything isn't a terrible strategy, as long as you remember that you need to be cynical about your own cynicism, too.
douglaswlance 6y ago
[Disagree and commit](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disagree_and_commit https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disagree_and_commit) is a common management methodology and one that the most effective teams utilize successfully. What is the issue?
- whateveracct 6y ago
  haha i have worked at amazon, where disagree and commit is one of their laminated leadership principles except it isn't the principle is "have backbone; disagree and commit" there's checks and balances in the principle's words themself. every leader i've had who has "disagree and commit" as their guiding light has just been an autocrat. they never mention on the "have backbone" part. i had a VPE from BigCos come into a LittleBigCo. he was all about "disagree and commit" really, he had a nose for dissent. he went around managers who disagreed with him to corral their engineers to his side. he put near-founding engineers on bad projects to force them out. i tried to have backbone with this guy once. i thought one of his tech decisions was bad (and in reality it was politically motivated to force people out.) i wasn't rude or anything. he had a 1-on-1 call with me, and acted like i was being irrational. i stood my ground and made fact-based arguments. he was losing the 1-on-1 debate, so how did he close it? "look whateveracct..i just have this crystal ball in my stomach, and it's usually right" disagree and commit? more like stfu i'm the boss
  - gkop 6y ago
    I was just looking at Amazon’s principles this week, and found the on-its-face ridiculous “Are Right, A Lot”, which more or less directly invites the behavior you describe,
    - xyzelement 6y ago
      In my understanding - "are right a lot" is a retrospective thing - it's asking whether the leader's past instincts and decisions had lead to good things. It's not measuring how many meetings you walk out of having gotten your way. For example, if a leader had an idea X,and Bob talked him into idea Y which worked out, then the leader was still 'right' because listening to Bob was the right thing.
zemo 6y ago
> "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. ^ the words of a person that builds things that nobody asked for and then gets mad when people don't use them.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  i'm doing fine :) did my fun pejorative phrase offend you? also - i & millions others just "use" some software service i built years ago at a previous job ;) i have no trouble getting things in production, making and saving money.
sgtnoodle 6y ago
I mean this constructively, but it sounds like you're rather jaded from your past experiences. I've personally experienced 4 flavors of work environments: high stress low wisdom politics (big stakes student project); High stress high wisdom politics (SpaceX); low stress high wisdom politics (Google X); and my current project, low stress high wisdom no-politics (Zipline). Each different environment required me to adapt my own behavior appropriately to work productively with coworkers. Notably, the only environment that consistently lead me to feeling jaded and burnt out in the long term was the low-stress BigCo environment. I see a lot of truth in what you describe about your current experiences, although I never got quite that pessimistic. If you're happy slithering around the politics and are able to find fulfillment in your personal life, good on ya. That reminds me of a coworker at SpaceX who, a month or two before getting let go, admitted to spending 8 years at a defense contractor doing crossword puzzles at his desk all day, every day. Building consensus around long term architecture is something like 80% of my current job, and over the years while the org chart has gone from 1 layer to something like 5 layers, I've successfully remained at the bottom. The folk at the top of the org chart are completely approachable, and in a lot of ways are there to serve me, solving the problems that would otherwise prevent me from getting my work done.

AlexCoventry 6y ago

> a toxic "we must be consensus after every meeting." What are the consequences of failure to establish consensus?

whateveracct 6y ago
hours of extra meetings on my calendar
rleigh 6y ago
An organisation where decisions are not arrived at, and where people work at cross-purposes to the disadvantage of the organisation as a whole. In a previous position, a failure to commit to certain key decisions led to over a decade of drifting in some aspects because they were unwilling to draw a conclusion and get on with development. For some of these, the cost of actually designing and implementing the solution was far, far less, than the total cost of all the meetings we had about them, not to mention the lost time. I'm not even slightly joking. It's a management failure at the highest level in not considering medium- to long-term issues, by focussing only upon short-term needs. I would also put some blame, in part, upon Agile as practiced by some organisations. Consensus is important because you have to have the whole team, or whole organisation, on the same page. Even those who don't fully agree with the decision. You have to have everyone commit to following the decision, even the naysayers. That is to say, the organisation as a whole has committed to a certain action. Which is not to say it can't be revisited or re-evaluated down the line, but that right here and right now, we will all follow the plan.

anonytrary 6y ago

As someone who used to work at LittleBigCo, I think this beats having great ideas and then having them given to people who are in the inner circle with the founders. At least BigCo isn't super fratty like LittleBigCo tends to be. Or I could be wrong, please tell me if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. Lots of LittleBigCo's these days are pushing overhyped products and are mostly just having fun with corporate money.

whateveracct 6y ago
oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo. BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote. Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree. There's no equilibrium in the org chart. So a couple bad actors can easily ruin it all. And they did at every startup I was at. My play is to collect checks and eventually make art with my computer science experience for the rest of my life.
- redisman 6y ago
  What do you mean by BigCo? Fortune 500 non-tech? Faang?
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    That fits the bill without giving me away, yeah :)
    - dbancajas 6y ago
      can you say how much salary? base/yearly RSU/bonus?
- anonytrary 6y ago
  You sound like me. Cheers. I hope it works out for us.

antonvs 6y ago

> "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. Not necessarily. You want to convince your team or other teams to adopt a new tool or practice? You need to build consensus. It's a good skill to have if you want to be able to shape your workplace to your liking. It doesn't necessarily have to involve org chart climbing at all.

BlargMcLarg 6y ago
The point being, most of the time people say "build consensus", what they mean is either "let's have an endless, design by committee approach where the backend dev with no knowledge on UI decides how the UI should look rather than letting the UI designer create a few samples and iterate and everyone else giving feedback like a user would" or "we already decided this is going to happen, but for the sake of formality we want you to agree with it so we can feel good about ourselves bullshitting one another into believing everyone has a say, so give us the ok or we'll pester you until you do" It also stimulates the idea that disagreements are inherently wrong and nothing should happen while a disagreement is in place. Sometimes, it's ok to disagree with someone else and see what happens. Some might call this a form of consensus, though I've had managers get uncomfortable when I didn't vehemently agree with the plan, but was willing to keep my nose out of it and focus on my own things so others could take the risk.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  There's a third thing they could mean: we want this to succeed in the organization which means we need to both hear people out to reflect their real needs in the plan, and that we need to communicate to them in a way that they buy in. So that it can work. In fact this is really the only way to get anything done regardless of what you call it.
  - roflc0ptic 6y ago
    Yes, this. It's funny seeing so many people being cynical about this - sure, there's plenty of ways for it go to badly, but far more importantly, there are a couple of ways it can go right. As general commentary - if you're smart and good at identifying problems with things, use your ability to identify problems to avoid those problems, not as an excuse to avoid doing stuff. Being cynical about everything isn't a terrible strategy, as long as you remember that you need to be cynical about your own cynicism, too.

douglaswlance 6y ago

[Disagree and commit](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disagree_and_commit https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Disagree_and_commit) is a common management methodology and one that the most effective teams utilize successfully. What is the issue?

whateveracct 6y ago
haha i have worked at amazon, where disagree and commit is one of their laminated leadership principles except it isn't the principle is "have backbone; disagree and commit" there's checks and balances in the principle's words themself. every leader i've had who has "disagree and commit" as their guiding light has just been an autocrat. they never mention on the "have backbone" part. i had a VPE from BigCos come into a LittleBigCo. he was all about "disagree and commit" really, he had a nose for dissent. he went around managers who disagreed with him to corral their engineers to his side. he put near-founding engineers on bad projects to force them out. i tried to have backbone with this guy once. i thought one of his tech decisions was bad (and in reality it was politically motivated to force people out.) i wasn't rude or anything. he had a 1-on-1 call with me, and acted like i was being irrational. i stood my ground and made fact-based arguments. he was losing the 1-on-1 debate, so how did he close it? "look whateveracct..i just have this crystal ball in my stomach, and it's usually right" disagree and commit? more like stfu i'm the boss
- gkop 6y ago
  I was just looking at Amazon’s principles this week, and found the on-its-face ridiculous “Are Right, A Lot”, which more or less directly invites the behavior you describe,
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    In my understanding - "are right a lot" is a retrospective thing - it's asking whether the leader's past instincts and decisions had lead to good things. It's not measuring how many meetings you walk out of having gotten your way. For example, if a leader had an idea X,and Bob talked him into idea Y which worked out, then the leader was still 'right' because listening to Bob was the right thing.

zemo 6y ago

> "Build Consensus" - hah, the words of an org chart climber. ^ the words of a person that builds things that nobody asked for and then gets mad when people don't use them.

whateveracct 6y ago
i'm doing fine :) did my fun pejorative phrase offend you? also - i & millions others just "use" some software service i built years ago at a previous job ;) i have no trouble getting things in production, making and saving money.

sgtnoodle 6y ago

I mean this constructively, but it sounds like you're rather jaded from your past experiences. I've personally experienced 4 flavors of work environments: high stress low wisdom politics (big stakes student project); High stress high wisdom politics (SpaceX); low stress high wisdom politics (Google X); and my current project, low stress high wisdom no-politics (Zipline). Each different environment required me to adapt my own behavior appropriately to work productively with coworkers. Notably, the only environment that consistently lead me to feeling jaded and burnt out in the long term was the low-stress BigCo environment. I see a lot of truth in what you describe about your current experiences, although I never got quite that pessimistic. If you're happy slithering around the politics and are able to find fulfillment in your personal life, good on ya. That reminds me of a coworker at SpaceX who, a month or two before getting let go, admitted to spending 8 years at a defense contractor doing crossword puzzles at his desk all day, every day. Building consensus around long term architecture is something like 80% of my current job, and over the years while the org chart has gone from 1 layer to something like 5 layers, I've successfully remained at the bottom. The folk at the top of the org chart are completely approachable, and in a lot of ways are there to serve me, solving the problems that would otherwise prevent me from getting my work done.