4 ms·

> "The turning point in my life was the day I realized to run great engineering teams I didn’t need to be the best engineer in the world, I needed to get good a

> "The turning point in my life was the day I realized to run great engineering teams I didn’t need to be the best engineer in the world, I needed to get good at advertising my people and their stories up the chain of command. I needed to improve their observability so that we can keep bureaucracy at bay by maintaining a high level of trust." Poof. Another Big Tech middle manager got their wings. This cynical surrendering is not keeping bureaucracy at bay, at all. It's joining the bureaucracy and increasing its size. It is the bureaucracy. At companies that have competent managers up and down the hierarchy, it doesn't have to be like this. Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. There are companies, mostly smaller, that work like this. It seems to reliably fail as companies scale, but for each company it might fail at a different point. The longer competent management can be maintained, the better chance of the company succeeding in a big way. But all it takes is one good manager hiring a bad manager and the whole thing can start to fall apart. Once the company culture starts to reward people for playing bureaucratic games more than doing good work, it becomes broken and dysfunctional. Diseased. Everyone quickly realizes that the dynamic has shifted. That good work isn't rewarded any better than bad work that is well marketed internally. And so the best people, who have the most confidence and ability, go to smaller/better companies that know how to reward the people that do the best work. The other people stay and settle in for long-term escalating bureaucratic warfare. And these broken companies are left to fail or ride out the momentum generated before they were broken. All the while being miserable places to work.

anticristi 5y ago
> Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. I lost hope this is possible. Even as a non-manager architect, I struggle to see good work if it's not made visible. Fortunately, making good work visible takes little effort from the doer: take "before" and "after" screenshots; update the docs; if you improved performance, leave some plots behind; talk about your work and the benefits it brings. All in all, if you are a software engineer, stop treating yourself as a code monkey and start treating yourself as a problem solver. You don't hear plumpers showing their hammer, they show the pipe stopped leaking. Same with software, stop showing code and start showing their effects.
- staunch 5y ago
  A non-manager architect should have some sense. They should know all the open problems in their domain and recognize who is solving them and how well they're doing it. But, yeah, the scope is basically limited to each employee's direct manager. No one else can reasonably maintain all the context and perspective required to judge accurately. The fundamental requirement is a high level of competence in the manager. It usually requires significant self-confidence, technical skill, and experience solving similar problems.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> This cynical surrendering is not keeping bureaucracy at bay, at all. It's joining the bureaucracy and increasing its size. It is the bureaucracy. It is keeping it at bay in the context of a team. My company is a company with seemingly more paperwork than the government (and I used to work in government). Until a few weeks ago, I saw none of it as an individual developer (then we got individual specific paperwork and I looked at the required paperwork in the Google drive). A little digging turned up exactly why he doesn't have time to write code anymore. I would have called my company extremely low in bureaucracy before that. How does that work? He is constantly in meetings with senior people. So my manager keeps the bureaucracy at bay from the perspective of me by joining it.
catoc 5y ago
This exactly. If it works it makes companies fly. Sadly when said companies grow, the managerial part needs to grow, but with that all too often true understanding of the technical core is diluted and diluted and diluted

anticristi 5y ago

> Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. I lost hope this is possible. Even as a non-manager architect, I struggle to see good work if it's not made visible. Fortunately, making good work visible takes little effort from the doer: take "before" and "after" screenshots; update the docs; if you improved performance, leave some plots behind; talk about your work and the benefits it brings. All in all, if you are a software engineer, stop treating yourself as a code monkey and start treating yourself as a problem solver. You don't hear plumpers showing their hammer, they show the pipe stopped leaking. Same with software, stop showing code and start showing their effects.

staunch 5y ago
A non-manager architect should have some sense. They should know all the open problems in their domain and recognize who is solving them and how well they're doing it. But, yeah, the scope is basically limited to each employee's direct manager. No one else can reasonably maintain all the context and perspective required to judge accurately. The fundamental requirement is a high level of competence in the manager. It usually requires significant self-confidence, technical skill, and experience solving similar problems.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> This cynical surrendering is not keeping bureaucracy at bay, at all. It's joining the bureaucracy and increasing its size. It is the bureaucracy. It is keeping it at bay in the context of a team. My company is a company with seemingly more paperwork than the government (and I used to work in government). Until a few weeks ago, I saw none of it as an individual developer (then we got individual specific paperwork and I looked at the required paperwork in the Google drive). A little digging turned up exactly why he doesn't have time to write code anymore. I would have called my company extremely low in bureaucracy before that. How does that work? He is constantly in meetings with senior people. So my manager keeps the bureaucracy at bay from the perspective of me by joining it.

catoc 5y ago

This exactly. If it works it makes companies fly. Sadly when said companies grow, the managerial part needs to grow, but with that all too often true understanding of the technical core is diluted and diluted and diluted