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The ability for people to give away their Legos is one of the most important ways I guage an organization's health. If I'm in an established organization and I

The ability for people to give away their Legos is one of the most important ways I guage an organization's health. If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems, it's usually an indicator that: - the leader cannot emotionally bear to give up engineering work and focus on leadership work. This signals a lack of maturity. - there is some other serious organizational problem preventing delegation from happening (weak engineering IC hires, lack of clear processes and ownership patterns, etc)

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems That 'established' part is key because early stage companies require wearing so many hats. And knowing when and to whom to let something go it's crucial IME.
colordrops 5y ago
You've got musk prescribing technical solutions at the CEO level, so clearly it's not true in every case.
- hef19898 5y ago
  And I'd say Tesla is successful despite and not because of that. Examples include: Tesla's shot at an in-house ERP and the drive to fully automate production. Both cost them a lot.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Also https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-to-ex-worker-over-hostile-work-environment-racism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-t... The ability to say "this is no longer my job" is crucial if a leader is to focus on what is their job.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bobsomers 5y ago
  I've talked to some folks from Tesla whose stories absolutely reinforced the parent's point. Some of the silly things Musk has dictated turned into massive wastes of resources for the engineering team.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    But not to Musk, who writes the check. Not always about engineering team resources.
- bombcar 5y ago
  There’s a line somewhere between understanding technical issues (and being able to make decisions on it) and being too interested in the details.
  - crabmusket 5y ago
    And another line after that when mandating the details from on high.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I worked at a multi-billion dollar company (not Tesla) where the CEO considered himself chief engineer and tried to prescribe low-level technical solutions from the CEO level. It was terrible. CEOs don’t have the time to keep up with technologies and understand the low-level requirements that drive good decision making. A person doing a CEO job can’t possibly keep up with someone doing full-time engineering work in any fast-moving field. The only way we could make progress was by subtlety seeding our ideas to the CEO and waiting for him to claim them as his own directives after he realized they were good ideas. It was an exhaustive way to get things done.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Like the absolutely asinine "steering yoke"?
  - stavros 5y ago
    Everyone's first words at the reveal were "is this a yoke?".
- mLuby 5y ago
  I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X." (Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.
jimmaswell 5y ago
Was Henry Ford a bad CEO? I have more faith in a CEO that's involved to a degree and understands the engineering side as opposed to some out of touch MBA.
- selectodude 5y ago
  Henry Ford was a good CEO in that he handed the reigns over to his son pretty early on. Henry did his best to hamstring the company until his death.
  - _hyn3 5y ago
    This is not historically accurate.
- billyhoffman 5y ago
  I think people like Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, are the exception that proves the rule. It is astronomically rare for a CEO to be that involved at a micro-level and be successful.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Steve Jobs definitely wasn't proposing technical solutions in any version of events I've read.
    - microtherion 5y ago
      Having been a bit closer to the action (through secondhand reports from colleagues), it was not at all uncommon for Steve to propose detailed technical solutions, but (1) many of them were no good (2) his teams got pretty good at working around him on such matters and (3) I think over time he developed the good sense to trust his lieutenants on matters like this instead of being overly insistent on seeing his bad ideas implemented. In contrast, in UX/Design, Steve generally had very astute insights, knew so, and it was much harder to get him to change his mind. For a publicly documented example of a bad technical decision by young Steve that the team simply worked around for a while until he changed his mind, see: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
fieldcny 5y ago
There are some bounds on this, I’ve seen plenty of situations where VPs may not be prescribing technical solutions because they are so far out of touch they can’t even understand the solution options in play.
hakfoo 5y ago
I don't think "engineering work" and "leadership work" should be a dichotomy, especially if you're trying to follow a promote-from-within mentality. Sure, after N years, you might be career-tracked from development into management, but you probably also know where all the bodies are buried. If you're not doing code reviews, trying to mentor new developers, or just butting in and saying "We tried that in 2006 and it has huge non-obvious compliance/performance/maintainability costs!", it lets all that knowledge go to waste.
- watwut 5y ago
  Code review by someone who did not cared for years except doing reviews strikes me as a bad idea. Same with that person teaching juniors. If is supremely annoying when code review is done by superior who does not produce code, but has opinions based on vague recollections.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Not so simple. You write like "weak engineering hires" is just a problem of laziness or ignorance. But the reality today is that most companies simply cannot afford to hire strong engineers across the board for economic supply-and-demand reasons. You have to work within the bounds of possibility, and yes, that sometimes means that people have to wear multiple hats.

paulryanrogers 5y ago

> If I'm in an established organization and I see a VP or director prescribing technical solutions to engineering problems That 'established' part is key because early stage companies require wearing so many hats. And knowing when and to whom to let something go it's crucial IME.

colordrops 5y ago

You've got musk prescribing technical solutions at the CEO level, so clearly it's not true in every case.

hef19898 5y ago
And I'd say Tesla is successful despite and not because of that. Examples include: Tesla's shot at an in-house ERP and the drive to fully automate production. Both cost them a lot.
- afarrell 5y ago
  Also https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-to-ex-worker-over-hostile-work-environment-racism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/tesla-must-pay-137-million-t... The ability to say "this is no longer my job" is crucial if a leader is to focus on what is their job.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bobsomers 5y ago
I've talked to some folks from Tesla whose stories absolutely reinforced the parent's point. Some of the silly things Musk has dictated turned into massive wastes of resources for the engineering team.
- edoceo 5y ago
  But not to Musk, who writes the check. Not always about engineering team resources.
bombcar 5y ago
There’s a line somewhere between understanding technical issues (and being able to make decisions on it) and being too interested in the details.
- crabmusket 5y ago
  And another line after that when mandating the details from on high.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I worked at a multi-billion dollar company (not Tesla) where the CEO considered himself chief engineer and tried to prescribe low-level technical solutions from the CEO level. It was terrible. CEOs don’t have the time to keep up with technologies and understand the low-level requirements that drive good decision making. A person doing a CEO job can’t possibly keep up with someone doing full-time engineering work in any fast-moving field. The only way we could make progress was by subtlety seeding our ideas to the CEO and waiting for him to claim them as his own directives after he realized they were good ideas. It was an exhaustive way to get things done.
seattle_spring 5y ago
Like the absolutely asinine "steering yoke"?
- stavros 5y ago
  Everyone's first words at the reveal were "is this a yoke?".
mLuby 5y ago
I'm sick of "but Elon Musk does X." Yes, the guy's exceptional. That literally means not representative, outside the normal rule or distribution. So like a black swan, you can point to him and say "proof X is possible" but you can't point to him and say "proof X is normal"—you've got to wait for "half of Fortune 500 CEOs do X." (Nothing personal colordrops, I've just seen this take a lot lately.)
- Jetrel 5y ago
  I mean, it's a fair take to argue that CEO-ship ought to be meritocratic, in the sense of only hiring extremely exceptional individuals. If you're just an average jobsworth doing a merely 'decent' job, you shouldn't be the ceo of any company. It's kind of similar to airline pilots or surgeons, where we have to demand "excellence" as a lowest-common-denominator. At that level, they need to be graded on a reverse curve, where unlike regular grades, where a mere 65% score is a passing grade — for those folks, nothing less than a 95% should be a passing grade. It's easy to make the argument for airline pilots and surgeons, because the human tragedy that results from their potential incompetence is immediate and obvious. I feel like the tragedy that comes out of incompetent CEOs is a lot more insidious, and sneaky. Poorly run companies, and depressing "waste of life" has ruined a lot of people's lives. In fact, one could dare to surmise that it's actually, statistically speaking, directly killed a lot of people (an easy low-hanging fruit here would be safety stuff that OSHA doesn't cover), but there's a lot of mental health stuff we don't track as well. This whole line of thinking reminds me a lot of Florence Nightengale — her primary contribution to medical statistics was to take something that people brushed off as irrelevant or not-causal, and prove that it was a primary malefactor. She convinced the british top brass that the bulk of their deaths during war had nothing to do with enemy action, or even hospital deaths from injury, but literally was just caused by petty diseases, due to poor barracks sanitation amongst uninjured men.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    Competence at being a CEO, competence in the core business (whether engineering or otherwise,) and competence at splitting focus between completely different levels of the business are all different competences. Being skilled at all three is the exception, but that doesn't make the non-exceptions incompetent. If you always aim for the exception, what you actually end up doing is selecting for the third competence; someone who can code-switch. And if that person isn't exceptional, then you just have a CEO who is getting involved things outside their depth.

jimmaswell 5y ago

Was Henry Ford a bad CEO? I have more faith in a CEO that's involved to a degree and understands the engineering side as opposed to some out of touch MBA.

selectodude 5y ago
Henry Ford was a good CEO in that he handed the reigns over to his son pretty early on. Henry did his best to hamstring the company until his death.
- _hyn3 5y ago
  This is not historically accurate.
billyhoffman 5y ago
I think people like Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, are the exception that proves the rule. It is astronomically rare for a CEO to be that involved at a micro-level and be successful.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Steve Jobs definitely wasn't proposing technical solutions in any version of events I've read.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    Having been a bit closer to the action (through secondhand reports from colleagues), it was not at all uncommon for Steve to propose detailed technical solutions, but (1) many of them were no good (2) his teams got pretty good at working around him on such matters and (3) I think over time he developed the good sense to trust his lieutenants on matters like this instead of being overly insistent on seeing his bad ideas implemented. In contrast, in UX/Design, Steve generally had very astute insights, knew so, and it was much harder to get him to change his mind. For a publicly documented example of a bad technical decision by young Steve that the team simply worked around for a while until he changed his mind, see: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Hide_Under_This_Desk.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

fieldcny 5y ago

There are some bounds on this, I’ve seen plenty of situations where VPs may not be prescribing technical solutions because they are so far out of touch they can’t even understand the solution options in play.

hakfoo 5y ago

I don't think "engineering work" and "leadership work" should be a dichotomy, especially if you're trying to follow a promote-from-within mentality. Sure, after N years, you might be career-tracked from development into management, but you probably also know where all the bodies are buried. If you're not doing code reviews, trying to mentor new developers, or just butting in and saying "We tried that in 2006 and it has huge non-obvious compliance/performance/maintainability costs!", it lets all that knowledge go to waste.

watwut 5y ago
Code review by someone who did not cared for years except doing reviews strikes me as a bad idea. Same with that person teaching juniors. If is supremely annoying when code review is done by superior who does not produce code, but has opinions based on vague recollections.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

Not so simple. You write like "weak engineering hires" is just a problem of laziness or ignorance. But the reality today is that most companies simply cannot afford to hire strong engineers across the board for economic supply-and-demand reasons. You have to work within the bounds of possibility, and yes, that sometimes means that people have to wear multiple hats.