7 ms·

> To this day, I believe these new leaders had a fundamental misunderstanding of what problem Uber’s SRE organization was solving (enabling bottoms-up organizat

by pm90 5y ago

> To this day, I believe these new leaders had a fundamental misunderstanding of what problem Uber’s SRE organization was solving (enabling bottoms-up organization with highly fluid priorities that weren’t resolved into a single priority list anywhere to function successfully), viewing it instead from the lens of their previous experience. As a result, SRE quickly shifted from an embedded model to a very different model. > The name was unchanged, but it was soon a very different team. That unchanged name concealed the beginning of a significant leadership and cultural shift Unfortunately a very common problem. New person weighs heavily towards their own great experience previously, fails to understand new org and its problems. One of the best infrastructure managers I worked with shared their approach with me: the first 6 months, they would go to all the team leaders for the teams they served and listen to the problems they faced. No solutions were proposed. Just understand the pain points first, develop solutions after learning those. I often wonder if we should have social scientists study these phenomena and create some guidance so people don’t keep repeating these mistakes.

munchbunny 5y ago
This is what the professors in business schools study. MBA’s often get a bad rap, but as far as the actual research goes, that’s where the current efforts at rigorously studying management and organizational dynamics are.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Is there any evidence that these academics affect the practice of business much? When I think of ideas or changes coming out of business schools and changing how businesses are run the only thing I can think of is Michael Porter’s five forces. Toyota has likely had a greater impact on how business is run than every business school professor combined, ever. More bluntly most business professors never even try to become successful entrepreneurs. They’re unwilling to bear the costs of the market test because they don’t expect the benefits to be worth it.
  - ajb 5y ago
    Sure: W Edwards Deming.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      Deming became a business school professor in 1946 and was brought to Japan in 1947, where he taught statistical process control. That was extremely important but Deming functioned more as a conduit for work Walter Shewhart and others had done than anything else. A man with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematical physics with less than two years of experience in a business school before transforming Japanese manufacturing by teaching them about techniques developed for the American war effort by statisticians does not seem a great example. > Deming edited a series of lectures delivered by Shewhart at USDA, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, into a book published in 1939. One reason he learned so much from Shewhart, Deming remarked in a videotaped interview, was that, while brilliant, Shewhart had an "uncanny ability to make things difficult." Deming thus spent a great deal of time both copying Shewhart's ideas and devising ways to present them with his own twist.[16] > Deming developed the sampling techniques that were used for the first time during the 1940 U.S. Census, formulating the Deming-Stephan algorithm for iterative proportional fitting in the process.[17] During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942)[18] and taught SPC techniques to workers engaged in wartime production. Statistical methods were widely applied during World War II, but faded into disuse a few years later in the face of huge overseas demand for American mass-produced products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
      - ajb 5y ago
        It says that he just transcribed Shewhart, but he also afterwards studied academically under Fisher and Neymann, two foundational figures in the world of statistics.
        5y ago
brnt 5y ago
They do. The management section in many bookstores isn't small.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Yes, but most of those books aren’t written by social scientists. Just as most of what is learned at business school is not the most important thing for running a business most of what scholars looking for the praise of other scholars publish is of limited use to businesspeople. Businesspeople have more to learn from their own than from people in a completely different sector, just as artists like painters and sculptors learn more from their own than art historians and theorists. Much of academia is masturbatory, of no use or interest to people outside the specific sub field of academia it comes from, and the further divorced a field is from use by or contact with practitioners or consumer demand the greater the proportion.
unicornmama 5y ago
> the first 6 months, they would go to all the team leaders for the teams they served and listen to the problems they faced. I once got rejected from a manager interview with a billion dollar unicorn. I said I would spend my first 3 months understanding and observing. The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work? It left a bad taste in my mouth. And I have pondered for months whether I mishandled the question, fundamentally misunderstood management, or whether this unicorn is doomed to fail-at-scale because of poor organizational intelligence.
- dmlittle 5y ago
  > what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work? Regardless of whether you're an incoming manager or senior IC, it's a good idea to observe your first few weeks/couple of months in a new team rather than come in suggesting big changes[1]. Yes, things might not be in an ideal situation, but there might be context you're missing which explains why things are the way they are. [1] There a few times where big, shocking changes are necessary to reset a team in a bad situation. Most of the time this is not the case.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  Your answer is a correct description of what you actually should do, but unfortunately, interviewing is a signaling game. There’s a lot of people out there who are smart and can perform well in an interview, but aren’t do-ers. They don’t make things happen. You don’t want to give off any vibes that you are that kind of person if you are interviewing for a fast-moving company. I believe Amazon calls it “bias for action”.
  - unicornmama 5y ago
    Thanks. This seems to be a good summary of "bias for action" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-7w6BeWfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-7w6BeWfQ
  - SkyPuncher 5y ago
    It also implies that ou have no experince to rely on if you wont make any quick improvements. You should certainly look to understand large problems, but if you know a quick solution to a simple problem - just implement it.
kqr 5y ago
And it's not just the first six months. It's something one ought to do all the time, to better serve the people one is there to serve. Just going to the place where the thing happens and looking at the thing happening to better understand is a hugely undervalued job. I don't want a detailed digital report of how my child is doing in preschool. If I want more details, I'll take a couple hours of vacation and join them in the preschool, just to observe. I don't need a product manager to tell me how a customer uses a product in detail. If I want to know in detail, I'll visit them and watch. Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.
- pm90 5y ago
  > Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work. This rings very true in my experience. Every new layer, every new TPM organization adds more overhead. They start off with “were gonna boost productivity and get things done faster!” but when that doesn’t happen the result is a demand of more process, more bureaucracy, more JIRA/story point blah blah all of which ultimately falls on the engineers who still have to do the actual work but now have to learn how to bullshit the bureaucracy.
  - fredophile 5y ago
    There's a saying I learned in shooting that applies to most physical activities/sports. "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast." It also applies to working as part of an aorganization. Process and bureaucracy might make you slower as an individual contributer but still speed up the organization.
    - kqr 5y ago
jb3689 5y ago
OTOH Uber is now in a stable place regardless of the author’s further involvement. The author’s story reminds me a lot of my own current situation - shit ton of ops load for years with everything being critical and no time to stabilize, new management comes in, get new hires, most of the old team leaves, mix of remaining old team and new team suss out remaining issues over the next year or two, team eventually falls into the normal working patterns setup by new managers. Does this happen at every big tech company?

by pm90 5y ago

munchbunny 5y ago

This is what the professors in business schools study. MBA’s often get a bad rap, but as far as the actual research goes, that’s where the current efforts at rigorously studying management and organizational dynamics are.

barry-cotter 5y ago
Is there any evidence that these academics affect the practice of business much? When I think of ideas or changes coming out of business schools and changing how businesses are run the only thing I can think of is Michael Porter’s five forces. Toyota has likely had a greater impact on how business is run than every business school professor combined, ever. More bluntly most business professors never even try to become successful entrepreneurs. They’re unwilling to bear the costs of the market test because they don’t expect the benefits to be worth it.
- ajb 5y ago
  Sure: W Edwards Deming.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Deming became a business school professor in 1946 and was brought to Japan in 1947, where he taught statistical process control. That was extremely important but Deming functioned more as a conduit for work Walter Shewhart and others had done than anything else. A man with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematical physics with less than two years of experience in a business school before transforming Japanese manufacturing by teaching them about techniques developed for the American war effort by statisticians does not seem a great example. > Deming edited a series of lectures delivered by Shewhart at USDA, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, into a book published in 1939. One reason he learned so much from Shewhart, Deming remarked in a videotaped interview, was that, while brilliant, Shewhart had an "uncanny ability to make things difficult." Deming thus spent a great deal of time both copying Shewhart's ideas and devising ways to present them with his own twist.[16] > Deming developed the sampling techniques that were used for the first time during the 1940 U.S. Census, formulating the Deming-Stephan algorithm for iterative proportional fitting in the process.[17] During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942)[18] and taught SPC techniques to workers engaged in wartime production. Statistical methods were widely applied during World War II, but faded into disuse a few years later in the face of huge overseas demand for American mass-produced products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
    - ajb 5y ago
      It says that he just transcribed Shewhart, but he also afterwards studied academically under Fisher and Neymann, two foundational figures in the world of statistics.
      - 5y ago

brnt 5y ago

They do. The management section in many bookstores isn't small.

barry-cotter 5y ago
Yes, but most of those books aren’t written by social scientists. Just as most of what is learned at business school is not the most important thing for running a business most of what scholars looking for the praise of other scholars publish is of limited use to businesspeople. Businesspeople have more to learn from their own than from people in a completely different sector, just as artists like painters and sculptors learn more from their own than art historians and theorists. Much of academia is masturbatory, of no use or interest to people outside the specific sub field of academia it comes from, and the further divorced a field is from use by or contact with practitioners or consumer demand the greater the proportion.

unicornmama 5y ago

> the first 6 months, they would go to all the team leaders for the teams they served and listen to the problems they faced. I once got rejected from a manager interview with a billion dollar unicorn. I said I would spend my first 3 months understanding and observing. The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work? It left a bad taste in my mouth. And I have pondered for months whether I mishandled the question, fundamentally misunderstood management, or whether this unicorn is doomed to fail-at-scale because of poor organizational intelligence.

dmlittle 5y ago
> what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work? Regardless of whether you're an incoming manager or senior IC, it's a good idea to observe your first few weeks/couple of months in a new team rather than come in suggesting big changes[1]. Yes, things might not be in an ideal situation, but there might be context you're missing which explains why things are the way they are. [1] There a few times where big, shocking changes are necessary to reset a team in a bad situation. Most of the time this is not the case.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
Your answer is a correct description of what you actually should do, but unfortunately, interviewing is a signaling game. There’s a lot of people out there who are smart and can perform well in an interview, but aren’t do-ers. They don’t make things happen. You don’t want to give off any vibes that you are that kind of person if you are interviewing for a fast-moving company. I believe Amazon calls it “bias for action”.
- unicornmama 5y ago
  Thanks. This seems to be a good summary of "bias for action" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-7w6BeWfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi-7w6BeWfQ
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  It also implies that ou have no experince to rely on if you wont make any quick improvements. You should certainly look to understand large problems, but if you know a quick solution to a simple problem - just implement it.

kqr 5y ago

And it's not just the first six months. It's something one ought to do all the time, to better serve the people one is there to serve. Just going to the place where the thing happens and looking at the thing happening to better understand is a hugely undervalued job. I don't want a detailed digital report of how my child is doing in preschool. If I want more details, I'll take a couple hours of vacation and join them in the preschool, just to observe. I don't need a product manager to tell me how a customer uses a product in detail. If I want to know in detail, I'll visit them and watch. Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work.

pm90 5y ago
> Instead in the corporate world we have layers of layers of management demanding progress reports and skill assessments and performance rankings and velocity audits and what have you. I'm sure this eats way more time than if they just spent a couple of hours every now and then working with and asking things of the people who do the actual work. This rings very true in my experience. Every new layer, every new TPM organization adds more overhead. They start off with “were gonna boost productivity and get things done faster!” but when that doesn’t happen the result is a demand of more process, more bureaucracy, more JIRA/story point blah blah all of which ultimately falls on the engineers who still have to do the actual work but now have to learn how to bullshit the bureaucracy.
- fredophile 5y ago
  There's a saying I learned in shooting that applies to most physical activities/sports. "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast." It also applies to working as part of an aorganization. Process and bureaucracy might make you slower as an individual contributer but still speed up the organization.
  - kqr 5y ago

jb3689 5y ago

OTOH Uber is now in a stable place regardless of the author’s further involvement. The author’s story reminds me a lot of my own current situation - shit ton of ops load for years with everything being critical and no time to stabilize, new management comes in, get new hires, most of the old team leaves, mix of remaining old team and new team suss out remaining issues over the next year or two, team eventually falls into the normal working patterns setup by new managers. Does this happen at every big tech company?