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> I explained to a Google leader how the WebAssembly project was struggling without support from his organization and how people were being driven away from the

> I explained to a Google leader how the WebAssembly project was struggling without support from his organization and how people were being driven away from the project. He agreed with my assessment and then told me nothing was going to change. In the end, the team changed things on their own. Man I wish that didn't feel so relevant. Literally on an all-day "strategy" meeting right now and heard a variation of this about 5 minutes ago...

akhmatova 4y ago
I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down on their heads when they actually get there?
- rhizome 4y ago
  The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just like hint-based management in general, except in these cases the hint is the person's skills.
grrrrrbox 4y ago
Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at big orgs. Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues. Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate. Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It. Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings. Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should." Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances. Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.
  - rektide 4y ago
    That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively. We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change." Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.
Arcsech 4y ago
Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've worked that's started to go downhill, it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it. I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  100% yes. Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels. Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    > dismissed at the top levels. The issue, IMO, is the only accountability C levels face is from either a board or stock prices. Otherwise, nothing they do has any real impact on them personally. Another major problem is the effects of their decisions are long delayed. Do something that slows development to a crawl and you still have a functional product for years (even if you can't add new features to it). Tying the original decision to the impact on the org is hard, and even harder since whoever made that decision isn't likely to want to take responsibility for it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    From my management experience the leaders are actually doing their job when they do this. Leaders at that level are expected to make strong decisions and to stick with them. It is thought better to have a leader make the wrong decisions firmly and adjust later with a well planned change than the business wobling down the road. So the senior executives are actually doing what the board expects/tasked them to do, keep the direction stable until the next planned/controlled correction. That is why it feels like you are talking to a wall. You are. What you see as a 'bug' the board sees as a 'feature' and the expected output of a C-level. Bad analogy (I'm old) the light at the intersection is going to stay red until it is time to turn green, even though it would make more sense right now for it to turn green for you because you are the only one at the intersection. Bigger picture, having the lights on timers works better than everyone having a stop sign, even though it looks/feels stupid waiting at a red light with no one else there. The lights seem stupid sometimes, but it scales better than a bunch of stop and go stop signs. (Yes, I know that now lights have sensors, bad analogy now like I said). TLDR; What if it's not a bug, but it's actually the output the board wants.
tyingq 4y ago
Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful "nothing is going to change" over false promises. At least you have the information you need to make a real decision for yourself.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  You're absolutely right about that. It's demoralizing, but in a "devil you know" kind of way.

akhmatova 4y ago

I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down on their heads when they actually get there?

rhizome 4y ago
The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just like hint-based management in general, except in these cases the hint is the person's skills.

grrrrrbox 4y ago

Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at big orgs. Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues. Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate. Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It. Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings. Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.

nostrademons 4y ago
In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should." Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances. Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.
- rektide 4y ago
  That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively. We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change." Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.

Arcsech 4y ago

Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've worked that's started to go downhill, it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it. I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago
100% yes. Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels. Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > dismissed at the top levels. The issue, IMO, is the only accountability C levels face is from either a board or stock prices. Otherwise, nothing they do has any real impact on them personally. Another major problem is the effects of their decisions are long delayed. Do something that slows development to a crawl and you still have a functional product for years (even if you can't add new features to it). Tying the original decision to the impact on the org is hard, and even harder since whoever made that decision isn't likely to want to take responsibility for it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  From my management experience the leaders are actually doing their job when they do this. Leaders at that level are expected to make strong decisions and to stick with them. It is thought better to have a leader make the wrong decisions firmly and adjust later with a well planned change than the business wobling down the road. So the senior executives are actually doing what the board expects/tasked them to do, keep the direction stable until the next planned/controlled correction. That is why it feels like you are talking to a wall. You are. What you see as a 'bug' the board sees as a 'feature' and the expected output of a C-level. Bad analogy (I'm old) the light at the intersection is going to stay red until it is time to turn green, even though it would make more sense right now for it to turn green for you because you are the only one at the intersection. Bigger picture, having the lights on timers works better than everyone having a stop sign, even though it looks/feels stupid waiting at a red light with no one else there. The lights seem stupid sometimes, but it scales better than a bunch of stop and go stop signs. (Yes, I know that now lights have sensors, bad analogy now like I said). TLDR; What if it's not a bug, but it's actually the output the board wants.

tyingq 4y ago

Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful "nothing is going to change" over false promises. At least you have the information you need to make a real decision for yourself.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago
You're absolutely right about that. It's demoralizing, but in a "devil you know" kind of way.