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> Turn up the heat in every interaction and ask uncomfortable questions. Some of the questions I repeatedly ask: > What’s the soonest we could get this done?
by sp527 4y ago
> Turn up the heat in every interaction and ask uncomfortable questions. Some of the questions I repeatedly ask:
> What’s the soonest we could get this done?
> What would you need to get this done tomorrow instead of next week?
Some helpful insight into why their employees are crying and burning out. Has anyone else's impression of the Collisons been tainted by the realization that they seem to have inculcated psychopathy into their corporate culture?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- earnesti 4y agoIs there something wrong about getting things done faster.
- rgrs 4y agoyes. poor planning
- nlitened 4y agoThese questions are all part of the actual planning. If the engineer does not participate in planning, and plan is enforced without any feedback, then the planning is poor.
- sp527 4y agoNot ordinarily. But it seems that 'faster' might be exacting a dire human toll over there.
- cjrp 4y agoIt implies you think the person doing the task is delivering more slowly than they could/should be. Especially if you’re asking it in every interaction.
- fortydegrees 4y agoYou're assuming that the individual's labour is the only input into work completion. I think those questions are good. One benefit is that it can reveal potential organisation-wide blockers: *Getting design changes could be slow (and hence the design department may be understaffed, or inefficient communication channels) *Maybe some processes can be ran in parallel. Someone can build the login form while the other does the database. *They might require git access for another department that could take a while to come through. Considering engineers' time is often the greatest cost for a technology startup, you can bet they'd be incentivised to maximise the efficiency of it. Not only might they reveal potential blockers, but answering it also helps both parties understand they're on the same page regarding what the task entails. If the task is building a login form and the response is 'It will take two days to train the neural network', you can nip that in the bud.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI have never seen this framed as performing work too slowly. It's more about cutting scope, gathering context, asking for help, identifying dependencies, etc. It's often really helpful for someone to ask these questions, especially when they have higher level context you weren't aware of.
- hef19898 4y agoSpeed is relative. What you want is the right speed of getting things done, not just being faster by default. It is as important to slow down in operations as it is to speed up as it is to just run things stable. The true art of good ops management is knowing to do those things, in parallel depending on the subject at hand, and to judge which approach to choose. The article didn't even hint at that.
- solar-ice 4y agoIf your mechanism for getting things done faster is to make your employees uncomfortable talking to you, yes.
- grvdrm 4y agoThis is all about context. Those aren't bad or uncomfortable questions. Having as much clarity as possible helps ensure plans are on track, need adjusting, etc. right? Some folks stress over questions like this, but I think it's important to ask them, and to provide context to the folks on the receiving end. So, I think you ask these questions with a few basic rules: (1) Don't send an email/message with a question like that without being clear about how urgent the response is (2) Send the question or have the conversation during the course of a "normal" work-day - instead of in the middle of someone's night/etc. (3) Keep the emotions out of the question, hopefully helping to keep them out of the response (4) Just always think about what might be involved in answering the question. Are you needlessly grinding someone for an answer or do you really need it? That last one really hits home for me. Was most recently in analytics/product at a large financial services company (insurance) and am now in a start-up. But I see a common thread across the two: senior folks sometimes asking for answers/work without spending much or any time thinking about the time the receiver will spend trying to figure out that answer/work.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoIt's uncomfortable because it forces you to question your assumptions and what you are doing. It's not a bad thing.
- hef19898 4y agoYou don't want unconfortable people, you want people being comfortable doing whatvthey are doing. Getting out of your comfort zone every once in a while is good, pushing it too hard is just increasing the risk of errors. You want stable operations with some slack for the cases something goes wrong, you don't want ops that are constantly under stress.
- 4y ago
- cinntaile 4y agoThey are uncomfortable but without asking questions like these it is hard to become more productive. It is also demanding of the employees, no doubt about it but I think people that want to work at Stripe realize it is a demanding environment. Calling it psychopathy is uncalled for.
- password4321 4y ago> Has anyone else's impression of the Collisons been tainted by the realization that they seem to have inculcated psychopathy into their corporate culture? Nearly every confirmation of this shared here on HN is still self-censored to some degree, but to summarize: yes.