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It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. It is corporate, investing, and all around culture that does not value quality and barely has a s

It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. It is corporate, investing, and all around culture that does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all (Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he had a strong sense of quality, it doesn't matter if you agree with his choices, that's taste, it's hard to argue that things he drove apple to produce had quality) People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages.

outworlder 4y ago
> It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. > It is corporate When dealing with corporations, that's _always_ the case. Even if it turns out that a single person was able to make a large mistake that went unnoticed, guess what, it's still a corporate failure. > People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages. Of these, the managers trying to advance are the most harmful. I've seen situations where actions of managers trying to advance their careers actually caused harm to the company, but they were able to place the blame elsewhere. Some are pretty good at that.
whatever1123 4y ago
> People instead value deadlines This is definitely true, and is a cultural thing, and deadlines are like, one of the most quintessentially big corpo dysfunctions ever. > It's not individual contributors When you have a surgical complication, do you blame the admins and the hospital bureaucracy? No. When you lose a court case, who's fault is it? Do you blame the clerks? Do you blame the Attorney General? No. > does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all I haven't met an "individual contributor" who cares about that shit in my life. Among the ones who do a lot of work all day, the rare few, the guys with the greasy hair and the track pants who live alone in Sunnyvale for a year, they have consistently been the least interested in a holistic sense of quality. You will say, oh the managers gave them the goals. Dude the managers do fucking nothing. They say the same shit to everyone, the "IC" has all the agency. They can work, or not work as much as they want. In fact the hardest working ICs I know are relentlessly optimizing for meeting immediate, dull goals. The ICs are almost always working on consumer products that are tremendously shitty and buggy. Listen, who the fuck is responsible? Everyone! Why do you give the trackpants guys a pass? They're dicks!
btown 4y ago
The conundrum is: how do you build an organization that can simultaneously scale super-linearly and retain a commitment to quality? There are plenty of businesses that pursue stable profitability or linear growth and maintain quality. But the faster an organization grows, the more it becomes metrics-driven, and outside of a regulated industry where quality is a requirement, it's hard to balance the priorities. I'm reminded of Honeycomb's pointed experiment in setting up a rotating employee seat as a voting member of their board: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeycomb-engineer https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeyc... - this type of thing can contribute towards striking the right balance at all levels of an organization. But it's definitely not a solved problem.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Apple did by having a quality dictator at the top. It would have lasted a lot longer but his unusual disposition led him to accidentally kill himself with a strange diet. In other words you can’t have a company run by the MBA mindset, there must be a superseding set of values beyond business school values.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

outworlder 4y ago

> It's not individual contributors responsible for bad quality. > It is corporate When dealing with corporations, that's _always_ the case. Even if it turns out that a single person was able to make a large mistake that went unnoticed, guess what, it's still a corporate failure. > People instead value deadlines, ever advancing middle manager careers, and tiny differences in margin percentages. Of these, the managers trying to advance are the most harmful. I've seen situations where actions of managers trying to advance their careers actually caused harm to the company, but they were able to place the blame elsewhere. Some are pretty good at that.

whatever1123 4y ago

> People instead value deadlines This is definitely true, and is a cultural thing, and deadlines are like, one of the most quintessentially big corpo dysfunctions ever. > It's not individual contributors When you have a surgical complication, do you blame the admins and the hospital bureaucracy? No. When you lose a court case, who's fault is it? Do you blame the clerks? Do you blame the Attorney General? No. > does not value quality and barely has a sense of it at all I haven't met an "individual contributor" who cares about that shit in my life. Among the ones who do a lot of work all day, the rare few, the guys with the greasy hair and the track pants who live alone in Sunnyvale for a year, they have consistently been the least interested in a holistic sense of quality. You will say, oh the managers gave them the goals. Dude the managers do fucking nothing. They say the same shit to everyone, the "IC" has all the agency. They can work, or not work as much as they want. In fact the hardest working ICs I know are relentlessly optimizing for meeting immediate, dull goals. The ICs are almost always working on consumer products that are tremendously shitty and buggy. Listen, who the fuck is responsible? Everyone! Why do you give the trackpants guys a pass? They're dicks!

btown 4y ago

The conundrum is: how do you build an organization that can simultaneously scale super-linearly and retain a commitment to quality? There are plenty of businesses that pursue stable profitability or linear growth and maintain quality. But the faster an organization grows, the more it becomes metrics-driven, and outside of a regulated industry where quality is a requirement, it's hard to balance the priorities. I'm reminded of Honeycomb's pointed experiment in setting up a rotating employee seat as a voting member of their board: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeycomb-engineer https://www.protocol.com/workplace/board-of-directors-honeyc... - this type of thing can contribute towards striking the right balance at all levels of an organization. But it's definitely not a solved problem.

colechristensen 4y ago
Apple did by having a quality dictator at the top. It would have lasted a lot longer but his unusual disposition led him to accidentally kill himself with a strange diet. In other words you can’t have a company run by the MBA mindset, there must be a superseding set of values beyond business school values.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]