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I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to

by duped 4y ago

I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the current PM team is incompetent. It doesn't matter if you're right, it matters how you communicate and strategize. This seems to be a skill that many people lack. This sounds like a conversation that should be had with a handful of managers who you can convince to your side, and concoct a plan to stage the product development and release such that it gets done and you don't cost a giant contract (and people's jobs). People talk shit about office politics, but sometimes you need to read the room...

pyrale 4y ago
> And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the current PM team is incompetent. As it turns out, they were wrong. The project management was actually fraudulent.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Always live below your means. Then you can walk out on people when they tell you who they really are. At least then you have a small chance that they will take the feedback for what it is, instead of learning to lie better. If you quit mysteriously six months later there's no feedback loop, even if you tell them what it is (same human psychology theory behind CI - only immediate feedback is properly internalized)
Seattle3503 4y ago
Yeah, it seems like scope needed to be reduced in order to deliver an MVP on time.
- pyrolistical 4y ago
  I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run? Do we have too much of a revolving door for an organization to see this trend?
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Yes. If you need more time ask for it and explain why it’s necessary and why the delay couldn’t have been anticipated. It’s better to be late than be late and also delivery a shoddy product.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      Sounds a lot like the discussion I had with my 12 year-old about his Science term paper :-)
      - rayiner 4y ago
        Being transparent and communicating roadblocks early is just a good way to get through life. Nobody likes to hear something will take longer than expected, but what people really hate is non-communication that leads to unexpected delay, or even worse, poor work that's delivered late.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    Pretty much. I have never seen a product manager/project manager see a multi year project through to the end. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to it not being the problem of anyone until the end of the project. Sales can promise whatever they want. Tech can put it off for a while.
  - origin_path 4y ago
    "Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue. The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it. Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.
Apes 4y ago
An organization entrenched with managers like this is not salvageable. There's no "right" way to fix organizational rot this extensive from the bottom up. The organization has evolved into a parasite that exists only to suck assets out of other companies, and the management exist only to suck assets out of the company they purport to manage. Don't waste your time playing political games and undermining incompetent management trying to "fix" massive organizational rot from the bottom up. Your reward is going to be negligible at best relative to your effort, and it's more likely you'll be punished instead. Go start your own company, or work for a small company where you can make a massive and positive difference - and get massively rewarded for it.
- d23 4y ago
  You've got it all wrong! These people are noble for being bloodsuckers that scam customers and rot the company from the inside!
VincentEvans 4y ago
The skill of reading a room in this particular case - is to realize the kind of place this is and go elsewhere before going through all that effort for it be disregarded by bruised egos, not do even more unnecessary work to bail out incompetent managers.
- invig 4y ago
  I'd go a step further and say don't work for people who are clearly liars.
  - thaneross 4y ago
    I have known very few managers who didn't routinely lie. The advantages of subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation are too tempting when trying to get something from someone.
ddoolin 4y ago
Doesn't sound like that was the job of this little committee. As written, it was to review and particularly identify extra work. Presenting solutions to this kind of problem isn't explicitly and often implicitly the function of the developer(s), especially in a room full of managers. Whose job it is literally to identify solutions to this exact kind of problem.
- kazinator 4y ago
  The managers might not understand the exact nature of the work. They want to know how they can reduce the scope: for which they need information about which work is urgent, or necessary at all. The mission is "please identify and estimate all untracked work so we can blindly put all of it into the plan, no matter how it delays the project".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- hinkley 4y ago
  Specifically, developers are in charge of tactical solutions, while management should be paying attention to strategy. Micromanagement is one of the many failure modes we talk about here, there, and everywhere. But having to do all of the strategy work because your bosses either can't be arsed to do so or can't find their way out of a wet paper bag, is another failure mode we talk about a lot. Leadership should be leading, not being lead by the nose. But when they won't you do what you can. It's not right, but it's expedient and somewhat sanity saving. Though if you take it too far you find all new kinds of insanity.
tenacious_tuna 4y ago
> you don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem Honestly that's exactly what I'd expect out of a meeting like that, and with good leadership it'd be a collaborative exercise on how to solve the problem. There's not going to be a solution that has zero impact on anyone else, and that individual team doesn't have the authority to make the call on what impact the business can sustain. They came, presented their problem, and their ideal recommendation (a 12 month delay). There's plenty of options on how to deal with that: ask sales how much of a delay is actually tolerable, see if low-priority asks could be dropped to free up some additional time, etc etc. It's leadership's job to mediate problems between "peer" groups, like engineering and sales. My first role out of college was on a four person product team split across three projects on two OSes. We were overloaded and couldn't maintain the desired velocity that Management was asking for. So we scheduled a meeting with the VP of product development and the CEO (the joys of a midsize company), sat down, and shared the amount of effort in our backlog, the goals we'd committed to as a company for these projects, and the cost that context-switching. The CEO considered us for about 20 seconds, then said "Okay, which project should we drop?". She had the trust in her teams and her management to take them at their word about their inability to achieve the goals, understand it's because the goals were beyond the reasonable capability of the team and not because the team was underperforming, and understand the landscape of the choices available: (1) continue underperforming on our existing goals and possibly upset customers due to not meeting stated expectations (2) walk back our commitments, possibly upsetting customers (3) cut the legacy product and focus on achieving and even exceeding our commitments for the modern product (4) do nothing and shred team morale More often than not "office politics" is really just shorthand for "low trust, low transparency environment". Yes, there's some amount of collaborative interpersonal skills necessary to be a good engineer, but if you don't trust me to do my job and tell you when our objectives are at risk then why did you hire me?
BWStearns 4y ago
> concoct a plan to stage the product development and release such that it gets done and you don't cost a giant contract Yes, always showing up with a solution to problems that you've surfaced is a good idea and good for your career, ... BUT: isn't coming up with a solution to this problem literally the job of the management team that they presented to? If management hears "the thing you think will happen will absolutely not happen" and then says "I wasn't handed an actionable plan by my subordinates so we'll just pretend I never heard all this", then they kind of suck. How well is an IC or lower level manager going to know what tradeoffs could be made without jeopardizing the contract or what kind of staging would be acceptable to the client? If your boss is ok with riding a project off a cliff when you've warned them then it's not your fault. That's when you either hang out, don't stress, and wait for it to explode, or you go find a new job.
- recuter 4y ago
  How do you reckon they (good ones) ended up in management? :)
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Suppose you were a junior engineer working with a senior engineer. They gave you a task, and you came to a similar conclusion: it was their job to do X, but they weren't doing it. Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? When I was 22 or so, I did go around telling a certain senior engineer that they weren't doing their job. I still cringe at how headstrong I was back then. The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. You're right that the optimal strategy is not to stress about it, though. That would've saved me a lot of heartache. My point is (and the point of many other commenters here) is that you can't really show up to a meeting and say "This project is doomed." That's arguably one of the core advantages of startups over bigcos -- you can pivot. Your options are to climb the politics ladder, or ride it out and see what happens. It depends how much you care, or how much responsibility you want.
  - 4y ago
deepsun 4y ago
I agree, however, the teams where people don't need to read the audience, and can just freely present problems whenever they want without fear of repercussions are the most productive, in my experience. The management team must be "thick skinned" enough, though, to be able to take the blame and work on the problem. Maybe talk in private to the person about the tact. Of course, I'm not going to try, just personal observation.
- MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  Meetings are performance, side-chats are politics. I think the decisions are based on the politics.
dimitar 4y ago
So what other possible solution there is? Cut scope? Hire 200 more people?
- mcv 4y ago
  Keep the client informed of the progress. Springing a surprise like this on the client on the originally planned delivery date, without any warnings well in advance, should count as proof of poor project management and make the software company liable for a significant chunk of the costs. The client shouldn't have to swallow that cost if they were kept in the dark.
- VLM 4y ago
  OP mentioned the moving goalposts, so cut scope. Hiring 200 more people would just make it 2 or 3 years late, not just 1 year late.
acheron 4y ago
And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for the same reason.
- blitz_skull 4y ago
  I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the responsibility but it just reinforces that if you want to just raise a stink—do it however you think best. If you want to communicate effectively, you must play by the laws of human ego. Plain and simple. People always underestimate the allure of human ego and pride.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    What a horrible truth, hate to upvote but you may be right. But why is it engineers who must rise to the political occasion?
    - vaidhy 4y ago
      Everyone should rise to the political occasion. Why is that the engineers should not rise? Politics is how we solve problems without resorting to fists.
      - peteradio 4y ago
        Engineering is the engineers domain. If engineers are expected to puppet master the managers then what is the point of the manager?
jkingsbery 4y ago
I had a similar reaction. It's pretty rare that you want someone to be surprised by what you have to say in a big meeting like that. Ideally, the goal of a large meeting like that is to say, "I've collected the data, we've had different workstreams look at the data, and having spoken to all of you, we've all agreed on X." > People talk shit about office politics Right... there are good ways to go about politics, and not-good ways. I think many of us see the not-good ways.
tootie 4y ago
I've personally done this exact thing. If the project is underestimated, there isn't always a solution. I worked on a smaller project for an agency where I was the tech director. Meaning I had a direct line to clients and account managers at all times as well as authority over the execution. I raised flags when the contract was drafted that it was vague and optimistic, but it got signed anyway. I did a prioritization and forecasting exercise to keep scope in check and set milestones for client obligations that would roadblock us. We could see in real time how far off we were and I reminded everyone at every turn. The account team who sold the project were not involved in execution. I back-channeled to our CTO that they messed this up and we have no hope of delivering on budget. We ended blowing the budget by a mile, the ones that sold the project said the team didn't execute and I got let go. As far as I can tell, I did everything right and still lost. My biggest regret is that instead of insinuating the account team were at fault, I should have yelled it at them.
- pojzon 4y ago
  Better approach is to leave. Talking to those kind of ppl is like playing chess with pigeon. Just dont, have dignity. We are some of the smartest ppl this earth is supporting.
  - tootie 4y ago
    Absolutely nobody involved in this was stupid. In fact, the ones who signed the doomed contract were very savvy, just very self-serving. Part of the reason I got screwed was because I had excellent relationships with almost all the other account managers and they also all knew that successful deliveries lead to more sales and were brilliant at what they did. It's hubris to think that tech brains are always the smartest.
    - Aunche 4y ago
      Clearly someone was being stupid if there was no accountability in what contracts they sign
fleddr 4y ago
Your take is exactly what is wrong with the culture. An existential problem is not a problem because you didn't sell it correctly. You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility. If a CEO were to be a fly on the wall in this room and overhear it all, they ought to fire every single manager in the room. Quite obviously they are willing to bury important facts. I'm well familiar with these "career limiting" types. I once was in a similar position, on an architectural board dropping a few truth bombs. One of the leaders of the many political kingdoms said to me in private: please know that I think that you're 100% right, but I can't commit to that in public or writing. These people gladly tank a company for as long as they keep their hands clean. Middle management games. If your company grows to the size as to have middle management, for god's sake split it up.
- balaji1 4y ago
  Any anecdotes of a company that was successfully split up as you suggest?
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    No, but companies internally re-org all the time. And one of the big motivating factors is to re-align incentives so that internal responsibilities are split into discrete, measurable areas. It seems like re-org success has mixed results - often due to Goodhart's law problems.
  - mindwok 4y ago
    Not specific, but I have some friends who are involved in highly successful private equity firms. I was talking to one of them about the work and he was saying that one of the primary strategies large firms use is buying existing large companies and firing all the middle management, because that’s the fastest way to create value after the acquisition.
    - balaji1 4y ago
      This seems to be in the vein of PE acquiring companies and cutting cost to extract value - just a sensible more strategy of firing middle management haha. But this reminded me of a podcast episode with some PE guys. The PE was able to enhance an acquisition by issuing ESOPs to all employees and educating the employees about the structure and value of the ESOPs - Inverse of firing folks.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
The lesson for engineers is that it is better to fail than try to lead. Should have just arrived at the handoff with a half finished project and a new job offer, leaving the business types with the mess.
- d23 4y ago
  I love that your cynical, worker-self-serving take is downvoted while the top comment is an equally cynical management-self-serving take.
cpeterso 4y ago
Bad news like this should probably be first communicated up to management privately, not sprung upon them in a meeting in front of their peers and reports.
mring33621 4y ago
There's a lot of apologizing in this thread for incompetent/lying management. Many of us 'less socially aware' (or perhaps 'neuro diverse') people would like this waste to disappear. If I suck at coding, you have no issue letting me go. If you suck at management, then I have no issue letting you go. Symmetry is beautiful.
- d23 4y ago
  I smell a lot of captains of industry with stockholm syndrome in those takes. They fetishize self-serving sociopathy -- which is frequently just compensation for deep incompetence.
- lazide 4y ago
  As long as you can find well paying alternatives, anyway.
xupybd 4y ago
The hid a known multimillion dollar over run from the customer. To me that goes beyond dishonest.
JJMcJ 4y ago
> Present solutions, not problems. Sometimes that's just victim blaming. In this story, the report presented the situation cogently, and the higher ups decided it would be best not to tell the client, within the context of semi-ripoff system development.
mjmsmith 4y ago
He saw that the project was doomed because of absent management, he presented the facts to management, and he quit after it was clear that the previously oblivious management was going to carry on in denial. It sounds like he read the room perfectly.
d23 4y ago
It's their fucking job to solve the problem, and it's professional malpractice to hear the news, acknowledge it's true, and then sweep it under the rug.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  No, it's the little people's responsibility to convince the big people. If they can't do it and the big people suffer as a result, it's still the little people's fault. Don't you know how power works?
nunez 4y ago
precisely correct. if consultants were asked to do this, the solution might have looked something like "there are nine months worth of opportunities to optimally architect the project; these are the top ten problems we identified and the top three preventing us from shipping; here are the tradeoffs; which would you like us to work on?" this could've been a resume generating event for a lot of people that said, burn out and feeling unheard definitely sucks. that probably played a part in how the OP landed here
bawolff 4y ago
> I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen... I think it depends what the rabble rousers actually wanted. Did they really want to fix the problems, or did they want to give management one last opportunity to address the issues before deciding to move on to other opportunities? The person telling the story seems to end it on what they precieve as a happy note. They quit and they felt good about quiting. Perhaps the outcome was a good outcome for them.
bumby 4y ago
>You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions...it doesn't matter if you're right, it matters how you communicate and strategize. I agree, I think the author misread what their role was. It wasn't to "tell it to them straight" as much as it was to solve a problem. Acknowledging the issue is only the first step. I once worked as an energy manager for a large financial institution. They had invested a lot of money into a complicated software system that promised to optimize all of their HVAC costs related to their data centers. The problem was the system didn't work well. At all. It used a complicated computational fluid dynamics model that took forever to build and any hiccup in the data would cause the system to start again from scratch. The engineers hated it so much they would just unplug it on the sly. It wasn't delivering on its promise to meet the sustainability goals as everyone thought it would. I didn't feel comfortable wasting the company's money on this system, but they thought it was great. There were plenty of vice presidents and managers up the line who vouched for it and it would make them look bad to say the system didn't work. We had to figure out a way to break it to them while allowing them to save face. So we went to work on their building automation system, reprogramming everything to be as efficient as possible. Part of the plan was to create an "experiment" where we had to remove the computational fluid dynamics model for a time. You know, so we gauge the true impact of our reprogramming efforts ;-) The effort worked wonders, exceeding their energy and sustainability goals set by the shareholders. We reframed it as "this worked so well that we think we can continue to meet sustainability targets without the computational fluid dynamics software contract." They were thrilled. Not only did they meet the goals, they saved money by getting out of the contract. It turned a bitter pill into a sweet one. Yes, I felt a duty to get them out of the contract that wasn't working. But getting them to accept that is a lot easier if you offer up a solution instead of just underscoring the problem.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  The project went over 2 years and got cancelled. While the author moved on and had more success. Who exactly had the problem?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
wilg 4y ago
The current PM team being incompetent seems to be a very common occurrence.
invig 4y ago
I think you've missed the point. These people are pretty close to thieves. There isn't an amount of communication strategy that would have changed the unspoken willingness to take the client's money knowing they were lying to get it.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Totally agree, they went in presenting a problem and not a solution, to the wrong bunch of people. Nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true, and even more so if it affects the company's bottom line. There's two ways I see they might have worked around the issue. The fundamental problem with the project might not be workable, but firstly reaching out for a private chat with some of the participants would have shown the likely reaction in advance. Secondly, re-framing it as a solution space, might get more people to buy in.
samhuk 4y ago
As most comments seem to say, I think that what you say describes a very bad culture. Although said with many more words, your proposed culture is of secrecy and opacity, where decisions and actions are performed in private in a conniving fashion to avoid "backlash". Any company that doesn't appreciate honesty/transparency/openness is certainly not one I would ever be a part of. Most importantly, and it's worth mentioning again because other comments pointed this out, the culture you seem to be a proponent of was critically instrumental in major disasters like the Challenger disaster. When we can't talk about those "inconvenient truths", they get buried until they are forgotten and we are forced to learn about them again, sometimes in the most cruelest of ways.
firefoxkekw 4y ago
> People talk shit about office politics, but sometimes you need to read the room... In my limited experience, most people have a kinda low self awareness, especially in the lower end of the food chain, the higher I go in the chain, the less naive people I meet. Why was he even worrying about a badly planned project? If your job is to code, just do that unless you are getting pay to be worried about the planning, which would be even a higher salary and at most have a very low key conversation about the problems with the superior of your manager, so when he gets fire for performing badly you can have more odds of getting his job.
prepend 4y ago
I call these kinds of solutions “baby solutions” because they are impractical and assume the problem is that no one knows the “truth.” So they suggest impossible things to solve the problem. Proposing an additional 2,400 person months and increasing the schedule 50% is not a viable solution. The PM probably said the kindest thing they could instead of “no shit Sherlock.” A more useful solution would be to identify what could be cut to release something viable. Or to figure out why so much unplanned work was taking place and an idea on why to solve it. It’s like recommending that step one is to built a time machine.
- deleted 4y ago
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yarg 4y ago
And in this case the room's interest was in denying reality. You cannot solve a problem that you haven't acknowledged.
nitwit005 4y ago
> You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. In other words, do management's job for them. Only, do it vastly better than them, despite having no experience. > And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And also take responsibility for the issues management created for other departments? Why do we have managers then? It's not to manage well, and it's not to take responsibility.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
They moved on, the company got hurt. It's not an individual employees responsibility to get the company to make good decisions.

by duped 4y ago

pyrale 4y ago

> And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the current PM team is incompetent. As it turns out, they were wrong. The project management was actually fraudulent.

hinkley 4y ago
Always live below your means. Then you can walk out on people when they tell you who they really are. At least then you have a small chance that they will take the feedback for what it is, instead of learning to lie better. If you quit mysteriously six months later there's no feedback loop, even if you tell them what it is (same human psychology theory behind CI - only immediate feedback is properly internalized)

Seattle3503 4y ago

Yeah, it seems like scope needed to be reduced in order to deliver an MVP on time.

pyrolistical 4y ago
I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run? Do we have too much of a revolving door for an organization to see this trend?
- rayiner 4y ago
  Yes. If you need more time ask for it and explain why it’s necessary and why the delay couldn’t have been anticipated. It’s better to be late than be late and also delivery a shoddy product.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Sounds a lot like the discussion I had with my 12 year-old about his Science term paper :-)
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Being transparent and communicating roadblocks early is just a good way to get through life. Nobody likes to hear something will take longer than expected, but what people really hate is non-communication that leads to unexpected delay, or even worse, poor work that's delivered late.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Pretty much. I have never seen a product manager/project manager see a multi year project through to the end. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to it not being the problem of anyone until the end of the project. Sales can promise whatever they want. Tech can put it off for a while.
- origin_path 4y ago
  "Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue. The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it. Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.

Apes 4y ago

An organization entrenched with managers like this is not salvageable. There's no "right" way to fix organizational rot this extensive from the bottom up. The organization has evolved into a parasite that exists only to suck assets out of other companies, and the management exist only to suck assets out of the company they purport to manage. Don't waste your time playing political games and undermining incompetent management trying to "fix" massive organizational rot from the bottom up. Your reward is going to be negligible at best relative to your effort, and it's more likely you'll be punished instead. Go start your own company, or work for a small company where you can make a massive and positive difference - and get massively rewarded for it.

d23 4y ago
You've got it all wrong! These people are noble for being bloodsuckers that scam customers and rot the company from the inside!

VincentEvans 4y ago

The skill of reading a room in this particular case - is to realize the kind of place this is and go elsewhere before going through all that effort for it be disregarded by bruised egos, not do even more unnecessary work to bail out incompetent managers.

invig 4y ago
I'd go a step further and say don't work for people who are clearly liars.
- thaneross 4y ago
  I have known very few managers who didn't routinely lie. The advantages of subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation are too tempting when trying to get something from someone.

ddoolin 4y ago

Doesn't sound like that was the job of this little committee. As written, it was to review and particularly identify extra work. Presenting solutions to this kind of problem isn't explicitly and often implicitly the function of the developer(s), especially in a room full of managers. Whose job it is literally to identify solutions to this exact kind of problem.

kazinator 4y ago
The managers might not understand the exact nature of the work. They want to know how they can reduce the scope: for which they need information about which work is urgent, or necessary at all. The mission is "please identify and estimate all untracked work so we can blindly put all of it into the plan, no matter how it delays the project".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 4y ago
Specifically, developers are in charge of tactical solutions, while management should be paying attention to strategy. Micromanagement is one of the many failure modes we talk about here, there, and everywhere. But having to do all of the strategy work because your bosses either can't be arsed to do so or can't find their way out of a wet paper bag, is another failure mode we talk about a lot. Leadership should be leading, not being lead by the nose. But when they won't you do what you can. It's not right, but it's expedient and somewhat sanity saving. Though if you take it too far you find all new kinds of insanity.

tenacious_tuna 4y ago

> you don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem Honestly that's exactly what I'd expect out of a meeting like that, and with good leadership it'd be a collaborative exercise on how to solve the problem. There's not going to be a solution that has zero impact on anyone else, and that individual team doesn't have the authority to make the call on what impact the business can sustain. They came, presented their problem, and their ideal recommendation (a 12 month delay). There's plenty of options on how to deal with that: ask sales how much of a delay is actually tolerable, see if low-priority asks could be dropped to free up some additional time, etc etc. It's leadership's job to mediate problems between "peer" groups, like engineering and sales. My first role out of college was on a four person product team split across three projects on two OSes. We were overloaded and couldn't maintain the desired velocity that Management was asking for. So we scheduled a meeting with the VP of product development and the CEO (the joys of a midsize company), sat down, and shared the amount of effort in our backlog, the goals we'd committed to as a company for these projects, and the cost that context-switching. The CEO considered us for about 20 seconds, then said "Okay, which project should we drop?". She had the trust in her teams and her management to take them at their word about their inability to achieve the goals, understand it's because the goals were beyond the reasonable capability of the team and not because the team was underperforming, and understand the landscape of the choices available: (1) continue underperforming on our existing goals and possibly upset customers due to not meeting stated expectations (2) walk back our commitments, possibly upsetting customers (3) cut the legacy product and focus on achieving and even exceeding our commitments for the modern product (4) do nothing and shred team morale More often than not "office politics" is really just shorthand for "low trust, low transparency environment". Yes, there's some amount of collaborative interpersonal skills necessary to be a good engineer, but if you don't trust me to do my job and tell you when our objectives are at risk then why did you hire me?

BWStearns 4y ago

> concoct a plan to stage the product development and release such that it gets done and you don't cost a giant contract Yes, always showing up with a solution to problems that you've surfaced is a good idea and good for your career, ... BUT: isn't coming up with a solution to this problem literally the job of the management team that they presented to? If management hears "the thing you think will happen will absolutely not happen" and then says "I wasn't handed an actionable plan by my subordinates so we'll just pretend I never heard all this", then they kind of suck. How well is an IC or lower level manager going to know what tradeoffs could be made without jeopardizing the contract or what kind of staging would be acceptable to the client? If your boss is ok with riding a project off a cliff when you've warned them then it's not your fault. That's when you either hang out, don't stress, and wait for it to explode, or you go find a new job.

recuter 4y ago
How do you reckon they (good ones) ended up in management? :)
sillysaurusx 4y ago
Suppose you were a junior engineer working with a senior engineer. They gave you a task, and you came to a similar conclusion: it was their job to do X, but they weren't doing it. Would you simply tell them they're not doing their job, or would you ask questions, talk in private, and try to dig in tactfully? When I was 22 or so, I did go around telling a certain senior engineer that they weren't doing their job. I still cringe at how headstrong I was back then. The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. You're right that the optimal strategy is not to stress about it, though. That would've saved me a lot of heartache. My point is (and the point of many other commenters here) is that you can't really show up to a meeting and say "This project is doomed." That's arguably one of the core advantages of startups over bigcos -- you can pivot. Your options are to climb the politics ladder, or ride it out and see what happens. It depends how much you care, or how much responsibility you want.
- 4y ago

deepsun 4y ago

I agree, however, the teams where people don't need to read the audience, and can just freely present problems whenever they want without fear of repercussions are the most productive, in my experience. The management team must be "thick skinned" enough, though, to be able to take the blame and work on the problem. Maybe talk in private to the person about the tact. Of course, I'm not going to try, just personal observation.

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
Meetings are performance, side-chats are politics. I think the decisions are based on the politics.

dimitar 4y ago

So what other possible solution there is? Cut scope? Hire 200 more people?

mcv 4y ago
Keep the client informed of the progress. Springing a surprise like this on the client on the originally planned delivery date, without any warnings well in advance, should count as proof of poor project management and make the software company liable for a significant chunk of the costs. The client shouldn't have to swallow that cost if they were kept in the dark.
VLM 4y ago
OP mentioned the moving goalposts, so cut scope. Hiring 200 more people would just make it 2 or 3 years late, not just 1 year late.

acheron 4y ago

And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for the same reason.

blitz_skull 4y ago
I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the responsibility but it just reinforces that if you want to just raise a stink—do it however you think best. If you want to communicate effectively, you must play by the laws of human ego. Plain and simple. People always underestimate the allure of human ego and pride.
- peteradio 4y ago
  What a horrible truth, hate to upvote but you may be right. But why is it engineers who must rise to the political occasion?
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    Everyone should rise to the political occasion. Why is that the engineers should not rise? Politics is how we solve problems without resorting to fists.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      Engineering is the engineers domain. If engineers are expected to puppet master the managers then what is the point of the manager?

jkingsbery 4y ago

I had a similar reaction. It's pretty rare that you want someone to be surprised by what you have to say in a big meeting like that. Ideally, the goal of a large meeting like that is to say, "I've collected the data, we've had different workstreams look at the data, and having spoken to all of you, we've all agreed on X." > People talk shit about office politics Right... there are good ways to go about politics, and not-good ways. I think many of us see the not-good ways.

tootie 4y ago

I've personally done this exact thing. If the project is underestimated, there isn't always a solution. I worked on a smaller project for an agency where I was the tech director. Meaning I had a direct line to clients and account managers at all times as well as authority over the execution. I raised flags when the contract was drafted that it was vague and optimistic, but it got signed anyway. I did a prioritization and forecasting exercise to keep scope in check and set milestones for client obligations that would roadblock us. We could see in real time how far off we were and I reminded everyone at every turn. The account team who sold the project were not involved in execution. I back-channeled to our CTO that they messed this up and we have no hope of delivering on budget. We ended blowing the budget by a mile, the ones that sold the project said the team didn't execute and I got let go. As far as I can tell, I did everything right and still lost. My biggest regret is that instead of insinuating the account team were at fault, I should have yelled it at them.

pojzon 4y ago
Better approach is to leave. Talking to those kind of ppl is like playing chess with pigeon. Just dont, have dignity. We are some of the smartest ppl this earth is supporting.
- tootie 4y ago
  Absolutely nobody involved in this was stupid. In fact, the ones who signed the doomed contract were very savvy, just very self-serving. Part of the reason I got screwed was because I had excellent relationships with almost all the other account managers and they also all knew that successful deliveries lead to more sales and were brilliant at what they did. It's hubris to think that tech brains are always the smartest.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    Clearly someone was being stupid if there was no accountability in what contracts they sign

fleddr 4y ago

Your take is exactly what is wrong with the culture. An existential problem is not a problem because you didn't sell it correctly. You first need to "massage" the individuals to create some kind of coalition. A coalition willing to accept basic facts or responsibility. If a CEO were to be a fly on the wall in this room and overhear it all, they ought to fire every single manager in the room. Quite obviously they are willing to bury important facts. I'm well familiar with these "career limiting" types. I once was in a similar position, on an architectural board dropping a few truth bombs. One of the leaders of the many political kingdoms said to me in private: please know that I think that you're 100% right, but I can't commit to that in public or writing. These people gladly tank a company for as long as they keep their hands clean. Middle management games. If your company grows to the size as to have middle management, for god's sake split it up.

balaji1 4y ago
Any anecdotes of a company that was successfully split up as you suggest?
- jacobr1 4y ago
  No, but companies internally re-org all the time. And one of the big motivating factors is to re-align incentives so that internal responsibilities are split into discrete, measurable areas. It seems like re-org success has mixed results - often due to Goodhart's law problems.
- mindwok 4y ago
  Not specific, but I have some friends who are involved in highly successful private equity firms. I was talking to one of them about the work and he was saying that one of the primary strategies large firms use is buying existing large companies and firing all the middle management, because that’s the fastest way to create value after the acquisition.
  - balaji1 4y ago
    This seems to be in the vein of PE acquiring companies and cutting cost to extract value - just a sensible more strategy of firing middle management haha. But this reminded me of a podcast episode with some PE guys. The PE was able to enhance an acquisition by issuing ESOPs to all employees and educating the employees about the structure and value of the ESOPs - Inverse of firing folks.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

The lesson for engineers is that it is better to fail than try to lead. Should have just arrived at the handoff with a half finished project and a new job offer, leaving the business types with the mess.

d23 4y ago
I love that your cynical, worker-self-serving take is downvoted while the top comment is an equally cynical management-self-serving take.

cpeterso 4y ago

Bad news like this should probably be first communicated up to management privately, not sprung upon them in a meeting in front of their peers and reports.

mring33621 4y ago

There's a lot of apologizing in this thread for incompetent/lying management. Many of us 'less socially aware' (or perhaps 'neuro diverse') people would like this waste to disappear. If I suck at coding, you have no issue letting me go. If you suck at management, then I have no issue letting you go. Symmetry is beautiful.

d23 4y ago
I smell a lot of captains of industry with stockholm syndrome in those takes. They fetishize self-serving sociopathy -- which is frequently just compensation for deep incompetence.
lazide 4y ago
As long as you can find well paying alternatives, anyway.

xupybd 4y ago

The hid a known multimillion dollar over run from the customer. To me that goes beyond dishonest.

JJMcJ 4y ago

> Present solutions, not problems. Sometimes that's just victim blaming. In this story, the report presented the situation cogently, and the higher ups decided it would be best not to tell the client, within the context of semi-ripoff system development.

mjmsmith 4y ago

He saw that the project was doomed because of absent management, he presented the facts to management, and he quit after it was clear that the previously oblivious management was going to carry on in denial. It sounds like he read the room perfectly.

d23 4y ago

It's their fucking job to solve the problem, and it's professional malpractice to hear the news, acknowledge it's true, and then sweep it under the rug.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
No, it's the little people's responsibility to convince the big people. If they can't do it and the big people suffer as a result, it's still the little people's fault. Don't you know how power works?

nunez 4y ago

precisely correct. if consultants were asked to do this, the solution might have looked something like "there are nine months worth of opportunities to optimally architect the project; these are the top ten problems we identified and the top three preventing us from shipping; here are the tradeoffs; which would you like us to work on?" this could've been a resume generating event for a lot of people that said, burn out and feeling unheard definitely sucks. that probably played a part in how the OP landed here

bawolff 4y ago

> I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen... I think it depends what the rabble rousers actually wanted. Did they really want to fix the problems, or did they want to give management one last opportunity to address the issues before deciding to move on to other opportunities? The person telling the story seems to end it on what they precieve as a happy note. They quit and they felt good about quiting. Perhaps the outcome was a good outcome for them.

bumby 4y ago

>You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions...it doesn't matter if you're right, it matters how you communicate and strategize. I agree, I think the author misread what their role was. It wasn't to "tell it to them straight" as much as it was to solve a problem. Acknowledging the issue is only the first step. I once worked as an energy manager for a large financial institution. They had invested a lot of money into a complicated software system that promised to optimize all of their HVAC costs related to their data centers. The problem was the system didn't work well. At all. It used a complicated computational fluid dynamics model that took forever to build and any hiccup in the data would cause the system to start again from scratch. The engineers hated it so much they would just unplug it on the sly. It wasn't delivering on its promise to meet the sustainability goals as everyone thought it would. I didn't feel comfortable wasting the company's money on this system, but they thought it was great. There were plenty of vice presidents and managers up the line who vouched for it and it would make them look bad to say the system didn't work. We had to figure out a way to break it to them while allowing them to save face. So we went to work on their building automation system, reprogramming everything to be as efficient as possible. Part of the plan was to create an "experiment" where we had to remove the computational fluid dynamics model for a time. You know, so we gauge the true impact of our reprogramming efforts ;-) The effort worked wonders, exceeding their energy and sustainability goals set by the shareholders. We reframed it as "this worked so well that we think we can continue to meet sustainability targets without the computational fluid dynamics software contract." They were thrilled. Not only did they meet the goals, they saved money by getting out of the contract. It turned a bitter pill into a sweet one. Yes, I felt a duty to get them out of the contract that wasn't working. But getting them to accept that is a lot easier if you offer up a solution instead of just underscoring the problem.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
The project went over 2 years and got cancelled. While the author moved on and had more success. Who exactly had the problem?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

wilg 4y ago

The current PM team being incompetent seems to be a very common occurrence.

invig 4y ago

I think you've missed the point. These people are pretty close to thieves. There isn't an amount of communication strategy that would have changed the unspoken willingness to take the client's money knowing they were lying to get it.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

Totally agree, they went in presenting a problem and not a solution, to the wrong bunch of people. Nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true, and even more so if it affects the company's bottom line. There's two ways I see they might have worked around the issue. The fundamental problem with the project might not be workable, but firstly reaching out for a private chat with some of the participants would have shown the likely reaction in advance. Secondly, re-framing it as a solution space, might get more people to buy in.

samhuk 4y ago

As most comments seem to say, I think that what you say describes a very bad culture. Although said with many more words, your proposed culture is of secrecy and opacity, where decisions and actions are performed in private in a conniving fashion to avoid "backlash". Any company that doesn't appreciate honesty/transparency/openness is certainly not one I would ever be a part of. Most importantly, and it's worth mentioning again because other comments pointed this out, the culture you seem to be a proponent of was critically instrumental in major disasters like the Challenger disaster. When we can't talk about those "inconvenient truths", they get buried until they are forgotten and we are forced to learn about them again, sometimes in the most cruelest of ways.

firefoxkekw 4y ago

> People talk shit about office politics, but sometimes you need to read the room... In my limited experience, most people have a kinda low self awareness, especially in the lower end of the food chain, the higher I go in the chain, the less naive people I meet. Why was he even worrying about a badly planned project? If your job is to code, just do that unless you are getting pay to be worried about the planning, which would be even a higher salary and at most have a very low key conversation about the problems with the superior of your manager, so when he gets fire for performing badly you can have more odds of getting his job.

prepend 4y ago

I call these kinds of solutions “baby solutions” because they are impractical and assume the problem is that no one knows the “truth.” So they suggest impossible things to solve the problem. Proposing an additional 2,400 person months and increasing the schedule 50% is not a viable solution. The PM probably said the kindest thing they could instead of “no shit Sherlock.” A more useful solution would be to identify what could be cut to release something viable. Or to figure out why so much unplanned work was taking place and an idea on why to solve it. It’s like recommending that step one is to built a time machine.

deleted 4y ago
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yarg 4y ago

And in this case the room's interest was in denying reality. You cannot solve a problem that you haven't acknowledged.

nitwit005 4y ago

> You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. In other words, do management's job for them. Only, do it vastly better than them, despite having no experience. > And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And also take responsibility for the issues management created for other departments? Why do we have managers then? It's not to manage well, and it's not to take responsibility.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

They moved on, the company got hurt. It's not an individual employees responsibility to get the company to make good decisions.