12 ms·

“Productive” probably means something different to you than it does to the people writing the checks…

RC_ITR 4y ago
This is a common thread in the current outside-in analysis of Twitter. Management exists to guide the priorities of those below them, so when management is gone, people feel liberated. But the point of managers was to keep them on the tasks deemed most important to the long-term wellbeing of the company, even if those tasks seem boring and unimportant.
- bluGill 4y ago
  When it works it is great, but too often management is responsible for deferring maintenance which save money now but is long term a cost
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Sure, totally agree that not all management is good management, but it does exist for a reason (and often that reason will always be unappreciated by those being managed).
    - civilized 4y ago
      The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best. In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years. My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
      - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
        > In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. 6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work. And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?
        civilized 4y ago
        > 6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work If he had wasted 6 weeks less than would have otherwise been wasted, I would have given him credit for saving 6 weeks rather than blame for wasting 6 weeks, which is what actually happened. According to everyone involved, including reportedly the manager himself, though he wouldn't say it to my face. > And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place? I'm a data scientist who helps people across the company with analytics. They make measurably better business decisions than they would have without me. Relationships, continuous service on existing products, and word of mouth generate more work. Basically I run my own analytics consultancy inside the company.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        What manager or director decided to fund & hire a data scientist with a charter to function as an internal consultant? Or did you hire yourself or co-found the company? A lot of managers are paper pushers instead of leaders. Their usefulness varies depending on circumstances.
        juhanima 4y ago
        Maybe no manager or director at all? Sometimes things happen in an organization in a self-organizing manner. Like people finding out who is able to help them with their problems and the word getting around. It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.
        4y ago
    - mumblemumble 4y ago
      I think that some of the lessons from the book Essence of Decision might be relevant. A challenge I've seen in management-heavy organizations is that the many layers of management largely function to make good management impossible. The many layers of command between ICs and the source of many decisions means that the people responsible for relaying information up the chain of command are incentivized to put their own spin on information as they relay it, in part in order to help secure their own positions within the hierarchy. The other side of that coin is that the many layers of communication between senior decisionmakers and what's actually happening on the ground mean that the information they get is often of insufficient fidelity to support accurate decisionmaking.
    - naasking 4y ago
      I suspect it exists because the person above them just wants one person to yell at and doesn't want to learn the names of everyone below them. The manager isn't a genius and the employees aren't morons. The business objectives could be explained to those employees and they could coordinate with each other to fulfill them without necessitating a conductor. Deep hierarchies are archaic holdovers from military organizational thinking.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  I see the opposite. Most often management guides priorities towards things that sound new and exciting, and will look good on their performance review and resumes. They tend to neglect the boring but necessary tasks that are good for the long term health of the company.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Management guides priorities toward the needs of the business, i.e. money, usually. You can sell and market new shiny things. If you can’t quantify the boring necessary tasks with dollars and deliverables then don’t be surprised when you get “oh yeah whatever.” I’ve had to fight so damn hard with my own teammates who rail on and on about tech debt but won’t do an ounce of lift to turn the kvetching into an actual business proposal. For some reason devs have such a hard time conceptualizing that they are also one of the stakeholders to the business. Here’s one that I made happen. “Setting up new 3rd party integrations takes $x hours of work (here’s the cards) costing roughly this much in engineer time. Based on our sales trajectory we expect to do this many next year costing this much. The team believes that if we develop a framework for these integrations we can cut the time spent for each one to this. Our metric for success will be measured by having a dev who didn’t work on the framework convert an existing integration in the test environment.” I’ve never gotten a green light so fast from our product management.
    - pm90 4y ago
      This is great. I think there should be more resources that explain this dynamic and especially how to have productive conversations around tech debt with management.
    - naasking 4y ago
      The benefits of addressing some tech debt can be hard to quantify. An architectural change could enable you to add new integrations or otherwise build new features faster, but you can't always predict the magnitude I'm advance. I agree that some devs can exaggerate the importance of this though. I still think you need to sometimes look at software as requiring some base level of regular maintenance funding, like a fleet of vehicles gets regular cyclic maintenance in any transport company.
- refurb 4y ago
  Yup, when I was early in my career I wondered why management had so many meetings. Then when I got more senior and closer to the decision making, I realize just how hard it is to keep large organizations on track. I've worked at companies that do it poorly and it's a mess - everyone is busy, but the company is just spinning it's wheels. Everyone with an oar is paddling in a different direction. I've worked under leaders who are really good at providing direction. It's a very valuable skill when done right.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I'm starting to realize this and it's a really interesting realization. My first taste of this was leading a small project of myself and 2 other devs, and wondering how the hell you're supposed to get other people to do what you want. Doing a good job of leading a large number of people seems extremely difficult, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that yet. Your explanation of companies doing this poorly sounds exactly like the example I gave in a comment I just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295803.
    - refurb 4y ago
      I worked in a 1,000 person org doing a product launch and leadership did a great job aligning everyone. Launch goals? There were 3 short ones and not fluff like “drive sales”. Everyone on the team knew what the goals are and why. What should you be working on? Just look at the 3 launch goals. And leadership constantly reinforced them and empowered people to stop doing things that didn’t work towards them. And I’ve worked in smaller teams where everyone had their own idea of what needed to be done. Leadership would keep changing goals (or they were so vague that anything fit them) or making exceptions. None of the pieces fit together and it was a total disaster. People got frustrated when they did great work but other critical parts weren’t done because something shiny or “cool” distracted other teams. Effective leadership makes a huge difference.
sinenomine 4y ago
For people writing the checks "productive" also means "staying on good terms with the PMC". If you are outed from these circles, your career takes a nosedive. Startups were a breath of fresh air, but as we continue falling towards the monopolization regime, the nepotism will permeate anything of value. Beyond these networks only soul-crushing work will remain, basically production of datasets for our replacements.
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  Could you define PMC in this context?
  - TinyBig 4y ago
    The professional–managerial class
    - brazzledazzle 4y ago
      Essentially middle management and maybe project management. Project management's inclusion depending on how much power it has over decision making in an organization.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Productivity at an org level is not intuitive. For example, the whole org working at 25% capacity on the same thing sounds terrible, but it could produce better results than everyone working at 90% capacity on different things. For ICs, the first scenario feels bad and wrong.
- btschaegg 4y ago
  A reason for that might be lead time, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula Since c_a, c_s and tau are out of your control, focus on the left part (rho / (1-rho)): 25% vs 90% utilization: .25/.75 vs .9/.1 = 27x increase in lead time.

This is a common thread in the current outside-in analysis of Twitter. Management exists to guide the priorities of those below them, so when management is gone, people feel liberated. But the point of managers was to keep them on the tasks deemed most important to the long-term wellbeing of the company, even if those tasks seem boring and unimportant.

bluGill 4y ago
When it works it is great, but too often management is responsible for deferring maintenance which save money now but is long term a cost
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Sure, totally agree that not all management is good management, but it does exist for a reason (and often that reason will always be unappreciated by those being managed).
  - civilized 4y ago
    The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best. In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years. My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
    - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
      > In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. 6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work. And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?
      - civilized 4y ago
        > 6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work If he had wasted 6 weeks less than would have otherwise been wasted, I would have given him credit for saving 6 weeks rather than blame for wasting 6 weeks, which is what actually happened. According to everyone involved, including reportedly the manager himself, though he wouldn't say it to my face. > And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place? I'm a data scientist who helps people across the company with analytics. They make measurably better business decisions than they would have without me. Relationships, continuous service on existing products, and word of mouth generate more work. Basically I run my own analytics consultancy inside the company.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        What manager or director decided to fund & hire a data scientist with a charter to function as an internal consultant? Or did you hire yourself or co-found the company? A lot of managers are paper pushers instead of leaders. Their usefulness varies depending on circumstances.
        juhanima 4y ago
        Maybe no manager or director at all? Sometimes things happen in an organization in a self-organizing manner. Like people finding out who is able to help them with their problems and the word getting around. It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.
        4y ago
  - mumblemumble 4y ago
    I think that some of the lessons from the book Essence of Decision might be relevant. A challenge I've seen in management-heavy organizations is that the many layers of management largely function to make good management impossible. The many layers of command between ICs and the source of many decisions means that the people responsible for relaying information up the chain of command are incentivized to put their own spin on information as they relay it, in part in order to help secure their own positions within the hierarchy. The other side of that coin is that the many layers of communication between senior decisionmakers and what's actually happening on the ground mean that the information they get is often of insufficient fidelity to support accurate decisionmaking.
  - naasking 4y ago
    I suspect it exists because the person above them just wants one person to yell at and doesn't want to learn the names of everyone below them. The manager isn't a genius and the employees aren't morons. The business objectives could be explained to those employees and they could coordinate with each other to fulfill them without necessitating a conductor. Deep hierarchies are archaic holdovers from military organizational thinking.
fallingknife 4y ago
I see the opposite. Most often management guides priorities towards things that sound new and exciting, and will look good on their performance review and resumes. They tend to neglect the boring but necessary tasks that are good for the long term health of the company.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Management guides priorities toward the needs of the business, i.e. money, usually. You can sell and market new shiny things. If you can’t quantify the boring necessary tasks with dollars and deliverables then don’t be surprised when you get “oh yeah whatever.” I’ve had to fight so damn hard with my own teammates who rail on and on about tech debt but won’t do an ounce of lift to turn the kvetching into an actual business proposal. For some reason devs have such a hard time conceptualizing that they are also one of the stakeholders to the business. Here’s one that I made happen. “Setting up new 3rd party integrations takes $x hours of work (here’s the cards) costing roughly this much in engineer time. Based on our sales trajectory we expect to do this many next year costing this much. The team believes that if we develop a framework for these integrations we can cut the time spent for each one to this. Our metric for success will be measured by having a dev who didn’t work on the framework convert an existing integration in the test environment.” I’ve never gotten a green light so fast from our product management.
  - pm90 4y ago
    This is great. I think there should be more resources that explain this dynamic and especially how to have productive conversations around tech debt with management.
  - naasking 4y ago
    The benefits of addressing some tech debt can be hard to quantify. An architectural change could enable you to add new integrations or otherwise build new features faster, but you can't always predict the magnitude I'm advance. I agree that some devs can exaggerate the importance of this though. I still think you need to sometimes look at software as requiring some base level of regular maintenance funding, like a fleet of vehicles gets regular cyclic maintenance in any transport company.
refurb 4y ago
Yup, when I was early in my career I wondered why management had so many meetings. Then when I got more senior and closer to the decision making, I realize just how hard it is to keep large organizations on track. I've worked at companies that do it poorly and it's a mess - everyone is busy, but the company is just spinning it's wheels. Everyone with an oar is paddling in a different direction. I've worked under leaders who are really good at providing direction. It's a very valuable skill when done right.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I'm starting to realize this and it's a really interesting realization. My first taste of this was leading a small project of myself and 2 other devs, and wondering how the hell you're supposed to get other people to do what you want. Doing a good job of leading a large number of people seems extremely difficult, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that yet. Your explanation of companies doing this poorly sounds exactly like the example I gave in a comment I just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295803.
  - refurb 4y ago
    I worked in a 1,000 person org doing a product launch and leadership did a great job aligning everyone. Launch goals? There were 3 short ones and not fluff like “drive sales”. Everyone on the team knew what the goals are and why. What should you be working on? Just look at the 3 launch goals. And leadership constantly reinforced them and empowered people to stop doing things that didn’t work towards them. And I’ve worked in smaller teams where everyone had their own idea of what needed to be done. Leadership would keep changing goals (or they were so vague that anything fit them) or making exceptions. None of the pieces fit together and it was a total disaster. People got frustrated when they did great work but other critical parts weren’t done because something shiny or “cool” distracted other teams. Effective leadership makes a huge difference.

sinenomine 4y ago

For people writing the checks "productive" also means "staying on good terms with the PMC". If you are outed from these circles, your career takes a nosedive. Startups were a breath of fresh air, but as we continue falling towards the monopolization regime, the nepotism will permeate anything of value. Beyond these networks only soul-crushing work will remain, basically production of datasets for our replacements.

andrei_says_ 4y ago
Could you define PMC in this context?
- TinyBig 4y ago
  The professional–managerial class
  - brazzledazzle 4y ago
    Essentially middle management and maybe project management. Project management's inclusion depending on how much power it has over decision making in an organization.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Productivity at an org level is not intuitive. For example, the whole org working at 25% capacity on the same thing sounds terrible, but it could produce better results than everyone working at 90% capacity on different things. For ICs, the first scenario feels bad and wrong.

btschaegg 4y ago
A reason for that might be lead time, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula Since c_a, c_s and tau are out of your control, focus on the left part (rho / (1-rho)): 25% vs 90% utilization: .25/.75 vs .9/.1 = 27x increase in lead time.