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Leadership. Unfortunately most companies with bloated middle management layers spread the responsibility so thin that the level of consensus required to take a

Leadership. Unfortunately most companies with bloated middle management layers spread the responsibility so thin that the level of consensus required to take action would stump the reincarnation of George Washington, Agustus, Ghandi and Genghis Khan combined (granted Genghis would probably just murder anyone who opposed him, which sadly would probably improve a lot of companies). Even in my program of just north of 100 people broken infrastructure follows that same pattern. Something moderately breaks, the devs complain, they are sympathetically told to make do. Rinse and repeat until the devs realize their complaints never get addressed and stop complaining past a quick email. Then something REALLY breaks with no workaround, devs mention it's been heading this way for a while, and management, all aghast, exclaims "well why didn't you say so earlier if this was such a problem?". It's to the point where we (the devs) have started keeping locally archived email records just for the "told you so". Which of course makes us no friends because we point the blame where it belongs, so we're officially covered but our complaints get listened to even less. And the infrastructure is fixed just enough to limp along until the next catastrophic explosion. You need someone who gives a shit with the power to crack the whip. In short, you need to give someone enough power that they can potentially abuse it, something modern business is allergic to.

throwawaysleep 4y ago
I think they should focus on fixing the "gives a shit" part of it. There is very little reason for an employee to care about preventing a failure they will not be directly held accountable for. I don't care if we lose clients. I don't care if we get hacked. My life is not impacted one way or another by whether the divisions I work in succeed or fail, unless they utterly fail. So if this Intune thing landed on my desk, I would do nothing about it. Give me some incentive to care and I would.
madaxe_again 4y ago
Your post describes the problem more succinctly than you might think. You are trying to do a good job which might lead to a promotion. You see the rules and operations of the organisation as something to work within. The people who ignore you are trying to get promoted. They see the rules and operations of the organisation as a irritating backdrop to their personal goals. The job could be anything. Ascent is all that matters. They will get promoted. You will retire one day, your nerves fried. The incentives are all wrong, and playing the social metagame rather than playing the game by the rules always results in an advantage, and thus this behaviour is inherently embedded in any human structure. The solution isn’t “better management” - it’s in fundamental societal change, which ain’t coming any time soon.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  But, but... leadership?
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  Better management seems like a much more tractable goal than "fundamental societal change" or "rework human nature".
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    It’s tractable, sure, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem of human nature and tribal dynamics. Put an impartial AI in charge and it will make the right decisions — and people will riot over the injustice. Ultimately, you’d have to go machine the whole way and the humans can all go bake bread and have wars over that or something.
acomjean 4y ago
I remember asking the facilities person responsible about an office move 3 times. I was ignored. I emailed a manager about moving my office. I was polite. I was ignored again. A coworker suggested emailing the department head. Within a minute the deptartment head forwarded my request to the manager who was ignoring me and told him to take care of it. It was promptly. I got the email chain when it was done, there was some comment from the manager who ignored me to the facilites person who ignored me, that it "should never have been allowed to escalate.." I don't miss big companies sometimes.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah I love that attitude Don't want the issue to escalate? Then maybe do the job you're paid to do
- spc476 4y ago
  The company I worked for got bought out, and new management took over (of course). I kept raising issues about how broken the new "Agile development system" was. My complaints hit a VP level, who was "looking into it." Until said VP was "let go" and replaced. New VP said, "How unfortunate" to my complaints. So much for escalation. I no longer work there (I left; I wasn't fired).
avgcorrection 4y ago
> Leadership. Cringe. Apparently most managers can’t even manage properly. Most of the time this “ship” word is tantamount to stolen valor in the workplace.
- tremon 4y ago
  Most managers aren't leaders. Yes, leadership is the solution here, and it's not cringeworthy. Manageship is. In dysfunctional organizations, the management structure exists to rein in true leaders. In a healthy organization, leaders are recognized and supported by management, whether they're in management positions themselves or not.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    I recoil precisely because this in practice is a mythical concept that managers and others in formal positions of bosshood self-aggrandize about.
chemmail 4y ago
So you are telling me, the some of the highest value companies, like APple and TEsla having two huge asshats at the top means something?
- throwaway892238 4y ago
  Success and dysfunction are often bedfellows. Look at some of the most successful companies, and internally, they are an outright shit-show. But - for many different reasons - they make a shit-ton of money and defeat all competitors. Like, with these 2,000 people locked out of devices? Assuming they're contractors? It probably won't affect the bottom line at all. A minor nuisance, monetarily. Easy to route around; just work people harder until the problem is solved, or take a minor write-off and play Tetris with the books to make it look like you actually made money rather than lost it. But if you want to have a company where people are happy to work, you absolutely must have non-asshole leadership.
- birksherty 4y ago
  Not always. Said by people who worked at tesla/spacex, many engineers and tech people have to dance around, present correct decisions such a way that the asshat at top realises it and does it. Lots of theatre. If they don't do that, the guy just does whatever he want, often leading horrible outcomes. It's only working because there are enough people who are passionate enough for the project and want it to succeed. Such people would leave if that was just a software company.
swearwolf 4y ago
You need someone who gives a shit with the power to spend money. That's pretty much it. Every single year, a company costs more to operate than it did the year before. Every piece of software you buy costs more over time. Same thing with hardware. Same thing with leases. Same thing with desks, chairs, trash cans, pencils, paper towels, and on and on. Yet I've watched many companies try to implement a "flat" budget, meaning no additional spend compared to the year before. Works fine if you've got room to cut, but do that over a long enough period of time (really not that long, two or three years max), and you'll end up with a situation where critical infrastructure is running on hardware that's so old it wouldn't survive a reboot or a gentle move from one rack to another. You can have great leaders up and down the chain, all of them saying, "Hey! This thing is probably going to break soon and it's going to ruin the whole year's sales forecast 'cause we won't be able to ship a damn thing!" but if that messages gets to the CFO, and they'd rather roll the dice on one more year of "lean" operation before they jump ship well...that's pretty much that. Also, no company I've ever worked for makes their budget after asking people what they need. Instead, the Finance team just copy-pastes last year's budget, usually with a little haircut off the top for "efficiency." So let's say you run a team that depends on a handful of servers. You bought the current ones five years ago, and it cost $500k. Now it's time to replace them. But since you didn't buy $500k in servers last year, it's not in the budget for this year, so now your entirely reasonable request is being scrutinized as "unplanned spend". Several times I've seen teams try to build a plan for the upcoming year, only to find that there's nobody to give it to, because the "budgeting process" is done in about a week's time, usually two or three weeks after the fiscal year starts and with commensurate effort.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

I think they should focus on fixing the "gives a shit" part of it. There is very little reason for an employee to care about preventing a failure they will not be directly held accountable for. I don't care if we lose clients. I don't care if we get hacked. My life is not impacted one way or another by whether the divisions I work in succeed or fail, unless they utterly fail. So if this Intune thing landed on my desk, I would do nothing about it. Give me some incentive to care and I would.

madaxe_again 4y ago

Your post describes the problem more succinctly than you might think. You are trying to do a good job which might lead to a promotion. You see the rules and operations of the organisation as something to work within. The people who ignore you are trying to get promoted. They see the rules and operations of the organisation as a irritating backdrop to their personal goals. The job could be anything. Ascent is all that matters. They will get promoted. You will retire one day, your nerves fried. The incentives are all wrong, and playing the social metagame rather than playing the game by the rules always results in an advantage, and thus this behaviour is inherently embedded in any human structure. The solution isn’t “better management” - it’s in fundamental societal change, which ain’t coming any time soon.

avgcorrection 4y ago
But, but... leadership?
JamesBarney 4y ago
Better management seems like a much more tractable goal than "fundamental societal change" or "rework human nature".
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  It’s tractable, sure, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem of human nature and tribal dynamics. Put an impartial AI in charge and it will make the right decisions — and people will riot over the injustice. Ultimately, you’d have to go machine the whole way and the humans can all go bake bread and have wars over that or something.

acomjean 4y ago

I remember asking the facilities person responsible about an office move 3 times. I was ignored. I emailed a manager about moving my office. I was polite. I was ignored again. A coworker suggested emailing the department head. Within a minute the deptartment head forwarded my request to the manager who was ignoring me and told him to take care of it. It was promptly. I got the email chain when it was done, there was some comment from the manager who ignored me to the facilites person who ignored me, that it "should never have been allowed to escalate.." I don't miss big companies sometimes.

raverbashing 4y ago
Yeah I love that attitude Don't want the issue to escalate? Then maybe do the job you're paid to do
spc476 4y ago
The company I worked for got bought out, and new management took over (of course). I kept raising issues about how broken the new "Agile development system" was. My complaints hit a VP level, who was "looking into it." Until said VP was "let go" and replaced. New VP said, "How unfortunate" to my complaints. So much for escalation. I no longer work there (I left; I wasn't fired).

avgcorrection 4y ago

> Leadership. Cringe. Apparently most managers can’t even manage properly. Most of the time this “ship” word is tantamount to stolen valor in the workplace.

tremon 4y ago
Most managers aren't leaders. Yes, leadership is the solution here, and it's not cringeworthy. Manageship is. In dysfunctional organizations, the management structure exists to rein in true leaders. In a healthy organization, leaders are recognized and supported by management, whether they're in management positions themselves or not.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  I recoil precisely because this in practice is a mythical concept that managers and others in formal positions of bosshood self-aggrandize about.

chemmail 4y ago

So you are telling me, the some of the highest value companies, like APple and TEsla having two huge asshats at the top means something?

throwaway892238 4y ago
Success and dysfunction are often bedfellows. Look at some of the most successful companies, and internally, they are an outright shit-show. But - for many different reasons - they make a shit-ton of money and defeat all competitors. Like, with these 2,000 people locked out of devices? Assuming they're contractors? It probably won't affect the bottom line at all. A minor nuisance, monetarily. Easy to route around; just work people harder until the problem is solved, or take a minor write-off and play Tetris with the books to make it look like you actually made money rather than lost it. But if you want to have a company where people are happy to work, you absolutely must have non-asshole leadership.
birksherty 4y ago
Not always. Said by people who worked at tesla/spacex, many engineers and tech people have to dance around, present correct decisions such a way that the asshat at top realises it and does it. Lots of theatre. If they don't do that, the guy just does whatever he want, often leading horrible outcomes. It's only working because there are enough people who are passionate enough for the project and want it to succeed. Such people would leave if that was just a software company.

swearwolf 4y ago

You need someone who gives a shit with the power to spend money. That's pretty much it. Every single year, a company costs more to operate than it did the year before. Every piece of software you buy costs more over time. Same thing with hardware. Same thing with leases. Same thing with desks, chairs, trash cans, pencils, paper towels, and on and on. Yet I've watched many companies try to implement a "flat" budget, meaning no additional spend compared to the year before. Works fine if you've got room to cut, but do that over a long enough period of time (really not that long, two or three years max), and you'll end up with a situation where critical infrastructure is running on hardware that's so old it wouldn't survive a reboot or a gentle move from one rack to another. You can have great leaders up and down the chain, all of them saying, "Hey! This thing is probably going to break soon and it's going to ruin the whole year's sales forecast 'cause we won't be able to ship a damn thing!" but if that messages gets to the CFO, and they'd rather roll the dice on one more year of "lean" operation before they jump ship well...that's pretty much that. Also, no company I've ever worked for makes their budget after asking people what they need. Instead, the Finance team just copy-pastes last year's budget, usually with a little haircut off the top for "efficiency." So let's say you run a team that depends on a handful of servers. You bought the current ones five years ago, and it cost $500k. Now it's time to replace them. But since you didn't buy $500k in servers last year, it's not in the budget for this year, so now your entirely reasonable request is being scrutinized as "unplanned spend". Several times I've seen teams try to build a plan for the upcoming year, only to find that there's nobody to give it to, because the "budgeting process" is done in about a week's time, usually two or three weeks after the fiscal year starts and with commensurate effort.