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I 100% agree. I've seen this happen to many managers at FAANG. You're promised 10 people for a project next year, you get 4. So you cut, manage, optimize, engi

I 100% agree. I've seen this happen to many managers at FAANG. You're promised 10 people for a project next year, you get 4. So you cut, manage, optimize, engineer, and hustle to get something done and working. Management above you sees this as relative success, and validates that they were right not to give you more people. Disillusionment sets in, the team quits or transfers, you get bad reviews. The next year, you're fired or transferred, and the new guy comes in, he gets 10 people, saves the day and gets high praise. He gets good reviews and maybe a promotion. You look back with resentment. The problem wouldn't have been there if they had given you the resources you said you need. If you had 10 people, you also could have saved the day. This is the sickness of large organizations and non-technical management. I have rarely seen organizations not run by owners spend the $1 on prevention today, they almost always elect for the $10 for a fix later. If you need 10 people to do a job, and you get 4, the job should fail. Your systems should be going down. Don't sabotage, but upper management needs to see, not hear about, failure. Update deliverable timelines form 6 months to 18 months or just cancel new projects all together, change your SLA's from 99.9% to 90%. Change your ticket response times from 30 minutes to 12 hours or best effort business hours. You'll either get the resources, get attention for reprioritization, or learn that your job isn't a real priority.

abigailserdana 4y ago
Something similar happened in my previous organisation with less than 5 people on the engineering side where I was asked to do a major refactor of the codebase that touched 70% of the files while also adding new features(with changing requirements) at the same time. Though I was working day and night, it took me thrice the time to do it than we initially expected. I was put on PIP after delivering the work(prod deployed) so I left. Then they got 3 engineers from top 1 percentile of industry to work on the same codebase. All this time I was shouting that I need someone to help me in the team but got no one :) . Question mark was put on my performance rather than the management of the team/resources.
bookish 4y ago
The right choice between the "get something done and working" and "your systems should be going down" paths might depend on the situation. Sometimes the right call for the company is to actually have "relative success" despite the downsides if it's better than the downsides of the early failure. Implicitly, this article implies some communication failures in an organization, where visible failures are used as as attention-getting substitute for what should be healthy communication and prioritization channels.
Upgrayyed_U 4y ago
I agree with your overall sentiment, though this definitely isn't limited to large businesses. Plenty of small businesses are plagued with hero culture as well. What's really needed are leaders who recognize hero culture for what it is and are willing to move away from it. That's hard to do, in large part because managers benefit from it in the short-term and many will move on before the long-term costs become apparent. Given your previous example: Every manager wants to be the "winner" who gets the job done with 10 people, but what's unfortunate is that many of them will move up to the next level and claim that they would have success even with just 4 "good" people (re: heroes). So their replacement will get 4 people and the cycle will continue.

abigailserdana 4y ago

Something similar happened in my previous organisation with less than 5 people on the engineering side where I was asked to do a major refactor of the codebase that touched 70% of the files while also adding new features(with changing requirements) at the same time. Though I was working day and night, it took me thrice the time to do it than we initially expected. I was put on PIP after delivering the work(prod deployed) so I left. Then they got 3 engineers from top 1 percentile of industry to work on the same codebase. All this time I was shouting that I need someone to help me in the team but got no one :) . Question mark was put on my performance rather than the management of the team/resources.

bookish 4y ago

The right choice between the "get something done and working" and "your systems should be going down" paths might depend on the situation. Sometimes the right call for the company is to actually have "relative success" despite the downsides if it's better than the downsides of the early failure. Implicitly, this article implies some communication failures in an organization, where visible failures are used as as attention-getting substitute for what should be healthy communication and prioritization channels.

Upgrayyed_U 4y ago

I agree with your overall sentiment, though this definitely isn't limited to large businesses. Plenty of small businesses are plagued with hero culture as well. What's really needed are leaders who recognize hero culture for what it is and are willing to move away from it. That's hard to do, in large part because managers benefit from it in the short-term and many will move on before the long-term costs become apparent. Given your previous example: Every manager wants to be the "winner" who gets the job done with 10 people, but what's unfortunate is that many of them will move up to the next level and claim that they would have success even with just 4 "good" people (re: heroes). So their replacement will get 4 people and the cycle will continue.