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Get It Done
- sgt101 3y ago>"is for people to more directly leverage their leaders." I just couldn't parse this until I read the rest of the article. I think that the author is saying "Ask for help from your boss when you are stuck." This is good advice, if you are personally empowered. If you can afford for your boss to go batshit crazy and crap on everything and everyone including you - then just go for it. If you can't afford for that to happen then you need to exercise this advice with caution. When you are in a really bad spot then the first thing you need to do is work up an escape plan - then you can go to your boss. As an example, if you are debt free and have a good credit history go and get a credit card and get a high limit. Then if you are fired you will have some funds to work with. It's not ideal, but if you are fired you won't have the card and you may find things much more difficult. A better escape plan is to be a fair way along in the hiring process somewhere else.
- bratbag 3y agoThe level of palpable fear in your approach, suggests you have only ever had bad managers.
- sgt101 3y agoReally this is senior leaders, not managers. In fact my line managers have (with very few exceptions) been great people. Proper, proper senior leaders - folks who run the 80k FTE companies worth $40bn or more... well those are a different breed. There is a lot at stake, they are like wild animals in that their motivations are not available to you and they can act in very unpredictable ways. I have seen rooms full of people emptied out of a business over a three month period due to an ill judged meeting that went badly. Could have been avoided... wasn't...
- ianmcgowan 3y agoI think you're thinking of career-ending fuckups (where you definitely should try all avenues, quickly, including asking trusted peers for help), rather than the article's more mundane examples of being blocked, having prioritization issues with another team, feeling overwhelmed, etc. If you can't talk to your manager about that kind of thing and expect some help (or at least some advice/sympathy), then agree with your point that it's time to look for another gig. That's no way to live...
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> If you can't talk to your manager about that kind of thing and expect some help (or at least some advice/sympathy), Perhaps I'm imagining it, but I believe this always has a side effect of incrementing a little counter in manager's head - one labeled "oh, they're failing to deliver again". The first few times around you might get sympathy, but then you'll start seeing irritation, and few rounds later you'll find yourself on a Performance Improvement Plan.
- tpmoney 3y agoIf you're constantly failing to deliver at the same rate and level as your co-workers, yes it is going to increment a counter. If you're delivering work though, and keeping management aware of blockers that need to be resolved, then no it wouldn't. I've seen more co-workers wind up on management's bad side because they were afraid to say when something was going sideways than ones that asked for resources or help resolving a problem. Turns out management hates it when they think something is on track and then 2 days before the estimated due date they find out "we're 6 months behind" a lot more than they hate hearing "we need some resources to resolve X Y and Z or we will need an extra 6 months"
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoYour manager is not an idiot. They generally can tell who is failing to deliver because they are constantly stuck on trivial things and who genuinely can’t do more and need help. If you go see your manager because the team next door is blocking you explaining clearly what you have tried and why you need the issue to be escalated you just sound professional. Same thing if you can tell you are going to be late in your delivery and need something specific done to help especially if you do it with a lot of time left. Also I have a pro-tip. Managers intentionally ask people they view as competent and trustworthy to do the thorny things that need to get done. So surprisingly the people who are expected to need the most help are often the most valued.
- striking 3y agoI would bet that that counter increments much more quickly when people say nothing about being off-target before it's too late.
- zug_zug 3y agoHaving worked at a lot of companies, I think this advice is hit-or-miss. I'd say as often as not, a good engineer is more knowledgeable than their manager in most respects, including the people dynamics. Ask your manager for help is often the nuclear option, because there's such a wide-range of outcomes when a manager tries to intervene -- maybe they misunderstand your message, maybe they fumble the delivery, maybe they forgot, etc. Even if the manager does intervene it could be neutral or negative "Hey I got you some 'resources' who know nothing about the project that's due this month to help out." Miscommunication is particularly common when there's a language and culture barrier at play. Also, what? IIRC most engineering teams miss most goals most of the time. I guess if it's agreed in advance something is a "hard commitment" then yes let the manager know early you're not going to make it happen. But also the manager should be even more responsible and should be asking for periodic updates on all goals if not receiving them. Also there's something really offputting about the "get it done" phrase/mentality for public companies. Delivering faster is not one of Meta's (or google's) top 50 priorities. Their priorities all need to be "This time, build a product that's going to be around in 10 years that will reflect well on our brand." Hustling is not only not a part of that equation, constantly feeling "under the gun" is antithetical to the kind of "Let's take a step back and do it right, even if it's twice as expensive and takes twice as long" approach they need.
- cushychicken 3y agoThis highlights how lots of managers are just plain not good at their jobs. I'd say that in many startups, MOST managers are not good at their jobs, as they are freshly promoted ICs who have to figure out a new role.
- thrashh 3y agoMost people are not great at their jobs. We’re all on a bell curve.
- cushychicken 3y agoI suspect good management, as plotted on a curve, does not follow a Bell curve. I'd suspect it's bimodal, and the "bad" peak is much higher than the good one. Ay least, that's how my own experience maps.
- ArunRaja 3y agoBeing team player (guidance seeking and delegation), and the synergy it creates is awesome. As with all, knowing when and what to collaborate is paramountly important. More generally, erring on the side of collaboration is better, than being self reliant and sub optimal.
- nine_zeros 3y agoExactly, collaborative environments produce so much more than forcing individuals to magically "get things done".
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou can also get help from other people in the team/org if the blocker is technical. If it is organizational then talking to your direct boss first of course a good idea.
- xupybd 3y agoOof that hits home. This is something I always struggle with. My personality seems to fight me every time I need to go up the chain and deliver bad news.
- nine_zeros 3y agoIf someone is wondering what gaslighting looks like, this post is it. If you, a "leader", are asking people to "get it done" but you simultaneously keep roadblocks in place or cannot remove them, YOU need to get things done before asking others. E.g. if a manager asks you to finish something by the end of the week, but the devs don't have a reasonable development environment to test things out, it is up to the manager (and the layers of "leaders") who need to figure out how to clear the roadblock. There is no point pushing more on reports when you yourself cannot "get it done".
- tpmoney 3y agoIf no one bucks up and tells management that the dev environment is a blocker in the first place, how do they know? I've seen way too many co-workers sit and stew in silence about problems that get solved as soon as they start speaking up, or at the very least start getting factored into estimates once someone starts saying "hey this sucks and adds 3 days to every week of work". Maybe it never gets fixed because "reasons" but it at least stops being an "unseen" problem. I worked on a team that used a free tool as part of the dev process that was just a continual source of problems for about half the team, with no obvious reasons why. Every 4th or 5th launch of the tool would just fail, and you'd lose half a day to trying to resolve the problem or otherwise clear all the settings / caches / accounts and start from scratch. Yet the team had worked like that for a handful of years because "it's just one of those things". It took 2 days after bringing it up to management to get the whole team paid licenses to an alternative tool. No one had bothered to bring it up because no one thought management would pay for a tool when a free one worked. But a half a day lost to a tool failure cost the company an order of magnitude more than just buying licenses to a better tool.
- nine_zeros 3y agoI have found that a lot of engineers learn helplessness because they've been burned by reporting issues to bad managers. Bad managers only shift the blame downwards. Why would any sane engineer ever report anything if there is a chance it will be held against them?
- doctor_eval 3y ago> the mandate of such a job is not to “do the best you can.” It is to get it done. And if the way to get it done is to ask for help, then that’s what you should do. In my limited experience in large companies I’ve often felt that the mandate for leadership is to position yourself for promotion (or better yet, a nice exit to a consulting firm). The job is more an annoying distraction from feathering your nest, and this bodes poorly for the sucker who asks for help. It’s possible that I’ve become overly cynical.
- throwawaysleep 3y agoI consider my job just the waiting room until my next job.
- neotrope 3y agoThis is great advice, but getting to a place where this works doesn’t always happen. There’s a natural incentive to not need help. The more help you need to get things done the less valuable you are. Conversely, great leaders are giving tasks that challenge people and can often include complexity beyond someone’s ability. As a general rule, leaders expect people to: - make a good effort (~90%) to solve problems (don’t kill yourself or your team) - understand the solution space when problems don’t yield - escalate with options for moving forward (the more fleshed out the better) - clear communication around important changes
- scarface_74 3y agoI worked at a startup at my last company where the CTO would give me “special assignments” to come up with proof of concepts that wouldn’t require him to go through the “process” - product managers, sales, project managers, etc. I wasn’t expected to know everything. I was expected to pull in the right people. Now that I work at BigTech, why would I struggle trying to figure out how something works on one of the hundreds of cloud products for more than a $Timeboxxed period of time when I literally can reach out to the team who wrote the service?
- zabzonk 3y agomeaningless bulshit. use of words like "leverage" is not encouraging. otoh, the best advice i've ever had was from a CTO of an investment bank i worked for - "just f*cking do it!" in other words, don't sit around overdesigning things and thinking why they might not work.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 3y agoI think if you work at a company that recently laid off 21k people, you are less likely to feel comfortable saying you need help with doing your job.
- alliao 3y agoI've rarely see this phenomenon when interests align, people hustle almost without coordination when everyone sees the benefit
- alxmng 3y agoThere’s two kinds of asking for help. There’s asking for help when you know it will accelerate things for everyone. There’s asking for help to avoid responsibility. Do the former while avoiding the latter.
- Venkatesh10 3y agoWhat's the tech stack of your blog? Seems very simple, fast and elegant.
- TheDong 3y agoThis is hacker news, we're allowed to look at the source code here if we want to. If you view source, you'll see <meta name="generator" content="Gatsby 2.15.26"/> If you view your network requests tab and look at headers, you'll see: server: cloudflare
- innagadadavida 3y agoI think this applies to his boss more than anyone else. Zuck just did not get it done. He picked a fight with apple, spent billions acquiring occulus and none of this actually got Meta to be anywhere close to where apple is today in that space and how meta is losing ad revenue because Zuck failed to bend the knee. I just can’t believe that billionaires egos are so fragile and it has to come in the way of building profitable and successful companies.
- swiftcoder 3y agoThis advice feels a bit ironic, given that Meta almost entirely lacks centralised command-and-control. There would be way less need to push problems up the chain of command if the chain of command actually made decisions in the first place, rather than delegating them to the trenches (where no one is empowered to make decisions without escalating, thus starting the cycle over again...)
- senel 3y agoThis article presupposes a healthy and functioning company. Leaders are more often than not blind to the realities of the company as they have control and feel they’re doing a great job. A useful analogy is reading self-help books about communication while having a toxic family environment. Sure the advice is good but some of us know how useless it is if the environment is not right.
- KSteffensen 3y agoAs a mid-level leader I personally rarely feel I have control or that I am doing a great job.
- KaiserPro 3y agoThere are a number of problems with Boz's posts. 1) they lack nuance, 2) they often don't reflect the reality of those in the field in his own back garden. In boot camp, I was expressly told that I shouldn't message people for help. Some smug ponytailed twat stood up and said "If I'm messaging you, I can't spend that time improving the system" The reason why he was getting messaged so much is because the code he wrote was "clever" old and entirely uncommented. The wiki was out of date. Yet, he didn't take it as a signal that his docs/onboarding experience was shite. So to him, this post basically says: make more code. To compound the issue, if you're an intern or a junior, you are penalised for asking too many questions. This is at odds with the core message.
- naillo 3y agoI agree with most of what you say. But uncommented code isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can often make it self documenting through long and descriptive variables names and function names.
- KaiserPro 3y agoI mean yes, for maintaining it. But. I just want to use a "message queue"(or what ever), the one I'm trying to use has the semantics I need for a project. I just want to use it, not learn to maintain it. I don't want to have to spend weeks reverse engineering the tests to figure out how to make it work, I just want to build with it. But, how do I know which Queue system to use? does it have the right semantics? what happens when you fill the queue, does it pause the producer or emit an exception? who knows, just look at the code! (this makes selection of systems really hard, unless you have the sacred knowledge) And thats the problem. Meta might have the world's best scaling primitives, but unless you can find the right person to ask, you'll never really be able to figure out _how_ to use it in your project in any reasonable timeframe