8 ms·

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” c

I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team working on things they don’t believe in or that don’t actually move the needle and are scrapped. In places like this the engineers and managers closest to the product and customers tend to have a better feel for what to work on, but in a large enough org it’s impossible to align those priorities across teams to get things done. This leads engineers to either POC ideas that aren’t possible in production yet or to focus on smaller features that don’t have dependencies. The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership who often care more about org size than output. I’m tired of the messaging around “lazy workers” pointing the finger where it doesn’t belong. Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. These people tend to be the most invested in building something in my experience.

endtime 3y ago
Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done about it.
- disqard 3y ago
  If you're willing to share, how long ago did you quit?
  - endtime 3y ago
    April 2022, after 10.5 years there.
- potatolicious 3y ago
  +1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership. Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only concerned with the people-management side of the org. There was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of anything about the products we owned. Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about the products they own. What a breath of fresh air. The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of features ourselves with little guidance from upper management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because senior management changed their minds about some overarching strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere. Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader. Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google kills so many projects - it demands insane metrics to approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close, and whole projects die as a result. I feel very firmly that Google as a company needs a reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that has any product credibility.
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor, only to be immediately removed.
  - danaris 3y ago
    The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there—senior management being primarily concerned with making the organization work well for the people in it, with the people further down the ladder being the ones directly in charge of the products—is inherently a bad or unworkable one. It just requires the senior leadership to openly acknowledge that it means they don't own the products, and shouldn't be the ones making decisions on them, at least not without extensive discussion with the people in the organization that do own the products. That includes decisions to kill off a product, for any reason other than a dire emergency. The problem, as is so depressingly common, is that being higher up in the org chart makes them believe they are better, smarter people, who always know best. So they make decisions without getting the right information, and very frequently for the wrong reasons.
- pinewurst 3y ago
  My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.
  - asielen 3y ago
    My current place is like this but with Salesforce leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce about the old days. Their first inclination is always to try to implement whatever they were doing there. But this is a very different industry and marke. Every few months we end up rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.
Spivak 3y ago
Seconded and thirded. Nothing is more soul draining then doing nothing for 8 hours a day, the idea that devs are lazy and don't want to code is like the antithesis of our whole profession. Most of us do it in our free time. When you actually have a real actionable thing to work on that gives the line workers meaningful "wins" the management pyramid flips and they all become "servant managers" trying to direct the excitement of the team to the most valuable stuff. Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering. If you find yourself imposing artificial deadlines as motivation then maybe what you're doing isn't all that important.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    For the same reason lots of people don't move and change jobs at the drop of a hat: responsibilities outside work. Kids in school, a mortgage, debts, friends, community participation. Once your lifestyle has lined up with a certain pay scale, cutting back is difficult. Upending the lives of your family to go for a more meaningful job that pays ways less? It happens. It's not pretty.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      I wasn't only referring to just people who are tied down to one place and one lifestyle. There's plenty of tech people who are in a stage of their lives when they are easily mobile and still live a frugal lifestyle, yet almost everyone chooses the same wealthy and least ethical companies, while complaining their jobs are boring and unethical. Not judging people who take well paying jobs at unethical companies, but they should at least stop moaning about it. Some people I know would suck d*ck behind a Wendy's to get paid FAANG money and be bored for 8h/day instead of do backbreaking work for peanuts.
bragr 3y ago
Yeah those managers aren't any more lazy than those idle employees. Everyone is just going through the motions. The fish rots from the head.
penjelly 3y ago
same in my experience as well so youre not alone. i dont see a solution though, its not like upper management is going to fire themselves.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Why there needs to be a solution? As long as shareholders and the board are happy...
  - lupire 3y ago
    We want meaningful jobs that are productive and profitable.
pawelduda 3y ago
The projects I've enjoyed the most is where I felt I was building something meaningful, as in something I believed would help the company grow. And asking questions that challenged the point of specific thing was encouraged - when I voiced concerns that RoI isn't there, it was at least considered and sometimes changed the plan. I don't expect my suggestions to be right, because I see only part of the picture, but I assume so does upper management, leadership, etc. It's just impossible to grasp the entire thing. Like you can't be just dev and not think about how customers will be using what you release. For me working like that feels more fulfilling and I like to think it helps to mend these perspectives. On the contrary, worst time I had was when I was just receiving roadmaps to crunch through, that were "set in stone", came from "up there" and suggestions or personal findings weren't part of development. Yes, the technical challenge was there but that alone doesn't cut it. So it felt like I'm just a cog in a machine and after some time the mood just drops and burnout starts creeping in... I find it very consistent.
throwaway1492 3y ago
> Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices. I know this will be downvoted, but software engineers are the worst at planning their own work. The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want. There really has to be guard rails to keep an organization sane and somewhat focused. But this post is spot on, productivety is a business problem. Software engineers will work, probably more than anyone else in the org, typically.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  >The vast majority I really don't think this is the case. I think there are a lot of less-experienced developers who will be very sidetracked, yes. But anyone even close to senior should have developed an intuition of when it is time to build carefully and when it is time to "just ship". (this isn't just "go slow at first and then haul ass to hit deadline", you can switch between these two mindsets several times even within a single PR.). And at a higher level - I expect senior and staff-type engineers to have at least a decent amount of product sense. Their job may not be to do product management, but they should be able to reasonably-accurately judge what product work will be more business impact vs less.
  - manicennui 3y ago
    Senior engineers are often good at turning boring problems into more interesting problems (to them) by doing unnecessary rewrites or introducing new technology.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      These days the title "senior engineer" is handed out like candy. Anyone with three years experience is now "Senior" in title. In the US, doctors fresh out of med school have a minimum of three years ahead before they can even begin to practice independently. For programming, and pretty much any other profession, senior doesn't really begin until nearing 10 years of work experience. At that point, that itch to turn boring problems into interesting problems takes on a different form: What becomes "interesting" is doing things within constraints, including the constraint of staying with existing technology, when it's solving the problem.
GreedClarifies 3y ago
“ The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership ” Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always “on” as well. But VPs can’t do everything, they can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I think you want something superhuman from them. The problem in tech, such that it is, is that the perf process is somewhat broken. But that’s a discussion for another day, and is likely intractable.
- lukeschlather 3y ago
  An example is the recent sale of Google Domains to Squarespace. Seems like it was a profitable product, why get rid of it? I'm sure they worked very hard on selling Google Domains, doesn't seem like it actually benefited Google as a company in the long term. Working hard isn't helpful if you don't have a solid vision for what you're working toward. In fact working slower with a more coherent vision is often better, since you actually get closer to a goal rather than just bouncing around between undefined local maxima as fast as you can.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  Working hard doesn’t necessarily mean working on the right things.
- antipaul 3y ago
  Were they "working hard" on individual-contributor-style work, or on management? "They can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels" - I'd imagine this is exactly what management should work "hard at". If you're not keen to do that, then maybe be a high-level IC?
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  Senior leadership has many important functions, and more demands on their time than hours in the day, but their number one job is communicating a vision to the org. There's basically nothing else with similarly high impact as this is what blocks or unblocks the productivity of the entire organization. I've watched 1,000 person orgs rot because the senior leader could not settle on a vision. He was "always on", smart, articulate, all those good adjectives. None of it mattered without the vision.
throwaway298420 3y ago
> In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. Since an acquisition at a company I used to work for full-time and remained on call as a contractor with for some time after, I have seen this happen in a very impressive way. Critical tech debt has gone unpaid as site performance degrades to the point of outages, but the new staff don't seem to know how to do anything except throw more hardware at the problem. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I got an inquiry from them about "administrator passwords" for a list of a dozen or so programs in use on their developer machines, including 7-zip and Notepad++. There were around a dozen items and all of them but some IDEs were completely open-source software. All of them were only deployed and run locally, with no administrative passwords or commercial licensing purchased. This inquiry came many months after I had left, including an extensive and agonizing knowledge transfer process. There's no way the person asking me was such an idiot that he didn't realize that Notepad++ has no administrative passwords. But he asked me anyway. I can only assume this is because some wrathful idiot asked him to do this, and he knew that performing the ceremony of asking me as he was directed to do would be easier to deal with than just answering the inquiry directly with the parts he knew himself. Once you have somebody generating fake work like that at the top, where can things possibly go other than down?
- random_kris 3y ago
  How to "fix" this ? I can see this all the time where I work. I call people out on it. And from bosses POV I am seen as the guy who delivers.. but from peers perspective I am a bit of a hard ass... And I feel like that anytime I don't look and inspect their work they go into this mode, maybe even as a sort of a revenge ?
abeppu 3y ago
I think there's also an issue that execs can create the appearance of being busy (and may indeed spend a ridiculous number of hours in meetings) but it can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable. I was at a startup which over a period of years repeatedly had new execs come in, claim that something was wrong with our planning or goal-setting process, "restart" the whole thing in a way which was virtually identical except with new exemplar docs, tracking spreadsheets, meetings etc -- and then pat themselves on the back. So far as I can tell, this is only because creating the appearance of change allows them to take credit for any later success. I asked one once what they found problematic about our prior process, and the answer was roughly "I don't know about your prior process so I cannot comment."
- antipaul 3y ago
  "It can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable" Indeed. It's easier to evaluate "the appearance of change" than actual value or improvement. When I consider this problem, my current belief is that only long-term discipline from senior leadership can change this system.
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Things that management knows about and worries about consistently, like 5 years and still going strong, do trickle down and make a difference, and eventually build a culture. Things that management changes every year end up making even the most good-hearted employees get cynical and uninvolved in those things.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    I was thinking about all this recently and came up with the question: In the event that someone fails, is it possible for it to be you? There are people who cannot fail at their jobs. I want one of those jobs. An upper manager who attends meetings and "makes decisions" and is personal friends with the CEO often cannot fail. If the product stops selling, it will be considered a failure of those below the upper manager and the team will be laid off, the upper manager cannot fail.
kurthr 3y ago
Yeah, I can't say I'm hoping for the LLM/AI replacement to start at the top, but it often seems like that's the best "bang for the buck". There's a lot of gibberish spewed and arbitrary dice-roll decision making in upper level management. They certainly aren't expecting it! But then we'll be working for the AI... stickin' it to the Man.
osigurdson 3y ago
Product managers are at risk of yesterday's business analysts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo
ravenstine 3y ago
> Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team working on things they don’t believe in or that don’t actually move the needle and are scrapped. Or the engineers are incentivized to mind-read leadership, since they can only beg leadership for answers to questions so many times in a sitting, which results in engineering time being wasted when it turns out said leadership didn't want a thing after all. Trying to understand what the owners of a product actually want is of course part of the occupation of an engineer, but it's another thing when owners and leadership are of little help and fail to actually provide the company with a real direction. Too often, they are high on their own supply, and they may even rationalize turnover as just a fact of the business.
freetinker 3y ago
Exactly matches my anecdotal experience as well. Thanks for sharing.
flashgordon 3y ago
So spot on. You see tons of articles and "thought leadership" on Managers vs Leaders as if managers are holding a company back through incompetence or malice. Oh man. Reality is leadership sets processes because they believe the "last ounce of juice" hasnt been squeezed. I can point you to a whole bunch of leadership rubriks (at faang/maangs) that is all about showing "impact" vs getting actual work down - and they all get vocalized a lot more during perf/calibration seasons. I am pretty sure someone who is a "Leader" will just say true work always equates to quantifiable impact (north star metrics etc) all the while ignoring the fact that collaboration needs a lot of political skills - ie convincing why we should do what leadership wanted to begin with - but without their ack. "I trust you will sort this all out instead of depending on us leaders". I know i know. I really apologize for sounding angry there. I have seen so many smart and well meaning people getting demotivated (and giving up) because the modern corp is built around "preventing" work getting done than channeling all this passion and then execs are surprised at why people are "saying they are burnt out" or not being productive.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lupire 3y ago
  Leadership doesn't care about squeeze juice, except CFO. Leadership is playing Game of Thrones backstabbing each other for promotions and ignoring the product.
ma34esense 3y ago
[flagged]

endtime 3y ago

Part of why I left Google was poor leadership at the VP level. The org wasn't set up for success and - as far as I could tell - the vision was myopic and incoherent. VP performance was more or less opaque to me for most of my career there, but eventually I got senior and experienced enough to have a real opinion. Really liked my direct manager, but we were in it together, and there was nothing he could have done about it.

disqard 3y ago
If you're willing to share, how long ago did you quit?
- endtime 3y ago
  April 2022, after 10.5 years there.
potatolicious 3y ago
+1 on this. Spent 4 years at Google including spending time as a TLM. Left around 2020 so my impressions may be a bit out of date. I spent time in both the Geo and Search PAs, and IMO Google's biggest problem is listless senior leadership. Google's orgs tend to lack product vision - there's a lot of abdication to front-line teams to ideate, come up with their own ideas, and ship features. My VP-levels were AFAIK only dimly aware of what we were shipping and largely seemed only concerned with the people-management side of the org. There was a lot of focus on morale, promo tracks, effective team composition, and other topics to the near-total exclusion of anything about the products we owned. Contrast with where I am now where the VP-levels I meet with on a regular basis have nearly encyclopedic knowledge about the products they own. What a breath of fresh air. The net result at Google was that we shipped a lot of features ourselves with little guidance from upper management. A lot of stuff would get killed opaquely because senior management changed their minds about some overarching strategy. The level of high-level turnover at Google didn't help matters - every incoming new VP or Director would wipe the slate clean for their own multi-year plan, and then get promoted/demoted out of the position before it went anywhere. Rinse and repeat with the next senior leader. Senior leadership was also naive and credulous when it came to major new initiatives. To get any kind of product idea past leadership (to the extent they engaged in the product process) the PMs would have to project wild metrics that didn't stand up to one iota of scrutiny, but was frequently just accepted. I strongly suspect this is part of why Google kills so many projects - it demands insane metrics to approve major initiatives, PMs dutifully submit said ludicrous projections, upper management credulously accepts it, and then of course the real numbers are nowhere close, and whole projects die as a result. I feel very firmly that Google as a company needs a reckoning at the top levels if it wants to be a company that has any product credibility.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  This is the exact kind of fantastic, in-depth, objective review of leadership that would fit perfectly on glassdoor, only to be immediately removed.
- danaris 3y ago
  The thing is, I don't think that the basic idea there—senior management being primarily concerned with making the organization work well for the people in it, with the people further down the ladder being the ones directly in charge of the products—is inherently a bad or unworkable one. It just requires the senior leadership to openly acknowledge that it means they don't own the products, and shouldn't be the ones making decisions on them, at least not without extensive discussion with the people in the organization that do own the products. That includes decisions to kill off a product, for any reason other than a dire emergency. The problem, as is so depressingly common, is that being higher up in the org chart makes them believe they are better, smarter people, who always know best. So they make decisions without getting the right information, and very frequently for the wrong reasons.
pinewurst 3y ago
My last employer was/is very much this, with the VP layer imported from Google. They don't even know the area the (tech) company operates in, but in meetings it's a drinking game to count their (almost always inappropriate) mentions of the Ol' Goog.
- asielen 3y ago
  My current place is like this but with Salesforce leadership. I call it big company syndrome. They are so far removed from the actual work and just like to reminisce about the old days. Their first inclination is always to try to implement whatever they were doing there. But this is a very different industry and marke. Every few months we end up rolling back their "great" Salesforce ideas.

Spivak 3y ago

Seconded and thirded. Nothing is more soul draining then doing nothing for 8 hours a day, the idea that devs are lazy and don't want to code is like the antithesis of our whole profession. Most of us do it in our free time. When you actually have a real actionable thing to work on that gives the line workers meaningful "wins" the management pyramid flips and they all become "servant managers" trying to direct the excitement of the team to the most valuable stuff. Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering. If you find yourself imposing artificial deadlines as motivation then maybe what you're doing isn't all that important.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?
- cratermoon 3y ago
  For the same reason lots of people don't move and change jobs at the drop of a hat: responsibilities outside work. Kids in school, a mortgage, debts, friends, community participation. Once your lifestyle has lined up with a certain pay scale, cutting back is difficult. Upending the lives of your family to go for a more meaningful job that pays ways less? It happens. It's not pretty.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    I wasn't only referring to just people who are tied down to one place and one lifestyle. There's plenty of tech people who are in a stage of their lives when they are easily mobile and still live a frugal lifestyle, yet almost everyone chooses the same wealthy and least ethical companies, while complaining their jobs are boring and unethical. Not judging people who take well paying jobs at unethical companies, but they should at least stop moaning about it. Some people I know would suck d*ck behind a Wendy's to get paid FAANG money and be bored for 8h/day instead of do backbreaking work for peanuts.

bragr 3y ago

Yeah those managers aren't any more lazy than those idle employees. Everyone is just going through the motions. The fish rots from the head.

penjelly 3y ago

same in my experience as well so youre not alone. i dont see a solution though, its not like upper management is going to fire themselves.

DeathArrow 3y ago
Why there needs to be a solution? As long as shareholders and the board are happy...
- lupire 3y ago
  We want meaningful jobs that are productive and profitable.

pawelduda 3y ago

The projects I've enjoyed the most is where I felt I was building something meaningful, as in something I believed would help the company grow. And asking questions that challenged the point of specific thing was encouraged - when I voiced concerns that RoI isn't there, it was at least considered and sometimes changed the plan. I don't expect my suggestions to be right, because I see only part of the picture, but I assume so does upper management, leadership, etc. It's just impossible to grasp the entire thing. Like you can't be just dev and not think about how customers will be using what you release. For me working like that feels more fulfilling and I like to think it helps to mend these perspectives. On the contrary, worst time I had was when I was just receiving roadmaps to crunch through, that were "set in stone", came from "up there" and suggestions or personal findings weren't part of development. Yes, the technical challenge was there but that alone doesn't cut it. So it felt like I'm just a cog in a machine and after some time the mood just drops and burnout starts creeping in... I find it very consistent.

throwaway1492 3y ago

> Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. I tend to agree but there's a real danger in leaving engineers to their own devices. I know this will be downvoted, but software engineers are the worst at planning their own work. The vast majority will just go off and do wtf ever they want. There really has to be guard rails to keep an organization sane and somewhat focused. But this post is spot on, productivety is a business problem. Software engineers will work, probably more than anyone else in the org, typically.

atomicnumber3 3y ago
>The vast majority I really don't think this is the case. I think there are a lot of less-experienced developers who will be very sidetracked, yes. But anyone even close to senior should have developed an intuition of when it is time to build carefully and when it is time to "just ship". (this isn't just "go slow at first and then haul ass to hit deadline", you can switch between these two mindsets several times even within a single PR.). And at a higher level - I expect senior and staff-type engineers to have at least a decent amount of product sense. Their job may not be to do product management, but they should be able to reasonably-accurately judge what product work will be more business impact vs less.
- manicennui 3y ago
  Senior engineers are often good at turning boring problems into more interesting problems (to them) by doing unnecessary rewrites or introducing new technology.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    These days the title "senior engineer" is handed out like candy. Anyone with three years experience is now "Senior" in title. In the US, doctors fresh out of med school have a minimum of three years ahead before they can even begin to practice independently. For programming, and pretty much any other profession, senior doesn't really begin until nearing 10 years of work experience. At that point, that itch to turn boring problems into interesting problems takes on a different form: What becomes "interesting" is doing things within constraints, including the constraint of staying with existing technology, when it's solving the problem.

GreedClarifies 3y ago

“ The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership ” Not what I saw. Leadership was shockingly hard working. I have never seen a person who works harder than Calder at GOOG. Urs never stopped as well. Lower level VPs were always “on” as well. But VPs can’t do everything, they can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels, the orgs are too big. I think you want something superhuman from them. The problem in tech, such that it is, is that the perf process is somewhat broken. But that’s a discussion for another day, and is likely intractable.

lukeschlather 3y ago
An example is the recent sale of Google Domains to Squarespace. Seems like it was a profitable product, why get rid of it? I'm sure they worked very hard on selling Google Domains, doesn't seem like it actually benefited Google as a company in the long term. Working hard isn't helpful if you don't have a solid vision for what you're working toward. In fact working slower with a more coherent vision is often better, since you actually get closer to a goal rather than just bouncing around between undefined local maxima as fast as you can.
sarchertech 3y ago
Working hard doesn’t necessarily mean working on the right things.
antipaul 3y ago
Were they "working hard" on individual-contributor-style work, or on management? "They can’t peer into everyday lives of the lower levels" - I'd imagine this is exactly what management should work "hard at". If you're not keen to do that, then maybe be a high-level IC?
Hermitian909 3y ago
Senior leadership has many important functions, and more demands on their time than hours in the day, but their number one job is communicating a vision to the org. There's basically nothing else with similarly high impact as this is what blocks or unblocks the productivity of the entire organization. I've watched 1,000 person orgs rot because the senior leader could not settle on a vision. He was "always on", smart, articulate, all those good adjectives. None of it mattered without the vision.

throwaway298420 3y ago

> In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. Since an acquisition at a company I used to work for full-time and remained on call as a contractor with for some time after, I have seen this happen in a very impressive way. Critical tech debt has gone unpaid as site performance degrades to the point of outages, but the new staff don't seem to know how to do anything except throw more hardware at the problem. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I got an inquiry from them about "administrator passwords" for a list of a dozen or so programs in use on their developer machines, including 7-zip and Notepad++. There were around a dozen items and all of them but some IDEs were completely open-source software. All of them were only deployed and run locally, with no administrative passwords or commercial licensing purchased. This inquiry came many months after I had left, including an extensive and agonizing knowledge transfer process. There's no way the person asking me was such an idiot that he didn't realize that Notepad++ has no administrative passwords. But he asked me anyway. I can only assume this is because some wrathful idiot asked him to do this, and he knew that performing the ceremony of asking me as he was directed to do would be easier to deal with than just answering the inquiry directly with the parts he knew himself. Once you have somebody generating fake work like that at the top, where can things possibly go other than down?

random_kris 3y ago
How to "fix" this ? I can see this all the time where I work. I call people out on it. And from bosses POV I am seen as the guy who delivers.. but from peers perspective I am a bit of a hard ass... And I feel like that anytime I don't look and inspect their work they go into this mode, maybe even as a sort of a revenge ?

abeppu 3y ago

I think there's also an issue that execs can create the appearance of being busy (and may indeed spend a ridiculous number of hours in meetings) but it can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable. I was at a startup which over a period of years repeatedly had new execs come in, claim that something was wrong with our planning or goal-setting process, "restart" the whole thing in a way which was virtually identical except with new exemplar docs, tracking spreadsheets, meetings etc -- and then pat themselves on the back. So far as I can tell, this is only because creating the appearance of change allows them to take credit for any later success. I asked one once what they found problematic about our prior process, and the answer was roughly "I don't know about your prior process so I cannot comment."

antipaul 3y ago
"It can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable" Indeed. It's easier to evaluate "the appearance of change" than actual value or improvement. When I consider this problem, my current belief is that only long-term discipline from senior leadership can change this system.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Things that management knows about and worries about consistently, like 5 years and still going strong, do trickle down and make a difference, and eventually build a culture. Things that management changes every year end up making even the most good-hearted employees get cynical and uninvolved in those things.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  I was thinking about all this recently and came up with the question: In the event that someone fails, is it possible for it to be you? There are people who cannot fail at their jobs. I want one of those jobs. An upper manager who attends meetings and "makes decisions" and is personal friends with the CEO often cannot fail. If the product stops selling, it will be considered a failure of those below the upper manager and the team will be laid off, the upper manager cannot fail.

kurthr 3y ago

Yeah, I can't say I'm hoping for the LLM/AI replacement to start at the top, but it often seems like that's the best "bang for the buck". There's a lot of gibberish spewed and arbitrary dice-roll decision making in upper level management. They certainly aren't expecting it! But then we'll be working for the AI... stickin' it to the Man.

osigurdson 3y ago

Product managers are at risk of yesterday's business analysts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

ravenstine 3y ago

> Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team working on things they don’t believe in or that don’t actually move the needle and are scrapped. Or the engineers are incentivized to mind-read leadership, since they can only beg leadership for answers to questions so many times in a sitting, which results in engineering time being wasted when it turns out said leadership didn't want a thing after all. Trying to understand what the owners of a product actually want is of course part of the occupation of an engineer, but it's another thing when owners and leadership are of little help and fail to actually provide the company with a real direction. Too often, they are high on their own supply, and they may even rationalize turnover as just a fact of the business.

freetinker 3y ago

Exactly matches my anecdotal experience as well. Thanks for sharing.

flashgordon 3y ago

So spot on. You see tons of articles and "thought leadership" on Managers vs Leaders as if managers are holding a company back through incompetence or malice. Oh man. Reality is leadership sets processes because they believe the "last ounce of juice" hasnt been squeezed. I can point you to a whole bunch of leadership rubriks (at faang/maangs) that is all about showing "impact" vs getting actual work down - and they all get vocalized a lot more during perf/calibration seasons. I am pretty sure someone who is a "Leader" will just say true work always equates to quantifiable impact (north star metrics etc) all the while ignoring the fact that collaboration needs a lot of political skills - ie convincing why we should do what leadership wanted to begin with - but without their ack. "I trust you will sort this all out instead of depending on us leaders". I know i know. I really apologize for sounding angry there. I have seen so many smart and well meaning people getting demotivated (and giving up) because the modern corp is built around "preventing" work getting done than channeling all this passion and then execs are surprised at why people are "saying they are burnt out" or not being productive.

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lupire 3y ago
Leadership doesn't care about squeeze juice, except CFO. Leadership is playing Game of Thrones backstabbing each other for promotions and ignoring the product.

ma34esense 3y ago

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