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Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decis

Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. It's also not helped by the fact that management skill has a low floor, since it's so hard to assess, thus everyone has had bad managers and they really make your life miserable. But at the upper end of management skill with large org sizes, the problem of debugging orgs and understanding the outputs of systems of people is way harder than software due to the human element. Even just getting accurate information and assessments is non-trivial given the underlying incentives and politics. In this type of environment, competence looks completely different from how a craftsperson thinks about it.

littlestymaar 3y ago
> Hiring the right people is competence It can be, or it can just be luck, which is the point of the comment you're responding to.
- dasil003 3y ago
  Sure, but it's always both in large scale human endeavor. We're not talking about virtuosic performance that is more or less the direct result of talent + obsessive practice. That's why I'm equally uninterested in those who claim it's all luck as those who worship and hang on every word of prominent tech billionaires. I'm more interested in applying human agency than trying to come up with a theory for success—the latter is inevitably biased navel-gazing.
rgifford 3y ago
You're missing what the previous commenter said. There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless. Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?
- borski 3y ago
  There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt. Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both. I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power. I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.
  - rgifford 3y ago
    I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world. When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers. In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you? It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s
    - borski 3y ago
      > I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers. That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig. The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause. > Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there. Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems. > But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you? That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed. The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways: 1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next. 2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it. What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted. But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment. Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do. An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across. An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!
borski 3y ago
My god, I could not have put this better myself. Thanks.
jarjoura 3y ago
You sir sound like someone who is in that upper management realm. People ARE hard. Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the bay area, they all copy each other with the same management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't heard one positive thing from anyone. So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their org debugging skills are actually doing things other than obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it does is keep their org goal post actually undefined. On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me. However, I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test out new ideas.
- dasil003 3y ago
  I'm actually middle management at a largish SV company, but I have also been leadership at smaller startups as well as the developer bootstrapping a 2-person SaaS app to 6-figure revenue, in addition to over a decade as a vanilla web developer working as an employee and freelancer. What this experience has taught me is a visceral understanding of the leadership position (where you are responsible for the life and death of a company) and the IC position (where you are responsible for the nuts and bolts of shipping and operating internet-based software). In a small company it's easy to understand both sides. Once a company gets large the gulf is enormous. I won't debate all your observations, other than to say that they are reductive and not reflective of the motivations and reasoning of executives I've known and worked with. To take one example: > I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic Chaos is not a goal (let alone obsession)— it is the merely the result of allowing significant individual agency among the creatives and craftspeople that do the work. The reason SV executives accept this is because reducing chaos requires a stronger command and control structure, but command and control structures don't work for building quality software products. Ultimately there are always minute details in the code and UX that end up being crucial and having outsized impact beyond where they are discovered. Most employees have your attitude of caring only about what is immediately asked of them by their supervisor ("I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me"), but you actually need a healthy mix of people at the ground level who are intrinsically motivated by the overall quality of the product, and will work to resolve things with the global optimum in mind even if its "not their job". This is incredibly difficult work—often going unrecognized, or even posing a career risk, in some cultures—but absolutely necessary for any company that depends on customer satisfaction. The only way this can work is if the culture allows for good ideas to be floated from anywhere and acted on without being squashed by a rigid official-org-enforcing processes and bureaucracy.
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. IMHO, hiring (and retaining, letting go) is hard skill not a soft one.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> Hiring the right people is competence It can be, or it can just be luck, which is the point of the comment you're responding to.

dasil003 3y ago
Sure, but it's always both in large scale human endeavor. We're not talking about virtuosic performance that is more or less the direct result of talent + obsessive practice. That's why I'm equally uninterested in those who claim it's all luck as those who worship and hang on every word of prominent tech billionaires. I'm more interested in applying human agency than trying to come up with a theory for success—the latter is inevitably biased navel-gazing.

rgifford 3y ago

You're missing what the previous commenter said. There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless. Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?

borski 3y ago
There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt. Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both. I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power. I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.
- rgifford 3y ago
  I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world. When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers. In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you? It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s
  - borski 3y ago
    > I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers. That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig. The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause. > Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there. Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems. > But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you? That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed. The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways: 1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next. 2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it. What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted. But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment. Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do. An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across. An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!

borski 3y ago

My god, I could not have put this better myself. Thanks.

jarjoura 3y ago

You sir sound like someone who is in that upper management realm. People ARE hard. Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the bay area, they all copy each other with the same management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't heard one positive thing from anyone. So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their org debugging skills are actually doing things other than obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it does is keep their org goal post actually undefined. On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me. However, I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test out new ideas.

dasil003 3y ago
I'm actually middle management at a largish SV company, but I have also been leadership at smaller startups as well as the developer bootstrapping a 2-person SaaS app to 6-figure revenue, in addition to over a decade as a vanilla web developer working as an employee and freelancer. What this experience has taught me is a visceral understanding of the leadership position (where you are responsible for the life and death of a company) and the IC position (where you are responsible for the nuts and bolts of shipping and operating internet-based software). In a small company it's easy to understand both sides. Once a company gets large the gulf is enormous. I won't debate all your observations, other than to say that they are reductive and not reflective of the motivations and reasoning of executives I've known and worked with. To take one example: > I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic Chaos is not a goal (let alone obsession)— it is the merely the result of allowing significant individual agency among the creatives and craftspeople that do the work. The reason SV executives accept this is because reducing chaos requires a stronger command and control structure, but command and control structures don't work for building quality software products. Ultimately there are always minute details in the code and UX that end up being crucial and having outsized impact beyond where they are discovered. Most employees have your attitude of caring only about what is immediately asked of them by their supervisor ("I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me"), but you actually need a healthy mix of people at the ground level who are intrinsically motivated by the overall quality of the product, and will work to resolve things with the global optimum in mind even if its "not their job". This is incredibly difficult work—often going unrecognized, or even posing a career risk, in some cultures—but absolutely necessary for any company that depends on customer satisfaction. The only way this can work is if the culture allows for good ideas to be floated from anywhere and acted on without being squashed by a rigid official-org-enforcing processes and bureaucracy.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

>I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. IMHO, hiring (and retaining, letting go) is hard skill not a soft one.