3 ms·

You know where people play politics? 1:1's. Stories get told, facts left out, no dissent, people take credit for things they shouldn't be taking credit for. G

You know where people play politics? 1:1's. Stories get told, facts left out, no dissent, people take credit for things they shouldn't be taking credit for. Group accountability and transparency squashes all that.

caminante 3y ago
For me, shadow governance is intrinsic to large organizations. It's going to happen. At these "open" nVidia meetings, I'm sure cliques are texting on MSFT Teams or SMS. I'm skeptical that 1:1 here means no 1:1 contact and rather no recurring meetings with reports.
aborsy 3y ago
People play politics everywhere possible. 1:1 at least guarantees that you have a chance to present your work. Problems with meetings: people don’t express themselves because they might offend others or create enemies, people follow each other, no defined rules on how the meeting operates, problems with credit, diluted responsibilities, opportunities for shifting the work and credit, as someone said in comments formation of cliques competing, etc. Both are probably needed. You need to mix.
- heisenbit 3y ago
  Group settings favor bolder, louder folks. But then he has email sampling. Besides a top manager directly cutting through layers changes communication culture. When facts and not presentation becomes focus of the group other sets of skills than political are becoming valued more.
  - kimixa 3y ago
    Group emails are also places where the "loudest" get heard - it's not just physically having a strong voice, but being the sort of person who feels the need to speak even if they're unsure they're correct, or this is the right forum. I see the same people do that in both physical meetings and group email chains. Sampling group emails likely has a similar bias to sampling large meetings.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      It seems to me that someone who can directly voice their views is a more efficient employee than someone who needs another person (their manager) to use their time do it for them. A company biasing to more efficient employees seems reasonable. Group meetings have other issues but if you can't even do it in async text form...
      - kimixa 3y ago
        Directly voicing views in a forthright manner is useful if the communication is meaningful and informed - which often isn't correlated with how "loud" it is.
        marcinzm 3y ago
        If you consider it "loud" to be able to send out an email of five things to a group in a structured format that everyone at the company uses then I think we should just agree to disagree. I see that as not loud but having the expected level of communication skills to function in a company at anything beyond a junior level.
        kimixa 3y ago
        Sure, there's places where it's good, but it's always a balance - and large mailing lists are often a poor place for actual discussion and instead just get flooded with what ends up being "spam" to many viewers - being things unrelated to your own work that takes energy to filter through and pull out the chunks that are more relevant. In my experience there's few "large" email groups people actually look at, while most are pushed by an automated filter to whatever subfolder they never look at, so there's zero point to them still being on the email group. Anything possibly relevant will be missed anyway. Emails being push rather than pull means you can't self-filter as easily - something more like a company forum may be better than email groups as it finer grained categorization than emails, while still being visible to anyone if there ends up being useful discussions between groups which wouldn't be the case if you had a thousand different email groups. Nvidia is a /huge/ company doing a very large number of different things, there's probably not a lot that's actually relevant to everyone. Lots of people think what they say may be, often the "louder" people I mentioned, but it's probably not actually true. Generally I find emails are a great place for 1-on-1 communication, OK for 2-3 people discussing things, but very quickly spiral into a mess if there's any discussion by a group - things get lost, threads get mixed up based on who happened to respond first, and taking things "off thread" exclude people based on arbitrary criteria of the responder anyway and are often invisible to anyone else. Maybe OK for "declarations" that aren't actually for discussion, but that doesn't fit with the idea of a "flat hierarchy" engineer-driven workplace either.
agumonkey 3y ago
I often wonder what's the right balance between group and personal, as you say, 1:1 has issues, but groups have some too (extrovert can use more space).

caminante 3y ago

For me, shadow governance is intrinsic to large organizations. It's going to happen. At these "open" nVidia meetings, I'm sure cliques are texting on MSFT Teams or SMS. I'm skeptical that 1:1 here means no 1:1 contact and rather no recurring meetings with reports.

aborsy 3y ago

People play politics everywhere possible. 1:1 at least guarantees that you have a chance to present your work. Problems with meetings: people don’t express themselves because they might offend others or create enemies, people follow each other, no defined rules on how the meeting operates, problems with credit, diluted responsibilities, opportunities for shifting the work and credit, as someone said in comments formation of cliques competing, etc. Both are probably needed. You need to mix.

heisenbit 3y ago
Group settings favor bolder, louder folks. But then he has email sampling. Besides a top manager directly cutting through layers changes communication culture. When facts and not presentation becomes focus of the group other sets of skills than political are becoming valued more.
- kimixa 3y ago
  Group emails are also places where the "loudest" get heard - it's not just physically having a strong voice, but being the sort of person who feels the need to speak even if they're unsure they're correct, or this is the right forum. I see the same people do that in both physical meetings and group email chains. Sampling group emails likely has a similar bias to sampling large meetings.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    It seems to me that someone who can directly voice their views is a more efficient employee than someone who needs another person (their manager) to use their time do it for them. A company biasing to more efficient employees seems reasonable. Group meetings have other issues but if you can't even do it in async text form...
    - kimixa 3y ago
      Directly voicing views in a forthright manner is useful if the communication is meaningful and informed - which often isn't correlated with how "loud" it is.
      - marcinzm 3y ago
        If you consider it "loud" to be able to send out an email of five things to a group in a structured format that everyone at the company uses then I think we should just agree to disagree. I see that as not loud but having the expected level of communication skills to function in a company at anything beyond a junior level.
        kimixa 3y ago
        Sure, there's places where it's good, but it's always a balance - and large mailing lists are often a poor place for actual discussion and instead just get flooded with what ends up being "spam" to many viewers - being things unrelated to your own work that takes energy to filter through and pull out the chunks that are more relevant. In my experience there's few "large" email groups people actually look at, while most are pushed by an automated filter to whatever subfolder they never look at, so there's zero point to them still being on the email group. Anything possibly relevant will be missed anyway. Emails being push rather than pull means you can't self-filter as easily - something more like a company forum may be better than email groups as it finer grained categorization than emails, while still being visible to anyone if there ends up being useful discussions between groups which wouldn't be the case if you had a thousand different email groups. Nvidia is a /huge/ company doing a very large number of different things, there's probably not a lot that's actually relevant to everyone. Lots of people think what they say may be, often the "louder" people I mentioned, but it's probably not actually true. Generally I find emails are a great place for 1-on-1 communication, OK for 2-3 people discussing things, but very quickly spiral into a mess if there's any discussion by a group - things get lost, threads get mixed up based on who happened to respond first, and taking things "off thread" exclude people based on arbitrary criteria of the responder anyway and are often invisible to anyone else. Maybe OK for "declarations" that aren't actually for discussion, but that doesn't fit with the idea of a "flat hierarchy" engineer-driven workplace either.

agumonkey 3y ago

I often wonder what's the right balance between group and personal, as you say, 1:1 has issues, but groups have some too (extrovert can use more space).