4 ms·

I used to work with an old Sun Microsystems dude, he was an executive at the company I was at. We used to have these meetings every week and he ended up attendi

I used to work with an old Sun Microsystems dude, he was an executive at the company I was at. We used to have these meetings every week and he ended up attending one. We had been trying to come to a conclusion for weeks on a specific piece of tech. He stopped the meeting dead in its tracks and said we're going to make a decision right now, if it's wrong, we'll learn from it, if it's right, awesome. Not making this decision is more costly than making the wrong decision. I just remember thinking, finally, someone with some authority is getting this ball moving.

cogman10 3y ago
Reminds me of a story that happened at my company. We needed and had purchased a rather expensive database software license, however, we didn't have the hardware yet to run that database. The guys doing hardware spent MONTHS debating on which $10k piece of hardware they'd pick to run the DB. The DB license cost? Something like $0.5 mill. As one engineer said to me "I don't care what hardware you guys get, purchase them all! We are wasting god knows how much money on a license we can't use because we don't have the hardware to install it on!"
- cj 3y ago
  I've noticed a lot of people, even ones making $200k+ in salary, are really bad when it comes to making decisions that involve any amount of money. E.g. I've been in meetings with multiple developers who, if you add up everyone's salary, is well over $1 million/year, debating for way too much time on whether it's worth it to buy a $500/month service to help automate some aspect of devops. Maybe this wasn't the case for your specific anecdote, but in the scenario I'm describing I got the feeling that a lot of people think about business purchases in the context of their own personal finances rather than in the context of the business's finances. Leading people to be extremely cautious with things like a $10k purchase that would be "expensive" if purchased as an individual and "cheap" if purchased as a company. In those cases, getting an exec to come in and pull the trigger can help. The exec is used to looking at big picture budgets/strategy, which IC's aren't. (Although I'm sure someone here can come up with another anecdote proving that wrong)
  - cogman10 3y ago
    Lol, that reminds me of another fun one. Every so often my company would provide lunches for the developers. However, they didn't want to spend too much money doing this. So how did they resolve it? They put together a committee of devs to discuss lunch options/etc. Easily 1+million/year of salary in one room debating whether we do Jimmy Johns or McDonalds and how they'd get the food to the office. For $2000, you can get some pretty nice catering for 100 people. But like you said, people just seem bad at thinking of that sort of big picture.
    - pants2 3y ago
      Providing daily lunches to developers is an insane ROI and I don't know why it's not standard practice. It's pennies compared to their salary, and they are happier, spend more time thinking about work instead of what/where to get lunch, spend more time eating together and conversing, and probably eat healthier food which mitigates the post-lunch coma.
      - mnahkies 3y ago
        +1 to this, I had one job where lunch was provided and it very much brought people together, particularly across team boundaries / job levels, and often "tricked" you into having pseudo meetings over lunch. I find that still happens organically in smaller companies without, but in larger companies things trend towards more clique like behaviour without it (caveat small sample size)
      - cogman10 3y ago
        Used to be something that companies just generally recognized as a good thing. Look at workplaces built in the 60 to 80s and basically all of them had cafeterias as part of the building plan. [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeterias-as-corporate-tool.html https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeteri...
        jdsully 3y ago
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  At least they didn't throw it onto some wholly under-specced machine, then yell at OPs because the response speed was measured in days.
ghaff 3y ago
When I was a hardware product manager, there were a ton of decisions people asked for and a heck of a lot of them basically didn't matter. If we needed to course correct, we'd course correct. The main thing was not sitting around twiddling our thumbs for weeks or longer.
epolanski 3y ago
I mean isn't all of that obvious? A crap boss is one that doesn't make choices, a good boss is one that does, a great boss is one that makes sure that the best of the possible choices is made giving the data at hand. Having careers and heads depending on making the wrong choice just pushed to paralysis.

cogman10 3y ago

Reminds me of a story that happened at my company. We needed and had purchased a rather expensive database software license, however, we didn't have the hardware yet to run that database. The guys doing hardware spent MONTHS debating on which $10k piece of hardware they'd pick to run the DB. The DB license cost? Something like $0.5 mill. As one engineer said to me "I don't care what hardware you guys get, purchase them all! We are wasting god knows how much money on a license we can't use because we don't have the hardware to install it on!"

cj 3y ago
I've noticed a lot of people, even ones making $200k+ in salary, are really bad when it comes to making decisions that involve any amount of money. E.g. I've been in meetings with multiple developers who, if you add up everyone's salary, is well over $1 million/year, debating for way too much time on whether it's worth it to buy a $500/month service to help automate some aspect of devops. Maybe this wasn't the case for your specific anecdote, but in the scenario I'm describing I got the feeling that a lot of people think about business purchases in the context of their own personal finances rather than in the context of the business's finances. Leading people to be extremely cautious with things like a $10k purchase that would be "expensive" if purchased as an individual and "cheap" if purchased as a company. In those cases, getting an exec to come in and pull the trigger can help. The exec is used to looking at big picture budgets/strategy, which IC's aren't. (Although I'm sure someone here can come up with another anecdote proving that wrong)
- cogman10 3y ago
  Lol, that reminds me of another fun one. Every so often my company would provide lunches for the developers. However, they didn't want to spend too much money doing this. So how did they resolve it? They put together a committee of devs to discuss lunch options/etc. Easily 1+million/year of salary in one room debating whether we do Jimmy Johns or McDonalds and how they'd get the food to the office. For $2000, you can get some pretty nice catering for 100 people. But like you said, people just seem bad at thinking of that sort of big picture.
  - pants2 3y ago
    Providing daily lunches to developers is an insane ROI and I don't know why it's not standard practice. It's pennies compared to their salary, and they are happier, spend more time thinking about work instead of what/where to get lunch, spend more time eating together and conversing, and probably eat healthier food which mitigates the post-lunch coma.
    - mnahkies 3y ago
      +1 to this, I had one job where lunch was provided and it very much brought people together, particularly across team boundaries / job levels, and often "tricked" you into having pseudo meetings over lunch. I find that still happens organically in smaller companies without, but in larger companies things trend towards more clique like behaviour without it (caveat small sample size)
    - cogman10 3y ago
      Used to be something that companies just generally recognized as a good thing. Look at workplaces built in the 60 to 80s and basically all of them had cafeterias as part of the building plan. [1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeterias-as-corporate-tool.html https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/24/nyregion/company-cafeteri...
      - jdsully 3y ago
sonicanatidae 3y ago
At least they didn't throw it onto some wholly under-specced machine, then yell at OPs because the response speed was measured in days.

ghaff 3y ago

When I was a hardware product manager, there were a ton of decisions people asked for and a heck of a lot of them basically didn't matter. If we needed to course correct, we'd course correct. The main thing was not sitting around twiddling our thumbs for weeks or longer.

epolanski 3y ago

I mean isn't all of that obvious? A crap boss is one that doesn't make choices, a good boss is one that does, a great boss is one that makes sure that the best of the possible choices is made giving the data at hand. Having careers and heads depending on making the wrong choice just pushed to paralysis.