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One way to read your story is that upper management applied heavy downward pressure, to the extent that relatively trivial changes in the organization were disc
by slimsag 3y ago
One way to read your story is that upper management applied heavy downward pressure, to the extent that relatively trivial changes in the organization were discussed as 'costly' - in an effort to get engineers like the senior staff engineer in your example to pull heroic feats of engineering in a few weeks all by himself, instead of using a small group of engineers / resources.
I think your argument is that 'it worked for him' because he is still there while the managers are not, but reality may be the managers were there to have that effect in the first place and the 50/50 turnover was because they were in the thick of it.
That'd be my cynical take, anyway.
- ytx 3y agoEspecially if he wasn't rewarded commensurately for that feat.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago"upper management applied heavy downward pressure" Correct "I'm an effort to get engineers like the senior staff engineer to pull heroic feats" I think this gives them too much credit. The reality, imo, is that the org had a pathological emphasis on "impact" and ran performance reviews so tight that everyone, managers included, were so scared of being PIPd and losing their grants that they were extraordinarily risk averse in planning and picking projects to bet on. And leadership in general undervalued "infra-y" changes as mostly make-work. The turnover was partly because of this general effect - people scared, not betting big or smart enough, and optimizing for holding on / not getting fired. And to their credit, most of these people vested 2-3 years of their 4-year grant before it all fell over, so they made out decently lucratively, so maybe they're the real winners in all this after all.
- slimsag 3y agoThat's an interesting take, thanks for writing that. That gives me something to think about.