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Sure, the buck stops with the CEO. That said, if things are so dysfunctional that your only goal is to ascribe blame—which, incidentally, is a common behavior

Sure, the buck stops with the CEO. That said, if things are so dysfunctional that your only goal is to ascribe blame—which, incidentally, is a common behavior of bad managers—then you are already fucked. High performing teams require trust. Workers need to trust that management has a sense of what's reasonable, not take estimates out of context and generally listen to the pain points/challenges on the ground. Upper management needs to trust that teams understand the vision enough to make the right tradeoff, not sandbag every estimate or fixate on the wrong details (because ground-level details matter, but some more than others from the business perspective). I realize many people have spent their whole career in such adversarial circumstances between workers and management that the above sounds like a fairy tail. I will say though, that it is possible, but requires a healthy understanding of the limitations of human communication, and the recognition that good intent is necessary but not sufficient to avoid dysfunction. You need a critical mass of folks spread throughout the org, able to do the necessary bridge-building, and (at times) emotional labor to work through all the challenges and differences of opinion. It's very easy to describe a problem and solution from one person's perspective, but much harder to prioritize and solve the 10 most important problems out of a group of 100 people where viewpoints differ and cooperation is needed to improve anything.

btilly 3y ago
I did not see the post itself as ascribing blame. The Head of IT here was very clear that he was hearing the messaging from the CEO, but the CEO was passing along pressure coming from the client. And clients learn to do this because the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen. Turning to management, your view on management reflects what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex thought will do their best work in an environment that reduces unnecessary pressure. But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so on. This means that a healthy organization should have multiple styles of management in play. And that means that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push back on the rest of the organization to enable the right style for software developers. And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management can cause mental health problems. But so can being a parent of children who are part of the current teen mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if you fix management.

btilly 3y ago

I did not see the post itself as ascribing blame. The Head of IT here was very clear that he was hearing the messaging from the CEO, but the CEO was passing along pressure coming from the client. And clients learn to do this because the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So lets not criticize for what did not actually happen. Turning to management, your view on management reflects what works for tech. People who need to engage in complex thought will do their best work in an environment that reduces unnecessary pressure. But not everyone does that kind of work. People in sales do better when they are pushed to meet a big audacious goal which is probably not realistic. Micromanagement is appropriate for people in a level 1 call center. And so on. This means that a healthy organization should have multiple styles of management in play. And that means that it is important to have leaders in tech who can push back on the rest of the organization to enable the right style for software developers. And now that we've talked about management a bit, mind talking about mental health? Because sure, bad management can cause mental health problems. But so can being a parent of children who are part of the current teen mental health crisis. So this issue is important, even if you fix management.