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Disclaimer: I was Will's direct report, and then Will became my skip level in a past life. I'd rate him as better than average manager, who was surrounded by a

Disclaimer: I was Will's direct report, and then Will became my skip level in a past life. I'd rate him as better than average manager, who was surrounded by a lot of well under average managers. I'd love to hear longer stories on your opinion here, because I have theories on the issues with Will's advice, but nobody sees quite enough organizations to quite be certain. The more stories we hear, the more likely we are to get things right. My hypothesis is that Will's advice is a lot of recipes to create change in organizations, but lacks focus on when to apply them, and how to be sure you aren't bungling it all up by fixing the wrong problem. This makes the ideas more attractive to the dashing, aggressive, confident executive, whether he has a good pulse on the problems, or he is the kind to trust on the wrong people, and fail to see that they are building enemies (as all agents of change do), without getting sufficient number of fans in the right places. So people that like his advice will tend to fail by overstepping. I know some executive who have an entire career like this, company after company: Seeing themselves as the protagonist of every story, and acting like bulls in a china shop, therefore failing politically even if their diagnosis was somehow right, and their changes made sense. Ultimately the best advice is 'make sure your manager likes you'. Which works just as well if you are a CTO reporting to a CEO, or an engineer reporting to a line manager. It's trivially easy for executives to think this isn't the case, and then be surprised when the reorg comes.

xwolfi 2y ago
And you ignore the fact that maybe you are more to credit for his success than he was. Engineers aren't fungible, aren't all the same, arent all compatible with each other and the manager. Your conclusion is the right one but can we always make it happen ? No.
atomicnumber3 2y ago
"make sure your manager likes you" This is always the best advice I've found. And I've also found that if your manager likes you, lots of other things just work out.
- barrenko 2y ago
  it's pretty goddamn stupid and seems to need constant reiteration for some people (like me!!!) but if you don't feel a cultural fit (from you as an employee point of view) - DON'T TAKE THE JOB
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    With the current market, I wish I had the power to refuse a job in lieu of a better culture fit But alas.
  - Karellen 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ebiester 2y ago
      I am not the parent poster, but if we change the definition of "cultural fit," I would like to know if that changes your opinion. (Note that I am not cis-het.) My definition of culture talks about the working values and processes in a company. Some engineers want to be given full problems and be left alone to solve them. Some engineers want to be given specifications on what to build and just turn to code. Some engineers don't work well in an org without robust automated tests. Others are fine to leave it to QA and toss it over. Some really love agile environments, and some hate them. Some like large organizations where you can be a deep expert in a small piece, and some prefer to be a generalist getting software off the ground. People have different preferences regarding async communications versus meetings. And even more fundamentally, some people want to go home at the end of the day and forget about work while others want to feel like they're in something so important that they can obsess over. (Most of us are a bit in the middle, but both extremes there exist.) Culture fit isn't (or shouldn't be) if people like to go drinking at the end of the shift, or if they like to talk about sci-fi or if you fit into the top end of the kyriarchy. (And if that is part of a company's cultural fit, it's going to be toxic in other ways, but as you say, widely marginalized groups and cultures are going to be affected much more here.)
      - 2y ago
roenxi 2y ago
> but lacks focus on when to apply them The gap between theory and practice - tacit knowledge - is probably a factor here. It seems quite likely that a lot of really good managers in software have theories about why they are good managers. Those theories could all easily be wrong and they are actually experts at communication or weird technical details that happen to make great managers. A manager's theoretical base is always built on a large tacit "I know how to X, Y, Z in a social setting". If we look at this article through a very abstract lens, software managing advice fits the pattern of "at the appropriate moment, do the appropriate thing". Obviously the advice he gives is heavily tinged by the managers ability to identify the appropriate moment to do something unusual. He's pointing out some times where the appropriate action seemed to be the counter-intuitive one, which is fair and interesting. But I wouldn't ever trust a random manager to be able to pick the moment to do a counter-intuitive action; unless they were mentored with extreme care.
idkdotcom 2y ago
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xwolfi 2y ago

And you ignore the fact that maybe you are more to credit for his success than he was. Engineers aren't fungible, aren't all the same, arent all compatible with each other and the manager. Your conclusion is the right one but can we always make it happen ? No.

atomicnumber3 2y ago

"make sure your manager likes you" This is always the best advice I've found. And I've also found that if your manager likes you, lots of other things just work out.

barrenko 2y ago
it's pretty goddamn stupid and seems to need constant reiteration for some people (like me!!!) but if you don't feel a cultural fit (from you as an employee point of view) - DON'T TAKE THE JOB
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  With the current market, I wish I had the power to refuse a job in lieu of a better culture fit But alas.
- Karellen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ebiester 2y ago
    I am not the parent poster, but if we change the definition of "cultural fit," I would like to know if that changes your opinion. (Note that I am not cis-het.) My definition of culture talks about the working values and processes in a company. Some engineers want to be given full problems and be left alone to solve them. Some engineers want to be given specifications on what to build and just turn to code. Some engineers don't work well in an org without robust automated tests. Others are fine to leave it to QA and toss it over. Some really love agile environments, and some hate them. Some like large organizations where you can be a deep expert in a small piece, and some prefer to be a generalist getting software off the ground. People have different preferences regarding async communications versus meetings. And even more fundamentally, some people want to go home at the end of the day and forget about work while others want to feel like they're in something so important that they can obsess over. (Most of us are a bit in the middle, but both extremes there exist.) Culture fit isn't (or shouldn't be) if people like to go drinking at the end of the shift, or if they like to talk about sci-fi or if you fit into the top end of the kyriarchy. (And if that is part of a company's cultural fit, it's going to be toxic in other ways, but as you say, widely marginalized groups and cultures are going to be affected much more here.)
    - 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago

> but lacks focus on when to apply them The gap between theory and practice - tacit knowledge - is probably a factor here. It seems quite likely that a lot of really good managers in software have theories about why they are good managers. Those theories could all easily be wrong and they are actually experts at communication or weird technical details that happen to make great managers. A manager's theoretical base is always built on a large tacit "I know how to X, Y, Z in a social setting". If we look at this article through a very abstract lens, software managing advice fits the pattern of "at the appropriate moment, do the appropriate thing". Obviously the advice he gives is heavily tinged by the managers ability to identify the appropriate moment to do something unusual. He's pointing out some times where the appropriate action seemed to be the counter-intuitive one, which is fair and interesting. But I wouldn't ever trust a random manager to be able to pick the moment to do a counter-intuitive action; unless they were mentored with extreme care.

idkdotcom 2y ago

[dead]