9 ms·

One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round

One of the most interesting discussions I've had around this was at a small company who mass-hired a bunch of people from a big company. We went round and round in circles for a while because of issues similar to what you're describing. I ran a small 4-6 person hardware team (softly blurry on the edges) and the new people wanted significant amounts of design and documentation review as well as financial oversight. We needed $40 worth of solder and connectors and had to wait a week for PO approval as well as demonstrate that we had gotten multiple quotes... even though there was just a store down the block that sold exactly what we needed. Anyway, after a month or two of this I started catching significant flak because my team was nowhere near as productive as it used to be. Complaining about slow POs was met with "maybe you should plan better". Complaining about design reviews for one-off boards that would go from idea-to-problem solved was met with "you're engineers, you need to document your work". It was painful and I came very close to resigning. What ultimately worked, though, was figuring out a catch phrase that spoke the language of the new people: "accountability without authority". This ruffled some feathers but once I repeated "you are trying to hold me accountable for delivering a $500,000 project on time but are not giving me authority to buy $40 worth of stuff to execute on that" enough times it finally got through and the system started to change. But man did it suck for a while.

al_borland 2y ago
This kind of stuff drives me nuts. I just spent 8 months fighting to get $150 for something. This should have just been taken out of some petty cash fund, but instead I wasted a ton of my time, and others, fighting to get it from the proper source. This cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost time.
- goosejuice 2y ago
  I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society. I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonomy. They of course won't be able to take credit in that case either :). Perhaps an overly cynical view I admit.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.
    - loupol 2y ago
      Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title : "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"
      - Cyphase 2y ago
        https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
      - OJFord 2y ago
        Matt Levine has a recurring bit on this in Money Stuff too, adjusting the crime/fraud/risk dial back and forth as companies decide to do more or less compliance.
      - gofreddygo 2y ago
        Yes and the optimal amount of test coverage is never 100%
        jappgar 2y ago
        And the optimal uptime of b2b saas is not 100% or even 99.999% and yet...
      - jappgar 2y ago
        This is true about a lot of things. The optimal number of (minor) crashes when training for a mountain bike race is non-zero. If you never crash, you cannot be sure you were going fast enough around that turn.
    - baumy 2y ago
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  When I've run into this, I've gone and bought what I need with my own money. Then I make sure my boss knows, so that it becomes a story that gets repeated up the management chain. Even if nothing changes, it still has therapeutic value.
- Log_out_ 2y ago
  Should be able to bill the process for working hours..
habitue 2y ago
That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and then I quit". Which, fair, but not as interesting
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff. Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get even the most simple or meagre of resources. The internal communications are heavily monitored and that has a chilling effect on cross-team collaboration. They have even weaponised their "culture" in a way that coddles the offending teams in the structure and still direct blame for missing deadlines at the victims rather than the perps. There is no fighting this. My small team are all aggressively looking for new jobs which is a shame because they are a tight crew with great skills who have now been beaten down as far as they will go. A great loss to the organisation when we walk too, all that institutional knowledge gone.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Different strokes. For some people, the desire to “build stuff” extends to building (improving? refactoring?) the organisation. For some people, tech problems that are just tech problems is, creativity wise, like eating meatloaf through a straw. Myself included.
    - tonyarkles 2y ago
      Yeah, that definitely played a part in it. I was employee #2 and had built an absolutely amazing culture in the team that I ran. I stuck it out in large part because I loved how well we worked together. The project was cool, too, which helped, but not wanting to abandon the team of fantastic young engineers I'd pulled together was the thing that kept me fighting. I semi-jokingly-but-not explained to them what a Shit Umbrella was and that while all of this was going down I regretted not being as available to them as I had been, but that I was doing my best to give them an environment where they could keep doing the amazing work they'd been doing without getting dragged too much into the bog with me.
BurningFrog 2y ago
This is why I only work at small startups. There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Same. I quit Google to go work at a 4 person company. I love that we’re just able to get stuff done. Hard to get GPUs? Walk down to Central Computers in SOMA and buy L40S cards and build a workstation for everyone to share. I’m not very financially motivated. I’m already making more than 90+% of the US. I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires. I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers. I get to work a chill number of hours while still learning every day. If you could get a lot of employees like that you’d have a huge market advantage.
  - getcrunk 2y ago
    How many number of hours is chill? 4? 6? 3?
    - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      5 or 6 most days. I’m of course happy to do more in sprints when duty calls. Working at 100% is fun - as an exercise. Like training with weights on. Maybe your site gets DDOS’d. Maybe your database has a critical issue. As long as you’ve done some prep these are recoverable issues. And solving big problems tells you and your boss that you’re important. But honestly most of the time I’m able to take my best thinking hours of the day, put those into the job, and get 90% of the output with much less than 90% of the time. The worst thing you can to is try to fill the time and create a bunch of tech debt. Artificial time scarcity keeps things lean.
  - daydream 2y ago
    > I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires. That’s very well written. Poetic even. > I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers. The industry used to be more like that. Never entirely, of course - Microsoft made a bunch of people millionaires in the 80s and 90s, turned some heads. A few others did too. Even in the early 2000s almost none of the MBA types were going to the Bay Area after graduating. But things changed. It basically had to. There were too many companies making too much money - and making their employees too wealthy - for people to ignore it. Zero interest rates added fuel to the fire and everyone who could jumped on it. Late stage capitalism, everyone gotta get theirs. And here we are.
Nathanba 2y ago
I noticed something similar on a project I was on. I was given the task to supervise external contractors but given no authority to tell them how to do things. I basically had to convince them with arguments. Well predictably it's pretty hard to convince somebody that they are wrong but it's nearly impossible if it will also cut the project time in half which means it will cut the money for them in half. So naturally there was quickly a quarrel because they wanted to keep doing things badly and it was my assigned job to prevent exactly that. I was eventually overruled by my own management though because I can't compete with several external project managers whose entire job it is to talk their way into more money. They were willing to outright lie and there was no incentive to believe me vs. believing the supposed expert contractors.
- 1312214 2y ago
  Had a similar thing. Ex Company hired outside agency in order to deliver big feature on time. Lead guys in agency were sweet talkers and they were lying to C level executives(they believed them because of buzz wording). Agency overcomplicated the system with microservices, kubernetes, etc. Everything ended up more complicated and slower. Whenever you tried to suggest something they would just speak in private with CTO and you would get shushed. Half of our original team was moved to other projects because agency "new better". I quit and it was best decision
osigurdson 2y ago
This is a very common problem in many orgs. Spending time (adding meetings, exploring various options, etc.) is completely fine while spending money is a huge deal because of the emotional connection to money that many people seem to have. Imagine, holding a 2 hour, 10 person meeting to decide if an additional one time $1000 cloud expenditure is warranted. Yet, this happens all the time. I can assure you, that this is not how shareholders or customers want you to spend your time.
- nikau 2y ago
  A lot of this comes down to budgets - those 10 people have a fixed salary so there is no visible cost.
  - osigurdson 2y ago
    Those costs should be made visible as they are real. The price of each meeting should be included in the agenda.
    - wild_egg 2y ago
      Have you seen this done anywhere? I have to wonder if it would even have any impact
    - evilduck 2y ago
      If salaries were transparent and queryable this could even be a Slack or Teams plugin. But most org cultures would never dare expose salary imbalances like that.
      - shepherdjerred 2y ago
        There is this project: https://github.com/syncfast/clockwise https://github.com/syncfast/clockwise
- bobmcnamara 2y ago
  I work in embedded. When I told my boss I was leaving he asked what the other company was offering me - compiler licenses. Without enough each firmware build took 40-60 minutes. With enough, 10 minutes.

al_borland 2y ago

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. I just spent 8 months fighting to get $150 for something. This should have just been taken out of some petty cash fund, but instead I wasted a ton of my time, and others, fighting to get it from the proper source. This cost the organization thousands of dollars in lost time.

goosejuice 2y ago
I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society. I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonomy. They of course won't be able to take credit in that case either :). Perhaps an overly cynical view I admit.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.
  - loupol 2y ago
    Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title : "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"
    - Cyphase 2y ago
      https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Matt Levine has a recurring bit on this in Money Stuff too, adjusting the crime/fraud/risk dial back and forth as companies decide to do more or less compliance.
    - gofreddygo 2y ago
      Yes and the optimal amount of test coverage is never 100%
      - jappgar 2y ago
        And the optimal uptime of b2b saas is not 100% or even 99.999% and yet...
    - jappgar 2y ago
      This is true about a lot of things. The optimal number of (minor) crashes when training for a mountain bike race is non-zero. If you never crash, you cannot be sure you were going fast enough around that turn.
  - baumy 2y ago
Tempest1981 2y ago
When I've run into this, I've gone and bought what I need with my own money. Then I make sure my boss knows, so that it becomes a story that gets repeated up the management chain. Even if nothing changes, it still has therapeutic value.
Log_out_ 2y ago
Should be able to bill the process for working hours..

habitue 2y ago

That's a great story of sticking through a really tough situation and figuring out how to make it work. Honestly most of these stories end with "it sucked and then I quit". Which, fair, but not as interesting

smackeyacky 2y ago
Most stories end that way because that is the only logical thing to do. Trying to fight an organisation with a terrible culture is a sisyphean task that consumes time and energy that could be spent making stuff. Some organisations (like the one I'm working for) seem to be run like a dystopian daycare. Stay in your box, be "respectful", don't complain about your terrible manager, don't complain about the hoops you have to jump through to get even the most simple or meagre of resources. The internal communications are heavily monitored and that has a chilling effect on cross-team collaboration. They have even weaponised their "culture" in a way that coddles the offending teams in the structure and still direct blame for missing deadlines at the victims rather than the perps. There is no fighting this. My small team are all aggressively looking for new jobs which is a shame because they are a tight crew with great skills who have now been beaten down as far as they will go. A great loss to the organisation when we walk too, all that institutional knowledge gone.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Different strokes. For some people, the desire to “build stuff” extends to building (improving? refactoring?) the organisation. For some people, tech problems that are just tech problems is, creativity wise, like eating meatloaf through a straw. Myself included.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    Yeah, that definitely played a part in it. I was employee #2 and had built an absolutely amazing culture in the team that I ran. I stuck it out in large part because I loved how well we worked together. The project was cool, too, which helped, but not wanting to abandon the team of fantastic young engineers I'd pulled together was the thing that kept me fighting. I semi-jokingly-but-not explained to them what a Shit Umbrella was and that while all of this was going down I regretted not being as available to them as I had been, but that I was doing my best to give them an environment where they could keep doing the amazing work they'd been doing without getting dragged too much into the bog with me.

BurningFrog 2y ago

This is why I only work at small startups. There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Same. I quit Google to go work at a 4 person company. I love that we’re just able to get stuff done. Hard to get GPUs? Walk down to Central Computers in SOMA and buy L40S cards and build a workstation for everyone to share. I’m not very financially motivated. I’m already making more than 90+% of the US. I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires. I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers. I get to work a chill number of hours while still learning every day. If you could get a lot of employees like that you’d have a huge market advantage.
- getcrunk 2y ago
  How many number of hours is chill? 4? 6? 3?
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    5 or 6 most days. I’m of course happy to do more in sprints when duty calls. Working at 100% is fun - as an exercise. Like training with weights on. Maybe your site gets DDOS’d. Maybe your database has a critical issue. As long as you’ve done some prep these are recoverable issues. And solving big problems tells you and your boss that you’re important. But honestly most of the time I’m able to take my best thinking hours of the day, put those into the job, and get 90% of the output with much less than 90% of the time. The worst thing you can to is try to fill the time and create a bunch of tech debt. Artificial time scarcity keeps things lean.
- daydream 2y ago
  > I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires. That’s very well written. Poetic even. > I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers. The industry used to be more like that. Never entirely, of course - Microsoft made a bunch of people millionaires in the 80s and 90s, turned some heads. A few others did too. Even in the early 2000s almost none of the MBA types were going to the Bay Area after graduating. But things changed. It basically had to. There were too many companies making too much money - and making their employees too wealthy - for people to ignore it. Zero interest rates added fuel to the fire and everyone who could jumped on it. Late stage capitalism, everyone gotta get theirs. And here we are.

Nathanba 2y ago

I noticed something similar on a project I was on. I was given the task to supervise external contractors but given no authority to tell them how to do things. I basically had to convince them with arguments. Well predictably it's pretty hard to convince somebody that they are wrong but it's nearly impossible if it will also cut the project time in half which means it will cut the money for them in half. So naturally there was quickly a quarrel because they wanted to keep doing things badly and it was my assigned job to prevent exactly that. I was eventually overruled by my own management though because I can't compete with several external project managers whose entire job it is to talk their way into more money. They were willing to outright lie and there was no incentive to believe me vs. believing the supposed expert contractors.

1312214 2y ago
Had a similar thing. Ex Company hired outside agency in order to deliver big feature on time. Lead guys in agency were sweet talkers and they were lying to C level executives(they believed them because of buzz wording). Agency overcomplicated the system with microservices, kubernetes, etc. Everything ended up more complicated and slower. Whenever you tried to suggest something they would just speak in private with CTO and you would get shushed. Half of our original team was moved to other projects because agency "new better". I quit and it was best decision

osigurdson 2y ago

This is a very common problem in many orgs. Spending time (adding meetings, exploring various options, etc.) is completely fine while spending money is a huge deal because of the emotional connection to money that many people seem to have. Imagine, holding a 2 hour, 10 person meeting to decide if an additional one time $1000 cloud expenditure is warranted. Yet, this happens all the time. I can assure you, that this is not how shareholders or customers want you to spend your time.

nikau 2y ago
A lot of this comes down to budgets - those 10 people have a fixed salary so there is no visible cost.
- osigurdson 2y ago
  Those costs should be made visible as they are real. The price of each meeting should be included in the agenda.
  - wild_egg 2y ago
    Have you seen this done anywhere? I have to wonder if it would even have any impact
  - evilduck 2y ago
    If salaries were transparent and queryable this could even be a Slack or Teams plugin. But most org cultures would never dare expose salary imbalances like that.
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      There is this project: https://github.com/syncfast/clockwise https://github.com/syncfast/clockwise
bobmcnamara 2y ago
I work in embedded. When I told my boss I was leaving he asked what the other company was offering me - compiler licenses. Without enough each firmware build took 40-60 minutes. With enough, 10 minutes.